OmnipotentEntity

Another SB Dev here: Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Hi, another nuclear engineer here. You mentioned you're using a scintillator, but that it's also "rugged." But scintillating material typically comes in crystal form that is somewhat fragile to mechanical shock. Specifically, I'm thinking of low cost scintillators like NaI(Tl), which crack readily, ruining your resolution.

While this might not actually be a problem because it doesn't seem like you're using this for spectroscopy, but instead like a geiger counter, can you speak to why you chose a scintillator and not a semiconductor like CZT, which is already used in similar small size applications, is far more rugged, and you don't have to deal with light and water tight sealing around the scintillator crystals and photomultipliers?

Hi, I'm also a nuclear engineer. LFTRs are very interesting technology, but they are not yet finished.

I worked on a reactor design research project in college that was a flouride salt cooled (FLiBe/FLiNaK) TRISO particle reactor, and the flouride salts were causing an unacceptable rate of degradation of the reactor wall in direct chemical tests, several different materials were tested (including Hastalloy-N), and this rate of degradation rapidly increased if the salt contained impurities (such as dissolved fuel and especially spent fuel).

Moreover, breeder reactors in the thermal spectrum strike me as very difficult, you don't really have enough neutrons to work with. 2.6 is the average per fission iirc, which means you have only 0.6 neutrons that can be wasted. This includes leaking from the reactor, absorbed in side reactions, absorbed in neutron poisons, such as your spent fuel poisons like Sr (which is always going to be present), etc. This is a pretty rough engineering constraint.

EDIT: I forgot the biggest one. The Th-U233 fuel cycle makes a very long pitstop in Pa233, which has a half-life of one month and likes to eat neutrons, which means there's an extra chemical separation and storage step that almost certainly must occur, due to the aforementioned problems with neutronics. Putting aside the difficulties of such an extremely radioactive and chemically messy environment to extract your breed fuel waiting on decay, that step would be a nightmare to prove the safety of to a regulatory body, which already do not allow fuel reprocessing, which this certainly is, let alone fuel reprocessing of extremely hot material so close to a reactor vessel. And storing this extremely radioactive material as it slowly becomes fissile as well.

We can still work on development of the thermal thorium fuel cycle, and fluoride salt cooling, and dissolved fuel with continuous separation, perhaps separately, perhaps together. But this is, in my opinion, a distraction to focus solely on it. We can have a mix of nuclear power between LWRs, BWRs, sodium cooled, salt cooled, etc etc. We don't need to focus only on LFTR. We need stuff that works today.

I will allow it if you too wear a tutu.

Oh god, I'm reading the briefs now, and they're hilarious. I'm so glad you linked them.

However, contrary to the Chamber's limited view, parody exists and is protected by the First Amendment even when the butt of the joke doesn't get, or appreciate, the humor.

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[T]he Chamber fails to allege that the Yes Men engaged in any cognizable unfair trade practice under the Act.

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The Chamber's "kitchen sink" approach to pleading a complaint set forth this eighth count with little foundation... This makeweight claim should be dismissed.

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Rather, the Chamber brought and continues to pursue this action for one reason only -- to harass and punish Defendants because of their biting parody that exposed the Chamber to embarrassment over it's actual political positions.

lolz