4h08m24s29f LFTR Chemistry - Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor's Online Chemistry - TR2016a
Channel: Thorium Remix
Date: 13/05/2017

http://ThoriumRemix.com/ Here's the reactor. Got a lot of graphite and the core. The green fluid is the fuel salt. So this is the material that's undergoing nuclear fission. The uranium in this is undergoing nuclear fission and generating energy. As you can see, the two regions here. There's the fuel salt region and surrounding it in kind of the turquoise blue is the blanket salt region. In the blanket salt, protactinium is formed from neutron absorption on thorium in the blanket. That blanket salt proceeds to a reductive extraction column where it's contacted with metallic bismuth that will remove protactinium in any uranium that's present there and return a cleaned up blanket salt back to the reactor vessel. That metallic bismuth stream then proceeds through a series of additional reductive extraction cells and electrolytic cells before ending up in a decay tank. In the decay tank we give the protactinium time to decay to Uranium-233. And, actually there's several other protactinium isotopes in there as well- 231 and 232. 232 will also decay to Uranium-232. Uranium-232 is still present in the decay tank here because of its formation in the blanket. So protactinium goes into the decay salt. Decayed uranium comes out. And this is also where we add thorium-tetrafluoride as a makeup material. This is where thorium actually enters the chemical processing system. As uranium begins to grow in, in the decay salt, it is removed through fluorination and then it's added to a stream. And, let me pick up from the fuel-salt's perspective- Fuel salt is taken out and it's fluorinated also to remove uranium and other gaseous hexafluoride products. Those two streams are joined at that point. The remaining fuel salt, now stripped of its uranium, goes to another reductive extraction column, where metallic bismuth is used to remove lanthanides and long-lived fission products. And then, that stream is returned to a reductive extraction unit where the UF6, the fuel salt and hydrogen gas is used to reduce UF6 back to UF4, bringing it back into solution and essentially refueling the fuel salt, and sending it back to the reactor vessel. The HF that is produced by this reaction goes to an electrolytic cell where it is split back into H2 which is used again for the reduction, and F2 which is used for the fluorination steps. So all of this forms a closed-cycle. -Kirk Sorensen

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