
Molten Salt Reactor Claims Melt Down Under Scrutiny - okket
http://www.powermag.com/blog/molten-salt-reactor-claims-melt-down-under-scrutiny/
======
cjslep
Nuclear engineering undergrad at NC State from 2009-2013. It's very easy to
get overhyped about molten salt anything. Our groups senior design project
presented at the ANS student conference at MIT was on a novel way to
pyroprocess SNF to get only Uranium out one end and Plutonium & Radioactive
Crap out the other, so it would be proliferation resistant. And continuous.

The theory and simulations all lined up. But we still were cautious about
claiming any sort of breakthrough, because we needed empirical experiments to
prove the theory. And the government doesn't just hand out SNF (as my Navy
Nuke classmate learned when he asked the Pentagon).

The most exciting thing at the ANS student conference at the time was a
presentation by a German Graduate student and her work on ceramic cladding of
fuel rods. So, its an industry that doesn't naturally lend itself to hype.

~~~
M_Grey
What do you think of Pb-Bi eutectic?

~~~
acidburnNSA
It's good in that it gives you a very hard neutron spectrum (good for
efficient breeding) without being chemically reactive. It still has
potentially unsolved problems in corrosion, required pumping power (i.e. power
density limits) and erosion. There's been some recent work on oxygen control
that really helps with the corrosion issue.

~~~
M_Grey
Thanks, I was wondering the issues around corrosion and servicing were being
addressed. It always seemed like the best hope for a balance between a good
breeder reactor, and non-proliferation concerns to me.

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tinco
Oh that's awkward. Worse than not being 75 times as efficient, and instead
only twice, is this other quote:

 _In addition, it now specifies that the design “does not reduce existing
stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel” or use them as its fuel source._

To me that was the most inspiring aspect of this idea. I'd still one day hope
to have a nuclear reactor in my back yard, but to realise that dream we've got
to keep the science as well as the engineering on point.

If nuclear scientists goof like this, it does not inspire confidence to the
public and all we will end up is projects like Shoreham.

~~~
bmh_ca
> If nuclear scientists goof like this, it does not inspire confidence to the
> public and all we will end up is projects like Shoreham.

To be fair, the claims were made by grad students. Good on them for
experimenting, hoping, testing, and failing. The true calamity would have
never been to test.

Their failure is not a reflection of their character, ambition, or talent.
Well perhaps a little bit their talent. But they could've done like many
(most, arguably) grad students and worked on some fundamentally useless but
"safe" path to ongoing work in the Ivory tower.

So let's hope they keep trying to identify and test the hard problems whose
resolution would improve life for humans, and do better next time.

~~~
noobermin
>Smith thought the claims for the technology were bogus, based on the physics,
notified the MIT hierarchy, and launched an inquiry. The magazine quoted him,
“I said this is obviously incorrect based on basic physics.”

Grad students should know the basic physics of their respective subfields.

~~~
huxley
At the very least, if it doesn't match up with the basic physics, to do the
legwork to show why they are right and the apparent contradictions with basic
physics are incorrect.

------
gumby
I enjoyed the bit about "in MIT’s highly regarded magazine, Technology
Review". I don't know anybody from MIT who doesn't think it's worthless
(except for the alumni news bound into the back of the alumni editions they
send out free. It's only connection to MIT is that they pay the alumni
association for the right to use the name (and agree to send alumni notes
out).

A friend of mine (also an alum) refers to it as "the magazine of things that
will never happen".

~~~
gpawl
Why does the alumni continue to agree to license their name to a publication
that drags down MIT's reputation?

~~~
gumby
It funds the alumni association. And it would take more than one dumb magazine
to put a dent in the institute's reputation.

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ajarmst
Sigh. Claims made by a few people about a particular molten salt reactor
design do not stand up to scrutiny. Molten salt reactors, on the other hand,
are proven technology.

~~~
pjc50
How many of them are in commercial use today? Where?

~~~
m389571
БН-600 & БН-800, Russia.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Those are both liquid-metal cooled solid-fueled reactors (sodium-cooled fast
reactors). Sodium in elemental form is a metal, not a salt like sodium-
chloride. There has never been a commercial molten-salt reactor.

------
phkahler
Last paragraph:

inally, who cares about reprocessing fuel? At this time naturally abundant
U235 prices are so low and projected to continue to be low for this century
that all this effort to recycle fuel and burn longer seems completely
unwarranted on market principles, despite how cool and hip it sounds to "close
the fuel cycle" or produce "100 times" less waste. Last I checked, fuel and
disposal was a tiny fraction of the real costs of nuclear electricity, and
certainly far smaller of an engineering problem than the public likes to
believe.

I wasn't aware that anyone had solved the problem of spent fuel. last I knew
there were thousands of tons of the stuff sitting around in swimming pools
next to reactors all over the country/world. I don't recall the status of the
project to bury the stuff under mountain in Nevada either, but I don't think
that plan is approved.

WTF is wrong with breeder reactors that consume the otherwise spent fuel?
Yeah, yeah, proliferation risk. If the stuff is that hard to contain then why
all the waste sitting around?

~~~
wahern

      Yeah, yeah, proliferation risk. If the stuff is that hard to
      contain then why all the waste sitting around?
    

I think the concern about breeder reactors isn't so much the proliferation
risk of the fuel and waste itself, but that a commercial market in breeder
reactor technology will proliferate the knowledge and equipment necessary such
that state actors will find it easier to build breeder reactors quickly and
secretly.

But maybe that's just a misperception on my part.

Before Beowulf clusters, building supercomputers required tremendous
expertise. The U.S. thought it could keep China from building supercomputers
by controlling the export of supercomputers and supercomputing-enabling
technology. But once supercomputing moved to clusters of commodity hardware,
most of those export controls became useless almost overnight. China didn't
spontaneously develop an expertise in chip design and fabrication; rather,
because of the technological shift in the West, supercomputing know-how and
equipment simply became impossible to contain.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
The idea state actors could building anything quickly and secretly is a
misconception.

~~~
wahern
Depends on the complexity and on our intelligence assets.

Because of our lack of intelligence assets, China and North Korean have done
spectacularly well. Pakistan got away with selling nuclear plans for years
without our knowledge. There's probably all manner of less complex projects
underway that U.S. intelligence is oblivious to.

Like China and North Korea, Iran is something of an outlier. Israel has long
had strong intelligence assets in Iran, and in addition to benefiting from
those, the U.S. seems to have been able to beef up SIGINT fairly quickly with
arguably better than usually results.

It's highly dependent on the technology and the country in question. Sure, at
the end of the day it's impossible to keep the genie in the bottle. But the
goal is never forever. A country's strategic interests always have an implicit
time component. If you can suppress tech long enough for a "rogue" state to
become a respectable player in the international system, then you've won. Long
enough might be only a few years.

Conversely, if you can develop tech faster than the U.S. can learn about _and_
act upon it, you've won. North Korea won that race, and might have been able
to win it even without China protecting it. And how did North Korea win that
race? Largely with exogenous skill, importing Soviet talent after the fall of
the USSR.

Also, need I remind anyone the intelligence disaster that was both 9/11 and
the Iraq War? It's not so much that the intelligence community was wrong, but
that there's rarely any certainty in their assessments. If you don't know for
certain that something is true, how do you justify your policy decisions? It
gets muddy very quickly.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
> Because of our lack of intelligence assets, China and North Korean have done
> spectacularly well.

I don't think that's fair. Maybe China and North Korea have done well because
there are knowledgeable and determined who live and work in those countries.

> Pakistan got away with selling nuclear plans for years without our
> knowledge.

How do you _know_ that?

~~~
wahern

      I don't think that's fair. Maybe China and North Korea have
      done well because there are knowledgeable and determined who
      live and work in those countries.
    

No doubt that's true. There are many capable scientists in those countries.
However, in the case of North Korea for example, from all available publicly
known information North Korea had been trying to build both ballistic missiles
and a nuclear program since the 1960s. But there appears to have been few
significant advancements until the fall of the USSR and the immigration of
some well-known Soviet scientists, after which their programs made significant
advances over suspiciously short periods of time.

    
    
      How do you know that?
    

I don't know, just like I don't know that Obama isn't a secret Muslim, that
Trump isn't a Manchurian Candidate, or that you're not an extraterrestrial
alien.

However, for whatever reason the Illuminati saw fit to disclose that Pakistan
sold nuclear secrets to North Korea; which apparently went on for over decade
before the initial disclosure; that many high-level U.S. officials
(politicians, appointees, and civil servants alike) went [apparently]
apoplectic upon disclosure; and that the fall-out seemed to be widespread and
persistent.

We also "know" that South Africa had the bomb and Israel has the bomb. And
despite official denials it seems clear that Israel, minimally, had the tacit
approval of the U.S. if not outright assistance, and that South Africa's
program was also under surveillance at the time. In other words, once details
of these programs became publicly known it also became publicly known shortly
afterward the extent to which the U.S. knew about those developments. In the
case of the Pakistan sale of nuclear secrets, and in multiple situations wrt
North Korea and China, by all public accounts the U.S. was and still is often
readily taken by surprise. There are plenty other historical examples
(including recent examples) of the U.S. being taken by surprise, although
obviously not all were so strategically consequential.

~~~
caf
There is no need for the scare-quotes around "know" \- President de Klerk gave
a speech in which he admitted that South Africa had built and subsequently
dismantled a nuclear weapons program. There are public IAEA reports on the
verification process following SA's accession to the NPT.

(An interesting insight into late cold-war politics is that it was the Soviet
Union that tipped off the United States that South Africa was preparing to
test a weapon).

------
djsumdog
From what I've read on other threads about Thorium and Molten-Salt reactors is
that they are highly corrosive.

I found the experimental Oak Ridge one that's talked about in the article:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-
Salt_Reactor_Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-
Salt_Reactor_Experiment)

..but I thought there was one fully operational and connected to the grid for
years before it was shut down. I can't seem to find that one though.

~~~
wersplectior
Possible corrosion issues aside, does the article have any negative
implications for the much sought-for development of molten-salt _thorium_
reactors?

~~~
neutronicus
Your zeroth-order mental model of a Thorium reactor should be "exactly like a
Uranium reactor". It's a different radioisotope; it ain't magic.

~~~
DennisP
Your first-order mental model should be that (1) thorium requires breeding and
that works in a thermal spectrum, (2) uranium doesn't require breeding if
you're content with fissioning U235, and (3) you can have a breeding uranium
reactor but that requires a fast spectrum.

------
jobu
The Powermag.com site seems to be melting down as well. After giving up on
loading the page I was able to google a bit and found this article:

"Nuclear Energy Startup Transatomic Backtracks on Key Promises"
[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603731/nuclear-energy-
sta...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603731/nuclear-energy-startup-
transatomic-backtracks-on-key-promises/)

2x the energy per ton of uranium is decent, but I wonder how they ever thought
they could get 75x.

~~~
acidburnNSA
They thought they had a breeder reactor I guess. Typical reactors burn mostly
U235 and a bit of bred-up Pu239 for an average burnup of the mined uranium of
roughly 10 MWd/kg. Breeder reactors, on the other hand (both Thorium thermal
MSR breeders and Uranium-Plutonium fast breeders) can get up very near the
theoretical maximum of ~930 MWd/kg. The latter figure really demonstrates the
sheer magnitude of the nuclear force in atoms. What a wonder to behold!

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comicjk
This whole discussion is misplaced. Economically, the cost of fuel for a
nuclear plant is almost negligible, about half a cent per kWh! Up-front
capital costs are the vast majority of the total. That's where research and
venture capital should be focused, not on squeezing down the half-cent.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Is that the commodity cost of the ore, or does it include the cost of the fuel
rod assembly and assorted middlemen costs?

~~~
comicjk
Everything up to the final fuel rods. See here (go to Operating Costs):
[http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-
as...](http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-
aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx)

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Thank you for the link.

------
geodel
I was reading like 'Morton Salt Reactor' and thinking do we really have one of
those.

~~~
leeoniya
drove past there today; Geiger counter didnt budge, so i guess not :/

------
leeoniya
even 2x is pretty damn good, though not being able to consume spent fuel is a
huge bummer.

what of the claimed safety benefits? and how completely can it use up _new_
fuel (thus reducing its own waste)?

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chiph
Not a nuke guy -- if you slow/stop the reaction, and the salt solidifies in
all the piping, how do you get it started again? Sure, the salt near the
reactor becomes liquid again, but there's no flow through the pipes to the
pumps & heat exchanger and all you have is convection flow in/near the vessel
itself, and maybe the heat eventually works its way through the plumbing.

Do you wrap all the pipes & pumps in heat tape?

~~~
ars
They use salts that melt at low temperature, and don't boil easily.

So they are unlikely to ever get cold enough to solidify, and if they do, can
be melted with external energy.

And yes, they do insulate the pipes. So heat from the reactor would eventually
flow and melt all the salt.

~~~
acidburnNSA
They also do run heater wires along the pipes. Same with liquid metal cooled
reactors.

------
imaginenore
While doubling the efficiency is still great, I'm not sure we should trust
people who make errors in such basic calculations to build a freaking nuclear
reactor.

75x should have been the red flag from the first mention, it's such a huge
figure. It's not like they are switching from fission to fusion.

~~~
DennisP
It's actually feasible with fast reactors. Conventional reactors fission U235
and a little plutonium which gets bred from U238, but most of the U238 and
plutonium just ends up as waste. Fast reactors fission the plutonium just
fine, and ultimately can use up virtually all the U238. So they produce very
little waste, most of that is short-lived, and they get up to 100x more power
out of the same amount of uranium ore.

But Transatomic isn't a fast reactor.

------
burntrelish1273
Also interesting:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_s...](http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_small_nuclear_fission_reactors)

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jxramos
"technology journalists all too credulous." ha, I guess so.

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seesomesense
Sounds like another would-be Theranos.

------
kalaracey
This title is extremely misleading. Makes it sounds like there has been a
nuclear accident, and subtly stokes fears of nuclear technology.

~~~
aetherson
Guys. It's a pun. This how article titles work. Welcome to the last 50 years
of American journalism.

~~~
castis
HN has been on an extreme title pedantry kick for a bit now. Hoping it cools
off a little.

~~~
stock_toaster
What is the expected half-life of the cooling period?

~~~
exabrial
I thought the pun was obvious; after all, that would be a waste of unspent
material.....

------
tjohns
Misleading title. The way this is phrased, it sounds like a reactor meltdown
occurred (!) and is now under scrutiny.

In reality, it's just an energy startup's exaggerated performance claims that
"melted down" (were proven incorrect) when examined by the community.

~~~
vacri
Are you a native speaker of English? If so, how would a Molten Salt Reactor
make any claims?

~~~
tgb
The title is a garden path sentence trying to be too clever with using "melt
down" in the context of nuclear reactors. I had to read the first few
sentences to have any idea what it was talking about. You don't need to
question people's language skills for this. Regardless, it's easy to take
"Molten Salt Reactor" as the name of a company, just as if you saw a title
saying "Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant claims meltdown".

~~~
vacri
I'm just tired of people on HN complaining about misleading titles like if
they were something that kicked your dog. If you are a native speaker that was
familiar enough with nuclear power to know what a 'molten salt reactor' might
be (the journal is 'powermag', after all), then for you to read that title as
"omg! there might be a meltdown" is just being lazy.

Please don't demand the dumbing-down of content for everyone else because you
want to be spoon-fed.

~~~
tgb
I really find your tone unnecessarily aggressive. There's nothing dumbed-down
about titles that read clearly on the first scan.

~~~
vacri
Two centuries of journalistic tradition disagree with you. Newspapers have
_always_ dones this, hence my comment on the native speaker. If you're a
native speaker, you will have grown up with this kind of pun happening around
you all the time.

And yes, my tone might be a bit aggressive, but people making trivial
complaints about titles has been on the rise at HN recently. I've been hanging
around here for years, and it's never been a problem before. You then talk
about (horror!) having to read the first two sentences of the article to
realise that it's not in fact a nuclear meltdown, though really you should
have realised there wasn't a nuclear meltdown when it mentioned students a
dozen words in.

Besides, reading it the way you're suggesting would mean that the supposed
nuclear meltdown was _caused_ by the scrutiny, which is just nonsensical.

This is what frustrates me into making these comments; that people prefer to
be spoon-fed content rather than use their brain a little.

------
fixxer
Are we close to peak bullshit for this cycle? I've about had enough.

~~~
astrodust
Thank you for your deeply insightful contributions.

~~~
fixxer
Read my profile.

~~~
castis
Your abysmal attitude probably contributes a hefty amount to your feelings
about this place. You basically just told that dude to go kill himself. What a
nice guy you are.

~~~
fixxer
¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
FireBeyond
Theranos 2.0...

~~~
kbar13
no, theranos actively lied about their product, this crew got their stuff
reviewed and has since revised their claims (which seems to still be pretty
good improvements)

------
bronz
people need to end this ridiculous obsession with fission for energy. solar
and wind. thats all we need. all the nuclear stuff should be limited to
research. when fusion is ready then we can do that. solar, wind and batteries
are here and ready to go. they are already rolling out. anything else is a
complete distraction and waste of time. im so fucking tired of this.

~~~
nikdaheratik
The appeal of fission is really dead simple: each fission event releases 200x
more energy than the equivalent chemical reactions. It would also take very
large amounts of land to replace a single nuclear reactor with the equivalent
in wind or solar.

I'm not 100% sold on nuclear as being a panacea, but it is hardly a waste of
time.

~~~
acidburnNSA
You're right in sentiment. But by my figuring (which is energy per mass of
fuel consumed), nuclear reactions release 2 million times more energy that
chemical reactions. [1]

If you got 100% of your energy as an average American (transportation,
electricity, heat, etc.) for your entire life, you'd consume 1.5 soda cans of
nuclear fuel. The tiny footprint associated with this incredible resource is
why nuclear matters.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densitie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities_of_common_energy_storage_materials)

------
shaunrussell
Alarmist misleading title. Downvote.

There are other companies (FLIBE, Lightbridge) researching LFTR MSR that have
promise. Just because some grad students made ridiculous claims, it shouldn't
throw shade on the whole industry.

