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.
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Agree on the chinese. My impression with the Indians is that they’re just incorporating thorium into their light water reactors rather than developing molten salt designs.
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.
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thanks for this bit of info. You generally hear that there are still problems with the lftr design but no one seems to elaborate. You’re the first I’ve heard get specific. This does seem to be a problem that could overcome with a bit of time money and attention.
If I were king for a day LiFTR is a technology I would fund in an effort similar to the moon launch program.
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Agree the promise is so stunningly fabulous ie dirt cheap and cheaper unlimited safe energy that will last hundreds of years and scale...that its gobsmacking that people don’t instantly push this tech.
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.
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Disagree on this. Prototypes in any case will be developed in under 10 years. The Chinese have moved up their prototype due date to under 10 years. I’ve heard Gates’s team push forward their prototype date to before 2020. (admittedly their tech isn’t lftr but their tech is more unproved than lftr) imho sometime in the next year or three some ambitious individual or team will announce their plan to prototype in 18 months or so. imho there will wind up being a very public race to get the first reactor in operation.
Disagree on this. Prototypes in any case will be developed in under 10 years. The Chinese have moved up their prototype due date to under 10 years. I’ve heard Gates’s team push forward their prototype date to before 2020. (admittedly their tech isn’t lftr but their tech is more unproved than lftr) imho sometime in the next year or three some ambitious individual or team will announce their plan to prototype in 18 months or so. imho there will wind up being a very public race to get the first reactor in operation.
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We shall, respectfully I hope, continue to disagree on this question of duration of time for a prototype to be built and certainly tested and proven and ready for commercialization. Only in time of war with a national resolve has something like this been done is time frames you suggest. It is being blocked, the climb to success is long, painful, expensive and full of capricious nonsensical risk and barriers.