So, will this thing work or not?

okay

What is everyones opinion on this?
fusionone.co/
magneto electrostatic fusion, F1 reactor.

Around the asteroid belt, solar irradiance gets too low for practical use. Mirrors and photovoltaics are really only useful around Earth and closer.

At tanagra

>You get the unlimited power for millions of years
>I drank the LFTR shitpost cool-aid

arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/3_VOLBERG.pdf
A more in depth analysis on what it actually is, also. How come I never hear anyone discuss Polywell type reactor designs in general? This specific design seems to mitigate a lot of the problems associated with the polywell design.

Explain Voyager or cassini or any probe that went beyond the asteroid belt

Radiothermal isotope generators, retard. RTG.

k geez

>reactor uses common isotopes of uranium and thorium with zero enrichment process required
>reactor produces thousands of times more energy per kilogram of fuel than is required to mine and refine a kilogram of fuel
>uranium and thorium are common enough that the average cubic meter of continental crust contains a higher potential energy content than a cube of anthracite coal of the same volume, after subtracting the energy required to purify the fuel content of the rock
>uranium and thorium salts are also in ocean water and likewise offer a higher energy content than is required to extract them
>at current rates of energy production, if 100% of that energy came from the fission of uranium and thorium taken from salt water, more uranium and thorium would be dissolving into the water from young oceanic crust than we would be using

>somehow this is not a solution to the world's energy needs for millions of years

So which of these claims are wrong? Or is your claim that the reactor itself doesn't work, and if so what are the flaws?
Seriously tell me, I'm not shitposting.

>The Thorium Energy Alliance estimates "there is enough thorium in the United States alone to power the country at its current energy level for over 1,000 years."
>US has 25% of world thorium
>1000 years of energy only for the US is we don't increase our demand at all
>Far less if countries have to share thorium

Literally millions of years!

It can be a good source of energy but that type of hyperbole is why no one takes you seriously. That doesn't even include the blatant lies about the engineering and proliferation concerns.

Link me up user, I'm not afraid to read

Only if you're lugging the mirror around. A spacecraft can't afford the mass penalty. Which is why they need nukes.

A stationary habitat, even at Pluto, can have a mirror miles across. Cheap plastic balloon, vaporize a bit of sodium inside, bisect. Similar to the process by which you make solar sails -- once you can make them in space and don't need them to fold into a dinky package.
If you're 10 AU from the Sun, you just need a collector 10 times the diameter that you'd need near Earth. No gravity, no clouds, no day/night cycle. Why would anyone want a complicated piece of machinery?

BTW: No one has identified the OP's concept picture yet.

The wikipedia page for thorium energy is an ok source to start. It gives a good surface level rundown on the benefits and costs. The page links are better. I want thorium to work, and think it could be a great alternative reactor design, but in order to make it happen we have to be realistic.

A good example of a problem that gets glossed over is the U-233 issue. If thorium is reprocessed to give it maximum safety, it is also a breeder for nuclear weapons. If you don't do the reprocessing, you have similar radiation hazards to traditional reactors:

popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a11907/is-the-superfuel-thorium-riskier-than-we-thought-14821644/

More:

world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/thorium.aspx#References

Interesting. Have they actually gotten funding to do any of their proposed steps?

As far as I can tell, they are in the midst of running a simulation on a supercomputer to validate there claims. Other than that idk. They are a new company(est. 2015), so hopefully they are on track.

is there enough thorium in coral to harvest for fuel? I know they use thorium dating on coral

Possibly. The raw value of the CaCO3 probably outweighs the trace thorium however. It's easier to just use that shit in baking soda or burn it for slake lime.

The page I was just reading said most thorium deposits are in phosphate minerals like Mozanite. Under a certain concentration, it's not worth mining.

The thorium concentration in the ocean is very low, even compared to uranium which is less common on earth. It forms more insoluble complexes than U in general so it stays in rocks and soils.

I also should have said U-232 problem in my last post, that's the gamma emitter. It's a by-product of U-233 breeding.

>CaCO3

Thanks for the TNG kek, user.

hurry it up faggots. we got like... 50 years tops before this energy thing gets out of control.

>if thorium is reprocessed

Isn't the whole idea of LFTR the fact that you can clean the fuel stream as you use it?
Reprocessing the fuel is an integral part of the system. Thorium salt goes into a blanket layer surrounding the core. It picks up neutrons from the U-233 fissioning in the core. The thorium is converted to protactinium, which is removed from the thorium stream and put into a holding tank. The protactinium decays with a half life of about a week into U-233. That uranium is the actual fissile material that produces energy in the reactor. It goes back into the uranium salt stream and undergoes fission in the reactor core, starting the process over again. The fission products are removed from the salt as the fuel stream flows.
At no point are thorium and uranium in the same salt stream. At no point does the U-233 exit the reactor building itself, it is produced in the protactinium tank, removed via chemistry, and added to the U-233 salt immediately. In terms of the reactor building itself, Thorium goes in, and fission products come out. U-233 isn't an issue with thorium reactors, it's the actual fuel. Thorium is just the fertile material that is bred into the fuel.

At some point we need to get over the fact that nuclear weapons exist. Any country that builds a breeder reactor automatically has the ability to make fuels that can be used for nuclear weapons. The only reason it's hard for anyone to make nuclear weapons today is because isotopic enrichment is difficult. In a U-238 to Plutonium breeder, you are taking fertile material and breeding it into fissile material that can also be concentrated to weapons grade without isotopic enrichment. That's also true for a thorium to U-233 reactor, but since a small amount of U-232 is also produced and gives off gamma rays, we can at least track that uranium everywhere it goes, unless enormous effort is put into isotopically enriching it anyway, which is harder than just separating U-235 from U-238.

>I also should have said U-232 problem in my last post, that's the gamma emitter. It's a by-product of U-233 breeding.

Makes more sense. As far as I know U-232 will fission with thermal neutrons just like U-233, it's only a problem if you are trying to remove uranium from the reactor's fuel stream and don't want it to spit out gamma rays.

In a LFTR the design is such that the fuel salt is cleaned of fission products continuously and no uranium is removed. Eventually the majority of it fissions and a tiny amount is further bred into plutonium-238, which is not fissile. In a solid fuel reactor where fuel processing happens discontinuously, I agree that U-232 is an issue because people would be working around it and the gamma rays would be hard to shield against. However with continuous reprocessing of liquid fuel the process of cleaning is vastly simplified and doesn't require human operators nearby, so I wouldn't agree that U-232 poses a problem.

Light intensity drops off with the distance squared, so for every 2x further away you get 1/4th the power. At 10x further from the Sun than Earth you need 100x the panel area. You may have been trying to say that in your post but you didn't make it clear enough. 100x the panel area is 100x the mass for the same amount of power. Your other option is to deploy a lightweight mirror to concentrate the light on the same sized panel, but that quickly becomes impractical on its own, since just the light pressure on that mirror would be adjusting your orbit all the time.

It's far easier at some point to just bring an RTG, or if more power is needed, a nuclear reactor. We can build small reactors, sub 1 kilowatt, but we can also build big reactors greater than 1 gigawatt, so it's better to invest in that capability imo.

>Why would anyone want a complicated piece of machinery?

Kilopower uses a control rod in a hollow tube of uranium, heat pipes, and sterling engines to generate power. More complicated than a solar panel, but not nearly as complex as a pressurized water reactor.

Yah, I get those point. A perfect, flawless LFTR would be dope. Has anyone made a good working version yet? Nah.

It's great that LFTRs can hypothetically clean the reactor stream efficiently and burn all the U but I have serious doubts that it could ever be done economically. Nowadays its not even worth it to do majority burn-ups of U fuel sources. The amount of reprocessing to make LFTRs a good option makes them non-competitive to traditional, dumb, U reactor designs.

>Yah, I get those point. A perfect, flawless LFTR would be dope. Has anyone made a good working version yet? Nah.
>It's great that LFTRs can hypothetically clean the reactor stream efficiently and burn all the U but I have serious doubts that it could ever be done economically. Nowadays its not even worth it to do majority burn-ups of U fuel sources. The amount of reprocessing to make LFTRs a good option makes them non-competitive to traditional, dumb, U reactor designs.

Solid fuel reprocessing is expensive, but liquid fuel reprocessing is not. This is because to process solid fuel you need to get everything into a liquid state in order to do the chemistry required to separate all the stuff in there. In liquid fuel processing, the stuff is already liquid. To get the uranium out of the thorium salt stream you expose the salt to a source of fluorine, the uranium salt reacts with the fluorine and becomes a volatile gas that removes itself from solution on its own. To remove most fission products you simply catch them as they are produced since they are vapors at the temperatures of the molten salt (xenon, cesium, and a few others are included here). Others are removed in a chamber where the salt stream is flowed in contact with liquid beryllium, which the fission products are much more soluble in. We know this type of fuel processing works because they actually built it and tested it by cleaning a uranium fluoride salt of these products, and they estimated it would be sufficient to keep up with the continuous operation of a one gigawatt reactor.

At no point have I said LFTR is perfect or flawless, I'm just saying you're raising red flags which don't exist. Nobody's built a working version yet because only recently has anyone started trying to develop molten salt reactors again. I'd also point out that every feature of LTFR has existed before in other reactors or experiments, just not all together in the same machine.

>and they estimated it would be sufficient to keep up with the continuous operation of a one gigawatt reactor.

That is, the machine they built to demonstrate. The technology of liquid fuel processing could easily be scaled up, or even use multiples of the same hardware on reactors greater than one gigawatt

Recommend "Atomic Accidents" by Mahaffey.
He's all in FAVOR of nuclear power.
But he wants people to remember that it has to be handled carefully. I don't mean a reactor can go up like a bomb. But "off" really doesn't mean "off" and trivial errors quickly become serious problems.

A reactor in the Outer System is less prone to that problem. 10 times the diameter is 100 times the mass for the same power. Hence, light pressure is less important. Besides, if your habitat isn't tied to a specific body, you just move along with your power source. If it is tied to a mass, you use it as an anchor.

>10 times the diameter is 100 times the mass for the same power. Hence, light pressure is less important.

Remember that there is a probe attached to that mirror. The light pressure in proportion to the mirror alone stays the same but the absolute pressure relative to total vehicle mass goes up significantly.

> trivial errors quickly become serious problems.

I agree for complex reactors, but Kilopower cannot even be forced to melt down due to the design. At maximum output it's giving off a few kilowatts of heat, and nothing can be done to increase that further. The worst thing that could happen with the Kilopower design is it gets stuck and either can't supply enough power to run certain equipment or uses up its fuel too fast producing excess power and runs out before the mission should have ended. Here on Earth our reactors don't operate like Kilopower because even though Kilopower cannot melt physically melt down it is very fuel inefficient, achieves low burn up percentage, and cannot be scaled beyond a few dozen kilowatts.

Oh, yeah. Reactors have been built that are so safe they can even by handled by college students.
Nonetheless, I think you'd enjoy Maheffey. Also his other book, "Atomic Adventures".

Even when they can't melt, reactors build up dangerous radioactivity. For a couple of hour, VERY dangerous. Only a small part of the spent fuel needs to be sequestered for ages. Most is either inert, or short-lived, or useful fuel which could be used. The US is the ONLY country with nuke plants which doesn't re-process. A young US Navy ensign was part of a team which participated in the clean-up of a Canadian reactor. They did the job well. No one was hurt. But the experience obviously impressed him. Killing the just built re-processing plant was one of his first acts as POTUS.

Sure, but for a reactor going to space you don't really need to worry about radioactive contamination.

>Solid fuel reprocessing is expensive, but liquid fuel reprocessing is not

Not yet. Molten salt pyroprocessing is still in it's infancy and has many hurtles to overcome. PUREX is cost effective RIGHT NOW.

Dissolving metal oxides is not that hard. I'd rather work with room temp acid-solvent mixtures than 600 degree C, liquid salt and eutectic mixtures (that have gas phase F2 sparging to remove Pr and U). Only on the chalk board is LFTR easy.

PUREX is far from perfect but I'd take it today, and I'd take it tomorrow

I didn't say you said it was perfect. All the assumptions dropped on Veeky Forums on LFTR's economy of scale, engineering issues, and durability imply near miraculous engineering luck, however.

>they estimated it would be sufficient

Sufficient, not economic. I U-reactors will beat the shit out of LFTRs for decades to come.

t. chemist with a job

it's the General Fusion prototype fusion reactor. I want to at least see the experiment work: using molten lead and HUGE pistons to extract the fusion energy is pretty hardcore. An steampunk design that might actually be useful in real life!

I thought there was also the technical hurdle of corrosion: the radioactive salts themselves can only be handled by one known alloy: Hastalloy-N, which is hard to work with. It is also unknown whether the piping will eventually corrode or get clogged by the various fission contaminants.

They solved that problem by keeping the environment that the salts were in reducing rather than oxidative. To keep fission products from dropping out the salt stream is engineered as a mixture of several different salts, which would preferentially react with the fission products of concern and turn them into salts while the original metal in the salt would be released and collected elsewhere in the system as liquid metal to be recycled back into salt.

If fusion happens it will be this way

>At some point we need to get over the fact that nuclear weapons exist.
Yeah, that's not going to happen.

This is where nuclear fanboys always completely alienate the general public, "Oh my god, guys! Just get over nuclear weapons! Just let everyone have them! It'll be alright!"

Just imagine that every suicidal terrorist attack, every bombing, every truck attack, every mass shooting, was a nuclear strike instead. Instead of a somewhat disquieting news story you can wave off as vanishing into the death-rate noise of car accidents, a city is gone, every few weeks, over and over, with no way to stop it. That's the world you end up with if you "get over the fact that nuclear weapons exist."

Last week they just finished the prototype plasma injector.

They didn't "solve" it. They have an approach that might do an OK job for only some of the fission products. To get many of the contaminants out, you need a reducing environment, to get the others you need bubbling fluorine gas. In an actual LFTR you need to clean the salt stream with reducing and oxidizing steps which would differentially corrode the system (particularly the fluorine gas sparge). Moreover, a reducing salt environment plates out rare earth metals in the tubes and clogs the reactor.

As for the alloys, their lifetime is limited by neutron brittling and corrosion. Just because they're better than most materials, doesn't make them invincible.

Separately, we've figured out how to clean a LF salt stream of all the major contaminants. Our ability to do this all at once is minimal because the methods we have to remove the contaminants are non-complimentary.