It’s a thorium based subcritical reactor. India tried to make something similar, but with some amount of plutonium to start this thing and to not include accelerator. The problem is that accelerator required is large and expensive, and needs to use up some fraction of power produced. As of waste, no heavy actinides are produced, and spiciest fission products have half-life of about 30 years, in particular there’s no plutonium or americium made with half life of 80 ish years and 430ish years respectively. This makes radioactivity drop in 100s of years instead of thousands. These problems can be solved in other ways, for example by using fast breeder reactors, but these are hard to make. So will be massive accelerator required, so i’m not holding my breath
freshly burned fuel is kept at nuclear powerplant spent fuel pool for months to years anyway precisely for this reason. heavy actinides have longer halflifes anyway
that’s just thorium nuclear cycle but worse
Please explain further or provide some info you have read or seen in video format, only if you would like to share that info with us!
Thanks!
it’s in their faq https://www.transmutex.com/faq
It’s a thorium based subcritical reactor. India tried to make something similar, but with some amount of plutonium to start this thing and to not include accelerator. The problem is that accelerator required is large and expensive, and needs to use up some fraction of power produced. As of waste, no heavy actinides are produced, and spiciest fission products have half-life of about 30 years, in particular there’s no plutonium or americium made with half life of 80 ish years and 430ish years respectively. This makes radioactivity drop in 100s of years instead of thousands. These problems can be solved in other ways, for example by using fast breeder reactors, but these are hard to make. So will be massive accelerator required, so i’m not holding my breath
don’t you have to transport the waste from the regular reactor to the breeder reactor though.
transport is a complete nonissue, this approach requires special reprocessing of spent fuel
but isn’t the worst stuff in the fuel in the short term? seems like the worst time to be moving it around.
freshly burned fuel is kept at nuclear powerplant spent fuel pool for months to years anyway precisely for this reason. heavy actinides have longer halflifes anyway
do they wait like that with this solution considering its onsite? Honestly the details are a bit sparse from what I can see.
Oh, awesome! Thanks for sharing your knowledge on the topic!
So it’s more complicated than just saying it’s like a thorium nuclear cycle but worse.
not more complicated, different
Same same