First US molten salt reactor in over 50 years to be built
First US molten salt reactor in over 50 years to be built
Most nuclear reactors use water as a coolant. Molten salt reactors use salts with higher boiling points. Kairos Power will build the US's first in decades.
One study suggested that the reactors could produce more nuclear waste than current systems and that they "will use highly corrosive and pyrophoric fuels and coolants that, following irradiation, will become highly radioactive."
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highly corrosive and pyrophoric fuels and coolants that, following irradiation, will become highly radioactive
How true is this? Because a highly radioactive and highly corrosive material that like to catch fire spontaneously - well, that just doesn't sound like a good idea, yet obviously some people are considering it. What am I missing?
If you can work it properly, molten salt reactors are MUCH safer and more efficient, because the waste heat from fission products cannot cause a problem with something cooled through convection and conduction of a molten salt. You can't really have a destructive meltdown when the coolant doesn't care if the fuel melts. The problem is, most previous attempts ended up with the reactor catching on fire. Not a dangerous fire, exactly, but generally not the outcome you're looking for.
On the waste front, neutron activation of water produces tritium at worst, which you dispose of by putting it into a bigger body of water. Neutron activation of the molten salt coolant can be more difficult to dispose of, but it's not exactly a major problem.
If we could use the tritium that would be helpful, it's limited on earth and our only known source off world is in lunar regolith. Plus it's part of the fuel needed to begin a fusion reaction.
It's not a lot of it and isolating it is more trouble than it's worth. It's easier to just create a lithium channel that creates it when it's neutron activated. That or isolating it from a heavy water reactor, since that produces a whole lot more.
Tritium isn't scarce, in that we really can create it pretty easily. Lithium-6 is available to do so if needed. (https://isotope.com/en-us/lithium-6-metal-li-95-pct-llm--827--pk). It's jut not economical to produce for most purposes.
Edit: Also, it's not tritium in the regolith but He3, which is theorized as an aneutronic (thus much cleaner and not creating a bunch of neutron activation waste like tritium fusion would create) fusion fuel but nobody's really achieved fusion with it. Tritium would've decayed if it was in the regolith.
When you let tritium decay, it creates He3.
"Salt as a coolant is just superior to water, once you've got the engineering details hammered out," Smith told BI.
You're missing the "engineering details" I guess
Is that like the whole "magic occurs here" thing that I also never quite got?
Sounds like you get it now ;)
""engineering details" is usually code for "very expensive".
The thing is that water, currently used in this place, is actually more dangerous, because when it evaporates it stops cooling the reactor and then, at those temperatures, it tends to cause powerful explosions - either due to the pressure buildup when it boils or because it gets split into hydrogen and oxygen. Chernobyl explosion was basically overheated water.
Liquid sales or even liquid metalic sodium (in some modern designs), won't boil off at reactor's operating temperatures and would stop reaction when it heats up any closer to the boiling temperatures. Of course that new heating media bring whole lot of new challenges.