Reply To: Wealth of Nations, and Economics of Abundance

[Elling]

Kirk Sorensen at thoriumenergy.blogspot.com and his Oak Ridge groupies may be a little bit nostalgic, not that there’s anything wrong with that…
But the original MSR design didn’t foresee the replacement of the grahite moderators.
These “tar babies” dripping with radioactive salts…

However the French, the Russians and the Japanese seem to think that MSRs can be run on fast neutrons instead of thermal without graphite moderators.
MSR remains an excellent design but it takes experts and tens of millions at least to build them. There are proposals for small scale MSRs but it seems that radioactive handling still should be strictly regulated among the smallest number of players possible. This means big scale reactors.
GW reactors means big corp and Wall Street finance with your fair share of inertia and ripoff.

Beat this :
http://home.earthlink.net/~bhoglund/multiMissionMSR.html