From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Saturday, November 16, 2013 10:53 AM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Nuclear power
On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 9:48 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemorse...@yahoo.com>
wrote:
> LFTR reactors would produce U233 - which is very nasty stuff.
Yes but nasty can be your friend. Proliferation is a vastly smaller problem
with a LFTR and its U-233 than with a conventional reactor and its Plutonium
for a number of reasons:
>>1) Theoretically you can do it but it's hard to make a bomb with U-233,
much harder than with Plutonium. As far as I know a U233 bomb was attempted
only twice, in 1955 the USA set off a plutonium-U233 composite bomb, it was
expected to produce 33 kilotons but only managed 22; and in 1998 India tried
it but it was a complete flop, it produced a miniscule explosion of only 200
tons.
Yes, Agreed, I have read that as well. And repeating myself again - of all
the Gen IV breeder reactor proposals LFTR is the one that makes the most
sense to me and seems to have the best long term safety profile. Much better
-- IMO -- than the Plutonium economy of the other breeder types that are
using U-238 as the fertile material.
>>2) In a LFTR U-233 will always be contaminated with U232 which gives off
such intense Gamma rays it would screw up the bomb electronics, be easy to
detect, and probably killed the terrorist long before he was half finished
making it.
The insane individuals doing the bad act might not care if they get a death
sentence form the intense gamma ray flux of the U-232 - (or they could force
other people to work with it perhaps not telling them they will most
certainly be dead within hours.) There are very insane and bad people in
this world who do not act in the same way as rational people. A dirty bomb
is not that hard to make if one has the material.
>>3) The U233 is completely burned up inside the reactor where its hard to
steal, unlike existing reactors where used fuel rods are shipped to
reprocessing plants to extract the Plutonium. In one case the potential
bomb making material needs to be shipped across the country, with a LFTR it
never leaves the reactor building.
Agreed. One of the principal reasons I believe the LFTR technology is
superior.
4) A regular reactor produces lots of neutrons but a LFTR makes less of
them, so it needs all that U233 to keep the chain reaction going, if you try
stealing some the reactor will simply stop operating making the theft
obvious.
Agreed again - but again by the time it is realized it may be too late.
Especially if those who propose widely scattering small scale 30 MW or so
LFTRs all over the place get their way. This problem could be mitigated by
keeping facilities relatively centralized - even if they are composed of
smaller scale modular units.
LFTR seems superior to the other breeder proposals - such as those using
liquid sodium metal as a coolant (not a good idea IMO). I like LFTR passive
safety features and would argue that any future reactor types should have
inherent passive safety features and not relay on active coolant circulation
for example as the current reactors do.
However all of this may be a moot point in ten years. Solar PV is scaling
out so rapidly and is starting to reach significant levels of penetration
already - nearing a deployed global capacity of 50 GW and based on current
decadal moving averages scaling out to a TW of deployed capacity in ten
years and to 20 TW in twenty years.
No one has shown me any fundamental reason why this very rapid rate of
growth in the PV sector will slow in the near term. As solar PV scales out
to the TW levels of deployed capacity - and it's per dollar per watt of
capacity figure continues to fall to lower and lower levels - it will become
the cost leader for generating electricity, beating out coal and every other
form of generating capacity.
Chris
John K Clark
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