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What is it with physicists and molten salt? Every battery-tech, pro-nuclear, fusion related news have to have somebody chiming in "molten salt". Just an obser

• ForHackernews 8y ago
  Molten salt has a high heat capacity and a higher boiling point than water, so you can get higher temperature without worrying about steam.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• HoochTHX 8y ago
  No pressure vessel required. Meaning no explosion possible. Intrinsic safety by design.
• Pica_soO 8y ago
  Its a superior concept, that regularly failed when realized in powerplants. Its part of the long list of experiMental reactors. With beautys like this concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor#Disadvantages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor#Dis... We had several attempts, and always the alternative medium causes more problems then trouble, corroding material, being flammable when escaping and other funny side-effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Disadvantages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Disadvanta... (TL,DR): It falls apart when under neutron bombardment. Of course, most of the proposers being theoretical physics enthusiasts, just ignore the long list of dangers, or even worse, love the addition of new problems to solve with experimental methods (the equivalent to problem solving by recursion on a labyrinth of depth n) and ignore the century long experience we have with hot water cycles. My suggestion to solve these sort of problems, is to build these reactor-prototypes on the roof of physics departments in university's.
• 08-15 8y ago
  Molten salts are hot! SCNR. Seriously though, molten salts are great heat transfer media, a bit like water, just at higher temperature and still low pressure. They are also completely immune to radiation damage, which is a big deal if you have 14MeV neutrons flying around and something has to stop them. Chemistry in molten salts is also interesting. Things can be extracted (say, into a molten metal phase) or precipitated, and some reactions just happen at 600 degrees while they need platinum and palladium catalysts at room temperature. What's not to love?
  • antocv 8y ago
    Can you teach me more about the radiation properties of molten salts? Didnt know molten salt is immune to radiation, why would that be? Thats cool, though.
    • pfdietz 8y ago
      Because they (or, at least, the ones being discussed) have no covalent chemical bonds or other static arrangements of atoms that can be disrupted. The ions are all just single atoms with more or fewer electrons than the neutral versions of those elements. The atoms can be ionized by radiation, but the resulting weird oxidation states just fall back to chemical equilibrium as the electrons redistribute.
• pfdietz 8y ago
  The confinement building of a light water reactor is large because it has to contain large volumes of steam in an accident. In a molten salt reactor, there is very little volatile material inside the containment building. The salt itself does not have high vapor pressure, even in accident conditions. As a result, the size (and cost) of the containment building can be radically reduced. Moltex's design, for example, reduces the cost (per unit of power output) of the containment building by a factor of 5 vs. LWRs.