binnsyboy said:
Yes, however to use it, requires a very corrosive salt solution. Nobody has actually yet looked into developing something capable of sustaining that while using it as a power source. Silly scientists!
Just a word of warning, I'm about to rock this.
The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) was an experimental molten-salt reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) constructed by 1964, it went critical in 1965 and was operated until 1969. The MSRE was a 7.4 MW test reactor simulating the neutronic "kernel" of an inherently safe epithermal thorium breeder reactor. It used three fuels: plutonium-239, uranium-235 and uranium-233. The Uranium tetraflouride 233 was the result of breeding from thorium.
Now that you know what was being dealt with, two fissile fuels and one breeder material. Back in the 60's the fuel salt didnt cause much of a problem for the materials used for the core. The fuel salt was immune to radiation damage, the graphite was not attacked by the fuel salt, and the corrosion of Hastelloy-N was negligible.
The MSRE was, by all means, considered a great success. It gave us insights to much of how a liquid flouride reactor would work and the design was improved later, the current design in discussion is the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor (LFTR).
There's a little joke now even "Thorium is what Fusion wanted to be"
Ionically-bonded fluids are impervious to radiation damage and the fluid form would allow easy extraction of fission product gases, thus permitting unlimited burnup (more fuel gets used to produce energy). Another point is that the salts are actually very low corrosion and to aviod corrosion, molten salt coolants must be chosen that are thermodynamically stable relative to the materials used of construction of the reactor; that is, the materials of construction are chemically noble relative to the salts.
The general rule to ensure that the materials of construction are compatible (noble) with respect to the salt is that the difference in the Gibbs free energy of formation between the salt and the container material should be >20 kcal/(mole °C)
Now I could literally fill the entire post space with the advantages of the LFTR compared to current pressure reactors. so instead I will write a little more maybe a paragraph or two. Hard time choosing lets go with 1000 MW of electricity for one year; Uranium Fuel Cycle vs Thorium.
Starting with Uranium it takes about 800,000 tons of ore to produce 250 tons of natural uranium, of that 35 tons of enriched uranium is produced through a very costly process, 215 tons of depleted uranium sticks around, now a large plant is used and some of the fuel is "burned" much wasted, and you end up with about 35 tons of spent fuel that sits around ~10,000 years 33.4 t uranium-238, .3 t uranium-235, .3 t plutonium, and 1 t fission products.
Thorium Fuel Cycle is much different, 200 tons of ore to produce 1 ton of natural thorium for a year, the plant with the LFTR is much smaller the thorium is introduced into blanket of flouride reactor completely converts to uranium-233 and is "burned", 1 ton of fission products results of which within 10 years about 83% of fission products are stable and can be partitioned and sold off, the remaining 17% of fission products go to geologic isolation for ~300 years.
1 ton of natural thorium compared to the 250 tons of natural uranium for 1 GW for one year.
Not to mention all the other benefits thorium has to offer with the liquid flouride designs including; efficiency, safety, cost effectiveness, and so on. Man I trailed off.
