3 ms·
> by the time you’re dealing with actual fuel rods you can stick in a reactor not just ore or 99.3% U235 0.7% U235 metal. It's actually possible to run a react
by Qem 2y ago
> by the time you’re dealing with actual fuel rods you can stick in a reactor not just ore or 99.3% U235 0.7% U235 metal.
It's actually possible to run a reactor on natural unenriched uranium. IIRC the first man-made reactor ever, the Chicago pile, used natural uranium. Why did we stop using natural uranium in reactors?
- Retric 2y agoRead up on CANDU, it ends up being slightly more expensive and produces more high level nuclear waste. Currently they’re enriching uranium even if the design doesn’t need to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor There’s a lot of different trade offs you can make with nuclear designs, but so far non of them have been demonstrated to actually be meaningfully cheaper.