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Comment by curtis3389

3 months ago

Some of China's new reactors are pebble-bed reactors, which I just think are super-cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor

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curtis3389

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pfdietz  3 months ago

A problem with pebble-bed reactors is the cost of waste disposal.

Unlike in traditional LWRs, the fuel is integrated with a solid moderator. All that graphite goes along with the spent fuel. The volume of the spent fuel is therefore much larger than the volume of spent fuel from a LWR. Storage casks will be proportionally more expensive.

TRISO fuel is also more expensive to manufacture than traditional LWR fuel.

  • credit_guy  3 months ago

    Waste disposal is an imaginary problem. A country like China (or the US) produces much more waste from nuclear weapons production than from running the civilian reactors. Why? Because in order to produce weapons grade plutonium you run a uranium reactor for a very low burnup rate. In the US the disposal of the military waste is done at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [1]. The fact that we don't put there the civilian waste is just a matter of lack of political will. I doubt that China has this type of problems.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant

    • pfdietz  3 months ago

      > Waste disposal is an imaginary problem.

      Ah, so the money a utility spends on its spent fuel is just imaginary? It's not actually being spent? And if more is spent (as TRISO fuel would require) that's all financial figments too? What one learns.

      12 replies →

glitchcrab  3 months ago

TIL about pebble-bed reactors - they're pretty cool! Obviously not without their trade offs, but they nullify a lot of the issues with PWRs.

iso8859-1  3 months ago

What I love about them is that they require a lot of investment, and investment means jobs. The decommissioning of the AVR in Jülich is estimated to cost 2.5 billion euros. That's a lot of jobs! It even translates to American jobs, since the relevant authorities (now public, of course) is planning to export the nuclear waste to USA.[0] It's a win-win!

[0]: https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/vorab/juelich-entsorgung-radi...

  • mcculley  3 months ago

    But if it required less investment, wouldn’t that free up cash for other investments and jobs? I don’t understand why projects which require more labor would be desirable.