Egregoros

@nanook @fluffy All these reactors running 50 years and

I'm in favor of thorium salt reactors. I like them. I'm just not super worried about something that's only happened to one reactor after it got hit with an earthquake two orders of magnitude higher than it was supposed to.

Friend of mine worked in an oil refinery a while and I think *anything* is safer than California's oil refineries.

I support your efforts but I remain unconvinced that conventional reactors are so terrible and thorium-salt reactors are still in the design phase.

@cjd @bajax @tard @nanook @p
>you're saying safety of nuclear power is intractable
caleb i am not making such an assertion. in my post, in the brief part where i did mention safety issues, that was mentioned to illustrate the straw man nanook (unknowningly?) constructed.

i wrote that the safety of nuclear power is contested, this is a very weak assertion, we need only find some nontrivial contest. but even if you ill like this, i wrote that part ("which, as far... contested?") as dramatic flair anyway, the post as written loses nothing if you omit that sentence.


ultimately the issue with nuclear power is that it several order of magnitude more expensive to construct, unless you are sitting on huge piles of cash you will be financing it, this means you will raise power costs to pay off the loan, the prices per watt hour then end up flat or higher, it is just a wealth transfer from the state to bankers.

if you have a lot of cash, you could build them and it would be a good idea, at least compared to just letting the cash sit around, but nation states are not apple or mihoyo, come to think of it didn't mihoyo build a fusion reactor? that was quite entertaining, i wonder about the details there.

@cjd @p @fluffy @bajax @tard The big expense of nuclear plants today resolves around things like the need for a containment building, not required for a molten salt reactor, plumbing has to withstand 200-300 atmosphere, emergency water dump systems for when the plumbing fails and all the water flashes to steam, emergency backup generators that have to keep cooling going if commercial AC fails.

Molten salt reactors by contrast don't require containment domes because they have no explosive failure modes, don't require active cooling in the event of a failure because first off they are self-limiting because the salt expands as it heats and reduces reaction rates, and that by itself is generally enough, but if it gets too hot anyway, a freeze plug melts and drains the molten fuel into a much larger tank that spreads it out too much for the reaction to continue and because fission products are continuously removed, there is no residual heat from fission products.

There is no water so no hydrogen explosions.

The only real failure mode is get a leak in the plumbing, and the liquid fuel/salt mixture leaks out and solidifies on the floor. And because fission products are continuously removed it is not so hot that it can't be handled so is scooped up thrown back in the reactor, plumbing fixed and life goes on.

These inherent safety features make the insane active features necessary in boiling water reactors unnecessary and with them their expense.