Hello moon,
That's an oxymoron. Here we are, at the perfect distance from our personal universal power station - good for billions of years yet- and we can't utilize it in a beneficial manner ? Any garden plant shows us up as stupid.
I was anti-nuke for a very long time. Especially after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
I recently changed my position after learning the technical aspects of newer technology. Nuclear accidents are very dangerous, it is true. But that is because the way we were building reactors left the chance for a melt down to happen. Still, the lure of all that energy with zero emissions, in the age of the climate crisis, looms large and tempting. So tempting that many people have been working on solving the problem of utilizing nuclear energy in such a way that it is impossible for a melt-down to occur.
The problem with old tech is that it relied on pumped water for cooling. If anything happens to the cooling water coming into the reactor, then it overheats and a melt down occurs. That is a weak point in the design.
New tech nuclear does not rely on pumped water for cooling. There are several ideas, and many have been tested.
One of them places the reactor beneath the cooling water reservoir so it is gravity fed. That's a big improvement, but I still don't like that one because once the reservoir is depleted it still leaves the chance of a lack of cooling water.
Others use micro-reactors that are not large enough to cause a big meltdown. Several units can be placed far enough apart so that if any of them has a problem, it doesn't affect the others. That's better, but I'm still not convinced on that idea.
Traveling Wave technology is the one that convinced me.
First of all, it uses the spent fuel from old tech reactors. Huge plus there. Now we are solving two big problems at the same time. What to do with the spent fuel and how to have safe nukes.
What makes it safe?
It is a completely different design. The fuel is packed differently, spaced out with other materials. There is no way for all the fuel to become involved in a runaway reaction because the distance from one part of it to the rest is too great. It is like a big giant long rod. The reaction is begun at one end and essentially allowed to go into a controlled melt-down. That's what generates the heat. The melt-down is controlled because of the spacing. The reaction uses up what fuel it is allowed to have and gradually moves along the big long rod, using up what fuel it had and consuming new fuel as it gets to it. No cooling is required.
Bingo. Now we have it. That is a safe controlled nuclear reaction.
That is our answer for safe clean abundant energy.
