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Re:Google Funding Construction of Seven U.S. Nuclear Reactors by cyberax on Tuesday October 15, 2024 @12:36PM (#41850355)
> The biggest concern would be liberation of elemental fluorine

Yep.

But I'm personally more worried about the pelletized fuel. Pellets are not a great form-factor, and they don't have cladding. Fluoride salts are also far more aggressive than water (mechanically and chemically), so this will limit the maximum specific power of the reactor. So I don't think that something like 1GW molten salt reactor is even possible.

It might be OK if they want to continue using SMRs, though.

> The slightly reduced salt is also preferred to limit corrosion

Sidenote: that's actually not always a great idea. Steel is stainless because it's covered in a film of oxides, and without oxygen it might not be able to form.

This is a problem for the Russian BREST-300 reactor that is cooled by molten lead, they had to do almost 10 years of research to perfect a system that controls the amount of dissolved oxygen in the molten lead. And it's still not clear if they succeeded until the full-scale reactor is built.

In this case, though, I think that they can tune the reducers to react with fluorine preferentially, while still leaving enough oxygen.

Re:Google Funding Construction of Seven U.S. Nuclear Reactors by pfdietz on Tuesday October 15, 2024 @03:13PM (#41852069)
Lead is a rather different case, because liquid lead itself corrodes steel. The oxide layer is needed to protect the steel from the lead. FLiBe by itself does not corrode steel.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00109...