4 ms·

This is brilliantly interesting. However, I lack a taxonomy for understanding nuclear power. What’s outdated, what’s just old, what’s new and promising, what’s

• philipkglass 3y ago
  The vast majority of new reactors built each year are still light water reactors using low enriched uranium fuel. There's a smaller but notable fleet of power reactors of the pressurized heavy water type. Everything else is a rounding error. My newest nuclear engineering textbook is from 1983 [1] and it's still fine because in the last 40 years very little has changed at a high level. In online discussions you'll see a lot of excitement about other kinds of reactors (molten salt reactors, gas cooled, metal cooled, pebble bed, breeders, etc.) and this older textbook mentions all those kinds of reactors too. But if you want to understand what the nuclear industry actually builds and operates, a used textbook from the 1980s or later will be fine. [1] Introduction to Nuclear Engineering 2nd Edition by John LaMarsh.