The molten salt stuff looks like an engineers dream. But salt is phenomenally corrosive and molten salt is even more so. I see material engineering issues all over that design.<br><br>Then there's the pebble bed reactors. They use pumps to keep them hot enough to run. Pump fail = shut down by gravity. <br>
<br>The biggest issue I've seen in all reactor failures has been human error. For 3 Mile Island, a decision was not made to shut down a reactor that was showing some temperature instabilities once it became known there were other issues with instrumentation. Chernoble was a total cluster f*%k of wrong decisions. The Japan screw up is a strangeness of design: the pumps require electricity to run - it a power plant; why does the power plant not have power?<br>
<br>Is nuclear power perfectly safe? Nope. Will it ever be? Nope. Can better engineering make it safer? Oh yeah! Are we (US) investing in the research to reach that goal? Not really. We have a fair amount of theoretical work going on but there's only so much that can be done in simulations before the only reasonable next step is to build one.<br>
<br>Some time back I was mulling over the basic reactor design of using a liquid for heat transport to turbines and the born rods used for moderating the reaction (neutron absorption) and hit on an idea: Design the reactor core such that the control rods are fixed, the core "floats" on high pressure jets of the cooling liquid over the rods. A loss of cooling flow will automatically cause the core to descend over the rods and slow the reaction rate. Seems simple until the use of freaking molten salt is added as a cooling. Or liquid sodium. <br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 9:26 AM, scott <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:scott@sboss.net">scott@sboss.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S</a><br>
<br>
that talks about the Salt-Based nuclear reactors.<br>
<div><div></div><div class="h5">_______________________________________________<br>
Ale mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:Ale@ale.org">Ale@ale.org</a><br>
<a href="http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale" target="_blank">http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale</a><br>
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at<br>
<a href="http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo" target="_blank">http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo</a><br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>-- <br>James P. Kinney III<br><br>As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as
they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the
outcome.<br>- <i><i><i><i>2011 Noam Chomsky</i></i></i></i><br>