Sea power

I was googling the words LFTR safety this morning, and I came up with something unexpected. The Navy Post Graduate School Foundation encourages Naval officers to study for graduate degrees. Listed under RESEARCH PROJECTS AT THE NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL, I found:

CURRENT PROJECTS: Thorium Ship Power

Well, well well, I thought, and read further.

Project Objective: An NPS student design team is investigating the benefits of a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) as a ship power plant. The LFTR offers greater power system density, deep inherent safety, and a simple, closed nuclear fuel cycle using abundant thorium rather than uranium. Successful development of LFTR power plants enable future naval operations for any size vessel even if fossil fuel prices rise dramatically.

Operational Payoff:
The payoff for this work would be a fleet that could operate with impunity to fuel price/availability with a reactor design that is simpler, safer, and less expensive than today’s pressurized-water reactors. Unrestricted electrical power for propulsion, weapons, communications, and land support services (water desalination, electrical power, hydrogen or fuel production).

Design Advantages:

• Smaller systems volume
• Minimizes fissile inventory with no external fissile addition
• Immediate restart or shutdown
• Inherent load following without control rods
• Extraordinarily safe - high negative temperature coefficient / passive decay heat removal

Technical Objective:
High efficiency, safe, low-cost, compact naval nuclear power.

Technology Challenges:
• Thorium fuel requires continuous reprocessing to remove bred 233U from blanket to core.
• Optimized gas turbine machinery for closed-loop and wide temperature range operation.

Technical Approaches:
Online thorium blanket processing, graphite/BeF2 slurry moderator, spiral core design, multi-reheat helium gas-turbine power generators.

Quote: "Increased fuel costs could threaten future naval operations. US thorium reserves can
power us for thousands of years. Increased fuel costs could threaten future naval operations. US
thorium reserves can power us for thousands of years."

Someone has been reading Energy From Thorium!