You're right, the author clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. But the story is still interesting nonetheless. :-)
Its great to hear news that Thorium is finally on the path to adoption.
Its great to hear news that Thorium is finally on the path to adoption.
Also, isn't the neutron economy of LFTR just slightly above unity? IIRC chemical removal of fission byproducts was needed for a feasible Th reactor that generates excess U-233. At least that was my recollection that one of the potential advantages of the FLiBe design was for such very simple chemical reprocessing.
Some of the engineers involved in molten salt reactors say "come for the thorium, stay for the reactor." Liquid fuels offer several benefits. Removing fission products continuously helps you achieve high burnup. There's no fuel fabrication cost. And if the electricity cuts off, a frozen plug melts and all the fuel dumps into a passive cooling tank, with little worry about decay heat since you've been removing those fission products.
The neutron economy is arguably an advantage from a proliferation perspective, since you can't remove much fissile without the reactor shutting down.
Still, a good fast reactor like the IFR has its own charms. The metal fuel is easy to fabricate on-site, and they tested electricity cutoff and it quietly shut down just fine, due to the physics of the fuel and coolant. And the mixed plutonium isotopes produced by the reactor are very difficult to refine into weapons-grade.
One advantage of the molten salt reactor is that there's nothing in the reactor that can drive any kind of chemical explosion, like the hydrogen that blew at Fukushima. The IFR uses molten sodium, which is pretty reactive with air and water. That might not be too terrible to deal with but it does drive up the cost.
Another advantage of the IFR though is that we've got a production-ready design ready to go.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Reactor
[2] http://www.ife.no/en/ife/halden/hrp/the-halden-reactor-proje...
Hopefully enough to write an interesting story, though :)
I think you did a reasonable job, but the add-in about cold fusion didn't make any sense and really affected the seriousness of the article. It calls into question whether anything else in the piece is valid or not.
There are tons of people here that have expertise in these fields. Some of them are commenting on this very page. Why not develop relationships with people that can provide domain expertise as needed for stories like this, rather than trying to wing it?
(I do have quite a few expert friends who I lean on for domain expertise, but as luck would have it, my nuclear guy wasn't online when I wrote this.)
The news of "Thorium Reactors exist somewhere" is good enough to report on, and happy news indeed. :-)