Re: salt plug
What on earth are you doing? Deriding a knowledgeable man with a misapplied citation, and as if that was not enough, spicing it up with ALL CAPS?
Problem is, that citation applies to a low-power experimental reactor. Even fusion is easy to achieve on that level.
Remember the Farnsworth device? Many geeks have built one at home. Of course, conveniently forgetting to tell their significant others, what they are actually up to. Some people just cannot cope with the knowledge of free neutrons flying around.
Andydaws, on the other hand, was talking about industrial scale. 1,21 jigawatts or thereabouts. Even a thing so simple as a piece of wire becomes a monster at the kiloamper scale - harder to calculate, harder to produce, harder to maintain. And most of the difficulties tend to increase exponentially.
Well, I've grown weary of all the thorium talk. It has definitely gone beyond technical - infinite repeats of the same old cliche's, from the thousands. It is a matter of faith now. Repeated like a mantra, propagated like a myth. Perhaps more plausible than some other myths, and it has chances to become a reality, but still a myth at the current stage. All puns fully intended.
Yes, thorium cycle looks so promising on the paper.
Yes, there is lots of thorium available.
Yes, there was a successful test reactor running in the sixties.
As for the "killed by the military-industrial complex" meme - well, duh. No.
Yes, it could be shut down for the weekends, unlike conventional reactors.
Yes, it could be cleaned out and refuelled relatively easily.
Yes, it could be started quite easily.
But there is another side to that coin, which gets so thoroughly ignored, so thoroughly rejected. Another telltale sign of a mythology instead of technology.
They could shut it down periodically - but then again, they absolutely had to. Reaction was not sustainable for the long periods. Removal of the inhibitors is extremely difficult here, as Andy has explained so many times. It needs a major breakthrough to become viable. And sadly, miracles are quite rare in that field.
They could shut it down quickly - but mainly because of the small size. Some of the residual heat could be absorbed in the structure and could be safely left there for a weekend. Few degrees one way or another did not matter much.
More power, more heat to remove - much slower shutdown sequences (yes, well, reaction stops quickly, but it takes many weekends before the reactor can be touched again)
Startup sequences suffer from the same effect - it takes quite a lot of time and work to get to the proper operating range.
They could clean it rather easily - again, because of the small scales involved. Many miles of plumbing and many tons of nasty substances are a much different story. And online cleaning is next to impossible right now.
Bottom line - this test reactor did confirm that the thorium cycle actually works. Which is wonderful. But those technical solutions do not scale much beyond that capacity point.