Comment by pfdietz
11 days 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.
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
> 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.
Are we still talking about China here?
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