Comment by tlb
4 days ago
250000 liters of FLiBe contains 44 tons of beryllium, and the current annual production is 220 tons, so it's possible but not cheap.
4 days ago
250000 liters of FLiBe contains 44 tons of beryllium, and the current annual production is 220 tons, so it's possible but not cheap.
Wow. The ARC reactor is supposed to deliver 270 MWe (when/if it will be built) [1]. So 20% of the world annual production of beryllium for one power plant that would deliver about one quarter of the power of an AP-1000 fission reactor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor
And the original ARC design used 958 tons of FLiBe.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540