Re:General Fusion to build demonstration plant in UK
by gentleman11 on Friday June 18, 2021 @12:20PM
(#27551951)
The waste really only remains radioactive for a month or so? Not 10k years? Is that just because the other radioactive waste is consumed as fuel, or is that generally true of what it produces?
Re:General Fusion to build demonstration plant in UK
by AtlasBarfed on Friday June 18, 2021 @03:58PM
(#27554301)
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but one of the LFTR videos seemed to comprehensively break down the nucleotide chains, and yes the fundamental breeding ability I think helps.
IIRC people have stated that the breeding could also reprocess the bad millenial-scale waste from LWR into usable fuel or other isotopes in MSRs, although maybe not in LFTR.
If we had a decent LFTR industry, we could probably have more specialized MSRs to deal with the "legacy" waste and breeder reprocess into new fuel or other stuff.
The chemists from ORNL seemed pretty amazing. They had all the work done for separating out the byproducts for use in other applications.
LFTR would be far better. Neutrons breed new fuel, and it consumes virtually all the radioactive fuel with "waste" that rapidly becomes non-dangerous within a month.
So I would guess neutron degradation of the equipment/vessel/reactor will probably be a similar problem in both cases.