| HN Mirror

Have you read any of the history behind the ORNL MSR and the budgetary ax it got?

Do you know that Weinberg and the ORNL people advocated for increased safety in the nuclear industry (which their reactor design had fundamental advantages over all other designs)?

The organizational religion of nuclear power was that it was safe and had no chance of failure. You can choose to disagree on my characterization of the nuclear industry, but the political wars with "The Greens" has counter-radicalized nuclear proponents.

ORNL and Weinberg saying their nuclear reactor was superior on safety leads to the inevitable follow-up implication for anyone listening that other nuclear reactors... WERE NOT.

Thus the ORNL director for MSR was sent to forced retirement/fired (fired from a government job!), ORNL funding was totally axed. Kirk Sorensen claims that MSR research was forbidden in public universities at a policy level, so no one would touch it. Sorensen is a pretty rabid LFTR advocate, but the fact that only in 2022 after 60 years, finally SOMEONE is doing a research reactor that fits in a closet? The fact there has been ZERO research programs in MSR tells me that Sorensen is probably right about the prohibition.

I believe that the Military was also involved in this, because they needed their isotopes for weapons, or to maintain popular support for nuclear weapons. You can't have these people undermining public confidence in civilian nuclear power, what follows after that is the hated peacenik "Greens" then getting nuclear weapons banned.

Anyway, yes it does seem conspiratorial, but with nuclear tech which required so much governmental push/funding in the beginning, and now has SO MUCH regulatory apparatus above it that was an organizational outgrowth of the original nuclear research government agencies, YES, there is a historical and effective bias against the ORNL design.

Some of that is practical: the ORNL and LFTR designs are totally different that the entirety of the world's solid fuel designs. It would require AEC regulatory fasttracking, and a ton of budget. And if something doesn't have government funding in the nuclear world, it is DEAD.

Anyway, China has a prototype MSR reactor coming online. Oh look! MSR projects are coming out of the woodwork everywhere! What a coincidence. Los Alamos is doing materials research! Some Texas university got clearance to boot the first US research reactor in fifty years! Huh, funny how that works.

So yeah, sure it might be conspiratorial or uncharitable, but this was probably a trillion dollars in budgeting (inflation adjusted) over 20-30 years that was at stake.

I know it seems like I'm anti-nuclear. I think fission power is so effing cool. I think LFTR is the coolest design I've ever seen. I also see that nuclear is fundamentally not competitive with the current approaches, and I don't think that is NIMBYism or excessive regulatory at the core: I think the designs don't scale and issues with nuclear waste and safety are offloaded, avoided, corner-cut, etc.

And if nuclear has to compete with solar/wind, those "hidden costs" would be handled even more poorly. So a reactor design that uses 99% of fuel, is meltdown proof, scalable, and can even reprocess old spent rod waste, well, to me that or something that also lives up to that is the real path forward. Scalable (i.e. closet sized) seems to also be a fundamental requirement to competitive economics, although I read a good post on how big honking reactors are what are needed to make the economies of scale work, not small reactors, but I personally suspect that view is polluted with existing huge-effing-solid-fuel-dome reactor design bias.

I'm just a dumb fuck programmer that reads this stuff in his spare time. I would love a cogent response from a nuclear scientist that knows the ORNL design in depth to give me really good reasons why it isn't commercially viable. But again I think the entire nuclear industry and university feeder system is all solid fuel rod, because it's the only practical/career/feasible thing to study. But ORNL had a working reactor. Was it commercializable? Would it stand up to industrial/production use? Are molten salts truly impossible to contain long term? Is neutron degradation of the liquid fuel's holding tank too problematic? Are the chemical separation processes too hard to do economically?

Anyway, MSRs would be an industrial paradigm shift. It's a total rebuild of the entire nuclear power industry. It's every incumbent nuclear power interest being shown the door, or having a time clock. It's overcoming whatever instiutional echo the Nixon Administration left when it assassinated the ORNL MSR in a massive budgetary knife fight. What could possibly cause a sea change?

Oh right, the Chinese are ahead of us in it.

It's so funny, the Chinese really are the new evil empire, but they are the fundamental economic and investment driver that produced competitive solar and the batteries that will power the mainstream EV revolution. And they are the ones that have a functional MSR coming online.

Well, whatever works.