Paul FlynnVerified account

But that's partly because early facilities weren't designed with decommissioning in mind: now they are

There's reactor designs (molten-salt reactors, specifically) which can consume spent nuclear fuel and are passively safe, too.

It never ceases to annoy me that development of those designs was dropped because they can't be used to make nuclear bombs as easily.

I'm surprised the Gov aren't supporting more R&D on MSR designs, especially as we have some UK companies with interesting designs.

Maybe because there isn't any evidence that they wud in fact be more cost effective, still just vapourware

The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment and Britain's own experiments in the 1970s proved otherwise. The issues are mostly political.

Not convinced, if molten salt reactors they wud have been developed by now. In other words still vapourware

Vaporware implies something inviable that never existed. MSRs are neither: https://www.ornl.gov/blog/ornl-review/time-warp-molten-salt-reactor-experiment-alvin-weinberg-s-magnum-opus … http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/2014/11/13/the-uks-forgotten-molten-salt-reactor-programme/ …

The Magnox and pressurized-water designs are a disaster. Military technology for making bombs crudely ported over to civilian power.

Particularly galling: we've had reactor designs which make orders of magnitude less waste for decades. But you can't use those to make bombs

Dual-fluid (molten salt fuel loop, lead-bismuth coolant loop) reactors can, in fact, consume dangerous nuclear waste while generating power.

Alas, instead the focus is on pressurized-water designs which aren't passively safe and are phenomenally expensive. The government is an ass

If you're right that "you can make bombs with it" is a positive rather than a negative, why didn't we get fast breeders 30 years ago?

*Can't make nuclear bombs with it. And we almost did. UK and US had fast molten-salt designs in the works in tge '70s - then cancelled them

*Can. You were saying they got cancelled because they couldn't be used to make bombs, weren't you? But the fear with fast breeders has...

...always been that they *can* be used to make bombs, and this is a problem because terrorists. That was my understanding?