On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 10:03 AM, Bob Cook <[email protected]> wrote:
X-Energy is a pebble bed reactor designer. > As I read about pebble bed reactors, the approach seems fundamentally more sane than current reactor designs, which appear to have low tolerances for error and catastrophic failure modes. Pebble bed reactors have few moving parts and assume high temperatures. The more complex a design, the more potential points of failure. I do not know how the NIF people thought that they could get inertial confinement fusion to work reliably by sending an enormous number of hohlraums through a high-energy laser. The approach does not sound dangerous, but it sounds like it would be hard to get everything properly tuned. And, apparently, hard to build at a small scale in order to iterate on the design. If transmutations and fission are more than a trivial component of LENR, as I suspect they are in some cases, you could get all kinds of toxic elements that build up as a result, such as arsenic. They may not have long-lived radioactivity, but lots of the byproducts would be poisonous. If this ends up being the case, there might be a way to control what elements are produced. Eric
