3 ms·
My understanding of the situation is that corrosion is the main issue holding back Thorium reactor design. Molten sodium is used in the coolant loop of some fa
by ohazi 8y ago
My understanding of the situation is that corrosion is the main issue holding back Thorium reactor design.
Molten sodium is used in the coolant loop of some fast reactors, but it doesn't develop any long-lived radioactive byproducts, so it (and the various parts and fittings that it inevitably corrodes) can be disposed of relatively easily. They don't really have solutions to keep it contained, it eventually eats through everything. You just have to keep it from contacting water and exploding.
- nickik 8y agoCorrosion is by far not the main issue holding back Thorium reactors. In fact in the MSR experiment they did a lot of work on corrosion and they considered it very solvable. Re-qualifying that material would be tricky and costly, but there are companies doing it. For the MSR style modern 2 fluid reactor your main problem is the chemical plant that needs to live in the reactor itself. Secondly Thorium has absolutely no regularly support, and given the way nuclear regulation works its basically impossible to get a new fuel and type of reactor to market. There is Thorium fuel for LWR coming to the market very slowly, but the advantages of that are very limited.
- angry_octet 8y agoI thought the combination: - hot corrosive sodium - heat exchanged with water for steam turbine - water+sodium = boom was always going to be problematic.