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There's no research being done on materials to safely contain molten radioactive salt, that research could be dangerous, pretty much only superpowers would have
by ses1984 6y ago
There's no research being done on materials to safely contain molten radioactive salt, that research could be dangerous, pretty much only superpowers would have the resources to do the research.
- bbojan 6y agoThis was being done three years ago: https://www.powermag.com/thorium-molten-salt-reactor-experiment-underway-in-the-netherlands/ https://www.powermag.com/thorium-molten-salt-reactor-experim... Also, I believe Copenhagen Atomics is doing this at the moment, but couldn't (quickly) find a reference.
- ses1984 6y agoThat's cool, thanks for the link.
- dheera 6y ago> materials to safely contain molten radioactive salt Wouldn't a giant steel or stone vat work, in theory?
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoThe problem is that the nuclear reactions produce many random materials which in turn might be corrowive to the reactor veasel. Dont forget that the vessel has to last decades, so even minor corrosion is a big deal.
- patmorgan23 6y agoYou'd still need a heat exchanger at some point, and you want a lot of surface area and thin walls for that.
- dheera 6y agoRandom thought experiment -- why not just drop it in the middle of a lifeless desert, forget about heat exchangers, and just let it slowly melt its way down through the crust of the earth? Assuming it went straight down and into the mantle, it would probably not impact the ecosystem.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jagannathtech 6y agobrb inventing teleportation
- selectodude 6y agoWouldn’t be particularly helpful for power generation since the salt needs to be cooled by water to create the steam to make the power.
- loopz 6y agoLike an uncontained nuclear reaction spewing radioactive materials over a large area?
- riffraff 6y agoThat's more or less what terrapower plans to build: dig a hole fill it with nuclear stuff and let it burn for decades.
- p1mrx 6y agoEven in a desert, you'll cross the water table before reaching the mantle. And people prefer to consume electricity in hospitable locations.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago"probably" being the key word here; Chernobyl was in a fairly remote area but the fallout spewed over a big part of Europe. If you go to the desert to make use of the space, might as well build a solar array instead.
- ses1984 6y agoMetals melt at lower temperatures than salt. Also think of how saltwater effects metal. That's just a bit of salt dissolved in water. Molten salt is like that, but way more concentrated, and hotter. Corrosive reactions go faster when you add heat. Molten salt is like metal's worst nightmare. That's before you even add the radioactivity into the mix, I believe that makes this problem an order of magnitude harder than just trying to contain molten salt, which is already kinda pretty hard. Stone, maybe, something like a specialized ceramic could work?
- jabl 6y agoNo, steel doesn't work, the salt is too corrosive. It's a very challenging problem, imagine you have half the periodic table floating around in a very radioactive salt at high temperature. Early molten salt reactor experiments used Hastelloy N (nickel: 71 wt%, molybdenum:16 wt%, chromium: 7 wt%, iron: 5 wt%, others:1 wt%), which apparently works. But as others have noted, there is ongoing research to further improve it.
- tootie 6y agoBill Gates is funding a company called Terrapower that is planning to bring compact MSR to market in the next 10 years. They already have working prototypes but are still a few years behind NuScale.
- petre 6y agoWasn't Terrapower trying to develop a travelling wave reactor? Or is that a MSR design as well?
- icodestuff 6y agoTerrapower is (was?) developing multiple technologies. They got approval for their traveling wave reactor (which uses molten sodium, not molten salt, but they are easily confused for obvious reasons) last week. Not sure if they're going to keep developing other techs.
- neltnerb 6y agoReally? I literally read dozens of papers about it a decade ago, at least... I guess I don't work adjacent to there so maybe no one else does either. Odd, I never have heard a reason why they were all that much worse than alternatives other than for corrosion and licensing costs, I am surprised that such a well defined problem just stopped being studied. I suppose at some point it's not competitive with solar so what's the point. Maybe we reached that threshold recently.
- ses1984 6y agoOk, there probably is actually lots of research going on, what little I know of it is several years out of date by now, at the time, advocates for the tech complained about the lack of research being done and I took them at their word.