• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 18th, 2023
  • roguetrick@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.ml•First US molten salt reactor in over 50 years to be built
    3·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • roguetrick@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.ml•First US molten salt reactor in over 50 years to be built
    41·
    7 months ago

    Molten Salt reactors are great at recycling spent uranium and don’t really cause pollution. If anything they reduce pollution because they create less nuclear garbage.

    If it was that big of a problem folks would be doing PUREX reprocessing with all nuclear fuel. Not a clean process, but reduces the overall mass problem you have with spent fuel rods. No matter what you do, you just can’t burn off the fission products that last forever and ever. You can put them in a container the size of a coffee can that still emits a similar amount of radiation as a whole rod if you want, but I’m not sure I see the utility. They just take those and vitrify them to make them bigger to take advantage of the inverse square law and make them safer to handle.

    As long as uranium stays cheap, neither reprocessing, breeders, or reactors that eat the plutonium they produce really makes sense. You still need a similar site to store the waste regardless. As it stands I don’t think we’ll see uranium being a significant part of running a reactor in the foreseeable future. (As long as you’re not a nuclear weapons state that doesn’t have a robust fuel enrichment program, like India).

  • roguetrick@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.ml•First US molten salt reactor in over 50 years to be built
    601·
    7 months ago

    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.