Reply To: Competition from the Thorium reactor

[Axil]

Brian H wrote:

Exelon would not buy the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) because this reactor type was too small at 600MwT. These small nuclear reactors cannot gain any commercial traction from the users of nuclear power because they are too small.

Recently, the Chinese bought four new Westinghouse Ap1000s instead of PBMRs as their baseload power producers.

The fixed overhead of a reactor in terms of licensing, inspection, and operation will run about 10 million dollars a year even if the reactor equipment only cost less than $500K.

That is the reality of the nuclear industry today. A small 5 megawatt FF reactor will need to be incased in a crash and proliferation proofed containment stature because it is “nuclear” and as such subject to proliferation abuse and must be guarded.

High energy ions can produce plutonium just as readily as neutrons using beryllium and U238!

Utter nonsense. Where is the U238 coming from? That’s the only proliferation involved. This model doesn’t use any elements with atomic numbers higher than 5 (6 if you count transient unstable Carbon). The high-speed ions aren’t beryllium, and you’d have a real hard time making it.

And the 10 million/yr is by analogy with equivalent fission plants; the entire housing for an FF generator is about 20’x30’x10′. The approval/inspection etc. would mainly be at the factory level, and that would become routine over time, as at no time are any radioactive materials involved. Even in operation, a foot (meter?) of water plus a centimeter of Boron10 will keep levels around background. And probably less than 20 man-days of work per annum required for servicing and refuelling.

Utter nonsense. Where is the U238 coming from?

A proliferator can easily replace the ion power production coil at the focus of the ion beam in a FF reactor with a sphere of beryllium coated U238. This will result in the production of very high quality PU239 is short order.

Proliferators are very resourceful people and much effort is required to make any reactor proliferation proof.

A FF reactor can be made proliferation proof in my opinion.