4 ms·

It seems like that might suggest a potential option in the search for appropriate materials to build the containment vessel and piping to hold in the salt: just

by elihu 4y ago

It seems like that might suggest a potential option in the search for appropriate materials to build the containment vessel and piping to hold in the salt: just make the whole thing out of salt. Anything that needs to be solid can have built-in channels with coolant piped through. The rest can maintain a sort of steady state. I'm sure there's all sorts of practical reasons why that wouldn't work, but it's an interesting thing to think about.

lolc 4y ago
Nice hack! That sounds so easy that I wonder what the catch is. Maybe it would need more energy for cooling than what it generates? So it would have to be scaled up to a size where the surface-to-content ratio becomes favourable. There might not be enough salt for that :-)
- elihu 4y ago
  I suppose one problem might be selecting an appropriate coolant that doesn't dissolve the salt on contact. Presumably water would, but google says that salt doesn't dissolve in oil so maybe that's an option. Ideally you wouldn't need to expend energy to keep the coolant cold enough; rather, you'd use the coolant to boil water to run your steam generator.
  - usrusr 4y ago
    “Vessel built out of nothing but heat transfer interface and freeze plug". Do some of the materials problems get easier while it's only touching the salt in frozen state?
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  Ok so I recently watched a video that went into some of this, and I had know idea how crazy some of these nuclear fuels are in terms of physical requirements. If I recall the video correctly, solid metal oxide fuel produces offgas at a 50:1 ratio, while being insanely dense. This produces pretty insane internal pressures if the goal of the fuel design is to keep everything contained. Like strong enough to eventually cause mechanical failure of the fuel. I think there's a lot of really difficult constraints intersecting in these fuel assembly designs, and something that seems obviously simple probably isn't.

by elihu 4y ago

lolc 4y ago

Nice hack! That sounds so easy that I wonder what the catch is. Maybe it would need more energy for cooling than what it generates? So it would have to be scaled up to a size where the surface-to-content ratio becomes favourable. There might not be enough salt for that :-)

elihu 4y ago
I suppose one problem might be selecting an appropriate coolant that doesn't dissolve the salt on contact. Presumably water would, but google says that salt doesn't dissolve in oil so maybe that's an option. Ideally you wouldn't need to expend energy to keep the coolant cold enough; rather, you'd use the coolant to boil water to run your steam generator.
- usrusr 4y ago
  “Vessel built out of nothing but heat transfer interface and freeze plug". Do some of the materials problems get easier while it's only touching the salt in frozen state?
jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
Ok so I recently watched a video that went into some of this, and I had know idea how crazy some of these nuclear fuels are in terms of physical requirements. If I recall the video correctly, solid metal oxide fuel produces offgas at a 50:1 ratio, while being insanely dense. This produces pretty insane internal pressures if the goal of the fuel design is to keep everything contained. Like strong enough to eventually cause mechanical failure of the fuel. I think there's a lot of really difficult constraints intersecting in these fuel assembly designs, and something that seems obviously simple probably isn't.