Reply to post: Re: Half the population—

Queue baa, Libra: People will buy what Facebook's selling. They shouldn't, but they will

Fred Flintstone Gold badge

Re: Half the population—

Not a problem - I know from experience that it's a lot to take in if this is the first time you're exposed to it.

It took me a while to get over the WTF feeling when I discovered just how good this tech is. I forgot to mention something: molten salt is a critical element of what makes a Thorium reactor so efficient because the resulting liquid is used both to carry the heat and to carry the thorium for recycling - it's that cycle that enables a Thorium reactor to actively use over 99% of its fuel (that's why MSR is certain to be a Thorium reactor, doesn't make sense for Uranium based fission).

The other fun fact with MSR is that it needs the graphite in the core to sustain a reaction, not to dampen it down as in the current reactors. You take the graphite away and fission stops, which is why they are so safe: if something goes wrong, the reactor contents will dump in a lower container. Due to the absence of the graphite required to sustain the reaction, the thing just stops. You just end up with a slowly cooling box in the basement (which, by the way, you could probably put back in use in a new reactor). No radioactive kaboom due to explosively expanding steam (there isn't any in the radioactive part), no meltdown because of a now unregulated reaction, no new hole in the ground where even robots have a hard time going.

I suspect that iiIf it wasn't for the fact that the specific salt in use is the mother of corrosiveness on materials, these reactors would have come online way before, but they have only "recently" (last couple of years) managed to address this.

Anyway, keep an eye on it - there are some seriously heavy political side effects to being able to generate energy on teh cheap without a need for fossil fuel or permission, and some will involve buggy whip manufacturers who may scheme like mad to hang on to their business..

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