Posted on 09/11/2015 9:48:35 AM PDT by thackney
Zero tolerance for failure? Failure is a safe shutdown without any outside controls or inputs.
The equipment has been proven, just not in a good way. Looks good on paper though.
Two different reactors ran for years.
Nukes were to prove to have the big problem that the radioactivity corroded the equipment making it easier to behave less than perfectly.
If someone has come up with a better solution to the problem of failing, which not a whether question but a when question, it deserves respect. If it is expected to melt down upon failure, and it is designed to catch the meltdown if it does, then we have a promising design. Don’t try to evade the failure mode; instead harness it.
That’s the intriguing factor here. When it fails, it is SUPPOSED to melt down.
And this isn’t sodium, this is salt. It won’t react with anything to produce an uncontainable catastrophe.
No, there was significantly more damage and problems than just the fuel tanks.
https://www.nirs.org/fukushima/naiic_report.pdf
page 12
The tsunami caused by the earthquake flooded and totally destroyed the emergency diesel generators, the seawater cooling pumps, the electric wiring system and the DC power supply for Units 1, 2 and 4, resulting in loss of all power—except for an external supply to Unit 6 from an air-cooled emergency diesel generator. In short, Units 1, 2 and 4 lost all power; Unit 3 lost all AC power, and later lost DC before dawn of March 13, 2012. Unit 5 lost all AC power.
The tsunami did not damage only the power supply. The tsunami also destroyed or washed away vehicles, heavy machinery, oil tanks, and gravel. It destroyed buildings, equipment installations and other machinery. Seawater from the tsunami inundated the entire building area and even reached the extremely high pressure operating sections of Units 3 and 4, and a supplemental operation common facility (Common Pool Building).
Can you link that claim?
The biggest problem with modern nukes as we know them, is that radioactivity inherently renders the equipment closer to an unsafe failure.
That could be excused as unexpected 70 years ago. No such thing today.
Well yes. Expect there will be failures, and design it so the results are harmless.
Molten Salt Reactors
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Molten-Salt-Reactors/
Updated 22 August 2015
The total levelized cost of electricity from the largest is projected to be competitive with natural gas.
A molten salt reactor would need to be durably waterproofed to prevent escape of fuel under a similar scenario, but otherwise would have just melted its fuel into its catch tub.
The uncontrolled failure mode of this is a "non-event" shutdown. Expensive yes, dangerous no.
Even the expense could be mitigated with good engineering. You set up to be able to carry these drainoff bricks safely to a processing plant, and to be able to service the equipment from which drainoff occurred. Fix, new fill, and you’re cooking with atoms again.
Yeah, I'm sure magic happens when the appropriate Engineers are allowed to think. I hope they got some of those involved.
Actually Fermi was liquid sodium metal.
Few elements make great moderators (slowing neutrons), are liquid or gases at fairly low temp and do NOT absorb neutrons.
Typical Moderators
Hydrogen
Helium
Carbon
Sodium Metal
Heavy Water (presence of Hydrogen)
Distilled Water (presence of Hydrogen)
Sodium is difficult to work with as refueling is done blind.
No way to see where the fuel bundles are.
You need a minimal amount of heat to get pumps flowing.
Also goes BadaBOOM in presence of any water.
Might even be possible to re-melt the brick at the site, depending on purity requirements and purification capabilities.
Take a look at the ThorCon site. The last paragraph on the page reads:
Cheaper than CoalModern nuclear plants are already competitive with coal, except for the cost of regulation and lawsuits. They produce no mercury or particulates, to boot...ThorCon requires less resources than a coal plant. Assuming efficient, evidence based regulation, ThorCon can produce reliable, carbon free, electricity at between 3 and 5 cents per kWh depending on scale.
Thanks for the link. I hope their claims lead to reality.
Not putting the spent fuel pond on top of the reactor would help too.
MIT Technology Review
Safer Nuclear Power, at Half the Price
Transatomic is developing a new kind of molten-salt reactor designed to overcome the major barriers to nuclear power.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512321/safer-nuclear-power-at-half-the-price/
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