Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor

[Moontanman]

Here is a shortened version of an hour long talk on LFTR reactor technology, if you want I do have the link to the long version on my you-tube channel under "safe nuclear power" list.

 

[Moontanman]

Does anyone think we might have gone the wrong direction when we chose the uranium/plutonium cycle over the thorium/uranium cycle for nuclear power 60 years ago?

[belovelife]

havn't watched the video yet, but is this the type that needs uranium to start the reaction

 

 

 

and is it possible to develop a fuse that instantly stops the fission?

[Eclipse Now]

Hi, just bumping up this thread because I've found a 2 hour documentary that has won some non-nuclear greenie friends over to nuclear power as an option.

These 'Lifters' (LFTR's) really are the way nuclear power should have gone!

 

After watching this documentary I wrote a blog post "I'm in Love"

https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/2014/11/16/im-in-love/

Summary points:

 

• Passive safety, just like the IFR
• Eats nuclear waste and warheads, just like the IFR
• But uses stable liquid salt, not the unstable and explosive sodium of an IFR!
• Uses graphite moderators to slow the neutrons for a slow thermal reaction, not the fast neutron reaction of the IFR (advantage below)
• Every other reactor on earth uses power to cool the reactor
• The LFTR uses a lack of power to trigger a cooling emergency.
• The moment power fails, the ice-plug melts and the reactor drains away into a safe, passive-cooling drain tank
• Only the reactor tank has the graphite moderator: the drain tank doesn’t have a moderator so the reaction cannot continue!
• “Melt down” is impossible: it is already a liquid, and gravity never fails. The moment there is a power failure, the frozen salt plug melts and the reactor drains away!
• Thorium is hundreds of times more abundant than uranium and every nation on earth pretty much has their own supply

But how ready is the LFTR to roll out? Isn’t it just hypothetical? Isn’t it just a nice idea that some scientists talk about, but no one is taking seriously? Isn’t the IFR decades ahead in prototype testing, and the LFTR just a nice idea we can explore sometime in the distant future?

Wrong!

The Chinese visited Oak Ridge a few years back. Oak Ridge built the world’s first LFTR back in the 1960’s, but the Cold War was on and the military needed plutonium. LFTR’s don’t produce plutonium, so LFTR’s were sidelined in the quest for the BOMB. Oak Ridge filed the project on a bunch of CD’s, and abandoned it. Most of the staff are dead or retired.

Until Kirk Sorenson retrieved all those files, uploaded new PDR’s onto his website, and the Chinese started taking notice! Now the son of a former Premier is running a trulymassive fast-tracked program aiming to prototype, test, and build out Lifter’s within a decade. This changes everything. I no longer think the LFTR is a ‘nice idea’. It’s serious. And the first nation to massively mine thorium for fuel also wins in the rare-earth market. Valuable rare-earth’s then become another resource stream byproduct of the lithium fuel market! Everyone wins!

As the UK’s Telegraph explains:

• LFTR’s can’t produce bombs
• China’s thorium project was launched as a high priority by princeling Jiang Mianheng, son of former leader Jiang Zemin, in 2013
• 140 PHD scientists and $350 million, so far.
• 750 staff by 2015 but could be more
• Opens the floodgates for a massive, worldwide nuclear comeback once people understand how safe and reliable Lifters are, and how utterly different to anything at Chernobyl and Fukushima

Unobtrusive, tidy, reliable, clean, cheap, abundant power can mean only one thing.  Hope.

Edited November 28, 2014 by Eclipse Now

[Moontanman]

Now if we could just figure out how to confine a uranium plasma in a magnetic field, we could have space travel and safe power for our bases on various planets and moons.. 

Edited November 29, 2014 by Moontanman

[Eclipse Now]

Sorry, why the magnetic field? Aren't they working towards nuclear-rockets in more conventional power systems?

[Moontanman]

Sorry, why the magnetic field? Aren't they working towards nuclear-rockets in more conventional power systems?

 

 

I am talking about the gaseous fission reactor, it is capable of having a specific impulse of 5000 seconds ISP, the best chemical rockets can do is about 450 ISP and solid core nuclear rockets can do about 900 ISP.

 

A magnetic field would help contain the Uranium plasma, this plasma would be at about 25,000C and heat up hydrogen via radiation of UV.  A silica barrier would keep the plasma out of the exhaust but a very powerful magnetic field would go a long way helping contain the reaction. At this time we cannot generate a magnetic field of the strength needed.  

 

http://members.shaw.ca/bru_b/Liberty_ship_menupg.html