Help! I may be publishing an article in a journal soon.

[eclipse]

Hi all,
I've been invited to write a pro-nuclear article in a popular church journal, Zadok magazine. I'm not pretending to be a nuclear engineer, far from it!, but am writing as a lay person who accidentally bumped into the world of breeder reactors and discovered that my whole anti-nuclear worldview was entirely wrong. I will of course want to focus on the myths of nuclear waste and nuclear danger, and will point out that in death per terrawatts, coal is a Chernobyl every day! But I was recently impacted by a Google Tech Talk, "LFTR, what fusion wants to be", and have also been watching a lot of Kirk Sorenson, and wanted to focus on IFR's being great, but LFTR's being near-perfect (but just less developed & therefore further away).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8

This is not for the magazine article, but is something I just posted on another forum with you. I just wanted to check what your understanding is of what would escape if a LFTR was blown up? Also, any hints on how to phrase liquid fuels V solid fuels below? Remember, I'm writing for humanities boffins... "Nuclear for dummies" so to speak.

• It cannot melt down, it's already a liquid.
• Being a liquid makes controlling nuclear fuel far easier. Imagine a log fire, but instead of producing ash that falls away each log gradually produces concrete on the outside that poisoned the fire. That's traditional solid fuel rods, producing Xenon which poisons the fission reaction. Solid fuel reactors shuffle the fuel rods around, like poking logs on a fire. But a liquid fuel allows the xenon gas to bubble up to the top similar to the bubbles popping out of your coke. New fuel is simply pumped in. It's the difference between driving down the highway and having to pull over every 20 minutes to load wood into your steam engine, or simply driving a modern car that handles all the fuel for you.
• The liquid fuel only fissions in the reactor core: the neutrons must be slowed down by moderator rods to sustain the reaction.
• The liquid fuel only fissions if there is power supply to the reactor! Most nuclear safety systems require power to cool the reactors and shut them down. LFTR safety systems trigger if there is a lack of power. It takes power to freeze the salt plug holding the fuel up in the reactor core. If there is a power failure the frozen salt plug melts from the intense heat, and the fluid just drains away into a non-reactive drain tank where the heat is quickly dumped into heat-absorbing walls. Even if someone put some TNT on the reactor itself and blew the thing up, the liquid salt would leave the reactor core and immediately stop fissioning. But being salt, it would also quickly dry and harden (at hundreds of degrees) to lock the radioactivity in the local area. While radioactive steam shot around Europe after Chernobyl, LFTR's lock it locally in the most catastrophic scenarios imaginable.
  The liquid fuel only fissions if there is power supply to the reactor! Most nuclear safety systems require power to cool the reactors and shut them down. LFTR safety systems trigger if there is a lack of power. It takes power to freeze the salt plug holding the fuel up in the reactor core. If there is a power failure the frozen salt plug melts from the intense heat, and the fluid just drains away into a non-reactive drain tank where the heat is quickly dumped into heat-absorbing walls. Even if someone put some TNT on the reactor itself and blew the thing up, the liquid salt would leave the reactor core and immediately stop fissioning. But being salt, it would also quickly dry and harden (at hundreds of degrees) to lock the radioactivity in the local area. While radioactive steam shot around Europe after Chernobyl, LFTR's lock it locally in the most catastrophic scenarios imaginable.

[Roger Clifton]

Eclipse, good on you for writing about an environmental issue for a church magazine.

As you say, you are more skilled in the humanities than nuclear engineering. I would recommend a more positive topic, as writing about why certain myths are wrong could easily give credibility to the myths among people who never took them seriously in the first place.

Why not write about the moral issues attached to carbon pollution? You know your audience. You know how much they know about anthropogenic global warming, and you can read up on details that they would appreciate knowing more about. In particular, you know which moral issues would rouse their interest, rouse their passions, and maybe even rouse them to action.

There are plenty of them. Responsibility is a recurrent concept in the issues that attract my own attention. Responsibility as custodians of Creation. Responsibility to act on behalf of the ignorant. Responsibility to have a category of wicked actions recast as criminal so that prosecution becomes a consequence for wicked behaviour. And so on.

Alternately, you might simply point out all the terrible things that are going to happen because of carbon emissions. Point out that what is already going to happen is much worse than they ever feared about nuclear electricity. Reassure them that there is hope if virtuous people are willing to act virtuously -- and follow through. Then point out that token reductions are not enough – renewables need gas backup and gas is bad.

[eclipse]

Hi Roger,
did I throw you off with my choice of discussing the LFTR in the first place, given that it needs far more development than the IFR? (Especially considering GE have the PRISM ready to go in whatever country will let them do it.)