4 ms·

Is there an ELI5 version?

badloginagain 12y ago
Its a nuclear generator factory. It uses molten salt as the catalyst for nuclear reaction, using thorium as the fuel. The molten salt allows passive safety measures, significantly reducing the negative effects of a meltdown. It also significantly reduces the size of the reactors housing. The use of thorium allows for significantly cheaper nuclear fuel, which happens to be very difficult to convert to weapon-grade nuclear fuel. By very difficult, I mean very difficult for a nation state, let alone a small group of bad actors.
- throwaway90446 12y ago
  So basically, they are better on every possible front, and the technology has existed for a while? Yet, LWR is still the dominant design. So, what's the catch? There's clearly something preferable about Uranium LWR that causes their dominance, no?
  - daeken 12y ago
    I have little more than a layman's understanding of the nuclear power landscape (I've read a decent bit and watched several talks, but that's about where it ends), but it seems to me that there are at least two reasons: 1) LWR reactors have been built for a long time, so they're very well understood (known risks are better than unknown risks) and the processes are already in place to bring them up. 2) Even though they're dominant, very few LWRs are built. There simply aren't many reactors being built of any kind, so it's unsurprising that the most common type (traditionally) is what we keep building.
    - taliesinb 12y ago
      > LWR reactors have been built for a long time, so they're very well understood (known risks are better than unknown risks) After Fukushima, I don't think most people would agree the risks are well understood, at least as reflected in the actions of the nuclear industry and its regulators. The NRC (and hence most of the world's regulators) uses a "design basis" approach to establish what emergencies reactors should be able to respond to safely without the release of radioactive materials. The design basis is supposed to quantify the known risks. In 2011 we saw just how inadequate the design basis framework was. It failed to predict risks such as multiple systems failing simultaneously, emergency generators being flooded, the plant being cut off from external help, multiple meltdowns happening simultaneously, valves getting stuck open, and a litany of other things that actually happened, resulting in the level 7 accident we saw. While the exact set of events that happened at Fukushima Daiichi is unique, similar accidents could happen in the US, or indeed anywhere (e.g. many reactors are downstream from major dams and could theoretically experience catastrophic flooding). And just as the NRC's computer models deemed Fukushima impossible before the accident, the NRC has largely ignored the recommendations of its own near-term task force in how to improve the regulatory situation in the US after the accident. It is up to us to demand that the nuclear power industry, which is wielding technology of massive destructive power at the behest of its shareholders, transform itself into the transparent, accountable industry we deserve.
  - ecopoesis 12y ago
    LWR is what the Navy used, and the civilian designs were just based on that.
  - everyone 12y ago
    LWR was chosen during the cold war because they wanted to make as much weapons grade fuel as possible.
    - aqme28 12y ago
      Also because IIRC it made more sense on submarines.
  - badloginagain 12y ago
    When nuclear research was first being developed, it was for the specific purpose of building the bomb. When the war ended, and the industry switched to civilian applications, they decided to go with Uranium because they had already worked out many of the issues. Still, the US Airforce wanted a nuclear-powered bomber shortly after the Navy showed their nuclear sub and before ICBM's deprecated "end-of-days" long-range bombers. A water-contained reactor wouldn't work in an airplane, so they funded the development of the MSR (molten-salt-reactor). Unfortunately, when they shuddered the project after the implementation of practical ICBMs, industry politics discredited MSR's in favour of the reactor-types we have now. After fukushima, a grassroots campaign has been undertaken to resume research of MSR's as a replacement of fossil fuels for scalable carbon-free energy creation. If you are interested, you can get a great overview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4
    - r00fus 12y ago
      > Unfortunately, when they shuddered the project after the implementation of practical ICBMs, industry politics discredited MSR's in favour of the reactor-types we have now. So essentially what you're seeing is the result of decades of regulatory capture of the NRC by the nuclear industry.
      - angersock 12y ago
        I think the missing factor is that there are massive regulatory hurdles in the way of testing new designs, no?
        fennecfoxen 12y ago
        ... well, yeah: placing massive hurdles in the way of potential competitors and their technologies is about half of the premise of regulatory capture...
    - agumonkey 12y ago
      It's amazing how the state of things may look like a local maximum depending on the root of the research path.
  - Animats 12y ago
    In light-water reactors, the highly radioactive part of the system is very simple. It's a core of metal fuel rods and support structure, some control rods, and water. All the plumbing complexity is external, and it's on water, which isn't hard to handle. Most of the alternative reactor designs have more going on in the radioactive part of the system, or more difficult working fluids. This usually leads to trouble. Sodium-cooled reactors have sodium fires. Helium-cooled reactors have helium leaks. Pebble bed reactors have pebble jams. (The one in Germany is so jammed it can't be decommissioned.) Molten salt reactors have to pump radioactive molten salt around and run it through a chemical processing plant. In some designs that salt is a fluorine compound. Now you have all the headaches of operating a radioactive chemical plant. Most power utilities don't want to operate a radioactive chemical plant.
    - pjc50 12y ago
      I wondered what had happened to pebble beds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor Most power utilities don't want to operate a radioactive chemical plant This is a brilliant phrase, thankyou.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- _kst_ 12y ago
  In spite of the name "ThorCon", there's no mention of thorium on the front page. http://thorconpower.com/features/clean http://thorconpower.com/features/clean says: > And ThorCon obtains about 25% of its power from easily mined thorium which requires no enrichment. http://thorconpower.com/design/thorcon-can http://thorconpower.com/design/thorcon-can says the "fuelsalt" is "a mixture of sodium, beryllium, uranium and thorium fluorides called nabe".
  - badloginagain 12y ago
    Interesting, I wonder if fuelsalt is more efficient or cheaper. I do know that thorium is tightly controlled in the US.
    - _kst_ 12y ago
      I'm pretty sure uranium is tightly controlled too.
- bkeroack 12y ago
  If I'm understanding it correctly, the term "meltdown" doesn't even really apply to this design since the fuel is already liquid.
  - badloginagain 12y ago
    You are correct- I use the term meltdown to encapsulate an event that causes significant damage to the control of a reactor, such as an earthquake followed by a tsunami. In such an event, an MSR has a "drain tank" that sits below the reactor. In an emergency, gravity drops the salt into the drain tank, and the nuclear reaction safely comes to a halt- all with zero human intervention.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
      Perhaps it would be better to use the term 'containment failure'. I'm surrounded by vehement anti-nuclear types, you know the ones who get arrested for their environmental activism antics. When talking about nuclear technology with them I find it helpful not to utter certain words like 'meltdown', 'weapons', etc etc.

Its a nuclear generator factory. It uses molten salt as the catalyst for nuclear reaction, using thorium as the fuel. The molten salt allows passive safety measures, significantly reducing the negative effects of a meltdown. It also significantly reduces the size of the reactors housing. The use of thorium allows for significantly cheaper nuclear fuel, which happens to be very difficult to convert to weapon-grade nuclear fuel. By very difficult, I mean very difficult for a nation state, let alone a small group of bad actors.

throwaway90446 12y ago
So basically, they are better on every possible front, and the technology has existed for a while? Yet, LWR is still the dominant design. So, what's the catch? There's clearly something preferable about Uranium LWR that causes their dominance, no?
- daeken 12y ago
  I have little more than a layman's understanding of the nuclear power landscape (I've read a decent bit and watched several talks, but that's about where it ends), but it seems to me that there are at least two reasons: 1) LWR reactors have been built for a long time, so they're very well understood (known risks are better than unknown risks) and the processes are already in place to bring them up. 2) Even though they're dominant, very few LWRs are built. There simply aren't many reactors being built of any kind, so it's unsurprising that the most common type (traditionally) is what we keep building.
  - taliesinb 12y ago
    > LWR reactors have been built for a long time, so they're very well understood (known risks are better than unknown risks) After Fukushima, I don't think most people would agree the risks are well understood, at least as reflected in the actions of the nuclear industry and its regulators. The NRC (and hence most of the world's regulators) uses a "design basis" approach to establish what emergencies reactors should be able to respond to safely without the release of radioactive materials. The design basis is supposed to quantify the known risks. In 2011 we saw just how inadequate the design basis framework was. It failed to predict risks such as multiple systems failing simultaneously, emergency generators being flooded, the plant being cut off from external help, multiple meltdowns happening simultaneously, valves getting stuck open, and a litany of other things that actually happened, resulting in the level 7 accident we saw. While the exact set of events that happened at Fukushima Daiichi is unique, similar accidents could happen in the US, or indeed anywhere (e.g. many reactors are downstream from major dams and could theoretically experience catastrophic flooding). And just as the NRC's computer models deemed Fukushima impossible before the accident, the NRC has largely ignored the recommendations of its own near-term task force in how to improve the regulatory situation in the US after the accident. It is up to us to demand that the nuclear power industry, which is wielding technology of massive destructive power at the behest of its shareholders, transform itself into the transparent, accountable industry we deserve.
- ecopoesis 12y ago
  LWR is what the Navy used, and the civilian designs were just based on that.
- everyone 12y ago
  LWR was chosen during the cold war because they wanted to make as much weapons grade fuel as possible.
  - aqme28 12y ago
    Also because IIRC it made more sense on submarines.
- badloginagain 12y ago
  When nuclear research was first being developed, it was for the specific purpose of building the bomb. When the war ended, and the industry switched to civilian applications, they decided to go with Uranium because they had already worked out many of the issues. Still, the US Airforce wanted a nuclear-powered bomber shortly after the Navy showed their nuclear sub and before ICBM's deprecated "end-of-days" long-range bombers. A water-contained reactor wouldn't work in an airplane, so they funded the development of the MSR (molten-salt-reactor). Unfortunately, when they shuddered the project after the implementation of practical ICBMs, industry politics discredited MSR's in favour of the reactor-types we have now. After fukushima, a grassroots campaign has been undertaken to resume research of MSR's as a replacement of fossil fuels for scalable carbon-free energy creation. If you are interested, you can get a great overview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4
  - r00fus 12y ago
    > Unfortunately, when they shuddered the project after the implementation of practical ICBMs, industry politics discredited MSR's in favour of the reactor-types we have now. So essentially what you're seeing is the result of decades of regulatory capture of the NRC by the nuclear industry.
    - angersock 12y ago
      I think the missing factor is that there are massive regulatory hurdles in the way of testing new designs, no?
      - fennecfoxen 12y ago
        ... well, yeah: placing massive hurdles in the way of potential competitors and their technologies is about half of the premise of regulatory capture...
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    It's amazing how the state of things may look like a local maximum depending on the root of the research path.
- Animats 12y ago
  In light-water reactors, the highly radioactive part of the system is very simple. It's a core of metal fuel rods and support structure, some control rods, and water. All the plumbing complexity is external, and it's on water, which isn't hard to handle. Most of the alternative reactor designs have more going on in the radioactive part of the system, or more difficult working fluids. This usually leads to trouble. Sodium-cooled reactors have sodium fires. Helium-cooled reactors have helium leaks. Pebble bed reactors have pebble jams. (The one in Germany is so jammed it can't be decommissioned.) Molten salt reactors have to pump radioactive molten salt around and run it through a chemical processing plant. In some designs that salt is a fluorine compound. Now you have all the headaches of operating a radioactive chemical plant. Most power utilities don't want to operate a radioactive chemical plant.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    I wondered what had happened to pebble beds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor Most power utilities don't want to operate a radioactive chemical plant This is a brilliant phrase, thankyou.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
_kst_ 12y ago
In spite of the name "ThorCon", there's no mention of thorium on the front page. http://thorconpower.com/features/clean http://thorconpower.com/features/clean says: > And ThorCon obtains about 25% of its power from easily mined thorium which requires no enrichment. http://thorconpower.com/design/thorcon-can http://thorconpower.com/design/thorcon-can says the "fuelsalt" is "a mixture of sodium, beryllium, uranium and thorium fluorides called nabe".
- badloginagain 12y ago
  Interesting, I wonder if fuelsalt is more efficient or cheaper. I do know that thorium is tightly controlled in the US.
  - _kst_ 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure uranium is tightly controlled too.
bkeroack 12y ago
If I'm understanding it correctly, the term "meltdown" doesn't even really apply to this design since the fuel is already liquid.
- badloginagain 12y ago
  You are correct- I use the term meltdown to encapsulate an event that causes significant damage to the control of a reactor, such as an earthquake followed by a tsunami. In such an event, an MSR has a "drain tank" that sits below the reactor. In an emergency, gravity drops the salt into the drain tank, and the nuclear reaction safely comes to a halt- all with zero human intervention.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
    Perhaps it would be better to use the term 'containment failure'. I'm surrounded by vehement anti-nuclear types, you know the ones who get arrested for their environmental activism antics. When talking about nuclear technology with them I find it helpful not to utter certain words like 'meltdown', 'weapons', etc etc.