A nuclear truth: We already know how to make virtually limitless, clean, and extremely safe nuclear energy. What’s missing is the political will to do so.

Now that Texas has experienced the joys of primitive energy, perhaps some are willing to investigate the truth about nuclear energy. The Tokaimura nuclear accident in 1999 was the result of pouring too much fuel into a tank of water and creating an undesired nuclear reactor.

But that process — pouring fuel into water to create power, except in controlled amounts — is how simple a perfect reactor can and should be. If our electricity grid were built on perfect reactors, we would never have power outages, our electricity would be cheap, and we could achieve our non–fossil fuel goals much more quickly.

Conventional nuclear reactors not only are ridiculously expensive, but also pose an existential threat to our country as potential weapons of mass annihilation. Should an enemy ever bomb our current reactors, they will spew thousands of nuclear weapons' worth of highly radioactive material across huge swaths of the countryside.

However, it is possible to convert these horrible reactors into perfect reactors. Perfect reactors can be built for a fraction of conventional reactor costs, produce electricity for nearly ten times less, and never be used as a weapon against the population.

All that is required is for enough citizens to speak up and support investigating the truth about nuclear energy. From the very beginning of the nuclear age, it has been known that the ultimate reactor was as simple as a tank of high-melting temperature material salted with nuclear fuel.

This material would generate heat simply by virtue of its composition, and electricity would be produced by passing it through a heat exchanger. This design can produce tens of times more energy than conventional plants. It requires nothing more than a tank, a pump, and a heat exchanger, and any disruption will result in the material solidifying

There are more nuclear scientists alive today than have ever lived, yet their progress per man-year spent has slowed down to almost nothing. The WW II nuclear gold vein is tapped out.

The ideal nuclear power source is mixing matter with anti-matter, but nobody has figured out how to make cheap anti-matter yet. Maybe matter can be efficiently disassembled into free energy some other way. Eventually some young nerdy Arthur will pull the sword from the rock, and will be made king.

The US Navy has been operating its own nuclear reactors since 1958 and currently has more than 200 online. Over those 60 years the Navy has had ZERO serious accidents despite the fact that all 200+ of its reactors are in mobile, seagoing platforms and a number of them even operate for extended periods of time UNDERWATER.

The US Bureau of Mines says that there were five coal miners killed in mining accidents the US in 2020. That's the lowest number ever recorded but it's still five people more than have been killed by nuclear reactor accidents in America in all of history. So even with OSHA and the advanced state of mine safety in the US, coal-fired power plants are responsible for more deaths than nuclear power plants.

Also, "renewable" sources all are inherently unstable, which makes them unsuitable for powering the entire power distribution grid. So a certain portion of the "green" generating capacity (somewhere around 80%) must be matched with output from more stable "conventional" sources (hydroelectric and fossil fuels) and kept in a condition known as Spinning Reserve. In other words, in order to run 10 megawatts of wind/solar on a power grid, it has to also have 8 MW of "conventional" power on stand-by and ready to take up green's slack when the sun goes behind a cloud or the wind stops blowing.

One of the reasons Texas was hit so hard by this ice storm is that they entrusted too much of their grid to wind and didn't have the spinning reserve capacity to stem the loss when all their windmills iced up. It is irrational to continue to spend from a limited coffer and become more dependent on "renewable" power sources that can never power the entire grid (without backup from conventional sources) when nuclear already has proved itself the safest, cleanest and most powerful source of electricity available.

I don’t know. Ask the people of Fukushima if that was such a great idea. 80 kilometers from one of the largest cities on the planet. Nice going GE and Tepco.

Nice job. Enjoy your Pacific seafood. Now it’s been polluting the Pacific ocean for 10 years.

Coming soon to a town near you.

BTW, do you know where your spent fuel rods are? I’ll give you a clue. They’re sitting right on top of the aging reactors.

They only have a 250,000 year half life, genius.

There are no prototype reactors as yet except maybe in China.

Yep... The Red Chinese have nothing holding them back from development in any direction. They are also certainly working on development of, if not already operating, TWRs.

From the linked article: "In September 2015 TerraPower and China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly develop a TWR. TerraPower planned to build a 600 MWe demonstration Plant, the TWR-P, by 2018–2022 followed by larger commercial plants of 1150 MWe in the late 2020s.[15] However, in January 2019 it was announced that the project had been abandoned due to technology transfer limitations placed by the Trump administration."

Terra Power is bill gates venture. Its not really a gen 4 lftr company. Its closer to a gen 3 design.

The lftr designs date from the 1960’s and were done by Alvin Weinberg—head of oak ridge labratories at the time. They were moth balled along with the the working reactors in the 1979’s and rediscovered again by a nasa scientist named sorenson. He was looking for a nuclear design that could weather the hazards of space. Light water reactors won’t do that. lftr reactors will. lftr reactors won’t explode in space. So they are the correct design for mar or lunar expeditions. In order to publicize his finding —Sorenson put the designs online about 2005. In about 2010 the Chinese downloaded the old designs and started their own lftr program. I thik they have dedicated about 600 million to the program. Its something entirely seperate from their work with bill gates. sorenson currently has a company named flybe that is working with the DOE labs to develop an lftr reactor. there are three or four other companies doing the same thing.

Interesting...And I found this to be interesting: "In October 2020, the company [TerraPower] was chosen by the United States Department of Energy as a recipient of a matching grant totaling between $400 million and $4 billion over the next 5 to 7 years for the cost of building a demonstration reactor of their 'Natrium' design."--Wiki

As far as I can discern from surfing the net, this program is still in progress. Apparently, the Chinese were not a critical component of Gates's plans. I'm sure he will get plenty of support from the new administration.

As you are probably aware, the DOE is funding a demonstration program for a number of advanced reactors.

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