#molten salt reactors

[ianmiller42]

We Write Reports on CO2 Removal, But Fail to Remove Much

There has been a report issued on the state of carbon dioxide removal (http://ianmillerblog.files.wordpress.com/2024/06/c57f5-the-state-of-carbon-dioxide-removal-2edition.pdf) that paints a rather gloomy picture. A large number of countries pledged in the Paris Agreement to reduce emissions of CO2. So far, what has actually happened is the total is increasing. This report has given up on the 1.5…

[lennyinlordran]

Note to people writing alien invasion storylines; if you think aliens need a reason to try and conquer our planet, here’s a few reasons;

Earth has plenty of uranium and thorium in it’s crust; along with fossil fuels that can’t be found in space or on other planets.

A thing sci-fi writers tend to forget is that rare metals are actually pretty common on an interplanetary or interstellar scale; arable land isn’t.

Earth’s pressurized atmosphere and gravity are themselves resources; the aliens may well want to conquer the planet for space to grow crops or livestock.

Expanding on the first point; Metals are pretty common in asteroids; earth has a lot of silica, sulfur, phosphorus, chlorine, boron, etc that aren’t common in asteroids;

Note; this list assumes the would-be-invaders have biochemistry mostly compatible with earth’s, and that they are economically-minded enough not to bother with conquering a place unless there’s money in it; we’re also assuming they can’t/won’t terraform somewhere else, and that “mining for money” is still something they do.

[nuclearsciencelover]

MSR refueling

[newsepick]

Google backs new nuclear plants to power AI

Google is partnering with nuclear startup Kairos Power to construct seven small nuclear reactors in the U.S., a groundbreaking deal aimed at supporting the company's growing energy needs for AI and promoting a nuclear revival. The agreement, which includes a commitment to purchase 500 megawatts of power, marks the first commercial initiative for small modular reactors in the U.S. Kairos plans to deliver the reactors between 2030 and 2035, using molten fluoride salt instead of water as a coolant. This partnership addresses the demand for stable, carbon-free energy in the tech industry.

[electronalytics]

Molten Salt Reactor

[literallymechanical]

Breeding blankets for fusion reactors

So, barring a few ambitious projects involving helium-3, fusion reactor power plants will use hydrogen isotopes as fuel: a 50/50 mixture of deuterium (hydrogen-2) and tritium (hydrogen-3). Deuterium is very stable and relatively abundant, as far as these things go, and can be extracted from ordinary seawater.  Tritium, however, has a half life of just over 12 years, so it doesn't occur in nature.

Fortunately, you can use your fusion reactor to synthesize its own tritium fuel, via the transmutation of lithium-6. You use the powerful neutron flux from the fusion plasma to “breed” tritium in lithium, extract it, then feed it back into the reactor. The figure of merit for this process is the tritium breeding ratio (TBR), which is simply the ratio of tritium bred to tritium used. The goal is to get a TBR substantially greater than 1.

This figure shows the physics of tritium breeding, where neutrons from the deuterium-tritium fusion plasma are absorbed by lithium, which then splits into helium and tritium. [source]

Generally speaking, most concepts for tritium breeding involve wrapping a lithium “breeding blanket” around the outside of the reactor, with as few gaps as you can manage. A deuterium-tritium reactor is constantly generating fast neutrons. You want to keep as much of that emission as possible inside the breeding blanket, for both tritium and power generation.

There are a few different ideas for breeding blanket designs, several of which are going to be tested on ITER, the massive reactor being built in France. One concept is a thick sheath of lithium ceramic that surrounds the vessel, either as solid slabs or pebbles.  As tritium breeding occurs under the blanket, water or liquid helium is circulated through it, cooling the lithium and potentially extracting heat for electricity generation.

While such a blanket might be relatively “simple” (lol) to build, there are some pretty fundamental challenges. Neutrons will penetrate most materials with ease, and it might be tricky to extract tritium that's been bred deep inside of solid lithium.  Ideally, you could do the extraction without pause, even as breeding is ongoing. For some designs, though, you have to cycle out breeder units for harvesting as they get a full load of tritium.

Another concept is “liquid breeding." This concept uses a molten mixture of metallic lithium and lead, or a lithium salt compound like FLiBe (fluorine-lithium-beryllium). The liquid would be pumped through a “breeding zone” around the vessel, where the neutron flux is thickest. The tritium will then be continuously extracted from the breeding fluid as it flows back out.  As part of the process, you can run the hot liquid through a heat exchanger, heating water to power a steam turbine. 

Liquid breeding does raise some prominent engineering challenges. Hot, molten breeding fluid will be very hard to handle – not just because of the heat, but also because you're trying to pump a massive quantity of viscous fluid into a very tight breeding zone. Moreover, molten lithium-lead might react explosively with air. If your breeding system springs a leak, you’ll have a serious mess on your hands!

It’s still unclear which of these breeding strategies will bear fruit. From conception to implementation, there are still a lot of unknowns!  Both liquid and solid breeding will be conducted in France, and a number of private fusion companies have plans to breed tritium in their machines as well.

[headcanons-phb]

Gen: this is the most over-the-top project you've ever done.

Senku, blueprinting a molten salt nuclear fission reactor: you say that so much it's lost all meaning.

[erbiumspectrum]

Chemistry video recs, part 2

[p1]

Note: some of these are "pure" chemistry, some may be strongly related to other fields. As promised, I make fairly liberal choices on the intersection of sciences and they aren't always objective, but the videos are always chemistry-related. Enjoy!

Under 15 minutes

Growing Flowers from Transition Metal Liquid

Molten Lithium Hydride is almost the Most Powerful Reducing Agent

Making Color-Shifting Rare Earth Salts

Understanding Crystallography - Part 1: From Proteins to Crystals

Cleaning old sodium metal

Paramagnetism and Diamagnetism

Space Galaxy in the Chemistry lab. Titanium tetraiodide.

Spin in Quantum Mechanics: What Is It and Why Are Electrons Spin 1/2? Physics Basics

SOLVING the SCHRODINGER EQUATION | Quantum Physics by Parth G

All about White Phosphorus

Making Acid Rain (INDOORS) - Periodic Table of Videos

Seleninyl chloride. Best solvent for selenium and other non-metals!

Recreating the chemical traffic light reaction

Over 15 minutes

Making Cat Attractant (Nepetalactone)

Inside a Nuclear Reactor

Making ferrofluid from scratch

What causes the Pauli Exclusion Principle?

The microwave plasma mystery

Literally the whole playlist of All Chemical Elements in Order

Recreating the Briggs-Rauscher oscillating reaction

Extracting the citric acid from lemons

Complete History of the Avogadro Number

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

Nuclear reactors don't explode they undergo thermal runaway which causes them to melt the pressurized water pipes that carry away the heat to a heat exchanger that's why molten salt reactors are an idea because instead of pressurized water pipes you have molten salt pipes which won't explode of melted

A Nuclear reactor is just a fancy steam engine that uses fission instead fire and the part that explodes is a boiler it's literally the steam mechanism by which Locomotive boilers fail where the crown sheet gets too hot melts out a hole and the boiler turns into a steam powered trebuchet

I used to think gender critical meant someone's gender was like a nuclear reactor about to explode

[max1461]

The PLAN originally wanted the Type 004 to be powered by a thorium molten salt reactor but the timeline doesn't seem to work out; they want to launch the 004 before 2030 and China hopes to maybe have the first commercial thorium molten salt reactor working in 2030 (and that's probably optimistic). Unfortunate because 120,000 tons displacement + EM catapults + thorium molten salt reactor would be an insane boat.

[cerulity]

if i were to make a game with nuclear power i would do 2 things:

accurate depiction of uranium. its common for metals to look different from their ores (green copper ore -> orange copper, red iron ore -> gray iron), but although uranium ore is depicted accurately as yellowish-green (which is accurate to ores like autunite), uranium is also depicted as green, even though its literally just a gray metal. this one might be harder to do, but if it can work, i would feel better about it.

different types of reactors, because there are different types of reactors. usually games just have The Nuclear Reactor which takes in fuel and water and outputs either heat or power. but i feel like you could integrate multiple different types of reactors. one that im thinking of is a molten salt reactor. if i had some sort of salt resource (like a salt flats biome or something) i could implement them, and i would make it generate less waste (because from what i know, a property of molten salt reactors is that they can use much more of their input fuel and therefore will generate less waste for more power).

factorio probably does the best in terms of accuracy when representing nuclear power. satisfactory has a few more options for nuclear power, but the way the waste is represented throws me off. mindustry's thorium reactors simplify a bit, but have no built-in safety systems; as soon as your coolant runs out, the reactor explodes. you can fix it with a micro processor, which is what pretty much all schematics do, and it does add some strategy, but it does feel like it propagates some of the fears around nuclear power.

[darkmaga-returns]

China has its strategic reasons for using Thorium. It’s basically dirt in its own backyard whereas Uranium, while still cheap as chips, might need to be imported at some point. But it’s so bountiful everywhere from Australia to Canada to Kazakhstan to Namibia I don’t take uranium scarcity as a serious concern. But the molten salt part… that’s where it gets interesting.

The Safety Case for MSRs

Anyhow. This tantalizing success is just the beginning of the hard work of the commercial molten salt reactor. It’s over time that corrosion and the thorny issue of neutron-poison buildup rears its ugly head. Again, as Nick Touran reminds us, “we're still decommissioning the MSRE to this day, though it shut down in 1969. The leftover fuel salt is offgassing UF₆ and all sorts of nasties.” To find out more, listen to Nick’s latest episode on MSRs on Decouple.

But if we (or you know… the Chinese) DO crack it, the potential could be incredible. There’s a reason why there are dozens of MSR startups all over the world (although none of them have ever split an atom yet).

The bulk of the world’s reactors work with solid fuel under very high pressure. This necessitates the construction of a huge containment dome to keep everything inside in the case of an accident. The molten salt reactor works at atmospheric pressure, and in an accident condition, the salt “freezes” in place.

There can of course still be nuclear accidents, but not the kind of widespread contamination that causes disproportionate panic. Could this pave the way for smaller, lighter, cheaper reactors to be licensed?

[dorkichiban]

this supposedly takes place in the 2030s... why are they not using a molten salt reactor design?

nuclear reactors don't have to meltdown like this you know, it only happens because people insist on building reactors wrong on purpose, as a joke.

[hasdrubal-gisco]

i wish we had a thorium molten salt reactor :(

[atomarium]

So @neoncityrain,

I'll being again.

You have probably heard the words "nuclear" reactor at least a couple of times. Many people fear them and don't understand. Some fear them because of that. In the principle nuclear reactors are actually incredibly simple on their own. It's basically a kettle with a turbine that heats using shiny rocks. To be specific about what happens in the process of "fission" (the process of atoms doing the absolutely mental). We fire a neuron, it hits a heavy atom like uranium 238 (238 indicates the number of protons inside the atom, this is important because different amounts of neutrons make different isotopes of the same element. And while some isotopes are stable, some are incredibly radioactive. This is needed to calculate the energy potential.) After the neutron gits the atom, it splits in to two atoms of a lighter elements. For example uranium 235 when split produces either barium and kripton, strontium and xenon or tin and molybdenum. Depending on how it splits. When the atom is split it releases other neutrons, Wich are moving very fast and carry an energy potential. It's also called the neutron temperature. Basically how much kinetic potential it has. Kinetic potential is basically temperature. As movment in atoms is heat. It in itself is important for splitting lighter elements or achieving higher efficiency. But I'll come back to that later.

So basically green rock Magic happens (it's actually emits blue light not green). And it heats a pot of watter Wich we make in to steam and then in to energy.

With the rock Magic done we come to the part of construction. Eich is my favorite as you see there is a lot of concrete metal and vey sturdy stuff in general.

Main concern for people that are afraid of nuclear reactors is another Chernobyl, Fukushima or three mile island.

Wich is a completely valid concern. However they are all human error. Fukushima was built on a shore... with tsunamis.

Chernobyl was managed by my ancestors, Wich they did incredibly porly and did experiments to the reactor that it was not Designed for.

Nuclear reactors altho do have uranium inside of them, just as nuclear bombs. Their are utterly and absolutely Incapable of exploding like one. It's just not as pure and condensed. And it's also not being exploded together. That's just not going to happen.

With today's technology in automatic control units, Materials and stuff, reactors are incredibly unlikely to fail. Unless humans do stupid human stuff. France for example is Europes largest nuclear powerhouse. And it's energy sources are basically carbon neutral. Also the concern of people that radiation will spread and radiate the area is very unfounded. I blame the Simpsons for that fear. Uranium is not a green glowy liquid. It's a metal ish metal, maybe greyish. And you can calmly hold it. It generaly doesn't contaminate watter. And not is it in direct contact with it. It's inside it's heat transfering case. The heat from the uranium case rods is transfers with either watter molten sodium or salt. (It sounds scary but each of them has their own benefits). There is a three loops design usually implemented. The first loop takes heat directly from the uranium. And transfers it via a heat exchanger (a radiator basically) to the second loop. The second loop uses the heated watter to spin the turbines. And then at the end cools it even more with the help of the third loop. The third loop is usually just taking water from a river and spraying it in the air after it took the heat. Those are the huge cooling towers you usually see. It's not smoke or radiation. It's just steam. So you can drink it without problem. Wich I proudly day I did. (it's almost like an iterator)(wait nuclear powered iterator) (a universe where the didn't discover void fluid energy) (holy shit I made something creative)

Nuclear power occupies a very important niech. It can produce A LOT of power on demand. Meaning if suddenly it's a holiday and everyone has decided it is time their ovens on. Renewables won't be able to compensate. As you see, if there is simply no wind or sun. There is nothing you can do. You can build batteries, but litium ion are very expensive and bad for the environment. And batteries that pump watter up so it later can spin generators falling down (usually called a gravity battery) are good and massive. But can't be everywhere.

Nuclear power plants can ramp up their energy production to cover that spike rapidly and efficiently. Making sure your country won't suddenly be low on energy ((KHEM KHEM GERMANY)) in the winter. Because uranium doesn't care for the weather.

Nod for the main part and the most interesting.

NUCLEAR WASTE

I shall repeat again. It's unfortunately not a dlurpee. And it doesn't leak.

Nuclear waste has 3 stages.

Fresh out of the reactor.

This kind needs to be actively cooled, because altho it has much of the useful uranium used up. There is still a little bit of wamrth. It needs to be cooled in a pond for a couple of months.

That's the cooling pond. It's about a years with I think. Fissile material is incredible energy dense. One kilogram of enriched uranium is enough to power uhhh. A lot of stuff for s long time. The voyager for example has been out there since uhh. A log time. And it's own small littler radio isotope nuclear generator is what keeps it warm and alive.

The second stage is splitting stuff that could be useful,such as enriched uranium. 238 neutrons. It can still be used. And recycled. Wich many do.

The third kind is the bad kind. The stuff thats radioactive enough to be dangerous but not useful. Right now it is stored underground in metal and concrete husks.

This is of course bad. As it accumulates there and isn't useful.

However, there is not that much nuclear waste. It's actually doesn't take up that much space. And in the end you're putting radioactive rocks back were you found them.

HOWEVER

here comes my favorite part.

THERE IS A WAY TO AVOID ALL OF THAT.

it's called fast neutron fission reactors. Those are experimental reactors right now. So there aren't any used actevly. But they posses a very useful trait. They feed using nuclear waste. And guess what it produces as a result ?

NUCLEAR FUEL.

This means it's an infinite energy glitch (not technically. Some of the matter is concerted to energy)

You put nuclear waste of normal reactors, in to fast neutron reactors ( also referd as breeder reactors or fast spectrum reactors) and get fuel back. And we'll 1 Gramm or so of trans uranics (the nasty nuclear waste) per ton. Wich tooooo be fair... it's just a Gramm, just pour it underground it'll be fine. Or keep it in a bottle as a lava lamp.

Altogether, nuclear reactors altho not as simple as burning coal or shining the sun at a panel. Are INCREDIBLY powerful. And are just misunderstood behemoths capable of boosting our civilization past the climate change. Many people fear them, but they shouldn't. They fear the complex, and refuse to learn about it.

Germany should really revisit it's nuclear policy.

Ah and by the way. Most biggest reason why we aren't building more faster is because they are expensive. However. Most of the cost comes from turbines and cooling stuff. The exact same as in coal power plants or gas powerplants. We can just put a kettle of cool rocks in there and get one free powerplant for relatively cheap and no CO2!!

Feel free to ask any questions, I have absolutely no problem with that. Also i apologize for my grammar and typos, I just don't wsnt to correct the entirety of the text. Hopefully I didn't screw something up badly.

Also @eltanin0 you might find this interesting to.

Bonus argument

JUST LOOK HOW BEAUTIFUL IT IS

Literally rainworld irl

The last two are scientific reactors, nuclear powerplants don't look like this

Oh and a schematic just in case.

Forgot to mention the control rods, it's just to stop neutrons when you don't need them. It's like graphite or similar. And its safer to be gravity droped so if there is suddenly no power they shutdown the reactor automatically.

Also one of the reasons Chernobyl went boom.

Yeah I'm definitely fucking autistic

[corvidaekilgore]

i want more radiation facts so have some facts about medieval european merchants!!! there was a medieval “middle class”! the merchant class was above peasants/serfs but below nobility and were, well, merchants. merchants were also often families in one trade. AND merchants had guilds that would sometimes intermarry for economic reasons. and the process to start a guild was SOO difficult and there were SO MANY hoops to jump through

(i can also infodump abt linguistics and the bible :D)

YAY!!!!! THATS SUCH A COOL SPECIAL INTEREST OMG?? I DID NOT KNOW THAT!!

HERES SOME MORE FUN FACTS!

THE AVERAGE AMERICAN RECEIVES MOST OF THEIR YEARLY DOSAGE OF IONIZING RADIATION FROM INHALING RADON, WHICH NATURALLY OCCURS IN THE AIR

RADIOACTIVITY WAS FIRST SCIENTIFICALLY STUDIED IN 1896 BY A FRENCH PHYSICIST NAMED HENRI BECQUEREL WHEN HE ACCIDENTALLY DISCOVERED IT WHILST RESEARCHING URANIUM SALTS AND X RAYS

and now for my favorite fun fact of all time 😁😁

THE ELEPHANT’S FOOT IS A MASS OF CORIUM CREATED FROM STEEL, MOLTEN CONCRETE, SAND, ZIRCONIUM, AND URANIUM WHICH FORMED BENEATH REACTOR 4 OF THE CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR POWER PLANT DURING THE DISASTER