Re:Nuclear-powered passenger aircraft 'to transport millions'
by DanielBMarkham on Monday October 27, 2008 @07:38PM
(#345773)
Before the knee-jerk "E-gads! Flying Nukes to Kill us All!" gets out of hand, I'd like to point out that pebble reactors have been talked about as useful for transportation because of their crashability. Blow one up and you get hundreds of thousands of "pebbles" that are slightly radioactive in themselves but not enough to prevent relatively easy cleanup.
Along those same lines (low level fuel pieces assembled in a destruction-proof container), aren't various companies working on micro-reactors or "nuclear batteries"?
"The fuel is uranium of a type that isn’t worth much to a terrorist. The reactor operates with principles that shut themselves down so meltdowns and other horrors for the neighbors simply don’t exist."
I'm not saying all the bugs are worked out. But it looks like enough has changed since TMI that we could/should take an honest, open look at what we can do with nuclear now that we couldn't back then. At least to me it has.
Along those same lines (low level fuel pieces assembled in a destruction-proof container), aren't various companies working on micro-reactors or "nuclear batteries"?
http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2008/...
"The fuel is uranium of a type that isn’t worth much to a terrorist. The reactor operates with principles that shut themselves down so meltdowns and other horrors for the neighbors simply don’t exist."
I'm not saying all the bugs are worked out. But it looks like enough has changed since TMI that we could/should take an honest, open look at what we can do with nuclear now that we couldn't back then. At least to me it has.