http://www.fastcompany.com/1660316/bill-gates-backed-nuclear-power-startup-gets-35-million bring it on..set one outside my window...
Sounds promising. gotta look more into the science of that one... This just in from our Traffic Copter: A mushroom cloud incinerated the Conneticut portion of I-95 today when a squirrel decided to try and make the distance and the car in front of him stopped short, inviting what would have typically been a job for AAA. Now we gotta call NEST and FEMA...
I have just read a bit about the physics behind it, and I say NO F****ING WAY. Do Not Want. Why ? Simply because contrary to standard nuclear reactor, that break fissile uranium into lighter and more stable elements, this reactor is actually akin to a breeder type reactor. It takes depleted uranium and transforms it into ... PLUTONIUM ! Which is way way WAY worse than anything found in other reactors, and used for making high-yield nuclear bombs. Lot of countries would loooooove to get their hands on such a reactor, no doubt. Apparently, the cooling agent planned for the reactor is liquid sodium ... Oh boy. Plutonium and liquid sodium .. bad enough on their own, don't want to see what happens when they leak ... (except on youtube ... far from me)
Thanks for pointing to nothing, nor bringing anything to the discussion. More reading only confirms the fact that this design produces and runs on Plutonium. And the coolant is liquid sodium. I will only correct myself to the extent that this design doesn't lend itself to continuous extraction of Plutonium, such as breeder reactors do, and thus isn't appealing for countries bent on producing it. I'm all for replacing coal and oil-generated electricity with nuclear, but not with designs like these. No Plutonium.
The reactor core uses depleted uranium, much like that found in certain amunitions, it has not been enriched to make plutonium nor is that a stated outcome..however if a form of plutonium was created, and seems most likely not, there are plenty of isotopes that are not fissable..... Isotopes and synthesis Main article: Isotopes of plutonium Twenty radioactive isotopes of plutonium have been characterized. The longest-lived are plutonium-244, with a half-life of 80.8 million years, plutonium-242, with a half-life of 373,300 years, and plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,110 years. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are less than 7,000 years. This element also has eight metastable states, though none are stable and all have half-lives less than one second.[6] The isotopes of plutonium range in mass number from 228 to 247. The primary decay modes of isotopes with mass numbers lower than the most stable isotope, plutonium-244, are spontaneous fission and α emission, mostly forming uranium (92 protons) and neptunium (93 protons) isotopes as decay products (neglecting the wide range of daughter nuclei created by fission processes). The primary decay mode for isotopes with mass numbers higher than plutonium-244 is β emission, mostly forming americium (95 protons) isotopes as decay products. Plutonium-241 is the parent isotope of the neptunium decay series, decaying to americium-241 via β or electron emission.[6][7]‹See Tfd› Plutonium-238 and 239 are the most-widely synthesized isotopes.[7] Plutonium-239 is synthesized via the following reaction using uranium (U) and neutrons (n) via beta decay (β−) with neptunium (Np) as an intermediate:[23] Neutrons from the fission of uranium-235 are captured by uranium-238 nuclei to form uranium-239; a beta decay converts a neutron into a proton to form Np-239 (half-life 2.36 days) and another beta decay forms plutonium-239.[24] Workers on the Tube Alloys project had predicted this reaction theoretically in 1940. Plutonium-238 is synthesized by bombarding uranium-238 with deuterons (D, the nuclei of heavy hydrogen) in the following reaction:[25] In this process, a deuteron hitting uranium-238 produces two neutrons and neptunium-238, which spontaneously decays by emitting negative beta particles to form plutonium-238. [edit] Decay heat and fission properties Plutonium isotopes undergo radioactive decay, which produces decay heat. Different isotopes produce different amounts of heat per mass. The decay heat is usually listead as watt/kilogram, or milliwatt/gram. In case of larger pieces of plutonium (e.g. a weapon pit) and inadequate heat removal the resulting self-heating may be significant. All isotopes produce weak gamma on decay.
It isn't the number of lignes that you paste that will give weight to your arguments. Instead of copy-pasting articles irrelevant to the case at hand, you should focus on that particular type of reactor. Every word of my post still stands.
only if you disregard the fuel in the reactors.....no plutonium...it would take an enrichment source and would need non-depleted uranium....
I suggest you either educate yourself or actually make a query on a search engine with that type of reactor. I have tried to push you into that direction instead of giving you the links right away, but you really seem reluctant to make that little bit of effort.
What like this.... A traveling-wave reactor, or TWR, is a kind of nuclear reactor that can convert fertile material into fissile fuel as it runs using the process of nuclear transmutation. TWRs differ from other kinds of fast-neutron and breeder reactors in their ability to, once started, reach a state whereafter they can achieve very high fuel utilization while using no enriched uranium and no reprocessing, instead burning fuel made from depleted uranium, natural uranium, thorium, spent fuel removed from light water reactors, or some combination of these materials. The name refers to the design characteristic that fission does not happen in the entire TWR core, but takes place in a fairly localized zone that advances through the core over time. there really should be a sarcasm font though.......
The process is U-238 (DU) -> Pu-239 (that "fissile fuel" it converts into). Requires a small amount of enriched uranium to start the reaction, then presumably the plutonium "wave" acts as the fuel from then on out. I would guess there is a rather small amount of plutonium present at any time, though, so it may not be feasible to use it for nuclear proliferation purposes.