> That application was submitted in March 2024 and is on track for approval in December 2026
Next time you complain that waiting for a code review approval till next week is excruciatingly long, think about these turnaround times.
Also this is why we can't quickly build many reactors to ramp up electric generation for millions of new electric cars, etc.
It truly baffles me how humanity has the technology for a nuclear reactor that can actually CREATE MORE FUEL THAN IT USES and no one wants to use it.
Did we cannibalize some of our nuclear warheads, in order to get the enriched uranium?
https://wyofile.com/fate-of-natrium-nuclear-plant-may-depend...
I'm quite ambivalent about nuclear power. On the one hand it's been proven that nuclear power isn't the answer to the energy transition question (https://sppga.ubc.ca/nuclear-is-not-the-solution/) - on the other hand - it makes up waaay more of my current carbon free energy.
For southern states, or states that get a lot of solar power, they shouldn't have nukes.
For areas that have plenty of wind, they shouldn't have nukes.
For areas with lots of people, they shouldn't have nukes.
Areas of seismic activity, they shouldn't have nukes.
Research needs to be done on how to lower the cost of interconnect and installation of solar power... like billions of dollars of research rivaling nuke research.
Is this old news or are there two big celebrations recently about being allowed to build the "non-nuclear" bits of a nuclear plant?
Following nuclear news would be absolutely tragic if I didn't think it was all a pointless diversion from the real work being done. As such their lack of progress leaves me a bit more ambivalent.
Liquid sodium certainly is a choice. Very few non-experimental liquid sodium reactors out there.
any idea why the Natrium class wasn't designed to be a breeder reactor?
dont know much about the subject but this will have more or less the same runway as gasoline
> That application was submitted in March 2024 and is on track for approval in December 2026
Huh? Is this something where there's multiple incremental steps in the process, and that date is just the final approval stamp, or does it actually just take more than 1.5 years?
This is a fast reactor. That is, a reactor in which the neutrons, instead of being moderated down to thermal energies, remain at high energy.
The fission cross section for such energetic neutrons is much lower than for thermal neutrons. Therefore, there has to be a much greater density of fissionable material in the reactor core.
The lack of a moderator also means rearrangement of the core in an accident is potentially much more dangerous. If the fuel itself rearranges to become more compact, say by melting and flowing, the reactivity could increase. This is not possible in (say) a light water reactor, where such a rearrangement would reduce reactivity.
The nightmare scenario for any fast reactor, warned about by Edward Teller in 1967, is a rearrangement that causes the core to become supercritical on prompt neutrons alone (that is, on only the neutrons released promptly at the moment of fission, not on those + the delayed neutrons emitted by some fission products as they decay). A fast prompt supercritical configuration could potentially explode with great violence, greater than Chernobyl. An atomic bomb is a prompt fast supercritical system.
I will want to see how the NRC does or does not license their design, a process that has just started. I will not be surprised if their approach ends up being unlicensable in the US because safety cannot be assured by analysis under accident conditions.