I can't see either of those scenarios being turn into a successful business. The shuttle is so much more expensive per kg to launch that no one is going to be willing to pay the premium shuttle prices when there are plenty of other options. People and bulk cargo can fly much cheaper other ways. I worked on a NASA funded project awhile back and even the NASA managers were constantly complaining about being forced to fly on the shuttle. The only way anyone would be willing to pay shuttle prices is if the shuttle is the only way to get it into orbit. And the customer would also have to be able to afford it. How often does that happen? Pretty much never.
The realities of those 4 points: 1)burning existing waste is really expensive and you have to run the reactor at a lower power level so it is not economically viable until uranium becomes prohibitively expensive(30-50 years from now) 2)while thorium is abundant the fuel behavior in a reactor is not as well known and more importantly its much less stable and more prone to clad failure(fuel leaking into the primary coolant) which usually forces an unplanned shutdown or reduction in output power until the next refueling. 3) blatant lie. 4) This is a claim that can only be made after years of experience because we(both the US and China) lack the capability to model fast reactors well.
Generation IV reactors like this one will probably be much more practical in 20 years time, but currently they make little sense unless you don't have access to uranium(ie India).
1) Nonsense. Fuel costs for nuclear generators are almost negligible. You would not burn the waste because it is cheaper to do so, you would burn them because you don't want to bury them. We don't reprocess currently because of political reasons not economic.
2) Nonsense, you don't even know what reactor you are writing about. LFTR is based upon the molten salt reactor experiment at Oak Ridge. There is no cladding, that is a solid fuel reactor. Salts are incredibly stable. The MSRE was so stable that when the operators want to shut it down, which they did on weekend, they simply turned it off. The hot fuel/salt mixture then melted a plug which allow the fuel/salt to flow into a drain tank leaving it in a subcritical configuration.
3) Nonsense, again you do not know what reactor you are writing about. LFTR would substantially reduce wastes on both ends of the fuel cycle. The front end wastes being the depleted uranium which would be completely eliminated and the backend wastes being the transuranic actinides created when U238 absorbs neutrons. Unlike LFTR which contains no U238, today's LWR fuel pellets are 97% U238 which provides the vast majority of the long lived radiotoxicity that must be contained for 10's of thousands of years. LFTR wastes are substantially less in mass, about 80% reduced in 10 years and down to background radiation levels in about 300 years.
4) Nonsense. What we are talking about is not a fast reactor. More importantly what the Chinese are doing is funding research into commercializing this reactor design, not building commercial reactors. Thanks to the low levels of science education in the U.S. and people like yourself spreading their ignorance and FUD, I doubt the U.S. will ever do the same.
The down side is there is no commercial version of this reactor. Someone has to pay for the research to bring it to that level. The anti-nuke activists will make sure that that never happens in the U.S.
LFTR produces far less waste than today's light water reactor because it uses the fuel more efficiently. Most of the fuel in a LWR ends up as waste because the fuel rods break down long before the fuel is used up. What is really fuel ends up as waste because we don't reprocess. Additional the uranium fuel is mostly U238, some of which is transmuted into long lived radioactive waste. LFTR on the other hand burns all of the fuel up because, by design, it continuously "reprocesses" the fuel thus it uses nearly 100% of the fuel. What is waste has a short half life so it decays away much more quickly than waste from a LWR. 10 years and 83% of the radioactive waste has decayed away. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk about 4:30 minutes in.
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I can't see either of those scenarios being turn into a successful business. The shuttle is so much more expensive per kg to launch that no one is going to be willing to pay the premium shuttle prices when there are plenty of other options. People and bulk cargo can fly much cheaper other ways. I worked on a NASA funded project awhile back and even the NASA managers were constantly complaining about being forced to fly on the shuttle. The only way anyone would be willing to pay shuttle prices is if the shuttle is the only way to get it into orbit. And the customer would also have to be able to afford it. How often does that happen? Pretty much never.
Sodium != molten salt.
The realities of those 4 points: 1)burning existing waste is really expensive and you have to run the reactor at a lower power level so it is not economically viable until uranium becomes prohibitively expensive(30-50 years from now) 2)while thorium is abundant the fuel behavior in a reactor is not as well known and more importantly its much less stable and more prone to clad failure(fuel leaking into the primary coolant) which usually forces an unplanned shutdown or reduction in output power until the next refueling. 3) blatant lie. 4) This is a claim that can only be made after years of experience because we(both the US and China) lack the capability to model fast reactors well.
Generation IV reactors like this one will probably be much more practical in 20 years time, but currently they make little sense unless you don't have access to uranium(ie India).
1) Nonsense. Fuel costs for nuclear generators are almost negligible. You would not burn the waste because it is cheaper to do so, you would burn them because you don't want to bury them. We don't reprocess currently because of political reasons not economic.
2) Nonsense, you don't even know what reactor you are writing about. LFTR is based upon the molten salt reactor experiment at Oak Ridge. There is no cladding, that is a solid fuel reactor. Salts are incredibly stable. The MSRE was so stable that when the operators want to shut it down, which they did on weekend, they simply turned it off. The hot fuel/salt mixture then melted a plug which allow the fuel/salt to flow into a drain tank leaving it in a subcritical configuration.
3) Nonsense, again you do not know what reactor you are writing about. LFTR would substantially reduce wastes on both ends of the fuel cycle. The front end wastes being the depleted uranium which would be completely eliminated and the backend wastes being the transuranic actinides created when U238 absorbs neutrons. Unlike LFTR which contains no U238, today's LWR fuel pellets are 97% U238 which provides the vast majority of the long lived radiotoxicity that must be contained for 10's of thousands of years. LFTR wastes are substantially less in mass, about 80% reduced in 10 years and down to background radiation levels in about 300 years.
4) Nonsense. What we are talking about is not a fast reactor. More importantly what the Chinese are doing is funding research into commercializing this reactor design, not building commercial reactors. Thanks to the low levels of science education in the U.S. and people like yourself spreading their ignorance and FUD, I doubt the U.S. will ever do the same.
The down side is there is no commercial version of this reactor. Someone has to pay for the research to bring it to that level. The anti-nuke activists will make sure that that never happens in the U.S.
LFTR produces far less waste than today's light water reactor because it uses the fuel more efficiently. Most of the fuel in a LWR ends up as waste because the fuel rods break down long before the fuel is used up. What is really fuel ends up as waste because we don't reprocess. Additional the uranium fuel is mostly U238, some of which is transmuted into long lived radioactive waste. LFTR on the other hand burns all of the fuel up because, by design, it continuously "reprocesses" the fuel thus it uses nearly 100% of the fuel. What is waste has a short half life so it decays away much more quickly than waste from a LWR. 10 years and 83% of the radioactive waste has decayed away. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk about 4:30 minutes in.