Talk:Sodium-cooled fast reactor

Bias
Is this supposed to be unbiased? I don't know enough to edit it, but it sounds remarkably like a sales pitch to me.
 * This is a suggested reactor design that isn't in operation at the moment, and the exact details of how it would be deployed are not determined yet, which is why the information about it is a bit limited. There will probably be more room for discussing the pros and cons of the SFR once actual designs are determined. Also, please sign your posts on the discussion pages by sticking four ~ at the end of them. This will automatically mark them with the date and time, as well as your account name (if you have one) making it easier to see who said what. Even if you don't have an account you should still stick four ~ at the end so we can see when a comment was posted. 88.90.197.94 17:13, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
 * It was by at 15:42, 16 November 2006, and is the only contribution to date from that IP. Andrewa (talk) 16:49, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Specific project or general type - Article needs to be split

 * First of all, "Sodium-cooled fast reactor" is a generic term and having it "hijacked" byt a particular research project is wrong as it is. This article should be retained for a 'general' description of this reactor type which would then link to articles on individual implementations - like the Russian production ones and the various European or US prototypes. Until the US-based project is split into its own article, this article will keep being a mess by its nature of being a marketing hijack.83.240.117.207 (talk) 12:33, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
 * All of this article seems to be about the US SFR project apart from the last line of the intro and the Reactors section. We need to split this article; eg. into Sodium-cooled fast reactor (project) and Sodium-cooled fast reactor (for the general category) ? - Rod57 (talk) 22:40, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
 * I've added a to the intro. - Rod57 (talk) 14:02, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
 * or maybe the general type should just be a section in Liquid metal cooled reactor (and this article can be restricted to the specific US project) ? - Rod57 (talk) 14:18, 28 September 2016 (UTC)

Expand tag
Why the Expand tag? It looks like a good short article to me, despite the anonymous comments above. No details are given at Requests for expansion either. Andrewa 16:33, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

I've rephrased the intro to conform to the WP:MOS and be a little less like a sales brochure, and removed the tag. Andrewa 16:43, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

First sentences of Design Goals?
The Design Goals section starts with these: "The operating temperature should not exceed the melting temperature of the fuel. It has been found that the melting point of a fuel called SFR-MOX (20% tranuranic oxides and 80% uranium oxide)." Clearly something is missing after the closing parenthesis, presumably the melting point of said fuel, as it stands now it doesn't make much sense. RealSunner (talk) 11:27, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Melting temperature of the Fuel?
RealSunner is correct, it appears the actual value of the melting temperature of SFR-MOX was just left out. 68.13.125.78 (talk) 04:36, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
 * It's 2690C according to http://www.inl.gov/technicalpublications/Documents/3901052.pdf, but I've no idea how to cite this properly. Epithumia (talk) 21:03, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Radioactivity of the sodium and the possibility to go "BOOM"
Certainly another unmentioned problematic aspect of sodium is that neutrons make it radioactive. Therefore the potential exists for sodium to come into contact with water and explode, and air and catch fire, releasing a radioactive plume. This is why two sodium loops are needed in the design. The second loop isolates the core sodium loop from the water/steam loop. Would the sodium in the secondary loop be made radioactive by contact with the first? How radioactive? How do you contain an explosion caused by contact between sodium and water say during an Earthquake or deliberately by terrorists that gain access to the plant? This seems to me to be the Achilles heal of this design and yet it not really discussed. 96.252.61.70 (talk) 17:18, 31 January 2011 (UTC)


 * If there were a break allowing sodium from the primary loop to enter the secondary, then yes, but by mixing rather than by contact. But Sodium-24 has a half-life of only 15 hours, so there'd be little lasting effect. You can see from the diagram that the only place water and sodium have to be close to each other is in the steam generator; there's not much water there and several places to stop the flow of sodium and water into it.
 * —WWoods (talk) 22:00, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

I appreciated your response, but it left several points unaddressed. The down side of a short half life is that it is very intensely radioactive, so if a large leak does occur it would be very dangerous, even if only briefly. I can believe that control systems could be designed to minimize contact between sodium and water if a leak occurred, but in a natural or man-made disaster, you would have water and radioactive sodium potentially mixing. The sodium cooled Monju plant in Japan had a leak that contacted air and very little water but was still hot enough to melt steel. Don't we have to be thinking of suddenly having the water and sodium loop mixed together if a large abrupt leak occurred? How would this be contained? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.252.61.70 (talk) 03:52, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Sodium has a low neutron cross section, but yes some does absorb them and turn radioactive. One would have to find where the equilibrium is in a running reactor. How much Na24 there is. It seems that the Russians have plenty of experience with sodium fires, so maybe they know about this one. Gah4 (talk) 00:37, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Sodium has a low neutron cross section, but yes some does absorb them and turn radioactive. One would have to find where the equilibrium is in a running reactor. How much Na24 there is. It seems that the Russians have plenty of experience with sodium fires, so maybe they know about this one. Gah4 (talk) 00:37, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Design Goals
The Design Goals section may be going in the wrong direction. The section should be about "A sodium-cooled fast reactor design is chosen in order to acheive X, Y, and Z"; not "here are the features we want to design into our sodium-cooled fast reactor." Anyone agree? Abramov (talk) 23:24, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Reactors
The Russian Beloyarsk-4 BN-800 reactor has meanwhile reached criticality: http://www.nucnet.org/all-the-news/2014/06/25/russia-s-beloyarsk-4-ready-to-begin-nuclear-reaction Stepmose (talk) 13:11, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

Suggestions/requests
After splitting the US project from the general type :

Could the Reactors section have the list converted to a table, with columns including construction start, first criticality ?, fuel type, pool/loop design, notes ? - Rod57 (talk) 21:57, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

Could we have a section giving the trade-offs between the pool and loop designs, eg on construction cost, operational cost, safety ... ? - Rod57 (talk) 21:57, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

What now
Not sure what to suggest.

On the one hand, there is good content here that should be preserved, with its history of course.

On the other hand, the topic is ill-defined to the point that the article should not even exist. It's not about all sodium-cooled fast reactors, just about two very different Gen IV proposals (one with metallic fuel, one with oxide) that have no more in common than the BWR has with the RBMK. The title should probably be Gen IV LMFR or similar, that would at least match the topic, but it's still a rather strange topic. And with the topical nature of the topic(s), the article is chronically out of date... so, do we really want to spend the time updating it? Far better to have the material in the (many) other articles where it more properly belongs and is to some extent already duplicated.

And just to underline the problem, parts of the article are appalling... ''The operating temperature should not exceed the melting temperature of the fuel. '' Well, yes. We don't want the reactor core to meltdown during normal operation. Ummmm, am I missing something? Andrewa (talk) 23:51, 26 February 2019 (UTC)


 * oh, cmon - tThe following sentence, Fuel-to-cladding chemical interaction (FCCI) has to be designed against., is at least as bad. But seriously, I think bad writing is obfuscating decision-making as to the scope of this article. Possible ideas we could pursue:


 * Move to Generation IV sodium-cooled reactor, explicitly changing the scope of the article to exclude existing and historical sodium-cooled fast reactors
 * Pare down and merge with Liquid metal cooled reactor
 * Keep and rewrite to have a reasonable amount of focus on existing and historical sodium-cooled fast reactors, with less relative focus on future models.

Personally, I think the 2nd option (pare down and merge) is best, but I'd like to hear others' thoughts. VQuakr (talk) 02:43, 7 March 2019 (UTC)


 * Agree that the sentence you quote is equally appalling in this context. I note that the source cited is a highly technical paper. I would guess that whoever picked this factoid from it just grabbed it as being scary-sounding and has no idea whatsoever what it means. And this is typical of the politics surrounding the subject. But Wikipedia of course is not the place for me to promote my own pro-nuclear-power agenda either. I'm just confident that if we produce a good encyclopedia that is informative rather than misinformative it will help, see wp:creed. And there is a long way to go... I was once laughed out of a meeting of University students for challenging a speaker who had just assured them that plutonium had a longer half-life than uranium. The scary thing is that the overwhelming majority believed him, and we're talking here about uni students with an interest in the subject. (Email me if you'd like a link to my page on the story, here is not the place for it.) (sigh) And this is not the only subject that suffers... when I did semi-professional PA we used to say that you couldn't throw a hand grenade into a rock'n'roll audience without killing at least half a dozen sound experts. And the article from which I most often remove BS is drum kit. Not the drummers' fault either, my father (a metallurgist before he became a nuclear engineer) and I used to read my cymbal catalogs and laugh out loud. It will probably be generations before most drummers realise what lies we have been told!
 * And you seem to agree that something should be done about this particular article. I am somewhat relieved that someone else does!
 * Also agree that each of these three would address the problems. And I hope my latest effort might be a start towards one of them. Comments on it? Andrewa (talk) 07:43, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

I just had a look at Organic nuclear reactor and I'm almost tempted to suggest a bot to simply tag all nuclear power articles with Template:Expert needed. No (-> not really... the template doco itself (rightly) discourages hit-and run. But see its talk. I'll get around to fixing it, or feel free to have a go... it's embarrassing, or is it only me that feels that way? Andrewa (talk) 09:31, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Moved
In that nobody has commented, I've moved the page as proposed. Andrewa (talk) 17:17, 4 March 2019 (UTC)


 * This appears to have been moved without any discussion. You never opened a formal discussion on a move, your previous comment is "What now" which has no meaning in itself and appears to be a personal reflection. Where is the move discussion? I think the current title is much worse than before. The article is clearly about sodium-cooled fast reactors, and right now "LMFR" is not even defined in the article. How is this an improvement? In my opinion the article should be moved back to its original name, and the lead should be changed to focus on what a sodium-cooled fast reactor is, independently of the Gen IV forum. --Ita140188 (talk) 17:42, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
 * True, it has been boldly and I think validly moved. It's not true that it was without discussion, it was foreshadowed here a week before it was done. By a formal discussion I assume you mean an RM? Overkill IMO.
 * It's true that the lead needs work, particularly in defining LMFR as you suggest. But the term is a fairly standard one in the way it's used in the title.
 * Have you read the reasons for the move? It's not true that the article is clearly about sodium-cooled fast reactors, it's about some sodium-cooled fast reactors, but not about all of them. Just the Gen IV ones. So the lead and title didn't match before the move. They did afterwards. How you can see no improvement in that is beyond me.
 * But yes, there are alternative fixes. I would not oppose moving it back provided the scope is changed as you propose... and not just in the lead, in the whole article. But that's quite a lot of work. I'd suggest that creating a draft in the draft namespace is the way to go if you wish to pursue this. It can incorporate material from the existing article, but that doesn't even cover 50% of the topic.
 * It's still a rather peculiar topic! Even the Gen IV proposals list two different classes of sodium-cooled fast reactor. But if you or others wish to write and maintain a useful article on the general topic of sodium-cooled fast reactors, I have absolutely no objection to this. Go for it. I'd suggest that it be particularly geared to the non-technical reader, as the similarities between oxide and metal fueled fast reactors are rather superficial, so technically aware readers aren't likely to come here except perhaps out of curiousity that anyone thinks it a coherent topic. Andrewa (talk) 03:04, 5 March 2019 (UTC)


 * I object to the move. I don't follow the objection to the previous title, and it was moved to horrible WP:Jargon.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:09, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Fair enough. If you think the previous title was accurate, then I should move it back. Would you object if, after the move back, the article scope is expanded to all Sodium cooled fast reactors, not just the Gen IV ones?
 * Or better, is there a jargon-free, accurate title which matches this topic, and to which you would not object? If so, I might raise it as an RM, as it's obviously controversial. Andrewa (talk) 04:45, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I see no reason to restrict Sodium-cooled fast reactor to generation IV reactors. I think it might be better titled Sodium-cooled nuclear reactor.  As with many topics, there is a tendency to reflect the jargon in non-introductory sources, and to leave out the most important information from the title (it is a type of nuclear reactor).  There is little purpose in using titles to implicitly exclude absent information about hypothetical things.  If there were sodium-cooled slow-neutron nuclear reactors, they should be merged into Sodium-cooled nuclear reactor.  "Gen" is not even a word, so if you find yourself using it, know that you are using jargon.  Generation IV reactor is a hypothetical concept, and a marketing term, and is particularly susceptible to a descent into jargon.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:09, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Exactly. If the article is moved back to Sodium-cooled fast reactor, we need to do something to make it clear that this article doesn't cover all sodium-cooled fast reactors, just to these two distinct types (one hypothetical, the other having had a prototype built but then became something of a political football) that are sometimes lumped together for political and/or marketing purposes. I still think it's a title to be avoided altogether (as is SFR for the same reasons).
 * Alternatively of course, rewrite the article to try to avoid this spin. Volunteers? Andrewa (talk) 13:44, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Moved back
OK, I've moved it back. In the fullness of time I'll probably raise an RM, depending on how and whether it develops. At present it still gives undue weight to the Gen IV proposals IMO, given the far more general scope of the title.

It is still a mystery to me why an article was ever written covering just two such disparate reactor types, let alone given such a misleading title. I'm guessing it comes from sources influenced by the Gen IV spin.

I have rewritten the lead to at least make some sense of it. Comments? Andrewa (talk) 02:03, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
 * There's a pretty extensive list of existing sodium cooled reactors already in the article. The amount of weight on Generation IV might be undue, but it isn't exclusive. VQuakr (talk) 02:43, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

and the hydrogen burns in contact with air
The article says: and the hydrogen burns in contact with air. Well, it does if there is an ignition source. If it is close to the hot sodium, then there probably is, but otherwise it just mixes with air. It is light and floats away. But if there is a sodium leak near water, then yes it is hot enough to ignite hydrogen produced. Gah4 (talk) 00:40, 13 January 2024 (UTC)