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Comment by AtlasBarfed

Again this story.

Ok, sure maybe it's smaller than a PWR behemoth. It's still solid fuel rod crap.

If you have solid fuel rods, you have meltdown danger, you can't use up all the fissile material, there's no breeding, extraction of fission products. It's under a lot of pressure, so besides meltdown you have other dangers. Solid fuel rods can only use the very tiny percentage of uranium that is naturally fissile.

This is simply not a good design for a nuclear reactor. The LFTR design has meltdown proof operation, no pressurized water, near 100% use of fuel, can burn/breed old solid fuel waste, can breed more fuel from plentiful thorium, and can scale down to closet-sized reactors.

Pebble bed also shares some of these aspects, and I assume there are other new generation designs with advantages.

But this is just more of the same bad design reactors. Oh great, it got spitshined and scaled down and passed approvals.

What nuclear needs to be relevant is to tackle meltdown danger and nuclear waste. LFTR addresses both and any future reactor needs to address both. Perhaps LFTR could be a "waste processor" if LFTR isn't economical enough, while other meltdown proof designs do more economical generation in a sort of large scale web.

parent AtlasBarfed 4 years ago

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