People often lump the concepts of thorium and molten salt reactors together and when they advocate for molten salt thorium reactors make the claim that those reactors can consume nuclear waste. One the one hand breeding thorium 232 into uranium 233 is done in the thermal spectrum while it takes a fast neutron spectrum to fission transuranics, which is more feasible to do in molten salt fast reactor running on uranium/plutonium, otherwise you would need to make the reactor more complicated and run it in a mixed spectrum.
It's not much, but I really want to show my appreciation for the work you put into these videos. They are a joy to watch for nerds like me. Especially with the slides where you have everything neatly categorised. This was 40 minutes of reactor goodness! And as an aside; yes, the RBMK was designed with plutonium breeding in mind. It is a direct descendant from military plutonium-producing graphite reactors (AM-1/AMB-100/AMB-200). Such a big, and powerful reactor cannot only make oodles of electricity, it can also breed lots of high-quality plutonium in a relatively short time. They endowed it with the on-power refuelling capability for being able to run longer in-between outages, but also that they could take designated fuel assemblies out to harvest the fresh plutonium before it would accumulate too much Pu-240. I haven't been able to find anything indicating that Unit 4 was ever used in such a manner, but it was most certainly a design requirement. Am looking forward to the next iteration in this series!
thank you! I looked into it a bit further and while the RBMK's predecessor was designed for breeding, the RBMK seems to only have been designed for power production. this is something I want to look into further, but if you have a link you could share for breeding, I'd be curious to take a look.
@@TheAtomicAgeCM You're most welcome! I really do enjoy these lengthy videos you make. They help me tremendously with furthering my learning about this most interesting topic. Absolutely! I'm more than willing to share what I have. Since I never seem to have much luck with posting actual links (YT always eats them for some reason) I'll give you the description and time, then it should not be hard to find. A YT video mentioning this is "What technically happened at Chernobyl" by Ethan Chaleff. It is a lecture of about 50 minutes. Besides a few very tiny RBMK mistakes, it is very good indeed. From 04:00 minutes he goes over the design requirements, and specifically mentions it. I also remember reading about it somewhere. Will have to dive into my not-so-small RBMK library to see if I can find it again for you. This may take some time, but will come back to you on this.
@@TheAtomicAgeCM Is there an email or something else I could use? I have tried multiple times to send you a link with more info, but YT keeps eating it.
I'm not in the nuclear field, but I do build my own amps with vacuum tubes. So I get the feeling of being able to have some physical interaction with your work. I especially like watching the electrons traverse empty space & striking the glass. Quite a nice blue glow from ionization (or so I've been told). AMD I've definitely got some Thorium in some of my oldest tubes...
I feel that a genuine advantage of thorium over uranium is that it is more abundant in the crust than uranium, meaning that you don't have to do expensive seawater extraction to get it, but breeding in general is expensive anyway, even more so for thorium because of U-232 as you mentioned
I have a question when making plutonium do the two extra protons get absorbed through alpha particles I’m only confused cause when u 238 absorbs enough neutrons to become plutonium I seem to miss where the other protons come from
ah yes, good question. The U-238 absorbers a neutron and becomes U-239, which does beta minus decay twice to become Pu-239. Beta Minus decay is when a Neutron gives off a negatron beta (a negatron is a negatively charged electron) and the Neutron becomes a Proton (think of it like the neutron has lost a negative charge to become positive). So, the 239 doesn't change (the number of nucleons), just the element number (U to Np to Pu)
People often lump the concepts of thorium and molten salt reactors together and when they advocate for molten salt thorium reactors make the claim that those reactors can consume nuclear waste. One the one hand breeding thorium 232 into uranium 233 is done in the thermal spectrum while it takes a fast neutron spectrum to fission transuranics, which is more feasible to do in molten salt fast reactor running on uranium/plutonium, otherwise you would need to make the reactor more complicated and run it in a mixed spectrum.
Yes, Thorium gets conflated with just general advanced reactor concepts. These are good topics for me to address in the future
You break it down in layman's terms and "Science-splanee" it for "the rest of us". Love the channel! Keep up the good work! Thanks!!
Thanks so much! More to come!
It's not much, but I really want to show my appreciation for the work you put into these videos. They are a joy to watch for nerds like me. Especially with the slides where you have everything neatly categorised. This was 40 minutes of reactor goodness!
And as an aside; yes, the RBMK was designed with plutonium breeding in mind. It is a direct descendant from military plutonium-producing graphite reactors (AM-1/AMB-100/AMB-200). Such a big, and powerful reactor cannot only make oodles of electricity, it can also breed lots of high-quality plutonium in a relatively short time. They endowed it with the on-power refuelling capability for being able to run longer in-between outages, but also that they could take designated fuel assemblies out to harvest the fresh plutonium before it would accumulate too much Pu-240. I haven't been able to find anything indicating that Unit 4 was ever used in such a manner, but it was most certainly a design requirement. Am looking forward to the next iteration in this series!
thank you! I looked into it a bit further and while the RBMK's predecessor was designed for breeding, the RBMK seems to only have been designed for power production. this is something I want to look into further, but if you have a link you could share for breeding, I'd be curious to take a look.
@@TheAtomicAgeCM
You're most welcome! I really do enjoy these lengthy videos you make. They help me tremendously with furthering my learning about this most interesting topic.
Absolutely! I'm more than willing to share what I have. Since I never seem to have much luck with posting actual links (YT always eats them for some reason) I'll give you the description and time, then it should not be hard to find. A YT video mentioning this is "What technically happened at Chernobyl" by Ethan Chaleff. It is a lecture of about 50 minutes. Besides a few very tiny RBMK mistakes, it is very good indeed. From 04:00 minutes he goes over the design requirements, and specifically mentions it.
I also remember reading about it somewhere. Will have to dive into my not-so-small RBMK library to see if I can find it again for you. This may take some time, but will come back to you on this.
@@TheAtomicAgeCM
Is there an email or something else I could use? I have tried multiple times to send you a link with more info, but YT keeps eating it.
you can find my email address on my channel page in the about section
@@TheAtomicAgeCM
You've got mail!
I'm not in the nuclear field, but I do build my own amps with vacuum tubes. So I get the feeling of being able to have some physical interaction with your work. I especially like watching the electrons traverse empty space & striking the glass. Quite a nice blue glow from ionization (or so I've been told). AMD I've definitely got some Thorium in some of my oldest tubes...
Loving this series
glad to hear it!
Thank you for your video. The future of the nuclear reactors is in the fast spectrum.
I feel that a genuine advantage of thorium over uranium is that it is more abundant in the crust than uranium, meaning that you don't have to do expensive seawater extraction to get it, but breeding in general is expensive anyway, even more so for thorium because of U-232 as you mentioned
Cool as mate, feel so smart rn
I have a question when making plutonium do the two extra protons get absorbed through alpha particles I’m only confused cause when u 238 absorbs enough neutrons to become plutonium I seem to miss where the other protons come from
ah yes, good question. The U-238 absorbers a neutron and becomes U-239, which does beta minus decay twice to become Pu-239. Beta Minus decay is when a Neutron gives off a negatron beta (a negatron is a negatively charged electron) and the Neutron becomes a Proton (think of it like the neutron has lost a negative charge to become positive). So, the 239 doesn't change (the number of nucleons), just the element number (U to Np to Pu)
@@TheAtomicAgeCM ohhhhhhh I seee
to slow
Hi Charlie
, thku for the 2nd video my dude