Guest post on Energy Matters by Robert Hargraves, co-founder of ThorCon.
ThorCon is a molten salt fission reactor. Unlike all current operating reactors, the fuel is in liquid form. The molten salt can be circulated with a pump and passively drained in the event of an accident. The ThorCon reactor operates at garden hose pressures using normal pipe thicknesses and easily automated, ship-style steel plate construction methods.
Understanding where the truth lies is no easy matter. The 100+ comments where the management of ThorCon are deeply engaged provide a foundation for readers to reach informed opinions.
Finally we can shut down filthy coal!
Mendacious Carbonaceous Moron
Coal is good, it burns Trolls
So good that 3 of the 4 biggest coal companies down south are bankrupt?
Bankrupted by the satanic Obama. Glad you are seeing the light. Coal is King again in the US. Are you happy for the coal workers Allan? Are you happy for struggling families that can have cheap power Allan S? Or are you going to trot out lies about how coal is environmentally unsafe?
Bankrupted by market forces
If coal is king why have coal plant closures accelerated?
Another trumpisite that doesnt actually check their own made up narrative:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2018-06-18/coal-plants-keep-shutting-despite-trump-s-order-to-rescue-them
“The trend has been underway for years. Since 2010, nearly 40 percent of the capacity of the nation’s fleet of coal-fired power plants has either been shut down or designated for closure, according to the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a trade-group that represents coal-fired utilities and mining companies such as Peabody Energy Corp., and Murray Energy Corp.”
No they were bankrupted by natgas. Trump being the total POS he is, is trying to bail them out by forcing power distributors to buy their energy at great cost to Americans under the rubric of ‘national security’.
Whether this technology will work or not, nuclear power could wipe out much of human CO2 emissions. But then we would need a nuclear tax.
Less plant food.. Can we afford that?
Nothing a couple of super forest fire couldn’t solve.
or a volcano or two.
Another worry
“A shortage of bottled pollution means Brits face beer, coke, bacon shortage”
http://joannenova.com.au/2018/06/a-shortage-of-bottled-pollution-means-brits-face-beer-coke-bacon-shortage/
Yes. And if the globalists were serious about stopping global warming, they’d be investing every spare penny in nuclear energy, which is perfectly safe in the hands of people who know what they’re doing.
They aren’t of course. They just want nuclear tech in the hands of the people they plan to have bury us. Today it’s Indonesia, it says here. Yesterday it was the Soviet Union. Remind me again how well that worked out.
(The Chernobyl reactors were designed with technology stolen from the West, which Soviet engineers, never mind the operators, only dimly understood, and were shabbily constructed at that. That reactor really was a ticking time bomb.
The Battle of Chernobyl was the last operation of the Red Army on Soviet soil, and arguably their finest hour, with the possible exception of Stalingrad. Not for the first time, the Russian army saved Europe from the consequences of globalist and communist incompetence and recklessness. The irony should not be lost on anybody.
The real villains here? The globalists who gave Stalin nuclear technology—and used Chernobyl as an excuse to ensure that if the communists couldn’t have nuclear energy too cheap to meter, nobody would.)
I think this is a good idea but overly complex. We certainly need to test out halide salt reactors, they certainly offer promise. I read somewhere that the Candu reactor could readily be converted to flouride salt reactor. My main concern would be orrosion. Hot common salt (Sodium Chloride) is very corrosive, I can only imagine how corrosive a Flouride salt would be.
Not intended to be negative, I advocate a Canadian program to develop this system.
Very sensible, Robert. Corrosion is the principal problem with any molten salt reactor. The physics of new reactors are relatively straight-forward. It’s the materials science aspects that are the long, hard part. When you look at the MSR projects around the world today, all of them are heavily engaged in chemistry and metallurgy problems to be solved.
CANDU? Probably not. I have some familiarity with its internals. The internal instrumentation alone would have to be redone entirely, and the materials in the fuel channels and feeder pipes alone would not be acceptable. Even worse, the steam generators would have to be replaced likely in toto. The analysis work alone for all of its tens of thousands of components would take at least a decade.
Steel corrodes. I wonder how a carbon pipe would make out? Maybe one with a ceramic lining? You’d have to do something interesting to prevent cracks. Ceramics with titanium mesh in them?
As an engineer, it is clear that nothing beats building hardware to test and solve problems. Discussion and models can only take you so far, if you don’t know when to stop talking and start building then you will never stop talking and never build. We’ve had plenty of time to plan and understand many different types of reactors. However, the cost for many of these technologies is always claimed to be in the billions, as they usually try to build a fully developed model and solve 1000 problems at once.
If (I don’t agree it is, but if the politicians really believe it) the west was serious about C02 then they would have asked engineers to solve the problem. Emitting CO2 is fundamentally an engineering problem. Instead of throwing billions (hell, trillions) at the banks they should have directed smaller grants to many engineering firms (in the range of 10-20 million) to develop, build, and test development models to solve the various problems, and as they are solved, scale up to solve larger problems. Private and public money should be mixed together to do so, and of course, honest auditing to ensure slimy types keep the hands off it.
This must be systemically planned and executed and gov’t must commit to funding it through, with the understanding that hard problems are hard for a reason. Things will fail, in fact hard things fail testing at a really high rate -that doesn’t mean you don’t do them, it means that you must learn from them and move on.
For example, if corrosion is a major problem, then engage various material experts, chemist, test engineers, etc and get to work solving just that problem. You don’t need to build a reactor to test corrosion in pipes.
+100, Frenchie. I agree with everything you write here. Fact is, the only time that CO2 emissions have ever been reduced is by 1. Recession or depression; 2. by building more nuclear power to displace fossil fuels. There are lots of intelligent reasons why nuclear power was used to do this long before global warming ever surfaced as a public policy issue, and none of those issues have changed at all in the past 50 years.
And yes, strongly about doing real applied research rather than wasting time on consultation and models. Moreover, materials research and development is generally long, hard and incremental. It’s not flashy and splashy the way the politicians want. By ignoring nuclear, it shows that neither the chatterati political class nor the Green Komissars are serious about solving the problem they claim is so existential.
Thats an absurd claim. The ongoing decline of carbon emissions in the US is a clear and obvious result of the conversion of power generation to natural gas, from coal.
When I worked for a uranium mine, the thorium was waste. So we put it in an impoundment pond.
During spring runoff, when there was lots of water that would dilute the percentage of thorium to “allowable limits”, we flushed the thorium pond into the river. Bwahahaha! Problem solved! Rock on Ontario!
The solution to pollution is dilution.
Of course there’s an allowable limit. There’s thorium found naturally just about everywhere. There’s three kilograms of the stuff in the top metre of topsoil in your back yard.
What? And the eco-freaks are not taxing it yet?
🙂
Theres a gold mine in South Dakota that does the same thing with cyanide.
I am sure thorium salt reactors will work. But we know uranium-fueled reactors work, and Canada is blessed with huge reserves of uranium. There really no primary thorium sources. It usually occurs as the mineral monazite, which is found as a rare accessory mineral in granitic rocks. AFAIK, the only place monazite gets concentrated is in certain beach sands, notably in India. Uranium, on the other hand, can be concentrated by a variety of geological processes, and mined profitably as a result.
My view of thorium reactors is that the concept is used as a sort of red herring to discourage investment in, and operation of, the proven technology of uranium reactors. You can be sure that if thorium reactors get close to being marketplace-ready, the greentards will be opposed to them as well.
No doubt.
And if this can be commercialized there is no need for any of those fission reactors
https://news.osu.edu/news/2018/01/02/a-fossil-fuel-technology-that-doesnt-pollute/
Hey Bord Bulk, I have a bridge for sale!!!!!
That’s your rebuttal? This tech has real potential as I understand it. Unless you can cite an article that says otherwise.
How’s the Pelosi kid’s molten pillar of salt working down in the CA desert? You know, the salt that must be preheated with fuel oil before the morning sun rises and the solar panels heat up.
What’s the deal with molten salt? Why is salt suddenly the miracle material of energy production?
Not ‘salt’ salt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(chemistry)
By reading through the comments it appears that there could be some major problems with a contaminated residue that is quite hot and persists for decades. That does not sound very promising or a better option than nuclear.
Everything is cheaper than coal. Until the bill arrives in the mailbox.
Nice press release….
It’s good to see a company that is “ready to go” with a prototype 4 years from now, to do qualification testing….
In the words of instapundit “faster, please”