4 ms·
No, France uses light water reactors, just like the rest of the world. They also reprocess their spent fuel, but due to complicated sciency reasons you can onl
by jabl 6y ago
No, France uses light water reactors, just like the rest of the world.
They also reprocess their spent fuel, but due to complicated sciency reasons you can only do that a few times when you're burning it in thermal reactors.
France had plans to move to a closed cycle, which would improve fuel utilization by a couple of orders of magnitude, but their breeder reactor program (required for the closed cycle) has largely stalled (see Phenix, SuperPhenix, and ASTRID which was recently cancelled before it even got off the drawing board).
And no, breeder reactors per se aren't about making weapons-grade material except in the feverish dreams of Greenpeace.
- speedgoose 6y agoSuperPhénix was cool on paper but I'm actually surprised that they built it and after that it took so long to stop it. It used sodium, a lot of it, which explodes violently in contact of water. That's an issue for most people. The political pressure was huge to stop the project. The CEA wasn't even that good at manipulating sodium, they got two known major incidents in Cadarache. One quite spectacular with a huge cloud of fire. I think nuclear power is great to research and the risk is sometimes worth it, but SuperPhénix was too risky.
- jabl 6y agoThe issues with sodium are manageable, as seen in other sodium-cooled reactors like the Russian BN-XXX or the US EBR-II. Sodium has other good properties which make up for the downsides, which is why most fast reactor designs have chosen sodium has the coolant.
- RangerScience 6y agoCool, thanks for the corrections. I learned a bit about this for a single semester a decade ago, so I'm not surprised my knowledge is incomplete and warped by time.