from Hacker News

Lead-Cooled Fast Reactor Proliferation Resistance White Paper 2021

by DrNuke on 12/28/21, 3:44 PM with 69 comments

• by kleton on 12/28/21, 8:28 PM

  China has 150 new reactors planned to go online in the next 15 years. They have a variety of different experimental fission plants such as molten salt and high temperature gas (helium) in addition to reliable "traditional" third gen reactors. It's a question of political will more than engineering at this point.

• by threeseed on 12/28/21, 4:21 PM

  I am far more interested in white papers on how nuclear fission can be made significantly cheaper. Otherwise advancements in design are great but ultimately pointless.

  Solar and wind continues to get cheaper and battery technologies continue to get better e.g. solid state in the medium term. And that makes once crazy ideas like shipping power from Australia to Singapore or from Africa to Europe economically feasible.

• by baybal2 on 12/28/21, 6:15 PM

  I would say proliferation resistance is nearly completely irrelevant.

  There are hundred of weaponizable reactors in not really good places of the world. In case of the next big war, nobody will ask IAEA for permission to build the nuke.

  As some the saying goes, the genie is long out of the bottle.