4 ms·
The article mentions breeder reactors and Uranium seawater extraction. Which other modern designs are missing in your opinion?
by fsh 7y ago
The article mentions breeder reactors and Uranium seawater extraction. Which other modern designs are missing in your opinion?
- bcatanzaro 7y agoThorium and molten salt reactors, for example. There are other promising ideas.
- fsh 7y agoThorium reactors are breeders. Molten salt reactors share many issues related to the corrosive radioactive colant with fast breeder reactors that are discussed in the article.
- bcatanzaro 7y agoFirstly, fast breeder reactors get a small fraction of the article, which is mostly devoted to the old stuff. Secondly, there are several different kinds of breeder reactor, and I don't see that lumping them all together helps understand their scalability. A liquid sodium cooled reactor fueled with uranium has completely different properties from a molten salt reactor fueled with thorium.
- fsh 7y agoAfter 70 years of research, LWRs are still the only reactor type that has ever been anywhere near economically viable. Many other approaches, such as Thorium pebble-bed reactors and sodium-cooled fast breeders have been tried and abandoned. It is simply unrealistic that all the issues that have plagued these designs will magically disappear with new ones.