That tech is known, well designed, approved and extensively proven through many thousand years manwork experience worldwide. It’s also the most affordable in liberalized markets. Going smaller & modular is the real novelty in the industry, for grid-agnostic coupling and decoupling. FYI: I have been consulting and designing innovative or exotic NPPs for years and I am now pretty confident I will not live long enough to see any one of them built and working, maybe not even at the demonstrator stage... but this side of the story might come good for another post ehehe.
Refueling is easier to do in MSRs and nigh takes away an embarrassing long downtime while the solid fuel is loaded. Why is that not a first concern (less downtime means more energy from roughly same capital expenditure)?
Safety is critical. It also costs a lot. With MSRs you need less land and can place the plant closer to the point of use (frozen plug to drain tank makes it so that any runaway is contained without intervention). It's even been suggested that for high-thermal uses like steel plants you could get better efficiency by using a thermal plant instead of making electricity for at least a twofold gain in power use. Is there anything inherently wrong with that idea?
Is the dialysis design as solid as it looks like on paper? Are there operational problems with it that the advocates are not talking about?
I have so many questions.....
The fundamental point is (in my very humble opinion, mind) you may still have a business case for nuclear in 2020 but no feasible return on investment against non-nuclear sources for decades-long experiments that, all in all, are aimed at marginal improvements in the grand scheme of things and the enormous hassle proponents have to face.
It is fusion or nothing, apart of a couple of Gen IV that are advanced enough already, for the next 20-30 years or such in the West (China or Russia might be more ambitious, but they are not liberal or neoliberal democracies, so they can play a different game to some extent)... until all the PWRs still operating worldwide must be put down for obsolescence.
For a layman computer science comparison, think of the still up-and-running fortran legacy in some sectors (banks?) you won’t really really want to drop if not really forced to... because it works, you need no fix, you do not expect any unheard catastrophic incident or accident anymore.
It sounds a little apocalyptic putting all of ones hopes on a technology that may or may not work at all. We have no guarantee that fusion will provide a return. It's the tech of choice because of wishful thinking. Gen 4 and liquid fuels are proven to work and eliminate a big slew of the disadvantages that made people fearful of NPPs. IMO if a part of the solution to CO2 is DAC then we will need massive energy generation to run the capture plants and we need them soon. No tech can deliver that in the next 10 years safely except Thorium.
There's nothing wrong with old tech in computer science. You can containerize Fortran batch programs with ease. All old things come back once in a while. Functional programming is now the rave and Common LiSP actually sees use.
You got it. May I second that as a nuclear eng for nuclear? Small & Modular is your container... and the novel, distributed grid at transnational level is your framework!?
Proven to work on lab scale, or an industrial scale? Because one thing is very different from the other
https://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/02/16/the-thi...
[1] https://art.inl.gov/ART%20Document%20Library/High%20Temperat...
There are a bunch of places I've found where the difficulty (and therefore cost) of working with titanium is really holding humanity back. If we could find cheaper techniques for working with titanium it would revolutionize a lot of industries, as it's plentiful, light, strong, non-reactive, and melts at high temperatures. But the same attributes that make it hold up under the stresses of use, make it very hard to shape.
Any material that can resist the corrosion will be bombarded by neutrons until it is transmuted into another material that can't, even with "slow" neutrons.
The Wikipedia article[1] says, "A 2011 MIT study concluded that although there is little in the way of barriers to a thorium fuel cycle, with current or near term light-water reactor designs there is also little incentive for any significant market penetration to occur. As such they conclude there is little chance of thorium cycles replacing conventional uranium cycles in the current nuclear power market, despite the potential benefits." What did they know at MIT in 2011 that we don't? Or were they just wrong?
If really no material will work for this, I can only imagine some sort of mag-lev design that keeps the molten salt out of contact with other materials, but that seems kind of far-fetched.
If you were to build that, how would you transfer the heat out of the molten salt?
However, running one and being able to make a cost effective reactor is completely different.
Especially when water is already a very well known and very well understood heat transfer medium.
Not being a proven technology would certainly be a business risk to consider though Thorium would be an easier pill to swallow politically and socially once the population is aware of the safety benefits.
EDIT: wrong decade
Newer types aren't used yet in the US because the incredible over-regulation of existing reactors due to the fear involved has made them very un-economical to build and very difficult to get new designs approved... if there's no money in something, corporations won't do it.
Which fuel is that? Thorium-U233?