4 ms·

I'm less worried about a reactor going critical than I am the safe storage and management of the waste. Anything from providing materials for a dirty bomb to g

• eridius 11y ago
  Waste management is certainly a problem. The pebble bed reactor produces waste that, while more voluminous than traditional reactors, contains the same radioactivity, but this does mean the waste is less hazardous and simpler to handle. It's also much more difficult to re-use pebble bed reactor waste for nuclear weapons as compared to other reactors. And there are other reactors that have a closed fuel cycle, meaning their waste can be reprocessed, though the reprocessing does itself end up with some amount of nuclear waste that has to be disposed of. All that said, it's not like the waste from fossil fuel power plants is particularly safe either, it just has a different effect than nuclear waste, such as causing global warming.
• yompers888 11y ago
  For your future advantage in these discussions, please know that going critical is a prerequisite for power generation; it is the steady state in which a fission-causing neutron is given off from each fission. A sub-critical reactor requires power input because it is not giving off enough energy to sustain the chain reaction; its population of fission-causing neutrons will exponentially decay, if left alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass
  • ergothus 11y ago
    You are correct, I expressed that poorly. Instead I should say "I'm less worried about a disaster in the reactor itself..."