molten salt reactors would cut the cost of electricity to 1/4-1/10 the current lowest cost coal produced electricity . This would make electricity for electric cars cheap but it would also make it cheap to do in situ mining for oil shale in the green river basin and thereby take the cost of oil shale production from the $80@ barrel range to the $40@ barrel range.
whats the “15 minutes of fame” all about?
that implies the idea came and went in short order. i don’t think thats what the article meant to say. the idea is still viable?
We are so burdened with regulation, second-guessing, and government interference.
Why should it take 35 YEARS to develop this technology. We put a man on the moon in less than 10 years. We developed a nuclear bomb in half that. 35 years we went from the first personal computer to computers in every last thing on the planet.
But it will take 35 years to develop something based on well-understood physics?
They were talking about this 2 years ago. Why don’t we have a test bed running today? Or do we?
They should repair the FFTF and crank that baby up again.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Flux_Test_Facility<
I recall that the US Navy equipped a submarine with an experimental liquid sodium reactor back in the 1950s.
That's HOT! 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit. Are there known materials that can maintain their integrity while being constantly exposed to that kind of heat for the expected lifespan of the reactor?
Brit article, pffft. The Chicoms and Indians have gobbled up all the ORNL Thorium Salt Reactor info they can find and are running with it. That little island is far too egocentric to advance much.
Long overdue technology though. As some have pointed out, it has been done and the reactor at Oak Ridge ran well for quite some time. The problem, as I understand it, is building a continuous process that will remove contaminants of spent fuel and recharge the salt with new fuel instead of the batch process used in the ORNL reactor. This is a very difficult chemical process to crack.
If I were king for a day LiFTR is a technology I would fund in an effort similar to the moon launch program.
Isn’t in ludicrous for them to suggest this is a “bridge technology” to Fusion that “will be available in 2050”? If we were very lucky and very good and very industrious LiFTR might be available by 2050. Fusion is still further away in all probability.
The other great benefit of the molten salt designs is that they can also use spent fuel from nuclear reactors. These reactors only burn about 5% of the nuclear fuel. So rather than store these nuclear fuels in yucca mountain, lftr reactors will burn them. These nuclear wastes represent 100’s of years of free energy.
Two companies are working on this angle. The first is Transatomic power mentioned in the article above which uses molten salt designs. the second is bill gates Terrapower which uses a different technology to burn nuclear wastes.