What if we could design and build a reactor :
• that uses no water and so can’t have high pressure steam or hydrogen explosions,
• with fuel that can’t have a nuclear melt down,
• that fissions over 99% of its fuel so there’s no waste needing storage for hundreds of thousands of years,
• some types can consume spent nuclear fuel from other reactors
Well, we’ve already built one, and we ran it for 5 years! (But you never heard about it…)
What Is A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor?
A Molten Salt Reactors, such as Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR, pronounced “lifter”) produces energy using a liquid (molten) nuclear fuel, not a solid fuel. MSRs also use a coolant that remains liquid at atmospheric pressure.
LFTRs are designed to convert Thorium (Th-232), an inexpensive and abundant material, into Uranium-233 which can then undergo nuclear fission. Other types of MSR can use spent uranium, depleted uranium, or plutonium, eliminating nuclear waste from solid-fueled reactors.
With liquid fuel and atmospheric pressures, LFTRs solve the safety and waste disposal problems our current (1970’s design) light water reactor (LWR) have.
With all the attention lately on nuclear waste, nuclear accidents like Fukushima, and producing energy without climate change, we need to look at nuclear energy not from our current type of reactors.
Most safety concerns of LWRs are from using water coolant; LFTR is a molten salt reactor (uses special salt as coolant). All the nuclear waste problems are from LWRs using solid fuel (less than 2% of the fuel gets used); MSR uses molten fuel, so can consume all the fuel leaving only short-term waste.
With a reactor design that is inherently safer, the expensive “engineered in depth” safety equipment of LWRs is not needed, making LFTR smaller and dramatically less expensive than LWRs.
We abandoned MSRs in the 1970s (we decided to go with the liquid-metal-cooled fast breeder reactor (LMFBR) which produced reactor fuel faster). We later dropped the LMFBR due to proliferation concerns and reactor control issues, but never came back to MSR, political inertia.
A demonstration Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) was developed at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the early 1960s and ran for a total of 22,000 hours between 1965 and 1969.
Alvin Weinberg, who ran Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) while the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was conducted, was also the original inventor of the Pressurized-Water Reactor PWR used today (got the patent in 1947).
Of the Generation-IV reactors being developed, only the MSR has been built and operated.
People are working on the engineering to bring a full LFTR into production (an MSR with a Thorium “blanket” to convert Thorium to Uranium fuel).
FLiBe Energy in the USA plans to have a LFTR operational by 2015. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has LFTR plans — in 2010 they visited Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Chinese New Year in 2011 they announced they would be starting a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor program (and patenting every advance they make).
MSR modeling and design work is also being done in other countries, incl. Canada, France, Czech Republic.
Liquid: The fuel is Uranium in a molten salt, circulating continuously through the reactor, for over 99% fuel burnup, and easy processing of fission byproducts.
Fluoride: The salt used is made of Fluoride, Lithium and Beryllium, (or similar salts) very chemically stable, very high boiling point (liquid from ~400° to ~1400° C), and essentially impervious to radiation damage. The high heat capacity of fluoride salts lets a LFTR operate safely at temperatures much higher than water-cooled reactors (1000° vs. 350° C) for more efficient electric generation and industrial use. Most fission byproducts chemically bond with the salt.
Thorium: A plentiful metal, probably a couple of grams in your yard. Among the least radioactive elements, commonly discarded as waste from Rare Earth mines. The reactor converts Thorium to Uranium for fuel.
Reactor: LFTRs are extremely resistant to nuclear proliferation (from mining to disposal) and produce only a very small amount of short-lived, low toxicity waste which is radioactivity-wise completely benign within 350 years. LFTRs run at atmospheric pressure, so much less expensive construction, much less expensive to operate. Passive safety features handle emergencies, even if no water or power is available.
Congratulations for the writing.
________________________________
http://apartamentosecasas.org/
Thank you for collecting and logically presenting this
information on MSRs utilizing the thorium fuel cycle
and specifically the LFTR approach .. There’s no
question in my mind that the MSR is the path forward
with regards to abundant and clean power .. Under your
list of benefits you might want to add a section on
the MSR’s ability to produce medically important
radioactive isotopes .. Check the Thorium Remix 2011
UTube presentation for the relevant information ..
=====
Consequences of The Path Not Taken ..
You knew ..
You knew at the very beginning .. You knew 50 years ago ..
You knew the correct development path for civilian nuclear power reactors
but chose instead to optimize nuclear fuel cycles for the production of
weapons grade materials .. Alvin Weinberg knew ( Inventor of the Pressure
Water Reactor ( PWR ) and former head of Oak Ridge National Laboratory ( ORNL ) ..
Glenn Seaborg knew ( Discoverer of Plutonium and seven additional heavy elements,
former Director of The Atomic energy Commission ( AEC ) .. Eugene Wigner knew
( Developed the Aqueous Homogenous Reactor ( AHR ) .. Edward Teller knew
( Principal developer of the Hydrogen or fusion bomb ) ..
And Yet ..
The unfortunate legacy of that singular decision is the world we find ourselves in now ..
Not a world powered by abundant, cheap, and safe Molten Salt Breeder Reactors based
on the Thorium fuel cycle; but rather a world characterized by resource wars for the
control of finite fossil fuels ( Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan ), fears of nuclear “accidents”
( Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima ), fears of nuclear proliferation ( North Korea,
Pakistan, Iran ) .. The problems associated with the long term storage and security of
highly radioactive partially burned nuclear fuel rod assemblies .. Having to deal with the
consequences of Global Climate Change caused in part by our over reliance and over
deployment of CO2 emitting coal fired power plants ..
You knew ..
=====
Jim Scanlon aka “Triffin”
I do have a little info on the medical radioisotopes LFTR produces, at Useful LFTR Fission By-Products, for Industry and Medicine. Very exciting to know we could have very targeted cancer therapies.
I don’t think “plutonium for bombs” was a direct major factor in not getting molten salt reactors. The direct factor was making nuclear bombs got top scientists knowledgeable about plutonium and solid fuels; those scientists then used what they were knowledgeable about for building nuclear reactors. They knew solid fuels, they knew water, they knew steel and using steel to contain pressure, they didn’t know nuclear power would work they needed to take it from theoretical to actual. They did know that water cooled solid fuel might not be the best approach, but it was the best approach to Get Started and verify nuclear power is possible, and learn what works and what doesn’t work, and then find the best solution. (See Kirk Sorensen – The Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor: Why Didn’t This Happen (and why is now the right time?))
Plutonium in a fast-spectrum reactor has advantages in the likelihood of the atom fissioning instead of absorbing a neutron, and advantages in the number of neutrons produced per fission to breed more fuel, over uranium. Remember, uranium was thought to be much more scarce in the 1950s and 1960s than it is today, especially thinking we’d have thousands of reactors by now; best breeding was a major factor in picking U238 to plutonium in a fast breeder reactor, over uranium in a molten salt reactor.
So, maybe the “conspiracy” wasn’t “plutonium for bombs”. The AEC recommendation in 1962 to switch to other reactors (the plutonium fast breeder and the molten salt reactor were recommended) didn’t consider how much money and power the LWR industry and NRC would get by making tons of nuclear waste, and by making fear of nuclear waste and nuclear power. If we had Molten Salt Reactors supplying all our electricity and gasoline, the coal industry would be all-but-extinct; they benefit by making fear of nuclear power, and by making sure nuclear power never becomes safer or more efficient or lower cost.
I note from various Thorium conferences that there seems to be a band of “Thorium enthusiasts”, almost like a religious cult, that propose Thorium to be the answer to the World’s energy problems (“the golden bullet”). The reality is somewhat different. LFTR are potentially hazardous in operation, just like contemporary nukes, but perhaps less prone to catastrophic accidents of the type like Fukushima, Harrisburg and Cherbobyl. [No, Fukushima and Harrisburg are water-based accidents, impossible in MSR. Chernobyl was a modified plutonium-production reactor, with a “positive void coefficient of reactivity” (steam bubbles could send it out of control at any time); MSR has inherently stable fission rate.] However, there are many analysts who say that Thorium LFTR and similar cannot come on stream fast enough to help against anthropogenic climate change, “peak oil” and similar. There is a lot of longterm development required to interrate a commercial design of LFTR. [Did you find out how many person-years work those analysts estimated? Scientists and engineers would only give time estimates for a specific number of people and specific budget. A well-funded company given a regulatory green light could have a factory producing 200MW MSR in well under 5 years, there are no technical hurdles just good design work.]
My submission is that coping with the present insane stockpiles of nuclear waste from conventional nukes needs immediate attention as these represent a severe contemporary biological hazard and considerable expense in the future, regarding building suitable longterm repositories. MSR and Thorium LFTR may enable this waste to be rapidly transmuted into materials which are less radiotoxic. This is a very pressing immediate issue.
However, the World is presently dictated by the love of money (Wall Street moto: “Greed is Good !”), such that Bilderberg and others do not care about the Earth’s environment, only the economic bottom line? It is thus likely to be that investment to develop MSR and LFTR is likely to come very slowly and reluctantly from the financial gurus of Wall Street and Bilderberg. Thorium is a dream, like a religious cult, and will need some divine intervention to make things happen quickly in reality !
You say “LFTR are potentially hazardous in operation, just like contemporary nukes, but perhaps less prone to catastrophic accidents of the type like Fukushima, Harrisburg and Cherbobyl”. No, Molten Salt Reactors can not possibly have out of control fission (positive void coefficient of reactivity) like Chernobyl; neither can LWR. MSR has far more stable fission rate than LWR, regulated by the thermal expansion/contraction of the fuel salt; the 1960s Molten Salt Reactor Experiment demonstrated highly stable even during startup, shutdown, adding fuel, etc. And MSR can not have a loss of coolant accident like Fukushima, the coolant never gets close to boiling temperature, the molten fuel is strongly chemically bound to the molten salt coolant. Unlike the materials of LWR, the materials of MSR can handle higher temperatures than the hottest the fuel can get.
The only ways molten salt reactors can fail that might be a “catastrophic accident” that I can think of is a large bomb exploding, which would then require collecting the solid salt, radioactive but not going to move in wind or water; easier to clean up than an oil pipe bursting. Remember, most of the radioactive material released in LWR accidents are a) gasses, that in MSR are frequently or continuously stored or b) elements that in MSR are strongly chemically bound to the salt. MSR can operate underground, the bomb would ruin the reactor but everything would be contained under 10 meters packed earth.
“Thorium LFTR and similar cannot come on stream fast enough to help against anthropogenic climate change, “peak oil” and similar” —
Read the estimates more carefully. Scientists always say with this many people and this budget, we estimate __ years. Most of the materials testing and equipment design can be done at the same time if there are more people working. A small group in the 1960s, part of Oak Ridge National Laboratories, using slide rules and pencils, went from initial idea to design to materials testing to functioning reactor in 5 years. We could have a production reactor in 5 years, with superior safety/testing/monitoring/reporting, and a factory 1 year later (any changes needed can be incorporated in the factory quickly, just like the automobile and aerospace industries do), given enough funding.
We need wind, solar, tidal, and advanced nuclear as fast as possible, to lessen the effects of climate change. To reverse ocean acidification (CO2 + water makes acid that dissolves plankton cell walls and other microscopic shells), hopefully in time to avoid mass extinction, we need industrial heat roughly the current annual energy use of the planet for 10 years; only modern, high-temperature, efficient nuclear power has any chance of being ramped up to that scale fast enough. (Plus, MSR would be about 1/10 the cost of wind + solar + solar thermal + offshore wind + wave + tidal — what an in-depth study for California says would supply all CA needs without oil/coal/NG/LWR, and CA has that huge coastline and sunny deserts, not including the cost of rebuilding our electric power grid for long-distance wind/wave/solar energy transmission.)
Thorium (in Molten Salt Reactors) is not a dream, simply an engineering and manufacturing project, not even one of the largest we’ve done.
Dear George
Your assertion is without foundation, as a Thorium LFTR has not been built since ORNL.
If you really want to see the devastation caused by nuclear technology, please visit the news aggregator http://www.enenews.com regarding Fukushima.[enenews gathers, they don’t discern whether something is sensible or factual or realistic; they present any gossip, mistaken “facts”, lies, from anywhere on the Internet. You really think something is true because you found it there? — George]LFTR have many potential failure modes:
(i) melt plug and pipe to dump tank can become blocked; [Of course, but so what? No release of radiation, no change in fission rate, fix it and move on. George]
(ii) leaks can occur due to unexpected fracture due to neutron embrittlement or undetected corrosion; [Of course leaks can occur. The leaked salt will cool and harden, we clean it up; we fix the pipe. No high pressure, no water, no way to carry anything away from the site. Neutron embrittlement is only in the reactor core (not even out to the reactor vessel), we know how long that would take for a specific reactor design, normal maintenance, not a risk of accident or failure.]
(iii) if continuous chemical processing is used, chemicals such as Fluorine, Hydrofluoric acid and similar are used; this could result in an explosion in the continuous chemical plant; [Right, so we should check safety procedures are followed. We detect leaks of these before an explosion occurs; this is known in many industries. There are far larger chemical plants, with much worse safety records than any nuclear reactor.]
(iv) for terrorist organisations, it is fairly easy to modify the continuous chemical reprocessing and change the fuel mixture to provide a very pure stream of P239, suitable for making atomic munitions;What nonsense! Undetected? With all the monitoring and communications we would factory install in every reactor? “Fairly easy”??? Power-generation reactors can’t produce isotopically pure Pu239, but inevitably includes other isotopes Pu that would make the bomb self-detonate as a fizzle. Much harder than making a secret 1940s-style Pu-239 production reactor.](v) all nukes release radioactive gases (e.g. Xenon, Krypton) which are typically vented to environment; it is well known to have leukemia clusters around nukes; [These aren’t “vented” at LWR sites. The LWR fuel pellets are so carefully made primarily to prevent any fission products escaping. The LWR steam containment building is so carefully made, to prevent any fission products escaping. There is equipment to filter all gasses before venting anything. “Clusters”? Radiation is carefully monitored, and less than at natural gas or coal plants. Molten Salt Reactors would collect and store xenon and krypton, not “release” them.]
(vi) operation of a LFTR will result in radioactive “consumables” being generated, for example graphite separation wall between primary and secondary (blanket) circuits which will need replacing on a regular basis, and will be initially highly radioactive and hazardous;
and the list goes o. [Many designs of MSR don’t use any graphite. Those that do, the “regular basis” would be about 4 years; “highly radioactive” is short-term fission products, simply store the graphite (which would have small amounts of fission products in it) for 10 years. “Hazardous” compared to what? The “consumables” of an equivalent power coal plant?]
To assert that Thorium LFTR are somehow benign and not health-dangerous to people living nearby to them is naive and dangerous sales talk. Much the same was said about conventional nukes in the 1960’s. History has shown how wrong the propaganda was at the time – see Fukushima as an example of what can go wrong. [The “sales talk” by physicists, engineers in the 1960s was not about the LWR. We are still using LWR because Congress kept it, against the recommendations of the physicists & engineers. I guess Congress kept LWR because it wouldn’t put the coal & oil companies out of business. The patent holder on the LWR type of reactor (PWR) was fired from running ORNL and the Molten Salt Reactor program, for daring to say LWR could have loss of coolant accidents and we should use MSR instead. Follow the basic safety procedures appropriate for any industrial site, and MSR is not health dangerous to people in the site or living nearby, and accidents would be less harmful and less likely than coal/oil plants.]
Rather than diverting scarce resources to LFTR development, would it not be more appropriate to divert the resources to try to ameliorate the Fukushima situation. TEPCO cannot cope and colossal damage is being done each day to the Pacific Ocean.
Millions of years of careful evolution of species in the Pacific Ocean is being wrecked by the radiation from Fukushima: 50 years of nuclear power, 500000 years of nuclear pollution.[Sure, go help TEPCO. But Seriously? Most fission products have half lives under 35 years; the uranium is low-level radiation and there is already far more uranium dissolved in the oceans than we’ve ever mined.] To think that Thorium LFTR s the “magic bullet” for power generation is both naive and irresponsible, just asmainstream media does not report Fukushima, nor all the nuclear reactors that Russia has dumped just off the Norwegian coast, some still with fuel in their reactors.[You can find all kinds of nonsense on the Internet. What does an unsubstantiated rumor of illegal ocean dumping have to do with the design, construction, operation, safety of a Molten Salt Reactor? You want to reduce pollution in the oceans, using Molten Salt Reactors or other modern nuclear power to replace coal and oil and natural gas, will save much more pollution than Fukushima made.]The focus should be on Thorium LFTR for transmuting the insane stockpiles of contemporary high-level nuclear waste, rather than on power generation per se. [Well, that plan would not replace coal & oil, or even LWR. And you wouldn’t use LFTR to fission LWR nuclear waste, you’d use a fast-spectrum molten salt reactor.]
When I and my colleagues have been to Thorium conferences, the word “Thorium” is uttered like some call to the Gods, in reverence, and any criticism of Thorium LFTR is rapidly dismissed or ushered away. Do not be deluded ! Please take a balanced view on matters. There should be more titles on your web-site to the dangers and hazards of Thorium LFTR, and fewer on the relatively few benefits of Thorium technology. [What if those “danger and hazards” of LWR don’t exist in LFTR or other Molten Salt Reactors? What if many of those don’t exist with LWR either? You seriously want to keep using coal? That’s what we’ll get if we don’t get a workable plan for replacing it. The manufacturing of all the solar + solar thermal + wind + offshore wind + wave + tidal + geothermal to replace coal & oil, would be much more polluting and over 10x more expensive than MSR, but it would work… if you want to pay that much more. I don’t just consider the benefits of thorium, but also molten fuel, salt coolant, atmospheric pressure operation, stable fission rate, chemically bound fission products.]
LENG is a much better way to generate power cleanly, but sadly is in its infancy, just like quantum physics would have seemed strange to Isaac Newton. Please do not damage and pollute the World with module Throium LFTR’s everywhere ! Not a good idea really ! [I guess he means “low-energy nuclear reactions”, which has some (as of early 2015) scientific verification and plausible theory; still takes far more energy than produces. I’m not going to take his recommendation.]
Hello George
Thank you for your edited comments above. I respectfully disagree with most of the assertions that you have made, any experience with LFTR in future will prove me correct. My views are backed up by analysis of various nuclear specialists in the UK, reporting and advising to UK government. [Careful, if you talk to “nuclear specialists” they will speak about what they know, which is LWR. You and they have to be rigorous making sure your conversation about MSR remains about MSR. Also, there are experts on MSR advising to UK government they widely implement MSR. George.]
To dismiss http://www.enenews.com as scaremongering is grossly incorrect. [I didn’t say scaremongering. I said aggregating. They don’t distinguish the accuracy, motives, credibility of what they aggregate. Most of what they aggregate is by people who don’t understand enough to repeat accurately what the scientists reported; or by people that are repeating what scaremongering people said. Most of what they aggregate is garbage; and they make no attempt to evaluate it.] The Fukushima Dai’ichi situation is very serious, and merely to dismiss it as a mere “blip” in the nuclear industry is quite irresponsible. [I never did “dismiss it as a mere blip”. It is however from management ignoring basic safety issues, that other reactor operators in the area followed; and it is less damaging than the “scaremongering” people say. And, Fukushima says nothing at all about Molten Salt Reactors! MSR is a completely different technology than LWR.] The ecological effects of Fakushima Dai’ichi in the Pacitic Ocean are beginning to become very clear, although I suspect that it will be attributed to “anthropogenic climate change”. Strange that most of the problems with the ecology of the Pacific Ocean have occurred within the past four years, when CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are now around 400 ppm, rising at a steady rate of around 3 ppm/year, and not subject to any sudden step change in concentration. [No, not strange at all, chemical pollution, acidity, etc. are rising, and stressing entire ecological systems. And we are measuring the effects more often and more rigorously. And they are not limited to the Pacific Ocean. As bad as Fukushima is, it can’t produce all the results we’re seeing. But climate change, combined with ocean acidification (CO2 + water makes acid, a specific acid that makes microscopic sea shells harder to form), “rising at a steady rate”, is “suddenly” making chemical changes happen (there is now enough acid and high enough temperature to dissolve more minerals so it is harder to form calcium carbonate shells. We are close to the acid levels that will make most species of plankton extinct. That’s not strontium or any other fission product, that’s CO2. Other effects from hormone-mimicking drugs, from heavy metal poisoning (from coal and other industries), from pesticides, etc. etc.) Now, are Molten Salt Reactors going to be an improvement over coal + oil + LWR? ]
One things is clear: there is a lot of very dangerous high-level nuclear waste around the World, at least 100000 tonnes of the stuff. MSR or LFTR is perhaps the only viable way of transmuting this waste to render it less dangerous. I hope we can at least agree on this point of detail. [I don’t know how much nuclear waste there is, but it’s too much; we only have so much because Congress blocked the reactors the designers wanted to use, and picked the reactor design they said not to use! After 10 years (the time for most fission products to be very low level radioactivity), dry cask storage is very safe for decades; it is not “very dangerous”. We should eliminate long-term nuclear waste, just the same; it’s the right thing to do, it’s less costly than storing it, and it makes a very good fuel in the right type of nuclear reactor. MSR is a safe inexpensive way to eliminate it, though other ways, e.g. the Integral Fast Reactor and accelerator-driven fast-spectrum reactors are also viable (but more complex, probably more expensive).]
Kind regards
Hello George
Regarding LENR, there is a growing mass of scientific literature on this subject, as research work progresses at various universities. Just like solid-state electronics and quantum theory might have seemed strange to developers of original thermionic electron tubes, LENR will become an important field. You seem to have missed out on studying recent peer-reviewed scientific papers. I kindly recommend that you acquaint yourself with this field of research as it offers something much safer than a LFTR or MSR.
Kind regards
I’m not writing about LENR. And it’s not something we can build today, as great as it will probably be when we develop it. (Hey, at least you aren’t one of those “well, if it’s so great how come nobody’s done it already” people.)
Dear George
Many of your assertions are respectfully not correct and not objective: prototype LENR devices have been tested today, and have been peer reviewed. There was skepticism some years ago, but this has now been dispelled.
Your web-site is very pro-nuclear and grossly ignores the downsides. Fukushima Dai’ichi should make people very nervous about anything to do with nuclear power. [MSR is not LWR. Fukushima is a completely different reactor than MSR. — George] There is presently a massive general media coverup (as identified by Greenpeace investigations) preventing true reporting of the severity of the Fukushima Dai’ichi incident; there have been triple melt-downs, melt-throughs and melt into the ground beneath the reactor buildings. A black mushroom cloud appeared over reactor 3 when it exploded, wherein black dust was expelled high up into the atmosphere, and massive bird die-off occurred shortly thereafter as the Plutonium dust was injested by the birds during migratory flights). A MSR (molten salt reactor), wherein Thorium LFTR with its FLiBe salts is a sub-class thereof, will be very dangerous under fault conditions, especially in a situation of a serious leak. To assert otherwise is reckless, misleading and irresponsible. [MSR has no water, no high pressure, no way for radioactive material to travel from the reactor building. The fuel, molten in the molten salt, quickly cools to solid, with the fission products trapped.]
[Notice this is all about LWR, not MSR.] Moreover, what do you expect from UK Government: Sellafield (i.e. Windscale and its associated nuclear accident), huge spills of radiation via regular discharges have occurred into the Irish Sea. There have been fires at the Thorp facility, and whole buildings at the Sellafield site are now regardedclassified as “nuclear waste” (i.e. so radioactive). The UK has circa 290 tonnes of P239 and does not know what to do with it, namely the most radiotoxic element known to mankind. Sure, the UK Government has MSR advisors, and reprocesses nuclear fuel (which has been a commercial loss-making activity for many years). After the Fukushima Dai’ichi accident, many redundancies were made in staff at Sellafield, so the UK was assisting with reprocessing the spent fuel rods from Japan. [All water-based problems, impossible in MSR; or lack of basic industrial safety (e.g. fire). P is Phosphorus, he means Pu Plutonium. Plutonium in a molten-fueled reactor would be completely fissioned, no long-term storage needed.]
Your site is typical of pro-nuclear types that ignore the safety and environmental issues, and naively get hung up on wizzy exciting technology.
At the present time, there is a desperate need for balanced thinking about the pros- and cons- of nuclear technology. LWR and BWR are an ecological disaster (note: understatement here) [per gigawatt-year electricity, even including Fukushima as if were a USA accident, LWR has less ecological damage than coal, and coal in USA is cleaner here than in Asia; USA about 600 times as many coal-related deaths than LWR], whereas MSR are an improvement, especially if they can be configured to transmute dangerous nuclear waste; 100000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste presently exist around the World. LENR promises large amounts of very clean power [I hope we get LENR, like fusion, but today still consumes more energy than generates], but does not offer transmutation functionality to dispose of the insane stockpiles of contemporary nuclear waste, as aforementioned. We agree on the fact that MSR can be extremely useful to mankind, and are beneficially developed as promptly as possible.
At the present time, wind, solar, gas are promising for the future for energy production, whereas oil and coal will be in relative decline in the longer term. Tidal and wavepower may see some innovation in future, likewise geothermal. However, the World is very hungry for energy, and UN analysis show that 2 kW/day energy access is required for families to self-limit their size, reducing population growth; renewables cannot provide such energy, so population growth continues in quite unsustainable manner at present. Population growth and CO2 rise is occurring so fast, that it is unlikely, according to many energy experts, that MSR, for example Thorium LFTR, can come on stream fast enough to help in the situation. That is the sad reality. Human society is on an unsustainable trajectory of resource consumption and population growth, and there will eventually be a major collapse. MSR, mutatis mutandis Thorium LFTR, will do little to change this doomed trajectory of human society. THAT IS THE REALITY. [Reality based on LWR history? We can produce MSR in factories, with quality control like aerospace uses, to supply current and expanding energy needs, including electricity and vehicle fuel, while generating power for desalinated water and reversing ocean acidification. MSR will take much less time and money than LWR, and much less than solar + solar thermal + wind + offshore wind + wave + tidal that would be needed for “all-renewable”.]
Kind regards
Tim