Would our nuclear scientists care to comment?

[Cyclone]

One of the comments on the reg was about bubbling the molten fuel through a column of liquid bismuth, what would be the point of that?

[Obelix]

I think probably it's to remove another one of the poisions - xenon 135 is the trickiest as it has a cross section of about 2 million barns, but there is also protactinium. You can hit that with a couple of neutrons to get U235 but it can have an adverse effect on the neutron economy of a reactor, if you washed the fuel salt with bismuth you would probably remove the protactinium. I'm not sure that would be ideal though, you'd probably take a lot of other nasties out as well like americium and the heavier elements too, it's much easier to just increase the neutron flux and burn these as well rather than extract them and create more waste.

[geared]

2 million barns you say?

 

Sounds like a fairly large target.

[s2 blade]

Certainly sounds interesting, hopefully it will pan out.

 

We've had claims like this in the past that proved to be flawed, remember the cold fusion discovery in the 1980s?

 

 

 

Profit, oh the horror.

 

Doubtless you eat in the popular, not-for-profit MacDonalds restaurants, watch the not-for-profit Sky TV and buy your food from not-for-profit stores like Tesco or Asda.

 

There's profit .... Then their's just taking the ......

[Obelix]

2 million barns you say?

 

Sounds like a fairly large target.

 

Originally it was called that because the target they were measuring was so big it was like shooting at a barn door... :-)

 

One barn, (not an official SI unit but very common in the literature) is 10^-24 cm^2