Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[bcreighton7]

delt0r wrote: Molten salt reactors are not restricted to Thorium, in fact you get all the same advantages (and disadvantages) with U in such a design. For example reprocessing U cycles give very similar waste.

Indeed molten salt was proposed to fix many of the issues with thorium. But lets be clear. It is *not* proven. A small demo reactor (or 2) was operated, *without* breeding and *without* in situ reprocessing. There was corrosion problems and fixes proposed but not validated. To get to a proper deployment status your talking about 10-20 years full size demo first. And that is a estimate from the industry, you know the people that actually build these things.

Hi,
Yes, that is why I said

It has a proven working model at least, and if we built out one, we may end up with a commercially viable plant within 10 years which could be used to replace the nuclear reactors which are now coming up for retirement while potentially keeping their electric generation systems. I’m sure there are still engineering problems to face on a full scale plant, but if the hype is to be believed it has many advantages over our current nuclear reactors:

I realize the LFTR reactor I am talking about still has engineering challenges to work out, but it was proven to work. I don’t think it is pie in the sky. At this point, fusion is still literally pie in the sky ie in the sun. Moving the physics of the sun to the earth will be a bit of an engineering challenge I think. While I believe Dr Lerner and team may well reach net energy with the beryllium anode, the challenge is to be able to repeat the fusion billions of times and convert the energy, and at this point we can’t confirm we will even get past the tungsten anode. If it ends up feeding impurities into the reaction, the challenges will really begin.
It seems to only make sense to have another viable and at least somewhat proven nuclear power source. Plus we are living at a time of some financing challenges for fusion. While I think this will certainly change for focus fusion once net energy is reached, there will still be nuclear engineering challenges to address.