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Something about word "nuclear" is always getting some people all hyper and buggered.
The premise of the article is idiotic - that "This should stop before an arms race, atomic terrorism or even nuclear war results."
"This" being R&D of nuclear energy for peaceful and safe(r) nuclear plants and reactors. As if any of that will result in (new?) "arms race, atomic terrorism or even nuclear war."
On the contrary, the new reactors are designed to be safe from exactly the ills author describes, that previous designs and plants were susceptible to, and move from costly and un-safe LWR into multiple solutions that have nothing to do with "arms race" because they don't depend on "enriched" U-235 or Pu-239.
For example, 30 safe CANDU (Canada Deuterium Uranium) reactors are currently deployed worldwide - 19 in Canada, 4 in Korea, 18 (16-modified) in India, 2 in China, 2 in Romania, etc.
FTA: |------- ... Biden also gave nearly $2 billion to TerraPower, a nuclear energy venture founded by billionaire Bill Gates, for a similar but larger "fast" reactor that also is touted for export. Experts say this inevitably would entail far greater plutonium extraction, even though the company denies any intention to do so. The U.S. Department of Energy also has funded the American branch of Terrestrial Energy, which seeks to build exotic "molten salt" reactors that use liquid rather than solid nuclear fuel. ...
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LFT/thorium MSRs (Malten Salt Reactors) are hardly "exotic" - they burn ALL nuclear fuel, some MSR designs go back 60+ years (one went "live" at Oak Ridge NL, TN in 1965) - and newer U-Pu "fast reactors" designs depend on cheap repurposed fuel that can be "extracted" from spent nuclear rods used in now-predominant LWRs, at the same time helping solve problem of storing the accumulated "nuclear waste."
Author "instead" is pushing for vague "... new reactor types that use tiny particles of coated fuel, which can bolster resistance to both accidents and plutonium extraction" (IOW, he means tristructural isotopic coated-fuel particles / TRISO CFP, which are also safe) ... but fails to mention that they also require processed uranium in UCO or UO2 (or Pu), and that TRISO-based reactors emit l2x-15x of SNF (Spent Nuclear Fuel) per unit of energy produced than a typical LWR. This creates several problems of both pre-processing and post-processing of radioactive materials, not to mention the total cost and radiation safety outside of reactor time, which also reduces the time the fuel can be stored and/or transported.
Different designs have different immediate and lifetime cost structures, and issues of operational and storage/transport safety, emissions, etc., so may need to be balanced depending on environment. But once built (amortized) they can produce immense amount of clean cheap energy.
Some of these companies are public or planning to go public via SPACs... Few, like Oklo (NYSE:OKLO), look like "vaporware" with nothing but slick PR and gov't ties. Be careful if you want to invest in them - remember a slew of "renewable energy" companies that spectacularly went bust.
There have been R&D funded by the US and other governments (Germany, UK et al) on improving all these designs, including bipartisan in the US (see above), so the author pushing the panic button because Trump admin (just like Biden admin before him) chose to fund some R&D outside of his fav solution, using "arms race, atomic terrorism or even nuclear war" rhetoric is nonsensical and plain scaremongering, playing on people's fear of "Nukes!" like use of "depleted uranium" in armor-piercing shells.
Not cool.
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