Thorium Reactor News!

Skipjack · Post by **Skipjack** » Tue Aug 31, 2010 3:10 pm

Via Next Big Future (of course)
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/08/uk-tel ... .html#more

Interesting!

kurt9 · Post by **kurt9** » Tue Aug 31, 2010 4:02 pm

The Telegraph is probably the most reasonable of the U.K. tabloids. They are not as psychotically luddite-left like the Guardian, for example.

Giorgio · Post by **Giorgio** » Tue Aug 31, 2010 4:05 pm

I was looking at it right now.

It's nice to finally see mainstream journalists to speak about these possibilities.
Only few years ago it would have been a chimera.

Hopefully something good will come out from Thorium while we wait for the Boron solution to take over the world....

KitemanSA · Post by **KitemanSA** » Tue Aug 31, 2010 4:34 pm

This makes little sense to me. The prime reason for having an accelerator driven reactor is so you DON'T have to re-process the fuel.

Fertile Thorium 232 becomes Protactinium 233 which decays over a period (HL~27d) into U233. While in the Pa stage it is a poison (neutron absorber) and either needs to be processed OUT of the reaction or overcome by accelerator created neutrons.

If you are going to reprocess, why do you need the accelerator?

Giorgio · Post by **Giorgio** » Tue Aug 31, 2010 4:50 pm

Slide 11 of the PDF explains it pretty well.

WizWom · Post by **WizWom** » Tue Aug 31, 2010 7:23 pm

KitemanSA wrote:This makes little sense to me. The prime reason for having an accelerator driven reactor is so you DON'T have to re-process the fuel.

Fertile Thorium 232 becomes Protactinium 233 which decays over a period (HL~27d) into U233. While in the Pa stage it is a poison (neutron absorber) and either needs to be processed OUT of the reaction or overcome by accelerator created neutrons.

If you are going to reprocess, why do you need the accelerator?

They are talking deep burn-down. But, even so, you end up with a fairly intact fuel element which has reached its service life, because the transmutation has degraded its mechanical properties; at this point, it is removed and reprocessed (rather than the once-through process used in typical uranium plants.)

Solutions like the molten-salt reactor or pebble-bed reactors are designed to make the reprocessing less time and energy consuming. and, with Thorium ADEP, it's basically grind up and re-manufacture, rather than new manufacture, since the core can handle using a wide range of nucleotides for energy.