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Were they a meme all this time? In the past month I've been reading and it seems like corrosion is an issue Hastelloy N seems to be the solution, and some lithium alloys that are made in Russia as well.
Then there's also the decay products that may react with the material out which the piping and reactor is built.
Oh, and salts freezing in the piping and the reactor when criticality stops. ORNL Wanted to heat up the pipes in order to avoid this, but this destroys the passive safety idea of "If you lose power to the LFTR, it all drains away in the safety tank.". Yeah if you lose power, the heaters will stop heating the salt. Some russian submarine reactors got destroyed by this.
Also, proliferation seems to be a concern to some. In order to kick-start the reactor you need a seed material. How is India going to start its reactors when they aren't allowed to have any u235 at all?
And of course, let's not forget the cost issues.
Let's see if China will start shipping these things like they do iPhones.
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>>9152537
>Were they a meme all this time?
Yes, we were telling you they were a meme all along. They're just breeder reactors, with all the implied advantages, complexity, and proliferation issues, and uranium-based breeders are a much more developed technology.
>How is India going to start its reactors when they aren't allowed to have any u235 at all?
They have U235 and Pu239. They have nuclear weapons. They're already breeding U233 from thorium in their CANDU reactors. Anyway, uranium can be produced by seawater extraction or weak acid leaching of granite, it's just more expensive than mining from good deposits. The raw fuel cost is such a small part of nuclear power that it doesn't really matter.
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