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Comment by iyulaev | Hacker News Reader

On a related note, I'm somewhat surprised that molten salt reactors don't get much interest or press.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

It seems like they have many advantages over conventional water-based reactors and are much, much safer to boot. Also the waste products decay quickly so storing the waste for long periods of time is less of an issue. But I guess anything nuclear is pretty much out of fashion today.

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A complete wild-ass guess -- those concerns are most important in small-scale reactors, and the primary driving force behind small reactors is Navy submarine use. At sea you are surrounded by water, so there is no reason not to use it as your fluid. Adding salt would add another complication to the supply chain.

I guess you could theoretically pull salt out of the water, but there is no telling what impurities may be left. Reverse-osmotic water filtering makes water so pure that it supposedly extracts minerals back out of your bones and teeth, so impurities are no concern when it used as an exchange fluid.

The MSRs use molten salts in the sense of ionic compounds, not in the sense of NaCl. They're talking about uranium flouride or liquid flouride thorium.

...which is one of the challenges of MSRs. Long-term high-temperature exposure to corrosive flourine salts is a not-completely-solved materials problem.

I highly doubt the availability of water ever was of any concern when designing the submarine reactor. It is a closed system.

I am a very infrequent commenter on HN. I have one page, total, of comments since I signed up. Two of those comments give a reasonable run-down on MSR technology, if you're interested.

The "die hard" MSR guy in the US is Kirk Sorensen of Flibe (Flih bee) energy: flibe-energy.com He's easy to find from a Google search, and is incredibly dedicated to MSR. He's the evangelist, for sure.

Bram Cohen of BitTorrent fame is on Flibe's advisory board.

I'll check it out! Thanks.

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