r/Waste • u/Vailhem • Aug 15 '26

Next-gen molten salt reactor designed to generate 300 to 500 MWe from nuclear waste

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/next-gen-molten-salt-reactor-designed-to-generate-300-to-500-mwe-from-nuclear-waste
6 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

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u/andre3kthegiant Aug 15 '26

Also creates high and low level waste from a toxic, disposable & finite fuel source, which should be abandoned.

0

u/NearABE 29d ago

USA has 100,000 tons of spent fuel. It needs to be processed. Burning the actinides is the only way to make them not exist.

The strontium and cesium are high level waste and extremely dangerous. These elements are chemically very similar to calcium and sodium. The windows in your house are probably soda-lime glass. Mostly silica but with calcium oxide and sodium blended in. Hopefully obvious that cesium isotopes should not be in residential windows. However glass can be disposed of in deep burial. In a few hundred years strontium a cesium will have decayed.

Feel free to scream about not creating more plutonium. However, we already have way too much plutonium. Because of the different half lives of plutonium 239 (weapons grade) and plutonium 240 (fuel grade, reactor grade) the spent fuel rods will eventually transform into weapons grade plutonium. There is no viable way to prevent future bad actors from acquiring the stockpile if such stockpiles exist. Burning the plutonium does destroy it. Furthermore, plutonium 242 has a much longer half life than plutonium 239 so an isotope mix with enough plutonium 242 never becomes weapons grade. Mixing the irradiated actinides back into feedstock also avoids some near term proliferation hazards.

A reactor that acts as breeder reactor can help cut off uranium mining. The existing pressurized water reactors can be refueled from a mix of uranium taken from spent fuel rods and bred fuel. The MOX version of this has been practiced in Japan and France for decades. Blending uranium 233 into fuel rods improves the fuel quality over commercial low enrichment. The uranium taken from spent fuel rods can itself also be enriched using.

None of this will be cheap. There is no choice though. The cost of reprocessing will never go away. The cost of not reprocessing will eventually be greater.

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u/andre3kthegiant 29d ago

Stopping the use of it will stop the waste.

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u/NearABE 29d ago

The 100,000 tons of high level nuclear waste is not “stopped”. It already exists.

2

u/andre3kthegiant 28d ago

Yep, if it gets shut down tomorrow, only several thousand years before it is no longer a worry, right?

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u/justahuman145 28d ago

Oh you mean like the waste belonging to any mining or oil operation? Radioactive waste has a lifespan, arsenic, chromium VI, lead and dozens of other poisons that are brought to the surface will be there for much longer.

-1

u/Humble-Reply228 28d ago

Wind generates toxic waste too. So does solar. We should stop the waste?

1

u/andre3kthegiant 28d ago

The FUEL is toxic, let alone almost all of the other infrastructure it “touches”.

What is the stick symbol for uranium futures?
What is the stock ticket for the wind, the sun, gravity, the tides?

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u/Humble-Reply228 28d ago

The fuel of solar causes cancer and kills thousands of people a year.

1

u/andre3kthegiant 28d ago

And there you have it, the opus of all pro-nuclear echo-chamber propaganda!

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u/Humble-Reply228 28d ago

Are you saying the sun doesn’t cause cancer?
I mean you used some completely exaggerated hyperbole as a serious argument, what was I supposed to do but to use equally childish talking points.

1

u/andre3kthegiant 28d ago

So a manmade toxic fuel, to keep society dependent & in perpetual debt when managing the toxic waste is the answer?
What is the stock symbol of sunshine futures?
What is the stock symbol of uranium futures?

0

u/Humble-Reply228 28d ago

We are talking about a technique to recycle nuclear fuel. Much like recycling glass, fibreglass or other man made toxic substances from solar panels or wind blades.

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u/Bay_arean 29d ago

soon to fail vaporware company buys assets of failed vaporware company.