Muh Thorium, Muh Fusion

Fusion

>These two fusion problems have to be solved

>There are two primary problems to be >overcome in fusion power research

>1. Sustained confinement and choice of >container materials.
>Fusion reactions are extremely delicate >and will stop almost immediately if not very >precisely maintained – this makes them safer >in many important ways compared to existing >fission reactors.

>2. They must also avoid losing energy in >order to be sustainable. Leading designs for >controlled fusion research use magnetic >(tokamak design) or inertial (laser) >confinement of a plasma.

>Both approaches are still under development >and are years away from commercial >operation.

>Pros

> Clean energy
> Virtually limitless fuel available
> No chain reaction. Easier to control or stop >than fission
> Nuclear fission is either a nuclear reaction >or a radioactive decay process in which the >nucleus of an atom splits into smaller parts >(lighter nuclei)
> Little or no nuclear waste. Core remains >radioactive for only 100 years. Possibly >radioactive structural elements
> Very low fuel cost

>Cons

> Unproven (it will take another years of >research to explore it on commercial scale)
> Commercial power plants will be very >expensive to build
> Requires extremely high temperatures
> If cold fusion could be achieved, it would be >much easier to implement

betterworldsolutions.eu/energy-from-fusion-pros-cons/

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I'm pretty sure we actually do. Nukes have an expiration date, and so must be continually replenished.

Supposedly the fission material doesn't actually decay fast enough to be an issue - based on a quick search.

On fusion, we're still trying to find a way to create and contain fusion. Which is why there are like a dozen reactor concepts that fall into confinement methods like magnetic confinement, inertial confinement, electric, etc. We not only have to break even, but we also have to produce more power than what we're spending to make it economically viable.

There's also the materials we use to make fusion. For fission, we have plutonium and uranium, fusion is not an exception. The reactions proposed for fusion is mainly associated with deuterium (hydrogen-2) because it's the easiest material to create fusion with and the most abundant, but we're still fiddling with it in using other compounds like tritium and helium-3.

>Cold fusion
Stop this meme

>the year: 2020
>user discovers cold fusion by thermoquantum-vibronicly lowering the activation barrier of nucleus to nucleus interactions
>builds first cold fusion reactor in his mom's garage
>flips the switch, sits down for a show
>neutron flux rises
>slight humming noise fills the air
>energy pulses begin to lower as the reactor vessel reaches perfect golden ratio harmonic
>he sips his mountain dew
>water jacket begins circulating
>o fuk its really habbeding
>reactor vessel groans and steams
>steams
>wtf
>the water is literally boiling
>it's hot as fuck

And thus cold fusion eluded us for another century.

>youtube.com/watch?v=k3zcmPmW6dE
what a god damn meme

no u

i'm a mong, but couldn't a fusion reactor be started with explosives? as i understand it, starting fusion requires extreme heat and/or pressure. could a single explosive charge start a fusion reactor?

The pressure needs to be constant. It would go out immediately, or explode consuming all the fuel at once. Hydrogen bombs work like how you said, using a fission charge.

>We literally don't make bombs anymore so how is this an issue?
The desire to make bombs provided all the funding for the initial research. Can't make bombs from Thorium, so no one put much money into it.

use a big ass hydraulic press then haha

>Everyone acts like they are some magical silver bullet, but why then aren't they in heavy use already?
Fusion requires temps similar to those in the center of the sun.

Thorium isn't in use because a Thorium power plant is way more expensive than a traditional uranium reactor. Because dealing with the fluoride salts is difficult and dangerous.

If fusion is accomplished, the theoretical power output would be astronomically higher than that of fossil fuels. What would be possible in turn is that we could do catalytic reformation of carbon in our atmosphere and make fuel for rockets, airplanes, trains, and freight ocean liners. It could also be used to produce; fertilizers, liquefied gases, helium, and practically all other modern chemical processes. It's only fuel source being salt water would open up deep sea mining and mineral exploration.

>Fusion requires temps similar to those in the center of the sun
Fusion requires temps 10x higher than those in the center of the sun

i thought that using salt water as fuel was a meme and that fusion required some kind of moon rocks? i read some stories about it

like, if you can use salt water why use moon rocks

Fun fact, you can use the thorium cycle to make nukes but they are heavy and have poor yield.

The first fission bomb contained some U-233.

>If fusion is accomplished, the theoretical power output would be astronomically higher than that of fossil fuels.
The problem with fusion is that while the reactor will barely need any fuel whatsoever and seems incredibly cheap in that regard, the construction and maintenance of the reactor itself shapes up to be incredibly expensive, cancelling out most of the immediate economic benefits.

Actually it's the other way around. Moon rocks are a total meme. Right now people are working on hydrogen fusion, more accurately, deuterium and tritium isotope fusion. Deuterium can and will be extracted from water without many problems. Tritium will most likely be made from Lithium within the walls of the Fusion reactor.

Moon rocks contain Helium 3, a special helium isotope deposited on the moon by solar winds. This kind of fusion however, is completely unresearched so far and seems harder to do. I don't think we'll see it in our lifetime. At least not before we thoroughly accomplished fusion with hydrogen first. Especially since the process of getting moon rocks seems to be disproportinally harder than getting water and lithium.

Thorium is a meme, its only regulations that stop Uranium Fission reactors, why would you want to do Thorium?

>If cold fusion could be achieved, it would be much easier to implement
Yeah and if fairies just gave us ever-turning wheels, we wouldn't need fusion at all.

>i'm a mong, but couldn't a fusion reactor be started with explosives? as i understand it, starting fusion requires extreme heat and/or pressure. could a single explosive charge start a fusion reactor?
Yes. It's called a hydrogen or thermonuclear bomb and we've been doing it for 60 years.
The explosive required for this is a nuclear fission bomb.

Yeah, but it's about confining the plasma so that you can use it for generating energy. If we can't even confine a plasma that is 50 million degrees hot for more than a couple of miliseconds, then we don't even need to bother trying to confine one that is 150 million degrees hot. Achieving these temperatures isn't the hard part, it's about keeping the plasma going without needing to add more energy than you are yielding.

Fusion is a long way away. It might not even work.

Next gen aka 4th gen reactors are pretty sweet, and thorium reactors are just a subset of those. The integral fast reactor also looks pretty good. Substantial portions have been tested, and there's several trustworthy companies like ThorCon who are claiming to be ready to build commercial scale prototypes, and assuming success, be in full production in less than 10 years.

Why aren't they used already? Because of fucking delusional environmentalists who are more anti-nuclear than they are pro-environment, and because they believe in fantasies like powering our society with wind and solar.

>Thorium isn't in use because a Thorium power plant is way more expensive than a traditional uranium reactor.
Um, no.

>Because dealing with the fluoride salts is difficult and dangerous.
Grossly exaggerated. Industry does it all the time. It's not even that hard. ThorCon, for example, plans to use conventional stainless steel, and they estimate a very slow corrosion rate, which is more than enough for their purposes.

>why would you want to do Thorium?
Thermal molten salt reactors seem to have substantially better safety, and therefore substantially lower costs, compared to conventional light water reactors.

Steam, from the steamed fusion we’re having.
Hmm, steamed fusion.

ITER will produce magnetic fields that are 13-14 tesla. No clue why he thinks they are stopping at 5.5.

You can actually do it like this (see Project PACER). But the cost of continously building nuclear bombs to keep it going would be much bigger than the net electricity gain. What you want to achieve is a burning plasma, then you could produce electricity very cheap.

Yes, and you call it steamed fusion despite the fact that it is obviously grilled.

Why is this guy shitting on inertial confinement? Tri Alpha is doing a pretty good job and will reach a higher Q than any Tokamak designs of similar size.

>What's stopping these things from being built now?

The (((Elites))) don't let truly intelligent people survive, because they want to control a slave race of morons.

So, human advancement (technologically speaking) is basically done.

Imagine being this retarded. Fissile material is extremely dangerous to have lying around, any idiot can cause a huge amount of damage with a pipe bomb and some radioactive material. Additionally the amount of missing fissile material in the world is already ridiculous and no one wants to add to it.

>it might not even work
I guess stars dont work and neither does the strong force in general then. Begs the question how you are managing to post this retarded drivel at all.

>Comparing celestial objects at least 100,000 more massive than the entire planet with some magnets and microwave generators
The two really have very little to do with each other.

>What's stopping these things from being built now?
ITER is the most purposely inefficient project on this planet. And it still seems entirely essential for fusion to become viable.

It's only the tritium that has to be replaced

They do. You just need to replace the gravitational confinement with magnetic confinement. As soon as we have magnets that are several hundreds or thousands of Tesla strong doing fusion on earth will be so easy you will have fusion-engined cars riding the streets.

MIT have come up with a design for a 200MW net electricity gain reactor that uses new superconductors to really bump the field strength and a FLiBe liquid blanket to solve the blanket problem, breed tritium and extract energy to turn turbines. It really is fucking incredible, why it hasn't been funded is beyond me. Look up ARC reactor.

Cold fusion is impossible because to move like-charged particles together close enough for the strong force to take over requires those charged particles to be moving very fast.

Heat is literally just particles moving quickly. Therefore unless we can turn charged particles into neutral particles we can't do cold fusion.

Fusion on earth requires temperatures 1-2 orders of magnitude higher than in the center of the sun.

/pol/scum? In my thread? It could be more likely than you think.

D-D fusion is the second easiest fusion reaction, with D-T fusion being the easiest of them all to achieve break-even. It has a lower coulombic barrier and a higher specific energy per reaction than any other kind of fusion fuel combo.

Both D-D and D-T fusion reactions generate very high neutron flux. It's likely that the first power-producing reactors will use the D-D cycle in a net-negative power mode to produce the neutron flux required to breed significant amounts of tritium in a blanket layer of deuterium, then introduce that tritium into the burning plasma to achieve net-positive power production, and simply maintain the tritium breeding reaction.

Helium-3 fusion on the other hand is much more difficult, both releasing less energy per reaction and having a much higher coulombic barrier. The only reason anyone talks about He-3 fuel at all is because when it fuses the reaction produces no neutrons, meaning a much higher percentage of the energy released can be easily redirected. Unfortunately He-3 is incredibly rare, and the fact that deuterium-tritium fusion can be used to breed tritium makes the higher potential efficiency of He-3 fusion a moot point. It would, however, be a really good form of fusion to try to use for propulsion, since the charged products could be pushed with a magnetic field.

Oh fuck lol is this how this works?

>2.2 microsecond half life

looks pretty dangerous to me

Molten fluoride salts are very acidic and very hot and need to be maintained at temps around 1000 to operate.

that's literally what the fusion reactor in OP's image intends to do

but from what I've seen they've failed at doing whatever the generating process is with their injectors

I don't know what they're trying to inject, probably energy heroin or something

so why aren't we building them on a massive scale already?

>very acidic
no, by definition no.

You're thinking of corrosion, and there are many alloys of stainless steel that do not corrode even when exposed to 1000 degree molten salt.

Because they need to be developed first.
Interest in the technology has only spiked in the last few years.

>>The only reason anyone talks about He-3 fuel at all is because when it fuses the reaction produces no neutrons, meaning a much higher percentage of the energy released can be easily redirected. Unfortunately He-3 is incredibly rare, and the fact that deuterium-tritium fusion can be used to breed tritium makes the higher potential efficiency of He-3 fusion a moot point.

So we could, in theory, establish a lunar mining outpost on the moon to gather Helium-3, and use it as a resupply outpost for ships in space?

>this post could be interesting >but is borderline incoherent >because >you're a fucking autistic

Not really.

Lunar Helium 3 is not as common as people say. While being millions of times more common on the Moon than on Earth, that's not saying much, because the Earth has essentially zero helium 3. You'd have to mine and finely process 100 million tons of lunar surface soil to produce a single ton of helium 3, and that's with zero losses along the way.

As I said, the only real advantageous use for Helium 3 fusion would be if we could build a fusion propulsion system, because a magnetic nozzle would allow us to capture the momentum of pretty much all of the particles generated by the fusion reaction and thus offer thrust at ridiculous specific impulse. That being said, we'd only need that kind of efficiency if we were trying to build a spacecraft capable of taking humans to other stars on generation ships. For anything interplanetary, D-T or D-D fusion is more than enough in terms of efficiency.

Even in the case that we wanted to build He3 fusion rockets to send things to other stars faster than the speeds D-T fusion would provide, we wouldn't bother mining the Moon for fuel. Instead we would mine one of the gas giants, probably Uranus because it has the least gravity of the four. All of the gas giants have many trillions of tons of He-3, and much more Deuterium. If orbital rings are feasible and can be constructed around gas planets we could end up mining hundreds of tons of useful hydrogen and helium isotopes from the gas giants every day, which would transform fusion fuels from relatively rare and expensive to very cheap commodities.

That's far into the future however. Closer to modern day is the development of D-T fusion propulsion, using fuels produced on Earth.

>implying that's a short lifespan for this kind of things

Thanks for the explanation user

It is if you want your reactor to run for longer than a few milliseconds unless you're continuously pumping new muons into the cycle, which need to be made separately and cause your reactor to draw more power than it produces.

Also the mechanism for this supposed fusion reaction makes zero sense, that's not how molecules form bonds and there's no reason that two nuclei would fuse in that case even if that were how it worked.

>What's stopping these things from being built now?

Thorium reactors aren't built because the private market (Bechtel and friends) prefers Uranium since they are government contractors anyway, and Ur gives the best output.

Fusors have already been built, they are just not self sustaining. Examples include the National Ignition Facility, the Shiva Star, and the Z-Machine all owned by the Department of Energy. These fusors are needed to simulate the high temperatures and pressures atomic bombs produce, so atomic bomb components can be thoroughly tested. At some point fusors will become good enough to be self-sustaining without external power inputs, and this what people reference as "commercial nuclear fusion". ITER in France is the oldest and largest international project aimed at creating this.

Gubmint doesn't give a fuck about investing in thorium because it can't be used to make bombs. If you couldn't make nukes, nobody would've developed regular reactors either.

Also with antinuclear retards in politics and society no one will push billions into R&D of nuclear reactors or fusion because they might get banned by some idiots like Greenpeace

interview with two of a hand full of scientists which worked on a successfully working msr thorium reactor in the mid-late 50s at oakridge labs until they got shut down, and all their research and specimens were destroyed/sold as scrap youtube.com/watch?v=ENH-jd6NhRc

its a fucking shame what they did with this proven technology, big nuclear forced into obscurity

youtube.com/watch?v=c7baTdyHv8g

lets hope these old guys live long enough to see a molten salt reactor up and running again.

stop the memes

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor#Disadvantages

youtube.com/watch?v=knofNX7HCbg

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor#Disadvantages
not a single real disadvantage listed which outweighs its pros

you could compile a list like that for any conventional light water reactor, making it look the most disadvantageous system you could think of

Assuming you build this underwater and let it mine ,if it's profitable a lot of companies would do it .What's the risk of filtering all salt out of water?

I am not talking about thorium but 4th gen in general also you can hear antinuclear crowd attacking fusion research as a waste instead they propose more subsidies for windmills and solar panels

youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4
Really good documentary detailing the work they are doing

>the mechanism for this supposed fusion reaction makes zero sense, that's not how molecules form bonds and there's no reason that two nuclei would fuse in that case even if that were how it worked

that's exactly how they fuse! if two nuclei get close enough for long enough, the residual strong force overtakes the electromagnetic force. why does time matter? because heisenberg uncertainty is always a factor. in our own star, there's not nearly enough heat or pressure to cause fusion alone, but because they're close enough, long enough, there's a slight chance of fusion through quantum tunneling. over billions of years, the chance of it occurring to a particular hydrogen nucleus approaches 100%.

so now make a D-T molecule with an extra close bond. the fact that D-T fusion already requires the least energy along with the fact that they are very close to each other mean thats each of those muon-bonded D-T molecules has a slight chance of fusing sporadically.

guys what if
guys hear me out
what if we build a big ass dome
fill them with water
detonate a fusion bomb
and run turbines off the dome's steam while we fill another dome and make another bomb?
fusion is clean so the steam is clean

yeah but then you have to build a bomb every time.

use the bomb in a volcano with a dome on top and then get steam from your volcanodome forever

>>What's stopping these things from being built now?
Physics

fucking this

Also check out Tokamak Energy, who are building a reactor with HTS right now.

youtube.com/watch?v=WW-B4BAfzfw

material science and research has to be done.
i case of fusion reactors entire new technologies have to be developed, and infrastructures need to be established supporting a fusion power cycle, including special tools to maintain a reactor, and switch out the torus blanket from inside the reactor for example, since you cant dismantle the reactor anymore once its finished, its just a way to complex machine.
in case of thorium reactors, long time material evaluation tests have to be redone since all the data and research specimens have been disposed of during the nixon presidency in favor of light water reactors and the contracts westinghouse and GE was going to have with the us military/navy. it all has to be redone now, decades of long time research is lost, and most of the people having worked on it have died from old age by now

Thoruim isnt as safe to use as slightly newer designs so people dont want to invest in it, also nuclear anything takes forever to implement change.

>its just a way to complex machine

no shit mang.
youtube.com/watch?v=2Y2CBJIp2j8
they cant make a single mistake assembling that beast. you cant just tear the whole thing apart again if you find a flaw afterward.

youtube.com/watch?v=pt70mO2nQac

>why then aren't they in heavy use already?
>What's stopping these things from being built now?

it took decades for ITER getting as far as it got. the projects foundation was layed during the end of the cold war, and construction just began 2006. it is so expensive that no single nation could or would want to develop the technology by itself, agreements had to be made, a location had to be found, not to mention it takes a shit long time to get that prototype thing built and tested, you underestimate the size of that project.
2017 iter just reached its 50% complete milestone.

2006 Signature of the ITER Agreement
2007-2009 Land clearing and levelling
2010-2014 Ground support structure and seismic foundations for the Tokamak
2014-2021 Construction of the Tokamak Building (access for first assembly activities in 2018)
2010-2021 Construction of the ITER plant and auxiliary buildings for First Plasma
2018-2025 Assembly phase 1
Dec 2025 First Plasma

youtube.com/watch?v=kuq1HU2gYEk

>stop the memes

Fuck you, we're not stopping them.

From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233#U-232_impurity

"This makes manual handling in a glove box with only light shielding (as commonly done with plutonium) too hazardous, (except possibly in a short period immediately following chemical separation of the uranium from its decay products) and instead requiring complex remote manipulation for fuel fabrication.

The hazards are significant even at 5 parts per million. Implosion nuclear weapons require U-232 levels below 50 ppm (above which the U-233 is considered "low grade"; cf. "Standard weapon grade plutonium requires a Pu-240 content of no more than 6.5%." which is 65000 ppm, and the analogous Pu-238 was produced in levels of 0.5% (5000 ppm) or less). Gun-type fission weapons additionally need low levels (1 ppm range) of light impurities, to keep the neutron generation low."

IOW: U233 is shitty material for making a nuke and requires purity levels that are so impractical, any facility that can turn thorium into bomb-grade U233 would have an easier time working with the standard U235. This bullshit mentality of a snowball's chance in Hell that thorium will turned into a nuke = "MUH PROLIFERATION" has got to go. Hell, even the scenario of stealth ninja Al Quada sneaking into nuclear facilities, grabbing a spent fuel rod from a standard light water reactor, and sneaking it to their volcano hideout to Blotfeld so he can whip up a nuke for SPECTOR is bullshit too. That convoluted shit only happens in 007 movies. In real life, a terrorist would get their hands on a nuke from a rouge state like Iran, which the US will not lift a finger to stop so why stifle out domestic energy production when we won't do a goddamn thing to stop the #1 proliferation risk.

Our prehistoric ancestors didn't get anywhere by banning fire and we won't make progress if we listen to a bunch of hippie faggots and ban nuclear power.

>"bureaucrats across two continents can't get their shit together proves that fusion power can't work"

but they got their shit together, and it is going to work. the JET research reactor was almost doing it, it was just 6 times to small to create a stable plasma. iter is meant to get the required size right. bureaucracy is the biggest hurdle of progress in any field

I believe nuclear fusion will be viable. I just don't have faith that ITER will succeed before one of the smaller fusion start-up companies does just as Space-X beat NASA and got Falcon Heavy flying before SLS.

Do you have a billion dollars to spend? Can you please convince one of the world governments to spend that billion dollars, and also change their regulations to permit development in the first place? That's why. A billion might sound like a lot, and it is, but that's relatively small chump change compared to the shit that waste on solar and wind subsidies in the US.

It's not a meme. It's the truth.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor#Disadvantages
The cost will be substantially lower, and there are good third-party independent analysis by actual proper nuclear contractors that verify this.

We don't need breeders in the immediate future. A simple molten salt reactor will still be safer and cheaper and more fuel efficient.

More development is needed. This is correct. We need to give one billion dollars to several companies, like ThorCon, who are more or less ready for full scale prototyping right now. That's the development that we need to do.

The startup fuel problem IIRC is only a problem for a breeder. Again, we probably won't start with breeders. ThorCon is not starting with a breeder design.

The "salts freezing" problem description in the source even includes a solution. This is not a problem.

Who the fuck cares about beryllium toxicity in the context of a nuclear reactor?

"In order to be predictably controlled, nuclear reactors rely on delayed neutrons." -- Debatable. There's a strong negative coefficient of reactivity because increased heat means lower density means less reactivity. I've been told that this is quite negative, e.g. more than enough. This is just people who are only familiar with light water reactor designs, and probably only basic knowledge, going outside their expertise.

Waste management is a non-issue. It's a fake issue brought up by Green Peace and other green liars.

Ditto for decom costs.

"Noble metal buildup" I forgot the solution to this, but it's easy and already tested. See the ThorCon design.

"Limited graphite lifetime" Then replace it regularly, like the ThorCon design.

"Graphite-caused positive reactivity feedback" Sounds like they're talking about an accidental criticality event. Due to the drain tank design, this is a not a concern.

"Limited plutonium solubility" Don't care. They're useful for reasons other than running on Pu fuel.

"Proliferation of neptunium-237" Don't know about this one offhand, but again, if we're assuming no online reprocessing this is probably not a problem either.

"Neutron poisoning and tritium production from lithium-6" Then don't use lithium and don't try to be a breeder. I seem to be repeating myself frequently.

"Corrosion from tellurium" Then use conventional stainless steel, like ThorCon is planning on doing. Some data shows that regular stainless steel will corrode, but slowly, and it'll be fine for the planned lifetime. Of course, testing is needed.

"Radiation damage to nickel alloys" see above. Not using hastelloy-N.

"Long term fuel salt storage" This happened in the original ORNL experiment only because they ignored the scientists' warnings and demands for a modicum of money to deal with the problem, and instead they let it sit for decades. Further, we know about it now.

"Business model" WTF is this? It's not even a technical concern. It's like "well, the business people won't like it". Fuck those people. We're making a new business model. Trying to save the world here.

"Development of the power cycle" Who cares? Use a conventional steam cycle. Again, like ThorCon is planning on doing.

Uhh, no. A lot of the research by ORNL has been uncovered, saved, and redistributed by Kirk Sorenson. He saved a lot of data.

>Kirk Sorenson
i like this insistent bastard, he and John Kutch are the faces of the Th renaissance

Sorenson definitely deserves a lot of credit, but my hype is with the ThorCon team now. I used to be a regular on the ThorCon forums, until the ridiculous over-the-top Republican idiocy from Kirk drove me away. I wish him the best and others to get nuclear rolling to save the world, but god damn is he a stereotypical teaparty idiot asshole.

Err, I meant I used to be a regular on the energyfromthorium forums, the one that Kirk runs.