A new kind of reactor, a Molten Salt Reactor, fissions 99+% of its fuel,
All of the waste is completely benign in under 350 years (83% of it is safe in 10 years!)
To run a 1 giga-watt reactor for a year, produces only 1 ton of waste, instead of 250 tons of waste from a solid-fueled reactor.
It uses coolant that is stable even at very high temperatures, and no water — no high-pressure to contain, no loss of coolant accidents, no risk of hydrogen explosions, no massive containment structure needed.
It has inherent safety (for example, the coolant won’t boil away), and passive safety (for example, the fuel drains safely to cooling tanks where no nuclear reaction is possible, even if there is no power).
And we even operated one for 5 years… Now several companies in countries around the world are designing and starting to build them.
Go read my Molten Salt Reactor site, about reactors such as Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. It is fascinating and we would like what happens when we build them.
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