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Power Technology

Fusion and Fission/LFTR: Let's Do Both, Smartly 218

TheRealHocusLocus writes: Disaster preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none," which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel. I too was happy to see Skunkworks' Feb 2013 announcement and the recent "we're still making progress" reminder. I was moved by the reaction on Slashdot: a groundswell of "Finally!" and "We're saved!" However, fusion doesn't need to be the only solution, and it's not entirely without drawbacks.

All nuclear reactors will generate waste via activation as the materials of which they are constructed erode and become unstable under high neutron flux. I'm not pointing this out because I think it's a big deal — a few fusion advocates disingenuously tend to sell the process as if it were "100% clean." A low volume of non-recyclable waste from fusion reactors that is walk-away safe in ~100 years is doable. Let's do it. And likewise, the best comparable waste profile for fission is a two-fluid LFTR, a low volume of waste that is walk-away safe in ~300 years. Let's do it.

Why pursue both, with at least the same level of urgency? Because both could carry us indefinitely. LFTR is less complicated in theory and practice. It is closer to market. There is plenty of cross-over: LFTR's materials challenges and heat engine interface — and the necessity for waste management — are the same as they will be for commercial-scale fusion reactors. To get up to speed please see the 2006 fusion lecture by Dr. Robert Bussard on the Wiffle ball 6 plasma containment, likely the precursor to the Skunkworks approach. And see Thorium Remix 2011 which presents the case for LFTR.
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Fusion and Fission/LFTR: Let's Do Both, Smartly

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  • Fission is Dead (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17, 2014 @02:14PM (#48171309)
    It doesn't matter how safe modern fission designs are; the public fears it after several high profile disasters and that isn't likely to change.
    • What exactly is "the public"?

      • Re:Fission is Dead (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @02:53PM (#48171703)

        What exactly is "the public"?

        It means the American voters, because many Americans think that only America matters. Fission reactors are unpopular in America. They are also unpopular in Japan, Germany, Britain, and other countries. But there are also plenty of countries where nukes have public support, including France, China, India, Russia, etc. Fission power is far from dead.

        • by zildgulf ( 1116981 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @03:50PM (#48172231)
          Here in Georgia we are having a heck of a time jumping through the political hoops to build two new much needed pressurized water nuclear (fission) plants in east Georgia. We also have a boiling water nuclear (fission) plant in south Georgia that probably needs to be decommissioned due to age and the problems of radioactive leaks in boiling water reactors inside the reactor containment bunker...er...building.

          P.S. How can you call an airtight, air-locked, negative-pressured, yards thick of specially hardened reinforced concrete, enough to survive at least 2 9/11 style airplane crashes, "building" anything but an above ground bunker?

          I have to say that where we built our nuclear plants geologically, population-wise, and climate-wise, are the best places to put such nuclear plants. Far better than in the crowded Northeast US or on the West Coast.

          In Georgia we have no single "go-to" on alternative energy for base electric generation, no desserts for large scale solar projects, like Nevada, nor massive amounts of land for large scale wind farms, like the Plain states, and we lost much of our hydro capacity in the last 30 years or so. Natural Gas and Nuclear are our go-to for large scale base electric generation and our chance to break from coal. We use too way much coal here in Georgia our air quality has suffered immensely for it. At least nuclear plants do not create millions of tons of CO2 and makes our air cleaner.

          I sincerely hope that the fusion plants can be built here.
          • Here in Georgia we are having a heck of a time jumping through the political hoops to build two new much needed pressurized water nuclear (fission) plants in east Georgia.

            That's because you cain't find nobody to read the instructions.

            I mean, we're talking Georgia.

            I have to say that where we built our nuclear plants geologically, population-wise, and climate-wise, are the best places to put such nuclear plants.

            You just build them next to that damn meth lab.

            I found this documentary about the people building

          • > nor massive amounts of land for large scale wind farms

            I had to look this up because I thought you were wrong. But you're not. Georgia has crap for wind:

            http://apps2.eere.energy.gov/wind/windexchange/wind_resource_maps.asp?stateab=ga

            What up with that?

          • I sincerely hope that the fusion plants can be built here.

            Congratulations on achieving ~22% nuclear electricity [eia.gov] in July 2014.

            My state of no-nuke Oklahoma [eia.gov] is powered by natural gas and coal (which arrives by train), considers itself a nexus of wind power but after decades of investment, hundreds of turbines and probably much more money spent --- net generation of mostly-wind ~809GWh for July is still less than the ~855GWh that would have been generated that month by the single two-reactor Black Fox Nuclear Power Plant [wikipedia.org]. That is... if it had not been the only nuclea

        • Damn, Posting as me to delete the accidental downmod when I was trying to upmod. Fat fingers, sorry...
      • Watch The Discovery Channel/History channel, CNN, MSNBC or Fox News for about 8hrs strait...
        While doing so, pretend you hadn't graduated high-school and need something other than your own failures in life to blame for your continuous and unabated fear of your unstable future.

        Then it will all make sense.
        You'll also either start calling the president Obola or chanting "Bush lied, people died"

      • by AK Marc ( 707885 )
        A preponderance of the people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]

        Your ignorance isn't a valid counter-argument.
    • Re:Fission is Dead (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gewalker ( 57809 ) <[moc.latigiDartsA] [ta] [reklaW.yraG]> on Friday October 17, 2014 @02:25PM (#48171419)

      Let's say I had a tested, working LFTR design. Do you really think it would be very hard to convince the public that it is inherently safer than other fission designs. Safer than a coal plant. Safer than hydroelectric. It is pretty easy to understand that a plant that is inherently impossible to cause a melt-down might be a different kind of plant than a light-water reactor design.

      True, there is radiation, but it is very modest. Few people seem to have NIMBY issues with LWR reactors based on the normal radiation. It is the fear of a Chernobyl event.

      • Re:Fission is Dead (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @02:59PM (#48171765) Journal

        Safer than hydroelectric.

        Including Chernobyl, there have been something like 56 direct fatalities, 4000+ deaths from cancer attributed to the radiation, and 350,000+ displaced peoples due to fission reactor failures. I'm not aware of any deaths *directly* attributed to Fukushima but let's round that off to an even 60.

        Banqiao hydroelectric dam collapse: 26,000 drowned, 145,000 dead from disease and famine, 11+ million displaced.

        Adjusted for GW capacity, hydroelectric power (970GW) is an order of magnitude more dangerous than nuclear (372GW).

        Ban hydro power! ;)
        =Smidge=

      • Re:Fission is Dead (Score:4, Informative)

        by markus_baertschi ( 259069 ) <(gro.sukram) (ta) (sukram)> on Friday October 17, 2014 @03:02PM (#48171801)

        Unfortunately yes.

        It is easy enough to get a big public outcry for any new nuclear plant, irrespective of its safety. The public has learned that nuclear = big accident (sooner or later). If you ask an activist if he want a coal or a nuclear plant, he will say 'neither' and fight both, but probably more vigorously against the nuclear one. That makes investing into any kind of nuclear stuff a very risky proposal.

        The only way to change is when other fuels get expensive and we'll see rolling power outages again and the public experiences that we need new plants.

        Markus

      • Re:Fission is Dead (Score:4, Interesting)

        by AK Marc ( 707885 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @03:12PM (#48171897)
        So far every "inherently impossible" to meltdown design has been proven to be susceptible. The pebble reactors were meltdown-proof, until it was shown that the pebbles will, over time, change in a way that would eventually guarantee a meltdown, shortening the useful life, and greatly increasing the risk.

        We've heard it before. So why should we believe it this time?

        Of course, the proponents claim the problems are overblown, but nobody wants to find out. The only approved reactor was put on permanent hold. So we may never find out for sure.
        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          The problem here is the demand for perfect safety. The terrible old reactor designs have the best safety record of any large scale baseload power production technology, ever. Now we're looking at newer designs that are at least an order of magnitude, and likely two to three orders of magnitude, safer, and also don't produce the volume and type of waste that has been a concern. Why would we hesitate?

        • So far every "inherently impossible" to meltdown design has been proven to be susceptible. The pebble reactors were meltdown-proof, until it was shown that the pebbles will, over time, change in a way that would eventually guarantee a meltdown, shortening the useful life, and greatly increasing the risk.

          We've heard it before. So why should we believe it this time?

          Of course, the proponents claim the problems are overblown, but nobody wants to find out. The only approved reactor was put on permanent hold. So we may never find out for sure.

          Engineers rarely use the word "impossible". With your standards, we'd never build another boat.

        • Re:Fission is Dead (Score:5, Insightful)

          by TheRealHocusLocus ( 2319802 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @05:29PM (#48172937)

          So far every "inherently impossible" to meltdown design has been proven to be susceptible.

          Liquid fuels are already 'melted' while in operation, but I do catch your drift, as in runaway catastrophe.

          Meltdown with atmospheric release of radioactivity is possible where decay heat comes into contact with water (hydrogen, Fukushima) or graphite (Chernobyl). While the danger of graphite ignition pebble reactors has been posed and disputed [wikipedia.org], they punt by saying, we'll keep a runaway pebbl;e reactor it contained and starved of oxygen (via inert gas) and it won't be a problem.

          My worst case scenario is worse than theirs. My LFTR-killer event involves an explosion powerful enough to destroy the containment vessel and building, in the rain. It would be an awful mess. But the salts would merely solidify and remain bound to the heavy elements mixed in, and aside from some steam which would be barely radioactive (because they only react with water slowly) there would be no need to evacuate the day care center over the ridge as the cleanup begins.

          So a LFTR 'disaster' is merely a local mishap. To solve the world's energy problems one could not hope for better.The Thorium video [youtube.com] describes the failures at Chernobyl and especially Fukushima in greater detail.

      • Re:Fission is Dead (Score:4, Insightful)

        by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @03:56PM (#48172283) Journal

        It's not about nuclear itself. We just can't trust the people running the industry, and that includes government oversight. They will cut corners and claim cost overruns every chance they get. It turns out that big business is just as funky as a traveling carnival show... They're all a bunch of hucksters. This is what makes nuclear look bad. Well, that, and a couple of well publicized accidents, caused by what? Corner cutting and corruption. Nuclear can be very safe and secure.

      • Re:Fission is Dead (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Maury Markowitz ( 452832 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @04:46PM (#48172637) Homepage

        > Let's say I had a tested, working LFTR design

        Ok.

        > Do you really think it would be very hard to convince the public that it is inherently safer than other fission designs

        No.

        But you make the common mistake of assuming that fission isn't being built because of NIMBY. Fission isn't being built because of $8 to $10 overnight CAPEX.

        So, is your LFTR three times cheaper to build than a AP1000? With all that plumbing? Are you sure? Because it has to be - three times cheaper.

      • Do you really think it would be very hard to convince the public that it is inherently safer than other fission designs.

        I expect that you can convince them that LFTR is safer than our current reactors but that is not the same as convincing them that it is safe enough to build. If you want to do that they best way to do it would be to sell them cheaper electricity. They are unlikely to be able to sensibly judge the risk but at least this way they see that they are benefiting from having a plant nearby.

        However there is still the issue of nuclear waste. Both LFTR and fusion still generate it but the advantage of fusion is t

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      > It doesn't matter how safe modern fission designs are;

      It makes no difference one way or the other.

      Modern fission plants cost between $8 and $10/Watt. Wind turbines cost about $1.50/Watt. See page 11:

      http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf

      Since the average fission plant has a CF around 85% to 90%, and the average wind turbine has a CF around 30 to 35%, that means that in energy-equivalent terms, wind has an equivalent cost of about $4 to $5. As a result, the *uns

      • Is that the study from the other day that was summarily dismissed because it made up bogus costs for nuclear power, to make wind look better?

        • > Is that the study from the other day that was summarily dismissed because
          > it made up bogus costs for nuclear power, to make wind look better?

          Ummm, no.

          Maybe you should google up Lazard.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by macpacheco ( 1764378 )

      I believe you are wrong. Molten salt reactors are so safe it will take a comet / asteroid / military precision strike to cause a significant radioactivity release, and there is no water pressure on the inside to spit stuff out.
      If you want to make the reactor 99.999999999999999% safe just bury it deeper. conventional reactors are too big to be buried, molten salts are compact enough you could install them 10 feet underground (with 10ft of reinforced concrete above it), and have all of its connections first g

      • Well said. Let me risk '-1 Troll' moderation too by saying I agree with almost all of your points.

        The problem isn't the disaster but rather Linear no threshold radiation cancer models which were created by deeply anti nuclear weapon scientists desperate to instill fear on governments undergoing nuclear weapons tests.

        The Linear no-threshold model [wikipedia.org] needs to be reevaluated, especially the way it is used in statistical tomfoolery to establish a "integer death count" for extremely large populations from doses that can be lost in the noise of background radiation... the official explanation is they were applying the Precautionary Principle [wikipedia.org] to something for which they had no hard data. Some references and angles to LNT in this p [slashdot.org]

    • Smarter countries than the USA are racing ahead with smarter U235 reactor designs and thorium reactors. Growing, not dead.

      • > Smarter countries than the USA are racing ahead with smarter U235 reactor designs and thorium reactors.

        Hmmm, let's see:

        India - been trying to commercialize thorium reactors for, what, 45 years now? How many are in commercial operation? Zero? Right.

        Canada - so convinced of the future of nuclear power that they sold off the entire reactor division of AECL for $15 million and a $770 million tax right-off (so basically negative $750 million).

        China - the latest saviour for everyone's flavour-of-the-month de

  • Um (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17, 2014 @02:16PM (#48171333)

    What the hell am I reading?

    >Disaster preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none," which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel.
    How does a non-nonsensical saying apply to energy? Explain yourself.

    > I too was happy to see Skunkworks' Feb 2013 announcement and the recent "we're still making progress" reminder. I was moved by the reaction on Slashdot: a groundswell of "Finally!" and "We're saved!"

    How did we move from crazy people sayings into nuclear energy? This is the worst written summary on /. in a very long time.

    Also, learn what a comma is and how it's used. For the love of god, this reads like stream of consciousness passed through google-translate a few times.

    • Re:Um (Score:5, Informative)

      by lgw ( 121541 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @02:36PM (#48171533) Journal

      >Disaster preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none," which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel.
      How does a non-nonsensical saying apply to energy? Explain yourself.

      Monoculture is bad. Choosing one form of baseload generation to emphasize is bad, because however great it looks on paper, if some horrible problem emerges 10 years later, you're screwed. If all new powerplant construction for decades were split between 2 technologies, and one of them proved problematic, we have a "shipping, tested solution" to migrate to immediately. Expensive, but possible. All of which is even more true when it comes to designs that aren't yet production ready.

      > I too was happy to see Skunkworks' Feb 2013 announcement and the recent "we're still making progress" reminder. I was moved by the reaction on Slashdot: a groundswell of "Finally!" and "We're saved!"

      How did we move from crazy people sayings into nuclear energy? This is the worst written summary on /. in a very long time.

      We need something not-fossil-fuel based that can be used by any city anywhere. (Yeah, yeah, solar and wind have their upsides, but there are plenty of cities where both are nonsense.) Fusion would be wonderful, but we should use "maybe oneday fusion" as any reason not to also pursue sane, modern fission designs. And regardless, we should pursue 2 unrelated technologies, because monoculture is bad.

      • Base load power production is not the problem.
        Load following and peak load plants are.
        Oh, you belong to the crowed who does not know what base load actually means?

        • Re:Um (Score:4, Interesting)

          by lgw ( 121541 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @03:32PM (#48172099) Journal

          There's no reasonable solution today for non-fossil baseload generation. I personally have no problem with natural gas, but lots of people do. And we shouldn't abandon coal/gas/ancient nuclear for just one replacement technology, lest the unexpected bite us.

          I also really like orbital solar following PG&E's design strategy, but it's still in shadow many hours each day. I doubt we have the tech yet to make the Asimov Orbit practical ("hovering" over the poles, thanks to solar sails), but that's also an eventual option, and might be practical before fusion, if fusion's history is any guide.

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

            There's no reasonable solution today for non-fossil baseload generation.

            Depends where you are. Many places have enough geothermal or hydro to meet their needs, e.g. parts of Africa.

            The other thing you have to realize is that even if it isn't possible today, that doesn't mean people will be willing to fund the developments that FTA wants. Tens of billions of Euros and tens of years to get it off the ground, at a time when other technologies are developing rapidly and in Germany even new coal plants are looking like they will never turn a profit.

            With energy you have to look at th

            • by lgw ( 121541 )

              Mankind has never used less power, over all, though regions have faltered. Power = standard of living. As more heavy industry becomes robotic over time, power becomes the primary cost of, well, everything. Efficiency will of course keep getting better, but that just leaves room for more!

          • > I also really like orbital solar following PG&E's design strategy

            OMG.

            http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/the-maury-equation/

            • by lgw ( 121541 )

              It makes sense for PG&E - it's about NIMBY, not cost. They put a lot of effort into how to prevent the sat from becoming an orbital weapon.

              Anyhow, give the new companies a chance to bring the price of launches way down - I expect the can shed an order of magnitude off launch costs. Further, it's only a matter of time and robotics until it becomes feasible to drag asteroids into orbit, so that we don't have to lift bulk materials, which won't help photoelectric solar, but solar thermal is dead easy to

    • What the hell am I reading?

      >Disaster preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none," which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel.
      How does a non-nonsensical saying apply to energy? Explain yourself.

      A saying like "Ai = MTBF/(MTBF+MTTR)" just doesn't have that same ring to it. Preppers aren't known for a keen embrace of statistics.

  • Closer to market (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mfwitten ( 1906728 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @02:17PM (#48171349)

    If you've got a valid business plan, then get investors like any other business.

    • Mod this guy up!

      You have hit the nail on the head.

      No conspiracy of hippies is keeping U.S. nuclear power off the table. Commercial ventures can get licenses if they want (and have). The issue is straight-up capitalism and profit-making business decisions -- the capital cost of a nuclear plant is very high so it is an unattractive investment as long as coal or natural gas are available.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Nobody has built a large-scale reactor of this type. What we had and have is THTR300 and CANDU converting Thorium. What we figured was that is IS HARD, ENGINEERING-WISE. I am not saying we should not do it, quite the opposite. But -

    Now we have a bunch of folks claiming that an unproven-in-reality concept is "easy". What year do we have ? 1317 ???

    Better look at the record of CANDU and the Russian fast breeder. These things ACTUALLY WORK.

    • > Nobody has built a large-scale reactor of this type

      Yup.

      > I am not saying we should not do it, quite the opposite.

      The *only* question is "how much can we do it for".

      If it's over $4 a watt, and I'd say the chance of that is 99%, then there's no point trying.

  • LFTR (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pollux ( 102520 ) <speter&tedata,net,eg> on Friday October 17, 2014 @02:48PM (#48171655) Journal

    I love the idea of LFTR. Honestly. A thousand years of cheap and plentiful fuel, simplified nuclear design, smaller physical footprint, lower risk of cataclysmic meltdown & resulting fallout, waste having a much lower half-life, no CO2 emissions...

    But it's still an idea. After Oak Ridge, there's been no government-led development of LFTR reactors in the states. Our only hopes at present are either with the Chinese [telegraph.co.uk] or a private company called Flibe Energy [flibe-energy.com] that's trying to gather investment funds to build LFTE reactors for army bases.

  • by Chas ( 5144 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @03:21PM (#48171989) Homepage Journal

    There's almost zero reason we should put LFTR and Fusion into an adversarial relationship.

    LFTR is closer to market right now, and fuel for it is ridiculously plentiful. It can easily power this planet for hundreds of years.

    At the same time, Fusion is around the corner (though it's been "around the corner" for several decades).

    Still, instead of dealing with:

    * Nasty, polluting fossil fuel generation
    * Solar/Wind/Hydro installs that fuck up the local ecology
    * Dirty, ancient solid-fuel fission tech

    Take the first step forward with LFTR and MSR fission.

    Yes, we'll have waste still. But it's FAR easier to design storage/depletion facilities that last 100-300 years. Current fission plants are producing stuff that'll be hot for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. And, quite simply, we can't guarantee anything we engineer will last that long. The oldest (mostly intact) megastructures on this planet are the Egyptian pyramids. And they're only about 4500 years old. Mostly because they're just a giant pile of stone.

    Still with LFTR/MSR, we can lower emissions and give ourselves time to grow and improve the grid while we get the kinks out of Fusion technology.

    With portable, modular solutions like Boeing's fusion skunkworks project, we can put cheap, safe power generation capacity just about ANYWHERE.
    When more power's needed? Just drop another unit next to the first and keep adding until your requirements are met.
    And when it's time to decommission a unit? Simply truck it away!

    And both of these technologies are engineered, from the get-go, to be inherently safe.

    With LFTR/MSR fission. If power is cut, you don't get a runaway reaction. By design, the reactor dumps the medium into dump tanks, away from the reagent.

    With fusion, you turn off power to a fusion reactor or change the dynamics inside the reactor, and the process shuts down naturally. Snuffed like a blown out candle.

    But, will all the "nuclear = bombs" hysterics ever allow this to go through?

    Hell no!

  • by DumbSwede ( 521261 ) <slashdotbin@hotmail.com> on Friday October 17, 2014 @03:24PM (#48172019) Homepage Journal
    What is really needed is a fusion/fission hybrid [wikipedia.org], which has been theorized for decades, but somehow never makes it past initial design phases. Gives a bridge to pure fusion, burns nuclear waste and/or thorium. Far fewer unknowns and engineering problems to overcome than pure fusion. What’s not to love?
    • What's not to love? You get the cost and complexity of having both a fission and fusion reactor but no more useful work done than if the reactor did just one or the other.

      I thought of how one might build a fission/fusion hybrid reactor and realized just how complex such a device would have to be to work. Everything inside the reactor would be very hot, bombarded by neutrons and gamma rays, and have to be precise and powerful enough to maintain confinement of a fusion reaction. I suspect that at some poin

  • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @03:35PM (#48172125)

    Quoting S.R. Hadden (from Contact [wikipedia.org]): "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?"

  • Realistically we should be making a new Nuclear Power utility every 20-40 years just to keep up to date with our technologies. More realistically: People are guaranteed to have health problems with coal furnaces, but only a chance that people get hurt by nuclear.
  • by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @06:18PM (#48173211)
    Safety is not about technology, it's about human error. As long as people do dumb things, no design will prevent a catastrophe.

    Look at the three big reactor failures: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. All three were caused by human error. For Chernobyl, it was a dangerous design and running dangerous tests. For TMI, it was a less dangerous design, and they still screwed it up with bad procedures. For Fukushima, they made a series of globally bad design choices because they refused to consider realistic worst case external events. Plus they uncovered a flaw in the containment structure design that lead to the hydrogen explosions.

    All of these are human error.

    And it's not just reactors. The British Petroleum oil platform blowout in the Gulf of Mexico was human error. The sinking of the ferry Sewol in Korea was human error, as was the sinking of the Concordia off of Italy. BP also had a refinery blow up in Texas because of bad operations and ignoring a known problem with volatile fume leakage.

    So no matter how secure a technology looks, it will still suffer a complete worst case failure. Assuming anything else is wishful thinking.

    What's the worst case for LFTR? No one seems willing to even talk about it. It's remarkably like the head in the sand attitude that lead to the Fukshima disaster.

    So here's a question: what happens when a molten salt containing fluorine, uranium, thorium and other miscellaneous radioactive elements comes in contact with water? Does it explode? Does it burn in air? How toxic are the substances entering the environment? (Trick question: both uranium and fluorine are very toxic elements. Fluorine forms many toxic compounds with carbon.) What is the equivilant explosive energy of tons of molten uranium salts?

    If it is burning, how do you put it out? (Note: with fluorine compounds water is a bad idea. It's explosive.) How do you build a containment vessel that will withstand all of that? How will the cost of proper containment and emergency planning and equipment impact the economics of power generation?

    A burning LFTR makes a burning graphite reactor seem like a campfire for a marshmallow roast. Good luck with that.

    • no, you are confused. The worst case is exactly what LFTR addresses and of course its engineers talk about that. Blow a hole in a LTFR reactors, the fuel drains into collection tanks and cools like glass. The salts are chemically stable and don't burn, decompose or explode.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]

    • If it is burning, how do you put it out?

      You are confusing fluorine with fluoride. A fluoride will not burn because it has already reached a state with a potential lower than that it would have with water or air.

      With that said most every LFTR design I've seen does have fluorine as a gas at some point in the process but that is in the chemical processing of the fuel while outside the reactor. There is little to no fluorine in the reactor vessel.

      There would not be a fire because the stuff in a LFTR does not burn. If there were things burning then

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