4 ms·
I heard a story a while ago about a facility working with a lot of molten sodium. The whole building had no running water at all, no bathrooms even, because wa
by darkpuma 7y ago
I heard a story a while ago about a facility working with a lot of molten sodium. The whole building had no running water at all, no bathrooms even, because water and sodium mixing is a problem.
Lithium doesn't seem a whole lot safer.. but I don't think a fusion power plant could be water free. As far as I'm aware there is no more efficient method of using heat to spin a generator than a steam turbine. A lithium/water heat exchanger seems pretty frightening. Do they have a better plan for that?
- amluto 7y agoFrom somewhat outdated memory: lithium is thermodynamically less stable in the presence of water, but the reaction is slower than it is for sodium. (And so on: potassium and cesium react even more violently with water.) But this is largely moot, as lithium in salt form (Li+) does not react with water. I would be more concerned about the beryllium salt dissolving in water and escaping. Beryllium is nasty.
- gmueckl 7y agoIf memory serves, lithium is more reactive than sodium. ITER will have some kind of heat exchanging system to cool the lithium. But I don't know what that secondary system uses.
- dojomouse 7y agoHaven't looked at the proposal, and not commenting either way on the risk of using water in this context, but the water/reactive-metal issues have been widely investigated in other liquid metal reactor designs and generally intermediate cooling loops with some benign medium are used. Edit to expand; having now looked it seems some of the intermediate loop designs have the SAME material (e.g. sodium). This at least means the loop at risk of mixing with water is isolated from the core (where an explosion is difficult to manage). I thought I'd seen other designs, just can't find them now.