They don't seem to have a charismatic front-man like Kirk Sorenson, but another team working on an "easy" to make Thorium reactor.
It seems it can/does produce some plutonium depending how it's fuelled, which I seem to remember wasn't possible with the LFTR?
I agree.
Bill
I can't see the name thorium without mentally following it by thulium and thallium, as in Tom Lehrer's Elements Song. :-)
Yes that, and a certain Dame off "Songs of Praise".
More nuclear drivel. They all start off saying that. The problems only become apparent when they (try to) get a commercial one up and working. A nuclear Lala Land always just over the horizon. Drivel on the internet. The internet is not an encyclopedia.
I'm glad to see someone that wants to give it a try.
That must be why all the links you post are rubbish then!
Maybe you should buy an encyclopaedia and read about climate and "green" energy.
If it is so wonderful, why did no-one take up the development when the prototype was closed 45 years ago?
I guess that *wanting* plutonium was one factor that influenced the designs back then.
50 years ago the push was to made fuel for fissionable weapons.
Generating something as useful as electricity was a by-product nuclear reactors.
Yes, and was what led to the stuff we have to clean up today. That this was the case, and has nothing to do with reactors built today or planned is too hard a concept for the likes of harry to grasp.
It didn't produce enough bombs.
Very cpmplex question.
Partly because it was tricky partly because it DIDN't make plutonium :-)
That's what pilot plants are for, Harry.
"The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything". (Theodore Roosevelt, 1900). You obviously never made a mistake.
Not true, by the 1970's plutonium production technology was well sorted, none of the existing weapons powers were bothering to try to piggy-back on civil nuclear. There was a certain amount of debate in the UK about whether or not some weapons grade plutonium "escaped" from the civil programme. When Magnox plant are started up, they started to refuel relatively soon so as to settle into an equilibrium fuelling regime. The early discharge fuel is potentially "weapons grade", but after a year or two of operation it is not.
Chapelcross & Calder Hall were owned by AEA then BNFL and built primarily for plutonium production. The rest of the UK Magnox stations were owned by GEGB & SSEB. The plutonium production reactors initially got through a complete change of fuel every 6 months, the electricity generators about 18 months. The AEA owned reactors swapped between making weapons grade fuel and being optimised for electricity until at least the late 1980s. The number of spent fuel flasks leaving Chapelcross could be used to estimate how it was operating.
Several of the Magnox power reactors had the fueling capacity to operate for weapons grade plutonium production but were operated under IAEA safeguards for civil reactors so it's unlikely that diversion of plutonium took place.
The AGR reactors were designed to achieve a higher burn up of fuel and have longer beween refueling so they would have been less suitable for making plutonium. Plutonium has a very long shelf life and is recyclable (unless you blow it up). It does not appear to have been a factor in UK reactor design 45 years ago.
I think Star Trek. "Tholian"
That's as maybe, but the MSRE from planning to being turned off happened entirely within the 60's and was something of a continuation of earlier projects from just after WW2.
The earlier reactors are apparently sitting out in the car park and open to visitors, which says something of the shorter cooling off periods and relative ease of decommissioning compared to other reactor designs.
I wonder how far crowdfunding could take this ?
I'd happily spaff a few hundred quid into a seriously costed project.
Bugger crowdfunding, I don't want a T-shirt, or my name engraving on the reactor
Just offer a tranche of shares ...
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