| I wanted to add a couple additional points, separate from my other response: Everything at Oak Ridge did _not_ provide our grandparents with insignificant technical challenges. Not only for the points (in my other response) about neutron bombardment making the Hastelloy N brittle, but also: - The cooling circuit glowed red hot. This indicates that it was close to its thermal creep zone; we didn't know much about thermal creep back then. [0] - The MSRE reactor spent a good portion of its life down for maintenance. [0] - The tritium release is not a small problem: of an estimated 2.0TBq of tritium produced, 6-10% diffused from the fuel system into the containment cell atmosphere, and another 6-10% was released from the heat removal system. And these were lower than expected. You really don't want your LFTR to be leaking tritium everywhere. [1] - The decontamination of the experiment was really, really hazardous. Not only were they dealing with nuclear waste; they were dealing with nuclear waste and fluorine gas. You really don't want to be anywhere near elemental fluorine gas. This was all because ORNL didn't defuel and store the salts correctly; it's mostly been rectified in modern designs[1]. But it goes to show how horrifyingly dangerous the components are. As bad as a nuclear spill would be, you have to remember that these aren't your run of the mill molten salts. They're highly toxic salts spewing out gamma, beta, and alpha radiation. I'm trying to imagine what it would be like if Chernobyl released these kinds of chemicals in its radiation plume. I don't think I can imagine something that horrifying. Toxic rain over Germany doped with uranium hexafluoride and plutonium? I'd rather have coal power. And I hate coal power. Of course, all of this is me being extraordinarily cautious. I was really, really excited about LFTR design when I first heard about it. But the more I learn, the more I'm convinced that we really don't have the materials to safely operate one of these things on a commercial scale. 0. http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/part-8-msr-lftr/
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment#... (throughout) |