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What Hacker News says
- Here's one. A great read: https://www.amazon.com/Plentiful-Energy-technology-scientifi...
It's available online also: https://www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/PlentifulEnergy.pdf
I read it 14 years ago or so, after the Fukushima accident. I don't think the science has changed since then, or since the 90s when this project was shut down. There continue to be so much money in coal, gas, and oil and it's from there I think most of the opposition to nuclear stems from.
Apart from fast reactors, there's also the traditional reactors and storage of spent fuel. Finland's close to opening their process facility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
- It's a 1MW reactor. That's a thousand times smaller than conventional nuclear reactors. It doesn't seem unlikely that it could be passively cooled.
For the rest, a great source is the book Plentiful Energy, by the chief scientists of another small fast-reactor project at Argonne. For that reactor, the fuel is a mix of plutonium isotopes which can't be used for bombs and are much more difficult to purify than natural uranium ore. The waste goes back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries.
http://www.amazon.com/Plentiful-Energy-technology-scientific...
- Argonne National Laboratory tested a cohabited breeder called the Integral Fast Reactor. The reprocessing would happen on-site, using a process similar to electrolysis which never separates plutonium from the other transuranics. The material would never be in a form usable for bombs, and making it bomb-ready would be more difficult than just enriching uranium. But the fast neutrons in the reactor would easily burn up those transuranics.
What's more, they had very good passive safety. Fukushima had problems because it lost external power. Argonne shut off the power to their test reactor, and it just quietly shut down with no damage, simply due to the physics of the fuel and coolant.
They had it just shy of production ready when Clinton shut it down in 1994. But GE-Hitachi has a design derived from it, called the PRISM. The NRC has approved it for a demonstration reactor, and they're currently trying to sell it to the U.K. to destroy their plutonium stockpile.
Since the reactor can use U238, it's about a hundred times as efficient with uranium. Combining that with seawater extraction gives us fuel for a very long time: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/01/nuclear-options/
A pretty good book on all this was just put online for free, here: http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/prescription-for-the-planet...
There's also a new book by two lead researchers from the Argonne project, called Plentiful Energy, by Till and Chang. That one goes into quite a bit more technical detail. Another good online source is here: http://bravenewclimate.com/integral-fast-reactor-ifr-nuclear...
- One exception is the Integral Fast Reactor, which was near production-ready when Clinton cancelled the program in 1994. GE-Hitachi has a similar design called the PRISM which has been approved by the NRC for a full-scale demo reactor. GE is trying to sell it to the UK to burn up their plutonium stockpiles.
In the IFR tests at Argonne, researchers cut off the cooling system entirely, and the reactor just quietly shut down, with no damage.
A great new book on the IFR is Plentiful Energy by Till and Chang, two senior scientists at the Argonne project.
