On 2 April 2014 14:13, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 4/1/2014 4:20 PM, LizR wrote: > > On 2 April 2014 12:10, Chris de Morsella <cdemorse...@yahoo.com> wrote: > >> >> Why has LFTR development essentially stopped for forty years? >> >> Apparently they can't be used to make bombs. > > > That was part of the reason. But the story is that when Hyman Rickover > was put in charge of the atomic submarine program he went to Oak Ridge to > be briefed on the thorium power reactor that was there. He was famously > abrasive and he started telling the director Alvin Weinberg how to run the > reactor research and Weinberg had him thrown out of the lab. Rickover then > turned to Westinghouse who would take orders from whoever supplied the > money. Westinghouse had a LWR design and that then became the de facto > standard. >
Either way, it doesn't look like there's anything intrinsically wrong with thorium reactors, and quite a few points in their favour - but once a lot of effort has been sunk into getting one method of power generation up and running, people are naturally reluctant to start again from scratch (or nearly so), and possibly have to pay similar up-front costs to get a new design working. (I believe something similar is supposed to have happened with the internal combustion engine using petrol rather than alcohol (I think it was) - or is that an urban myth?) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
