The notable thing here is that it's a molten salt reactor design, where the fuel is dissolved in a molten salt (FLiBe). This allows online continuous processing of the fuel, unlike with solid fuel rods sealed inside a pressure vessel.

This unlocks a lot of options for the fuel cycle, including the use of thorium.

This work builds on a previous molten salt reactor experiment at Oak Ridge, decades ago. There's a whole lore about MSRs.

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JumpCrisscross an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> notable thing here is that it's a molten salt reactor design

Notable, but not unique. The unique bit is it burns thorium.

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AtlasBarfed 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

It breeds thorium to fissionable uranium from a starting fissionable uranium starter fuel. It doesn't directly use thorium for fuel.

What people need to understand about the cycle efficiency is that when you mine uranium, the fissionable part of uranium (U-235) is only 1% of that uranium, the rest is nonfissionable U-238.

Thorium is about twice as abundant as Uranium (all isotopes). The MSR uses Thorium to create U-233, a fissionable but not naturally occurring Uranium isotope.

So the "unlimited energy aspect" is that about 200-300x more breedable Thorium exists than fissionable U-235.

A MSR nation could also try to breed U-238 into plutonium, which would provide another 100x more breeding stock, although LFTR never talked about U-238 breeding. IIRC the plutonium may be difficult to handle because of gamma rays, but I don't recall exactly.

While I don't have confidence that even LFTR/MSR reactors can get economical enough to challenge gas peakers, it may be possible to make truly price-competitive MSR electricity with the right modular design. I wish the Chinese the best of luck, because if they do it will spur the rest of the world to adopt this about-as-clean-and-safe-as-it-gets nuclear design.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 26 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Thorium is about twice as abundant as Uranium China has thorium, and while less than others [1], it’s better than they do with uranium [2]. > it may be possible to make truly price-competitive MSR electricity with the right modular design Yes. But probably not in the near term with thorium. This isn’t designed to be cheaper. It’s designed to be more available to China than being dependent on Russian deposits. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/492031a [2] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1800.pdf
	▲	rhoads 34 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's what you learn playing factorio

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bilsbie an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

What absorbs the neutrons then?

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lazide an hour ago | parent [-]

The thorium cycle is generally neutron negative.

	▲	JumpCrisscross an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> thorium cycle is generally neutron negative Source for the fuel cycle? Thorium 232 -> 233 is neutron negative. But after that you get all kinds of nonsense.