Decommissioning costs are high because anything even with fairly low radioactivity must be disposed as if it were profoundly dangerous. If we adopt radiation standards that consider living in Denver and SLC safe, nuclear site decommissioning costs would drop perhaps by 40%.
Molten salt does not require on site re processing. It requires on site reprocessing to achieve ultra high burnups (99%+). The DMSR (denatured molten salt reactor) single fluid design achieves 6x better burnup without requiring reprocessing (keeping everything but noble gas fission products inside until reactor end of life in 30 yrs, but allow for infrequent reprocessing to increase burnup, the sole reason for reprocessing it to remove neutron poisons from the core). Pyro reprocessing is a simple, fairly cheap system. It's essentially a fractional distillation process. Heavy (fuel) and light (moderator) elements go back into the reactor and mid weight elements (fission products) get removed. Quite different than Uranium, Plutonium oriented reprocessing for reactors that require new fuel to be of very specific chemical makeup. MSR's and IFR's keep all actinides inside until fissioned.
In honesty, Hydro is much like Nuclear. Including or excluding Chernobyl (nuclear) and including or excluding Banqiao Dam accident. Makes a huge difference in the numbers. Except Chernobyl is credited for killing 100 people (with top credible predictions of 5000-6000 total deaths incluing future deaths from cancer). The Banqiao hydro accident in china killed 170k people. But while nuclear go for years without a single death, hydro typically kills around a hundred yearly due to drowing and other causes from hydro dam bursting causing flooding. Hydro is safe, as long as you don't live downstream to a dam. But you can live a mile from a nuclear power plant and you are still orders of magnitude at higher risk of dying from a car crash. Like a thousand times.
Breeding U-233 from Th-232 is simple. So burning U-233 = the core of the Th-232 reactor. Read up on it. The critical difficulty was operating a molten salt reactor on U-233. And it worked.
Shill ? How would the US Army / Air Force rather power a base in the middle of nowhere ? Trucking diesel fuel for 1000 miles (hundreds of truckloads of fuel / year) or a single truckload of nuclear fuel for a decade ?
While the trillion tons of CO2 we put in the atmosphere is still haunting us. At least radioactivity decays away. As well as the millions of tons of lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium from burning coal. Being anti nuclear today = being pro coal. As simple as that. Only those in favor of all non fossil fuels are really anti coal and anti natural gas.
Damn right. The main reason Nuclear isn't truly strong in USA, Germany or the UK is they have lots of coal and/or natural gas. The correlation is extremely strong. But even then, there are dozens of countries producing over 1/3 of their electricity from nuclear. Many use reactors to both produce electricity and provide district heating.
For every person that died from radiation, 10000 died from coal and 100 died from hydro dam bursting. Get your numbers straight. Coal alone kills 200k / yr worldwide, 13k / yr in USA. Hydro killed 170k in a single incident in China in the 70s. It kills hundreds yearly even disregarding that horrible event in China. Nuclear is the safest energy source in the world. Look up the numbers.
Looking only at civilian nuclear accidents (including mining, transportation, processing, fuel preparation plus reactors), nuclear power have killed less than 1000 people ever, worldwide.
Thorium molten salt reactors were tested in the 60s/70s, achieving 22000 hrs of trouble free operation. Got cancelled by Richard Nixon because the lab researching it wasn't from his home area (south Cali). Plus they didn't wanted advanced nuclear power to succeed, since inefficient nuclear power was enough of a threat to mighty american coal and Oil in general. Most great research projects outside of wartime are meant to take a long time. Employ a lot of people, give profits to pork&barrel govt suppliers. Much like Fusion research. God forbid ORNL / Dr. Alvin Weinberg managed to run a test reactor program with less than 1% of the total nuclear research budget, would put all other nuclear research labs in a serious existential risk. Yes, the project was a victim of its own success. Much like SpaceX and Tesla today. SpaceX is putting the mighty ULA enterprise at risk. Tesla could put Detroit snails pace innovation at risk in a decade. Just a few of the ideas I'm a fan of. Molten Salt: Why it didn't happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The true reasons for the MSR project at ORNL (Oak Ridge National Labs) being cancelled look more like this:
It was never a mainstream project. Dr. Alvin Weinberg got funding for his idea due to ORNL being the sole responder to USAF demand for a nuclear powered bomber in the 60s. They managed to do their thing kind of under the radar, I believe other nuclear guys thought they would never be successful, so when he showed he was (MSRE 5MW test reactor ran for 22000 hrs) and he asked for real money to do the whole thing, then he got shot down.
Only ORNL was researching into Thorium, all other nuclear labs were working on fast uranium/plutonium breeders. The thing about other reactors being better for Plutonium production is a very big misconception that conflates reactor grade plutonium and weapons grade plutonium. Weapons grade plutonium has always been produced by irradiating lots of U-238 with a fairly small dose of neutrons, to avoid double irradiation of U-238 atoms (leading to Pu-240). Conceivably weapons grade plutonium can even be produced by placing a blanket of U-238 around any existing reactor (catching only neutron losses). Any reactor will do. But today it's way easier to obtain highly enriched U-235 instead. Reactor grade plutonium = premature detonation or nuclear artifacts becoming duds in storage, both a huge problem. Too much Pu-240 and Pu-241. Pu-239 does simple alpha decays, while Pu-240 has spontaneous fission probability.
Plus the main fast breeder research site was in Southern California, right where Richard Nixon was from (exactly when the ORNL Thorium project was cancelled and officially buried). There is a very complete video about this on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I just complete an introductory course to nuclear technology, they say burn fuel, burnup ratio all the time. Technically is wrong, but even nuclear engineers talk about burning nuclear fuel.
Spent fuel is 96% fuel. Combined with the depleted uranium its 99% fuel. It just takes a more efficient reactor to burn it. Nuclear energy is orders of magnitude environmentally cleaner even than natural gas. The main issue is nuclear regulators decided to make it economically unfeasible to to nuclear power. Learn about it and you will find out you are wrong. https://class.coursera.org/nuc...
This is a solid fuel water cooled reactor problem. Ok, that's 95% of current reactors, but there are many alternatives. We must see all water cooled, solid fuel reactors as a legacy. LFTR Molten salt reactors running primarily on Thorium could take 3% of it's fuel as spent nuclear fuel from water cooled reactors are fission that completely (99%). There is so much nuclear energy on accumulated depleted uranium and spent nuclear fuel to produce a trillion dollars worth of electricity. Remember, it's not nuclear waste, its mostly unburned fuel, a result of extremely inefficient solid fuel reactors cooled by water.
Both projects are solid oxide fuel. One Heavy Water Thermal, one Sodium Fast reactor. Running Thorium on water / heavy water cooled reactors in solid fuel format gives marginal benefits over uranium fuel. And it's nothing new. The Shipping Port reactor ran it's last fuel load using Thorium. That was decades ago. It's mostly interesting for countries that have little uranium reserves and ample thorium ones. But it still keeps using very little of the mined nuclear materials, since fuel swells with noble gas fission products, and it can't be designed with large space to accommodate for Xe and Kr products otherwise it reduces the solid fuel already tight thermal conductivity parameters. There is a well publicized test running in Halden, Sweden, 10% reactor grade Plutonium + 90% Thorium in a Heavy Water test reactor. They are certifying that new kind of fuel. It's well publicized what they are doing, but the exact performance goals aren't (you need to enter the cost sharing deal to get the full detailed specs). Just to certify new solid fuel takes 5 years testing. Hopefully by then the DMSR project will be in fairly advanced stage. The simplest molten salt idea is a reactor that can run for 30 years essentially non stop, using 80% less Uranium than a solid fuel reactor, without the fast reactor issues (fast neutrons degrade materials inside the reactor much faster than thermal reactors).
It's not a reason not to build them. I would live at the border fence of an AP1000/ESBWR/new CANDU site without issue. The real concert is Gen II reactors on areas with serious tectonic activity. Even tornadoes / hurricanes are not an issue for old reactors. But Westinghouse / GE / Toshiba / Hitachi are investing zero on molten salt reactors, with GE / Hitachi insisting on the S-PRISM concept with it's big issue on sodium coolant fires. Huge conflict of interest between the current solid fuel reactor business model and future reactors that would have zero fuel fabrication revenue.
Chernobyl had the exact same effect of a very large dirty bomb. Probably at least 10 times the dirty bomb size predicted by likely terrorist scenarios. So far it killed around 100 people and caused a few thousand cancers. Far from the scenarios of tens of thousands of deaths. Ok, so Chernobyl wasn't in Moscow or NYC, but the Green Peace alarmists managed to predict one million deaths. Until nuclear regulatory agencies accept logical arguments that radiation safety standards are way too stringent it will lead to all of those absurdities. The current radiation standards essentially consider living in Denver, SLC, in front of a Monazite beach too be an unacceptable risk to life.
India is decades away. Perhaps China might make it happen before 2030. A big part of China and India's effort is an academic / jobs program. I'm not saying they are incompetent, but they are not results focused. I'm hoping to seeing the first molten salt reactor circa 2025, in commercial operation. For now I'm going out on a limb, but a few years we'll know the credibility of that project with more certainty. I'm talking about Terrestrial Energy Inc of Canada, Dr. David LeBlanc brainchild. His molten salt presentations are the most end goal oriented ones, focusing very clearly on getting to the market instead of selling an optimal idea. Giving up many optional features for minimizing certification issues to the greatest extent possible. Focusing on the minimum design that will be usable with an order of magnitude better fuel burnup, safety, simplicity and cost than typical large water cooled reactors. The full LFTR design is a great idea, filled with design challenges and regulatory issues along the way. Dr LeBlanc design is derived from the ORNL DMSR. LFTR design as advocated by FLiBe energy is on the other end of the spectrum.
It has something to do with public negative perception about nuclear power, but it isn't the real driving force. The reason the NRC has become itself anti nuclear is far more related to the millions US politicians gets from fossil fuel lobbies instead. Too many presidents have appointed people to the NRC that are committed to making nuclear power as expensive as possible. Plus it's not like the FAA is much better, I heard a saying that summarizes the FAA pretty darn well "We're not happy until you're unhappy", the NRC is far worse.
I'm not an anymous coward hiding his name to take pot shots at things he doesn't like and doesn't understand. There are at least a dozen serious molten salt / molten metal nuclear projects worldwide. If you don't know them, then I have zero reason to write another sentence. You show not even a hint of knowing about them, goodbye.
Get rid of all subsidies and solar is in big trouble. Easy to talk about competition while you are enjoying huge subsidies. Yes, other forms of electricity gets subsidies too. I would be fine with removing every single subsidy from just coal and letting the market take its course. You would see a surge in nuclear power projects, because solar isn't baseload and baseload is here to stay.
So you hate nuclear power and have no interest in properly learning about it, instead taking your knowledge from Hollywood sensationalization of radioactivity and nuclear power. We find those by the bucket nowadays. The difference is most don't dare speak, because the aren't sure. Those that actually think they got it right are the most dangerous. Here is a source for serious information on nuclear power, without any BS: https://class.coursera.org/nuc...
Still insisting on the same basic concept that gave us reactors that use just 0,5% to 1% of mined uranium and have the concept of a meltdown. Even the most advanced water cooled reactor today still does that. B&W mPower reactor is just a smalled version of the same. When will this people learn ? We need a breeder / near breeder reactor that is able to use bare minimum 10% of uranium mined, or much more. liquid fuel instead of solid fuel, with the fuel molten in the coolant means meltdowns are impossible and heavy neutron poisons (noble gas fission products) can be collected from the reactor quickly, resulting in minimal neutron losses, the lower the neutron losses are, the better the fuel burnup can be (increasing that 0,5% to 1% utilization to much higher levels), plus the less neutron poisons are kept in the reactor, the less excess reactivity exists on the reactor, minimizing the risk of prompt neutron criticality scenarios. That's why I don't support any reactor except for molten salt or molten metal coolant designs. The AP1000 and similar Gen III+ are plenty safe enough for my taste, but if you honestly discuss even the most remote risks a gen iii+ reactor with non technical people, they will still be against nuclear power. Plus water cooled reactors demand lots of expensive active safety systems like hydrogen+oxygen recombinants, pressurizer, emergency spray, emergency water injection, the list goes on, making the reactor far more expensive than necessary. Perhaps with the mPower being a much lower power reactor, it can do away without some of those systems, but they can't all be eliminated unless the reactor has low pressure operation (only possible with molten salt or molten metal cores).
I live in Brazil. Brazil is a democracy, since we can vote, and we can criticize anybody without fear of being arrested or singled out by the govt. Perhaps you should understand the basic pillars of a true democracy:
1 - Freedom of the press
2 - Freedom of peaceful assembly
3 - Freedom of expression
4 - Right to private property
5 - Right to a fair trial Many countries are controlled by a fairly small political elite, but are subject to the 5 above rules, even though the political elite doesn't quite do what the people want. It's still a democracy. Questionably even Brazil, USA, and some european countries are in that category.
But in the countries I singled out, all of those liberties are only real as long as you don't offend the political powers. Criticize the Chinese or Russian govt to hashly and you will be arrested, subject to a rigged trial and thrown in filthy prisons to rot away.
It's very useful to study the thinkings and sayings of the French and American revolutions. If you haven't studied both you can't call yourself a properly educated man. My Brazil teaches the French revolution but ignores the wealth of knowledge from the American one. Too capitalist for the taste of the ones in control of our education system.
Perhaps China could become a democracy and stay a single country. I hope it could. But for as long as it's a dictatorship, I have less than zero respect for that country. Same for Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many other de facto dictatorships like Russia,Venezuela,Equador. Oh the curse of having lots of Oil.
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Decommissioning costs are high because anything even with fairly low radioactivity must be disposed as if it were profoundly dangerous.
If we adopt radiation standards that consider living in Denver and SLC safe, nuclear site decommissioning costs would drop perhaps by 40%.
Molten salt does not require on site re processing. It requires on site reprocessing to achieve ultra high burnups (99%+).
The DMSR (denatured molten salt reactor) single fluid design achieves 6x better burnup without requiring reprocessing (keeping everything but noble gas fission products inside until reactor end of life in 30 yrs, but allow for infrequent reprocessing to increase burnup, the sole reason for reprocessing it to remove neutron poisons from the core).
Pyro reprocessing is a simple, fairly cheap system.
It's essentially a fractional distillation process. Heavy (fuel) and light (moderator) elements go back into the reactor and mid weight elements (fission products) get removed. Quite different than Uranium, Plutonium oriented reprocessing for reactors that require new fuel to be of very specific chemical makeup. MSR's and IFR's keep all actinides inside until fissioned.
In honesty, Hydro is much like Nuclear. Including or excluding Chernobyl (nuclear) and including or excluding Banqiao Dam accident. Makes a huge difference in the numbers.
Except Chernobyl is credited for killing 100 people (with top credible predictions of 5000-6000 total deaths incluing future deaths from cancer).
The Banqiao hydro accident in china killed 170k people.
But while nuclear go for years without a single death, hydro typically kills around a hundred yearly due to drowing and other causes from hydro dam bursting causing flooding. Hydro is safe, as long as you don't live downstream to a dam.
But you can live a mile from a nuclear power plant and you are still orders of magnitude at higher risk of dying from a car crash. Like a thousand times.
Breeding U-233 from Th-232 is simple. So burning U-233 = the core of the Th-232 reactor. Read up on it.
The critical difficulty was operating a molten salt reactor on U-233. And it worked.
Shill ?
How would the US Army / Air Force rather power a base in the middle of nowhere ?
Trucking diesel fuel for 1000 miles (hundreds of truckloads of fuel / year) or a single truckload of nuclear fuel for a decade ?
While the trillion tons of CO2 we put in the atmosphere is still haunting us. At least radioactivity decays away. As well as the millions of tons of lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium from burning coal.
Being anti nuclear today = being pro coal. As simple as that. Only those in favor of all non fossil fuels are really anti coal and anti natural gas.
Damn right. The main reason Nuclear isn't truly strong in USA, Germany or the UK is they have lots of coal and/or natural gas. The correlation is extremely strong.
But even then, there are dozens of countries producing over 1/3 of their electricity from nuclear. Many use reactors to both produce electricity and provide district heating.
For every person that died from radiation, 10000 died from coal and 100 died from hydro dam bursting.
Get your numbers straight.
Coal alone kills 200k / yr worldwide, 13k / yr in USA.
Hydro killed 170k in a single incident in China in the 70s. It kills hundreds yearly even disregarding that horrible event in China.
Nuclear is the safest energy source in the world. Look up the numbers.
Looking only at civilian nuclear accidents (including mining, transportation, processing, fuel preparation plus reactors), nuclear power have killed less than 1000 people ever, worldwide.
Thorium molten salt reactors were tested in the 60s/70s, achieving 22000 hrs of trouble free operation. Got cancelled by Richard Nixon because the lab researching it wasn't from his home area (south Cali). Plus they didn't wanted advanced nuclear power to succeed, since inefficient nuclear power was enough of a threat to mighty american coal and Oil in general. Most great research projects outside of wartime are meant to take a long time. Employ a lot of people, give profits to pork&barrel govt suppliers. Much like Fusion research. God forbid ORNL / Dr. Alvin Weinberg managed to run a test reactor program with less than 1% of the total nuclear research budget, would put all other nuclear research labs in a serious existential risk. Yes, the project was a victim of its own success.
Much like SpaceX and Tesla today. SpaceX is putting the mighty ULA enterprise at risk. Tesla could put Detroit snails pace innovation at risk in a decade.
Just a few of the ideas I'm a fan of.
Molten Salt: Why it didn't happen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The true reasons for the MSR project at ORNL (Oak Ridge National Labs) being cancelled look more like this:
It was never a mainstream project. Dr. Alvin Weinberg got funding for his idea due to ORNL being the sole responder to USAF demand for a nuclear powered bomber in the 60s. They managed to do their thing kind of under the radar, I believe other nuclear guys thought they would never be successful, so when he showed he was (MSRE 5MW test reactor ran for 22000 hrs) and he asked for real money to do the whole thing, then he got shot down.
Only ORNL was researching into Thorium, all other nuclear labs were working on fast uranium/plutonium breeders.
The thing about other reactors being better for Plutonium production is a very big misconception that conflates reactor grade plutonium and weapons grade plutonium. Weapons grade plutonium has always been produced by irradiating lots of U-238 with a fairly small dose of neutrons, to avoid double irradiation of U-238 atoms (leading to Pu-240). Conceivably weapons grade plutonium can even be produced by placing a blanket of U-238 around any existing reactor (catching only neutron losses). Any reactor will do. But today it's way easier to obtain highly enriched U-235 instead. Reactor grade plutonium = premature detonation or nuclear artifacts becoming duds in storage, both a huge problem. Too much Pu-240 and Pu-241. Pu-239 does simple alpha decays, while Pu-240 has spontaneous fission probability.
Plus the main fast breeder research site was in Southern California, right where Richard Nixon was from (exactly when the ORNL Thorium project was cancelled and officially buried). There is a very complete video about this on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I just complete an introductory course to nuclear technology, they say burn fuel, burnup ratio all the time. Technically is wrong, but even nuclear engineers talk about burning nuclear fuel.
Spent fuel is 96% fuel. Combined with the depleted uranium its 99% fuel. It just takes a more efficient reactor to burn it.
Nuclear energy is orders of magnitude environmentally cleaner even than natural gas.
The main issue is nuclear regulators decided to make it economically unfeasible to to nuclear power.
Learn about it and you will find out you are wrong.
https://class.coursera.org/nuc...
This is a solid fuel water cooled reactor problem. Ok, that's 95% of current reactors, but there are many alternatives.
We must see all water cooled, solid fuel reactors as a legacy.
LFTR Molten salt reactors running primarily on Thorium could take 3% of it's fuel as spent nuclear fuel from water cooled reactors are fission that completely (99%). There is so much nuclear energy on accumulated depleted uranium and spent nuclear fuel to produce a trillion dollars worth of electricity.
Remember, it's not nuclear waste, its mostly unburned fuel, a result of extremely inefficient solid fuel reactors cooled by water.
Both projects are solid oxide fuel. One Heavy Water Thermal, one Sodium Fast reactor.
Running Thorium on water / heavy water cooled reactors in solid fuel format gives marginal benefits over uranium fuel. And it's nothing new. The Shipping Port reactor ran it's last fuel load using Thorium. That was decades ago.
It's mostly interesting for countries that have little uranium reserves and ample thorium ones.
But it still keeps using very little of the mined nuclear materials, since fuel swells with noble gas fission products, and it can't be designed with large space to accommodate for Xe and Kr products otherwise it reduces the solid fuel already tight thermal conductivity parameters.
There is a well publicized test running in Halden, Sweden, 10% reactor grade Plutonium + 90% Thorium in a Heavy Water test reactor. They are certifying that new kind of fuel. It's well publicized what they are doing, but the exact performance goals aren't (you need to enter the cost sharing deal to get the full detailed specs).
Just to certify new solid fuel takes 5 years testing. Hopefully by then the DMSR project will be in fairly advanced stage.
The simplest molten salt idea is a reactor that can run for 30 years essentially non stop, using 80% less Uranium than a solid fuel reactor, without the fast reactor issues (fast neutrons degrade materials inside the reactor much faster than thermal reactors).
It's not a reason not to build them. I would live at the border fence of an AP1000/ESBWR/new CANDU site without issue.
The real concert is Gen II reactors on areas with serious tectonic activity. Even tornadoes / hurricanes are not an issue for old reactors.
But Westinghouse / GE / Toshiba / Hitachi are investing zero on molten salt reactors, with GE / Hitachi insisting on the S-PRISM concept with it's big issue on sodium coolant fires.
Huge conflict of interest between the current solid fuel reactor business model and future reactors that would have zero fuel fabrication revenue.
India has been working on thorium since the 1970s. Their Thorium program looks like Fusion research.
Chernobyl had the exact same effect of a very large dirty bomb. Probably at least 10 times the dirty bomb size predicted by likely terrorist scenarios. So far it killed around 100 people and caused a few thousand cancers.
Far from the scenarios of tens of thousands of deaths. Ok, so Chernobyl wasn't in Moscow or NYC, but the Green Peace alarmists managed to predict one million deaths.
Until nuclear regulatory agencies accept logical arguments that radiation safety standards are way too stringent it will lead to all of those absurdities.
The current radiation standards essentially consider living in Denver, SLC, in front of a Monazite beach too be an unacceptable risk to life.
India is decades away. Perhaps China might make it happen before 2030. A big part of China and India's effort is an academic / jobs program. I'm not saying they are incompetent, but they are not results focused. I'm hoping to seeing the first molten salt reactor circa 2025, in commercial operation. For now I'm going out on a limb, but a few years we'll know the credibility of that project with more certainty.
I'm talking about Terrestrial Energy Inc of Canada, Dr. David LeBlanc brainchild. His molten salt presentations are the most end goal oriented ones, focusing very clearly on getting to the market instead of selling an optimal idea. Giving up many optional features for minimizing certification issues to the greatest extent possible. Focusing on the minimum design that will be usable with an order of magnitude better fuel burnup, safety, simplicity and cost than typical large water cooled reactors. The full LFTR design is a great idea, filled with design challenges and regulatory issues along the way. Dr LeBlanc design is derived from the ORNL DMSR. LFTR design as advocated by FLiBe energy is on the other end of the spectrum.
It has something to do with public negative perception about nuclear power, but it isn't the real driving force. The reason the NRC has become itself anti nuclear is far more related to the millions US politicians gets from fossil fuel lobbies instead. Too many presidents have appointed people to the NRC that are committed to making nuclear power as expensive as possible. Plus it's not like the FAA is much better, I heard a saying that summarizes the FAA pretty darn well "We're not happy until you're unhappy", the NRC is far worse.
I'm not an anymous coward hiding his name to take pot shots at things he doesn't like and doesn't understand.
There are at least a dozen serious molten salt / molten metal nuclear projects worldwide.
If you don't know them, then I have zero reason to write another sentence. You show not even a hint of knowing about them, goodbye.
Get rid of all subsidies and solar is in big trouble. Easy to talk about competition while you are enjoying huge subsidies. Yes, other forms of electricity gets subsidies too. I would be fine with removing every single subsidy from just coal and letting the market take its course.
You would see a surge in nuclear power projects, because solar isn't baseload and baseload is here to stay.
So you hate nuclear power and have no interest in properly learning about it, instead taking your knowledge from Hollywood sensationalization of radioactivity and nuclear power. We find those by the bucket nowadays. The difference is most don't dare speak, because the aren't sure. Those that actually think they got it right are the most dangerous.
Here is a source for serious information on nuclear power, without any BS:
https://class.coursera.org/nuc...
Still insisting on the same basic concept that gave us reactors that use just 0,5% to 1% of mined uranium and have the concept of a meltdown.
Even the most advanced water cooled reactor today still does that.
B&W mPower reactor is just a smalled version of the same.
When will this people learn ?
We need a breeder / near breeder reactor that is able to use bare minimum 10% of uranium mined, or much more.
liquid fuel instead of solid fuel, with the fuel molten in the coolant means meltdowns are impossible and heavy neutron poisons (noble gas fission products) can be collected from the reactor quickly, resulting in minimal neutron losses, the lower the neutron losses are, the better the fuel burnup can be (increasing that 0,5% to 1% utilization to much higher levels), plus the less neutron poisons are kept in the reactor, the less excess reactivity exists on the reactor, minimizing the risk of prompt neutron criticality scenarios.
That's why I don't support any reactor except for molten salt or molten metal coolant designs.
The AP1000 and similar Gen III+ are plenty safe enough for my taste, but if you honestly discuss even the most remote risks a gen iii+ reactor with non technical people, they will still be against nuclear power. Plus water cooled reactors demand lots of expensive active safety systems like hydrogen+oxygen recombinants, pressurizer, emergency spray, emergency water injection, the list goes on, making the reactor far more expensive than necessary. Perhaps with the mPower being a much lower power reactor, it can do away without some of those systems, but they can't all be eliminated unless the reactor has low pressure operation (only possible with molten salt or molten metal cores).
I live in Brazil. Brazil is a democracy, since we can vote, and we can criticize anybody without fear of being arrested or singled out by the govt.
Perhaps you should understand the basic pillars of a true democracy:
1 - Freedom of the press
2 - Freedom of peaceful assembly
3 - Freedom of expression
4 - Right to private property
5 - Right to a fair trial
Many countries are controlled by a fairly small political elite, but are subject to the 5 above rules, even though the political elite doesn't quite do what the people want. It's still a democracy. Questionably even Brazil, USA, and some european countries are in that category.
But in the countries I singled out, all of those liberties are only real as long as you don't offend the political powers. Criticize the Chinese or Russian govt to hashly and you will be arrested, subject to a rigged trial and thrown in filthy prisons to rot away.
It's very useful to study the thinkings and sayings of the French and American revolutions. If you haven't studied both you can't call yourself a properly educated man. My Brazil teaches the French revolution but ignores the wealth of knowledge from the American one. Too capitalist for the taste of the ones in control of our education system.
Perhaps China could become a democracy and stay a single country. I hope it could.
But for as long as it's a dictatorship, I have less than zero respect for that country. Same for Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many other de facto dictatorships like Russia,Venezuela,Equador. Oh the curse of having lots of Oil.