Re: New Power Stations

David Hansen wrote:
On 19 May 2006 11:43:27 -0700 someone who may be dezakin@xxxxxxx
wrote this:-

The reprocessing of the future is much more likely to use molten salt
methods,

Sounds energy intensive.

Why?

That should be rather obvious. Do such things usually exist in
liquid form? If not, how are they converted to liquid form.

I'll direct you to the processes of molten oxide electrolysis in
aluminum refining which operates at high temperatures with far more
vast quantities of material than would be used in nuclear fuel
processing.

With motlen salt reactors, the reprocessing is done on-line and
involves little more than helium sparging of the molten fuel.

Molten fuel. Sounds like even less energy is going to be used to
generate electricity.

It sounds like you arent familiar with heat engines in general. I
realize it may seem counter intuitive, but the hotter the fuel, the
more efficient the engine. Look up Carnot efficiency.

How does one prevent criticality?

Nuclear reactors by definition are critical. If you mean criticality
excursions, you use control rods and doppler broadening. I can direct
you to a nuclear engineering text and some links if you're actually
curious how you manage reactivity flux. In general, molten salt
reactors are the easiest to control because of very low excess
reactivity, very high delayed neutron component, and the liquid fuel
expands the hotter it gets lowering the neutron density... so its self
balancing.

If it gets too hot, it melts a freeze plug at the bottom of the reactor
and the fuel drains into dump tanks for cooling while the engineers
figure out which idiot pumped several hundred thousand dollars of
excess fuel into the reactor for no reason. Then the freeze plug is
replaced and the fuel is pumped back into the reactor with no damage
done.

Its
estimated that molten salt reactors, once mature, would be competitive
with light water reactors on cost but with a much smaller fuel load and
waste stream. The problem is of course that they are immature.

Another promise then, from an "industry" that has many previous
offences to be taken into consideration. "Electricity too cheap to
meter", being the most well known offence.

Some military dork said this over 50 years ago and people have been
locking onto it ever since.

http://www.cns-snc.ca/media/toocheap/toocheap.html

There are many nuclear proposals that are bad ideas: All fast neutron
breeder reactors for instance.

.

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