News: 1622722435

Finally we've found the power source for all those microchiped vaccines!

I was thinking more along the lines of if Gates has an extinct volcano, but a used coal mine will do

Ta-ra power?! Really?

We need a Cilla Black Icon.

We need a Cilla Black Icon.

No, we really, really don't.

Eh? But I thought Cilla Black was *already* an icon ... ;-)

Call it Thorium, call it Natrium, I don't care. Get it up and running and stop those coal-based generators ASAP.

If Gates really does care sbout the planet and environment, he would be putting money into solving the problems that are holding back thorium reactors.

Meanwhile the UK is actually doing some useful work with a spherical Tokamak using a new type of divertor that should bring large increases in efficiency.

Maybe.Fusion is still X years away but progress is being made and what was bleeding edge tech a while back is slowly becoming routine.

It's a pity I can't give you half an upvote and half a downvote.

Agreed on the Thorium reactors. The main argument being (publicly) put forward against them is "but it hasn't been done commercially before", which you would think should therefore stop any new technology anywhere ever being deployed.

However IMO there's a stronger reason this isn't being done: nuclear power needs government backing. And government backing won't come if those reactors don't contribute to the other purpose of nuclear reactors: to provide bomb-making material (no matter how much they plead innocence). Thorium doesn't meet this criterion.

On the other half of your post: fusion. Meh. I'm expecting my hoverboard about the the same time fusion becomes viable. Yes it's worth pursuing because if it does ever work the payoff will be great, but these days I just turn the page when I read "Fusion! Real Soon Now!".

Yes, we are getting closer to viable fusion reactors all the time. Why, every 20 years or so we get halfway closer than we were 20 years earlier. Ad infinitum.

Yeah, it's like those Free Energy machines. If they work as well as the inventor thinks, then they can just string up lots of 1000W bulbs and show it!

Call it Thorium, call it Natrium, I don't care.

You just failed chemistry. Natrium is sodium, element 11. Thorium is element 90. I wouldn't put thorium chloride on my chips.

I was thinking the other day, what a nuclear power plant needs to make it safe, is to be cooled by an explosive metal that burns freely in the air and explodes in water....

Almost as smart as pumping 'cooling' air through graphite moderators and wondering why the fire won't go out.... Windscale circa 1957.

It's about 170,000 Air conditioners. If you made an airconditioner that used the blazing sunshine to cool the building then you've made saved us from another nuclear power plant. Branson's goal is a better goal than Gate's goal here. Turn the big ticket energy use into small ticket energy use and eliminate the need for the generation.

Molten salt reactors were designed at a barbecue where a Naval Nuclear Engineer was complaning about how trixy those small U235 fueled reactors used for submarines and battleships were. This was overheard by some flake who's day job is designing neutron warheads or something at Los Alamos, who got inspired and went "Hey, hold my beer"!

Grabbed the blackboard and started to rant:

"On top of all the know things with conventional reactors, lets take the "hotter" Naval kind and then add some 700C molten salt to it, just to corrode all know materials we could build this device from, then we add a chemical plant next to it, to separate the isotopes out of the radiocative and corrosive molten salt.

Yeah, Thorpe were Pussies! We can do better!!".

The last sentence was the only bit understood by the coke-infused Venture Capitalists at the barbecue, and now Modular Molten Salt Reactors are The Shiieeets, attracting billions of surplus dollars.

PS:

All UFO's are alien YouTubers, here to see how we blow ourselves up in quaint and amusing ways!

There's a tiny difference between molten sodium and molten sodium salt. One is significantly more stable than the other for a start.

... Once irradiated, both kinds will a lot of Fun to clean out of a clogged pump!

The advantage of using sodium for a heat transfer medium is that under neutron bombardment it turns in to 24 Na that has a half life of 15hrs when it turns in to stable 24 Mg. So leave it for a week and the radioactive content will have reduced to 0.04%.

The advantage of an energy efficient air-conditioner, is it sells itself and doesn't go boom.

Other AC> Almost as smart as pumping 'cooling' air through graphite moderators and wondering why the fire won't go out.... Windscale circa 1957.

Very unfair comment given the action of the teams to control that disaster.

And as opposed to water cooling and building a 30 mile emergency evacuation road to get people out before the reactor blows in the event of a coolant failure? As the Americans did?

(Remember these were plutonium production reactors. Not civil power reactors.)

Solar has a payback of ~12-15 years or so, including the battery pack, so who needs this? At best it simply delays the rollout and development of solar and the development of energy efficient tech and storage tech.

Swapping water cooling for melted salt cooling, well I confidently predict you will get two new modes of failure: the salt will solidify in the cooling system and the cooling will fail. The salt will overheat and liberate sodium for spectacular big-badda-booms of hot mplten burning contaminated salt. Oh what fun.

The problem with nuclear is not the cooling system, its the *failure* of the cooling system. Creating extra modes of failure doesn't make for a safer reactor.

I chose Windscale because in hindsight, it was such a dumb thing right? Anyone whose lit a barbecue would know that was dumb. It's like major league stupid dumb. Like using a solid as a liquid coolant dumb. Like using corrosive things in a system thats difficult to maintain dumb. Like doing something that's failed again and again and again and expecting a different result this time, dumb.

The issue isn't liquid sodium cooling, it's the "travelling wave" concept. Basically, you get a big, big lump of depleted uranium, and put a fissile core in the middle of it. Neutrons from the core transmute the inert uranium into fissile isotopes of uranium and plutonium. Eventually, there is enough of these to create fission in a shell around the core, while the core burns out. The shell neutrons transmute the depleted uranium on the outer edge, so that the fission process gradually moves outwards until everything is consumed.

One advantage is that while you are breeding plutonium and fissile uranium, it is fairly inaccessible if you wanted some for a bomb.

One can do all that better, because one can control the neutron rate and energy to get at those hard-to-reach isotopes, by using an Accelerator Driven System.

Some of my former colleagues are busy building a science prototype, "Myrrha" in Belgium of all places. https://myrrha.be/

They're both issues. Sodium is a tricky thing, especially at high temperatures. Most of the problems with research into sodium-cooled reactors stemmed from leaks . Try looking up the "Sodium Reactor Experiment" and "Monju"

As for the traveling wave concept, it seems fiendishly complicated, not to mention lacking in critical research. RoI on it seems sketchy at best, and research into long-term RoI for power plants in general suggest the numbers could be excessively rose-tinted.

Have to dump all that spare energy somewhere while trialling this POC.

Generate Billcoins?

>>this plant is to be built on the site of an old coal mine<<

Reactors are built on several thousand tonnes of concrete and surrounded by several thousand more, how far down are the old levels?

Perhaps it's an old open cast coal mine?

That would make the eventual decommissioning process easier, just fill in the hole..

Maybe they are following the Tried and Tested Windscale approach and they plan to dump all the waste down those old mineshafts?

It goes down until you start hitting the turtles.

Wyoming mines are mainly open surface pits, not deep.

a sodium cooled fast breeder nuclear reactor was commissioned in Germany, the [1]SNR-300 in Kalkar . It was build at the cost of 4 billion USD, but never used. It is now a (profitable) themepark for [2]kids .

BTW The Dutch protests against Kalkar gave Milieudefensie a boost. The same organisation that now [3]successfully prosecuted Royal Dutch Shell as a global polluter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_yU9TEYJlM

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milieudefensie_et_al_v_Royal_Dutch_Shell

BTW The Dutch protests against Kalkar gave Milieudefensie a boost. The same organisation that now successfully prosecuted Royal Dutch Shell as a global polluter.

Those nutjobs and neo-luddites also protested against Petten's HFR and it's proposed replacement, Pallas. And also prowl beaches, looking for molybdenum-99 and daughter products, and then claim those must have come from nuclear leaks, and shut down nuclear plants now! And they're semi-correct, although the 'leaks' probably come from patients who've been fed/injected with deadly radiation stuff like Technetium-99. Which then decays to ruthenium-99 and that stuff has a half-life of over 200,000 years!

So ban this sort of thing! Or not, because radioisotopes can be rather vital in medicine, and can't easily (or cheaply) be produced without nuclear alchemy. Sure, it's possible to produce molybdenum-99 with a particle accelerator, but a tad energy intensive. Plus needing a LOT of cheap, reliable energy. It's one of those fun things to troll neo-luddites with. So you have an application that requires reliable energy for hours/days to avoid expensive shut-downs and machine cleaning. Now power that with 'renewables' like windmills, and you can't rely on cheap grid power..

But such is politics. Nuclear power saves a lot of lives, and hopefully this demo plant will demonstrate the feasibility of SMRs for the energy we'll need to power our 'Green' transformation. The UK is probably fsck'd due to Boris's choice of Green policy advisor.

PS.. but we thought: Na, people will groan...

I did. Bad vulture!

If they fucked Shell in the ass they are OK people!

There are two hugely exciting aspects about this Natrium project: the first is that it comes with its own energy storage (molten salt, much like with e.g. CSP), the second is that it's a fast neutron reactor. For those unaware, a fast neutron reactor employs fast neutrons (instead of slower, 'thermal' neutrons in LWRs) which are able to fission not just U-235 fuel like most fission reactors, but also transuranics and actinides.

This is similar to Russia's BN-series of reactors, of which the BN-600 and BN-800 types are currently being used to test an aspect that's central to Russia's nuclear power program: closing the uranium fuel cycle. This involves processing spent fuel from conventional LWR (thermal neutron) reactors and using it as MOX fuel for full burn-up. This would leave just some short-lived isotopes at the end, with no significant levels of uranium (U-235, U-238 or otherwise), plutonium isotopes, etc. remaining.

In essence, this Natrium reactor has the potential for not only lightning-fast load following due to its molten salt buffer, but also the ability to use up all the spent fuel in the US that's stored around the country.

Worked great at Dounreay on the northern tip of Scotland.

Oh wait, no, no it didn't.

Great for jobs though, if jobs is decommissioning and cleanup.

Surprised at the use of sodium in the primary cooling circuit. Sodium-potassium alloy is a better bet as its liquid at room temperature so easier to handle - and has been used in reactors before

FWIW Thunderbird 2 was said to use either liquid Na or NaK back in the 1960's - the liquid metal took the heat directly from the aircraft's nuclear reactor core and dumped into the ramjets (used for supercruise flight) that ran along the two sidestruts that held the front and back of the aircraft together.

Chemical rockets were used for launch until enough air was flowing through the ramjets.