Molten Salt reactors are great at recycling spent uranium and don’t really cause pollution. If anything they reduce pollution because they create less nuclear garbage.
Over here in Germany it has already shown that you can’t fully replace nuclear power with green power. What you instead get if you try to shut down all the nuclear reactors is an increase in coal fossil fuel based plants, which are far worse for the environment
So, do you want nuclear power and have us learn how to recycle nuclear waste, or do you want to abolish nuclear power and have us return to fossil fuels? These are your only two options.
Molten Salt reactors are great at recycling spent uranium and don’t really cause pollution. If anything they reduce pollution because they create less nuclear garbage.
If it was that big of a problem folks would be doing PUREX reprocessing with all nuclear fuel. Not a clean process, but reduces the overall mass problem you have with spent fuel rods. No matter what you do, you just can't burn off the fission products that last forever and ever. You can put them in a container the size of a coffee can that still emits a similar amount of radiation as a whole rod if you want, but I'm not sure I see the utility. They just take those and vitrify them to make them bigger to take advantage of the inverse square law and make them safer to handle.
As long as uranium stays cheap, neither reprocessing, breeders, or reactors that eat the plutonium they produce really makes sense. You still need a similar site to store the waste regardless. As it stands I don't think we'll see uranium being a significant part of running a reactor in the foreseeable future. (As long as you're not a nuclear weapons state that doesn't have a robust fuel enrichment program, like India).
Sounds like it will be a “modern” reactor that uses molten salt as coolant instead of water. I wonder what they’ll make the coolant loops out of: steel glows at 900 deg Freedom.
highly corrosive and pyrophoric fuels and coolants that, following irradiation, will become highly radioactive
How true is this? Because a highly radioactive and highly corrosive material that like to catch fire spontaneously - well, that just doesn't sound like a good idea, yet obviously some people are considering it. What am I missing?
If you can work it properly, molten salt reactors are MUCH safer and more efficient, because the waste heat from fission products cannot cause a problem with something cooled through convection and conduction of a molten salt. You can't really have a destructive meltdown when the coolant doesn't care if the fuel melts. The problem is, most previous attempts ended up with the reactor catching on fire. Not a dangerous fire, exactly, but generally not the outcome you're looking for.
On the waste front, neutron activation of water produces tritium at worst, which you dispose of by putting it into a bigger body of water. Neutron activation of the molten salt coolant can be more difficult to dispose of, but it's not exactly a major problem.
They aren’t just towers in the dark. These things have all sorts of sensors on them. I doubt even a submarine is going to stealthily destroy these.
The power grid has way, way more weaknesses that would be way more impactful dont require a submarine to execute. Capitalism has guaranteed we have basically zero spare parts for large transformers. A single person can easily destroy these and do more damage in a war time scenario.
Was stuck at my friend’s dad’s house, stuck on Fox News for a week while this went down.
Dad and his wife literally laid in their armchairs all week, smoking pot, watching Fox. Nothing else. And I do mean literally. They slept in their Lazy-Boys, never in bed, Fox never got turned off. Not once.
His dad was a smart man, and quite reasonable. Asked him why the biggest story on the planet, one that made Obama look bad, didn’t get a single mention on Fox. Not one. Over an entire week. Shoulder shrug.
Still can’t understand what happened there. Perfect time for Fox to go ballistic on Obama. Silence.
Currency and numeric formatting works differently by location, it looks consistent and correct for US formatting.
Personally, I think it's high time for a new global standard on this that abandons the dots and commas altogether, using new symbols so nobody can complain that it's unfair that only some people have to change. But that's... very unlikely to ever happen, for no good reason.
TIL Digit grouping style variances are even more fucked than I anticipated. International Bureau of Weights and Measures along with International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry uses spaces, but different countries use commas or dots and some use spaces and comma OR dot?
Fuck this, we should redo the whole numeric system. Burn it all down and start from scratch.
you can be assured that no matter what we choose America will legislate that whatever they're using now is defined in law by the new standard while people are free to ignore it, just like metric.
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