Pebble bed reactors have many unresolved problems. A pebble bed reactor was the cause that persuaded the German population to ban nuclear power from that country.
On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 12:30 PM, Eric Walker <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > >
