Energy Department teams up with Bill Gates to move mini-nuclear plants to market

Re:Energy Department teams up with Bill Gates to move mini-n... by pfdietz on Sunday August 26, 2018 @08:49AM (#17845707)

> Nuclear plants should never fail by way of nuclear explosion. If this is a possibility it is a bad reactor design.

Fast reactors have always had this potential problem, since they require a much higher density of high enrichment material. A larger fast reactor might have a ton of plutonium in it; in an accident where fuel is melting and moving around unpredictably it's hard to prove that a prompt supercritical mass of Pu won't assemble somewhere. Edward Teller famously warned about this in 1967.

This is one advantage of MSRs as fast reactors: the fuel is already dispersed in salt, so such rearrangement is less plausible.

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Re:Energy Department teams up with Bill Gates to move mini-n... by donttrustatoms on Monday August 27, 2018 @02:05AM (#17849728)

"Fast reactors have always had this potential problem"

- Not really. Check out the dramatic experiments at EBR-II (fast reactor) demonstrating unprotected loss of coolant at full power. It shut itself down. Without damage. And started back up later that day, and operated that year, as a research reactor, with better uptime (capacity factor) than the fleet at the time.

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Re:Energy Department teams up with Bill Gates to move mini-n... by pfdietz on Monday August 27, 2018 @05:33PM (#17854761)

That just shows that in that particular accident scenario the situation would not arise.

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