This thread is dedicated to discussing advanced nuclear reactor designs that could form an important component of the push towards widespread EVs.
A number of these advanced nuclear reactor designs offer huge improvements over current water-cooled reactors:
as little as 5% as much nuclear waste, safe from explosions, greatly reduced proliferation risk, higher thermodynamic efficiency.
The designs I like the best can burn our vast stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel accumulated from conventional reactor operation.
The waste from the advanced designs mostly decays within a few decades to a century, vs the 10s of thousands of years for conventional waste.
Some of the advanced reactor concepts: Fast spectrum, both Lead cooled and Helium cooled, Thorium fuel, and molten salt, either with solid or liquid fuel.
This post is about molten salt reactors, which have been in the news recently because the Chinese are building a new molten salt research reactor that will be the first to operate since the 1960s.
http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-china-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor/
A small MIT-based company Transatomic Power is pushing an upgraded version of the liquid fuel molten salt reactor operated by Alvin Weinberg at ORNL in the 1960s. Its design and benefits are well described here in the context of other approaches:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterde...tors-part-of-americas-long-termenergy-future/
Transatomic has a white paper with many more design details. It is long, so see the following link first:
http://transatomicpower.com/white_papers/TAP_White_Paper.pdf
The following web site is supportive, but it also summarizes the challenges remaining:
http://www.whatisnuclear.com/reactors/msr.html
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All nuclear reactors operate as base load generators that only adjust their output slowly, so they cannot respond to fast changes in either the load or other generation, such as wind or solar. I did not know the reason until I read the Transatomic paper. If a reactor is shut down too rapidly, Xenon, which is a neutron "poison," builds up. This prevents the reactor from restarting until the Xenon decays, which takes several days.
A number of these advanced nuclear reactor designs offer huge improvements over current water-cooled reactors:
as little as 5% as much nuclear waste, safe from explosions, greatly reduced proliferation risk, higher thermodynamic efficiency.
The designs I like the best can burn our vast stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel accumulated from conventional reactor operation.
The waste from the advanced designs mostly decays within a few decades to a century, vs the 10s of thousands of years for conventional waste.
Some of the advanced reactor concepts: Fast spectrum, both Lead cooled and Helium cooled, Thorium fuel, and molten salt, either with solid or liquid fuel.
This post is about molten salt reactors, which have been in the news recently because the Chinese are building a new molten salt research reactor that will be the first to operate since the 1960s.
http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-china-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor/
A small MIT-based company Transatomic Power is pushing an upgraded version of the liquid fuel molten salt reactor operated by Alvin Weinberg at ORNL in the 1960s. Its design and benefits are well described here in the context of other approaches:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterde...tors-part-of-americas-long-termenergy-future/
Transatomic has a white paper with many more design details. It is long, so see the following link first:
http://transatomicpower.com/white_papers/TAP_White_Paper.pdf
The following web site is supportive, but it also summarizes the challenges remaining:
http://www.whatisnuclear.com/reactors/msr.html
----------------------
All nuclear reactors operate as base load generators that only adjust their output slowly, so they cannot respond to fast changes in either the load or other generation, such as wind or solar. I did not know the reason until I read the Transatomic paper. If a reactor is shut down too rapidly, Xenon, which is a neutron "poison," builds up. This prevents the reactor from restarting until the Xenon decays, which takes several days.