Floating molten salt thorium reactor

[dan_b]

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Arti ... st-ThorCon

Well this is a fun one. Supposedly a project to build a commercial thorium molten salt nuclear reactor is going ahead in Indonesia, with 500MW reactors installed in barge hulls.

[Moxi]

Small world - I just mentioned Thorium in another thread. (computer glitch 12 hours later............)

Its a much better alternative fuel source to the one currently used, of course in the 40's 50's and 60's it was binned off because it produced nothing that was weaponizable and in the 70's 80's and 90's no one wanted it to become practicable as they had all spent billions on Uranium and needed other countries to buy that tech to recover some of their costs.

Thorium Waste products around for 300 years max V's Uranium waste products that run to the hundreds of thousands of years.

Oh and of course the fact that Thorium is much more readily available across the planet doesn't help the big countries with all the uranium does it!

I'm always a bit itchy about putting a high temperature process over water though - it just seems like another possible fault mechanism unnecessarily introduced.

Moxi

[Ken]

I always thought that nobody could get them to work and it was not for want of trying.

Thorium reactors cannot run away. They can also use the waste uranium for fuel.

[Oldgreybeard]

I always thought that nobody could get them to work and it was not for want of trying.

Thorium reactors cannot run away. They can also use the waste uranium for fuel.

The USA ran one for a few years in the 1960's, worked OK, and the only reason it wasn't developed further was because the US chose to continue with uranium reactors as they could also produce weapons grade material. This was at the height of the Cold War, and so there was a high priority placed on reactors that could be dual use.