Reply To: Mind, Spirit, Science connection?

[mjv1121]

First of all, to state the obvious, I believe the most important thing is to move to an all electric society (which may or may not include hydrogen – incidentally LFTR would be great for process heat to extract hydrogen). In order to achieve that there we need a method of generating electricity that is considerably more viable than burning fossil fuels, both economically and environmentally. Thorium powered fission could certainly be economical and would be orders of magnitude greener than wind and solar.
The problem with the present fission technology is the fundamental inefficiency of solid fuel and the subsequent considerable waste stream. Bill Gates is an advocate/investor in Travelling Wave Reactors – basically a variation on-a-theme of solid fuelled sodium cooled fast reactors like IFR. The big – very big – advantage with molten salt reactors is that they use liquid fuel – molten salt in fact . This turns a nuclear reactor from being a dangerous beast that must be controlled using “defence in depth”, into a reactor that is self-controlling and can be chemically processed. In addition thorium is far more abundant than uranium, certainly sustainable for a few hundred thousand years. All in all, a thorium powered world would be very very acceptable.

The reason that D-T fusion will find it hard to compete is that there is no advantage – LFTR really is that good. A “pleasant physics surprise” card could be Aneutronic fusion, but even that is not much of an advantage against LFTR. What we need is a small, but scalable generator, that can be manufactured and implemented at a 90-95% cost saving…..focus fusion! I do think the fact that its the Chinese that have made this move could (maybe, possibly) be an advantage. It may motivate the powers that be to take a second look at alternatives. The problem remains though, that its not the decision makers that are the stumbling block, its the advisors to the decision makers.

As a point of interest (and because I’m a MSR nerd), the molten salt is the same salt that is proposed to be used for cooling and heat transfer for tokamaks and LIFE. For fusion use it has the added benefit of making tritium, which is quite useful cos it doesn’t grow in the wild.