On 4/4/2015 7:45 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
Whatever the breeder fuel cycle: LFTR or the (seems like the Russians are going in that direction) plutonium economy; inherent passive safety features are critical. If we learned anything from Fukushima, I would argue that one of the lessons must be that reactors need to be walk away safe, being designed with in-built passive safety designed failure modes. This also argues for smaller scale units than behemoths like the MarkII design. The very big units just generate too much heat all, in a remarkably small place… too much for passive safety to be practical. I think a better reactor scale would be around 200MW, big enough to matter, but small enough to be manageable in failure mode.
Most proposed advanced reactors will operate at higher temperatures than the older designs. This both makes them more thermodynamically efficient and it allows them to be air cooled.
The safety problem isn't from the high temperature in the design use, it's from the residual radioactive components that continue to decay after the reactor shuts down. There's been assertions about Fukushima's core melt down and escaping the reactor vessel based on muon imaging. But the corium didn't escape the concrete containment under the reactor.
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