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A comment on Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable.

Re:Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable by mikepurvis on Friday November 12, 2021 @10:31AM (#29200201)
Aren't breeder reactors mostly still on the drawing board? I get that they're very promising, but my understanding is that there remain some non-trivial issues to work out around corrosion and so on.

Anyway, I'm totally a believer in nuclear power for a greener future (yay Michael Schellenberger), but we need to keep these discussions honest: the path forward is to right now be building hundreds of copy-paste instances of existing, proven designs, not making the discussion about what might be possible with technology that's in development or not really in use at scale.

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Re:Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable by Ottolay on Friday November 12, 2021 @10:47AM (#29200449)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor

Japan and India also have them.

The problem seems to be that at least the Sodium type are more expensive to operate than traditional nuclear plants, so even though the technology has been around for a while, no countries are building very many of them.

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Re:Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable by p_l on Friday November 12, 2021 @11:17AM (#29200894)
Another is the small modular SVBR-100, which is essentially civilian version of submarine reactor that could be packed onto single rail car, and has no sodium nor fluoride involved.

The problem is that since 1995 or so there was never enough funding to go to production.

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