Molten salt reactors are nothing new. It would be truly wonderful if these folks solved the corrosion issues associated to circulating high-temperature molten salts, and the ever-recurring military-grade fuel proliferation risk associated with spent fuel reprocessing.
I found another article that talked about corrosion:
> While the DoE is still investigating ways to get around these showstopping corrosion issues, Prof Memmott said that his team, along with Alpha Tech Research Corp (the commercializing partner for the BYU MSR, and of which Memmott is director and senior technical advisor), believe they have solved the problem by removing water and oxygen from the salt, massively reducing the corrosion issue.
> Memmott said the micro-design doesn't require salt to flow through the reactor, which means it eliminates components such as pumps and valves, as well as solving operational problems, like having to tightly control flow and temperature.
I can’t speak to the durability of the reactor design, but the reprocessing is one of the primary points of the design.
Apparently, it is helpful to think of this design in the same way as fractional distillation of oil is viewed by industry: each stage of the process results in valuable byproducts.
Good thing no-one who has incentive to build an A bomb or dirty bomb had any U238 shot into their house and/or children or anything.
There's absolutely no risk of anyone being able to get their hands on some to make plutonium if there were hundreds of breeder reactors in every country.
My comment was really about uranium 233, which is very hard to work with because it emits a ton of gamma rays, which means you need great care in handling it as you purify it from thorium waste.
Yes, if you got a hold of a ton of depleted uranium and had a ton of money to burn and somehow hide what you were doing, you could breed it. I suspect you could use a neutron generator to do it at a staggering cost in electricity (at least until you bred enough fissile material that you could then sustain the rest of the breeding). But these things are not remotely trivial, and they're definitely not cheap. They're within reach of large corporations, but not small ones or individuals.
And my comment was about what happens if one of the proposed millions of megawatt reactors required for this to contribute meaningfully to decarbonisation gets under the control of someone powerful with motives to become a nuclear threat.
If you can run it on thorium and U233, then it's much easier to run on U238 and Pu.
Also you wouldn't need 'heaps' of depleted uranium, just the number of depleted uranium bullets lodged in the wall in the average afghani kindergarten
