Monju had many things wrong with the design, it was a loop-type reactor that nobody is talking about building anymore. Also it was nowhere near adequate from a seismic perspective it is kinda shocking they were allowed to build it at all.
Water reactors have no future for the same reason nobody has built a coal plant since 1980. The steam turbine and associated heat exchangers are unacceptably large and capital intensive compared to modern fossil fuel power plants based on gas turbines. (Look at how huge the steam generators are for the PWR)
Even if the construction problems were solved for the LWR, the economics will not work, you are better off capturing the carbon from a fossil fuel gas turbine plant and pumping it underground.
For nuclear power to be competitive we have to develop closed cycle gas turbine powersets. The 1970s model was that a fast reactor would be more capital intensive than an LWR but with the CCGT advanced reactors could be possibly be competitive -- if we can develop the powerset and reactors that run at high enough temperatures (not water) to support the powerset.
Hmm, seems China, India and Indonesia are still building them at a rate of one per week or so, unfortunately. Heck, even Germany opened a new coal plant last year.
https://www.powermag.com/france-scraps-fast-nuclear-reactor-...
In addition to be bad news for fast reactors, this also means France does not see nuclear being a major factor in avoiding global warming (a nuclear powered world using burner reactors would run out of uranium very quickly, or would need to tap vast new sources at dubiously low cost.)
(Ok, the Russians are serious too about using MOX in fast reactors but they've developed an alternative to the high energy ball mill.)
The supply of uranium is vast if you consider seawater as a resource. If burner reactors can be made economical in terms of capital cost we could possible make seawater uranium work. With a breeder cycle seawater uranium would certainly be affordable, we'd wind up spending a lot more on the rest of the fuel cycle.
Seawater uranium extraction would have to be scaled up by a factor approaching a trillion if nuclear w. LWRs is going to fuel the world (to in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year), and it would only last a few thousand years.
Anyway, I don't believe France (or anyone else) has any major program to bring seawater uranium extraction to market either.
Steam explosions :|
Isn't a sodium fire suppressible by throwing powder/foam on it?
Isn't a containment building that can dump powder on a fire much cheaper than one that is able to withstand explosions?
Also there are non-flammable salts (eg. FLiBe)?
So.... what happens with solid fuel rod processing that is any different?
Well, I guess they just bury it rather than trying to consume all the fuel?
* Sodium Reactor Experiment (Leak, minor sodium explosion, decommissioned)[1]
* Monju Nuclear Power Plant (Sodium fire, never worked properly, decommissioned)[2]
There's even been a sodium fire at a solar plant, one of those big focused mirror systems.
Many of these new reactor designs are based on complex arguments that the worst-case accident doesn't require a huge, expensive secondary containment vessel capable of containing a major accident. That's a tough sell, since Chernobyl didn't have a containment vessel and Fukushima's reactors had ones that were too small. On the other hand, Three Mile Island had a big, strong containment vessel, and in that meltdown, it held, containing the problem. In all three accidents, the actual accident was worse than the design maximum credible accident.
The NRC is right to be skeptical of weak containment designs.
It's frustrating. The reactor designs that have worked reliably for long periods are very simple inside the radioactive portion of the system. Sodium reactors had leaks and fires. Pebble bed reactors had pebble jams. Helium gas-cooled reactors had leak problems. Molten salt reactors include a radioactive chemical plant. So nuclear power is stuck with water as a working fluid.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant