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megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Various common steels with a bunch of insulation around it usually, sometimes with a thin coating. The potassium/sodium/calcium nitrate mixes that are used with concentrated solar systems operating in range between 200 C and 600 C. So like, yah you don’t want to touch it, but it’s not gonna do much to steel. It can be somewhat corrosive, but, this is fairly easily mitigated by design.

Molten salt for heat transfer and thermal storage is a pretty mature technology that goes way back before we started using it in concentrated solar systems.

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how_we_burned@lemmy.zip ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Molten salt for heat transfer and thermal storage is a pretty mature technology that goes way back before we started using it in concentrated solar systems.

Isn’t the core problem with anything that uses molten salt is that when the heat ~~sauce~~ source (thanks autocorrect, really, the context in that sentence means you should suggest “sauce”?) fails you just end up with a huge lump of solid salts that clog every part of your system?

The Russian Alfa class had a similar problem due their use of lead-bismuth heated into a liquid.

When they lost power for whatever they’d essentially end up being written off as reheating them was incredibly difficult and very tricky.

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- megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  molten salt systems can be fail safe by having the coolant drain from parts of the system that can’t operate with solidified salt in them, even if they do, you can sends someone with a heating element to remelt the system at critical points before turning it on. It’s not like water where the coolant will physically expand and burst things when it freezes, water’s actually pretty weird in that regard, most things take up less volume when they freeze.
  
  I don’t know why they couldn’t do the same for an alpha class, but I suspect it’s because running the reactor without coolant in it would have caused a melt down, and if any coolant was left inside it when turned off, the control rods would have been frozen in place preventing it from being restarted. Perhaps in such a tightly sealed system, the shrinkage caused by cooling could have caused things to break as well.
  
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