The Nuclear Green Revolution: The LFTR in the American Scientist
The LFTR story has now been told for the July-August Issue of the American Scientist by Robert Hargraves and Ralph Moir.
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The article recounts the early history of the Molten Salt Reactor and Alvin Weinberg’s contributions to it. The authors state:Knowing what we now know about climate change, peak oil, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Deepwater Horizon oil well gushing in the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 2010, what if we could have taken a different energy path? Many feel that there is good reason to wish that the liquid-fuel MSRE had been allowed to mature. An increasingly popular vision of the future sees liquid-fuel reactors playing a central role in the energy economy, utilizing relatively abundant thorium instead of uranium, mass producible, free of carbon emis- sions, inherently safe and generating a trifling amount of waste.
Dr. Hargrave and Dr. Moir lay out the advantages of the MSR/LFTR approach,
Liquid fuel thorium reactors offer an array of advantages in design, operation, safety, waste management, cost and proliferation resistance over the traditional configuration of nuclear plants. Individually, the advantages are intriguing. Collectively they are compelling.
And indeed they are as the writers explain,In solid fuel rods, fission products are trapped in the structural lattice of the fuel material. In liquid fuel, reac- tion products can be relatively easily removed. For example, the gaseous fission poison xenon is easy to remove because it bubbles out of solution as the fuel salt is pumped. Separation of materials by this mechanism is central to the main feature of thorium power, …
The more i read about this technology, the more pissed i am that it isn’t on the front page of every newspaper. Either I’m missing the parts of teh interwebs where someone explains why this is seekritly evil, or we need to funnel stimulus money in this direction, like, yesterday.