Thorium Safe
Thorium Safe is the name given to a range of wave-tech generators provided by "HH Engineering". These use thorium nuclear fission as their power source, but are packaged as sealed units which only need more thorium every three to five years. The fuel they use is unenriched, nor nuclear processed, thorium of sufficient chemical purity in pellet form. They are considered pretty safe as they are tough, are not radioactive above background levels, and you know exactly where the power is coming from, as opposed to it being handwaved from some unclear source.
Integral to the generator is an expert system which checks the suitability of supplied fuel, and rejects it if unsuitable. This system also checks the generator for damage, and reports if maintenance is required. Generators have very tough externals and internals, including shock-proofing by acceleration-damping fields. Allegedly you could drop one from Earth orbit and it would be blackened but still functioning when retrieved. Unless you follow proper maintenance procedures you'd need a fusion torch to get into one of these. If you want to sabotage one you can force it to shutdown by preventing it from dissipating heat; it will restart when it cools-off enough.
Integral to the generators are a set of capacitors and accumulators which provide for irregular power loads; about five times the steady power output for about fifteen minutes. If there is an intermittent external power source, like regenerative braking, or solar panels, this can be connected to the generator to top-up its storage; there are automatic cut-outs to prevent the generator from receiving too much power in this way.
The bottom end of the range is the shoebox-sized "Thorium Safe: Home", which provides a steady 20kWe, for roughly 500kWe/day. This masses 25kg. Given reasonable insulation and passive cooling this provides all the power for home use anywhere in Fenspace for about twenty-five human-equivalents, including the life support systems, with a large safety factor (supposedly 100%, i.e. enough for fifty). This power output is roughly equivalent to the engine output of a 2008 medium-sized hydrocarbon-fueled hard-tech car. There is not enough power for more than irregular use of power tools, or more of a drive system than station keeping. If this is the only thing powering your life support the supplier strongly recommends you have two of these, preferably kept a good distance apart.
Other generators in the range include the "Commercial", which is 50% more powerful and heavier, the "Light", "Medium" and "Heavy Industrial" which starts at 200kWe (1MWe peak) and 250kg mass, then works-up. Custom models and specialist orders are possible. Note that this reactor is effectively a mushy-tech descendant of the hard-tech reactor used in the US nuclear aircraft program of the 1950s.
What surprises many people is that these generators are highly consistent in how they work, and almost quirk-free. The only notable quirk is that after about three years the generator starts audibly complaining "I'm hungry!", starting with a mumble, and rising to an almost unignorable whine as gets close to five years. After five years power output from the generator drops to 10%, and it just moans quietly to itself; it's unclear how long a generator would maintain this without refueling, but it is probable it would completely shut-down no more than twenty years from the last full refueling.
Technical Details
This variety of reactor comes preloaded with activated thorium fuel and uses the thorium fuel cycle. The reactor also includes natural uranium which is mixed, in very small quantities, with any inactivated thorium fuel supplied by the owner of the reactor. Internally, this is a molten salt reactor, using thorium fluoride, which 'burns' almost all of its long-life nuclear waste products.
Where the handwavium is used in this reactor design is the chemical recycling of almost all of its waste, resulting in a design life-time without maintenance of hundreds of years, and the ultra-materials (ultra-dense non-atomic materials) used to shield the high-energy gamma radiation flux, and neutrons.
The only detectable radiation from this, above background levels, is a neutrino flux, which hard-tech instruments would have trouble detecting beyond quite a short range.
Created by Ace Dreamer.
