re: #353 Aceofwhat?

re: #339 LudwigVanQuixote

Hey. Been on vaca for a few days.

I’m on a Liquid Fuel Thorium Reactor reading kick…i can’t get enough, mostly because i can’t figure out what the catch is.

Either of you have thoughts on whether there’s a catch? And if not, why in the name of holy heaven aren’t we all begging congress for one?

This gets into a lot of history with General Atomics, the cold war and the history of the early nuclear industry in America.

The short form is that we wanted to make reactors that could capitalize on our Uranium reserves and breed plutonium for weapons. Further the technologies for such reactors were already developed first as a result of military research. It was felt at the time that those sorts of reactors would power the future and the companies were frothing to deploy existing technologies.

As a result, this promising technology fell by the wayside. Consider it a nuclear betamax.

I am not a nuclear engineer enough to go into the details of this design or that design being better than others to the level you might want. I know people who swear by this technology as a wave of the future. I also know that pebble bed reactors would do the job really well right now and we can make various fuel cycles with those as well.

I understand that the Japanese have a huge project going on with pursuing this.

Personally, I would like to start building the reactors we can now and phase in the new designs as we move forward.