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Don't confuse solid fuel with traditional light water reactors. The highest temperature reactors are triso fueled helium cooled solid fuel reactors like HTTR with outlet temperatures over 1000C. Also, fast breeder reactors with solid fuel are just as sustainable as any fluid fuel breeder.

Molten salt is one of about a dozen advanced reactor techs that has huge potential.

Hard part is economics. Hazardous coolant has been a pain to maintain cheaply so far.

Also seawater uranium replenishes from erosion and plate tectonics so it will effectively never decrease in concentration, even if we pull it out at world scale.

http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/...



The successor of LWR/HWR should be a fluid-fuel reactor.

Once we setup a pebble/advanced fuel making factory, closing it will takes decades (because people may lose jobs) and the new solid-fuel factory will again pause nuclear innovation for another 100 years. The only way to continuously improve nuclear reactors is to go fluid-fuel. No engineered fuel, so no job loses. Reactor innovation is independent of fuel factory. Nuclear fuel becomes a commodity instead of engineered speciality. Example: MSRE ran U235 and U233 without any modification.

Secondly, solid fuel reactors throw away fuel along with heat exchange surfaces (clad). Fuel also undergoes crystal structure degradation along with other solid structures. Maybe there is enough fuel in the seawater, but there may not be enough places suitable for geological repositories.

Solid-fuel reactors always need excess reactivity reserve. Always needs control rods, and if someone (or a bad actor) pulls all the control rods, reactor gets supercritical. Needs highly skilled people and needs security.

For emergency shutdown of solid-fuel reactor, poison is added to coolant, not fuel. In an emergency, poison is added to the liquid-fuel, permanently destroying the fuel. Emergency can be anything, from a natural disaster to terrorist attack. Fluid-fuel reactors offer unbeatable safety features against anything.


Highest temperature fission reactors are the gas core (vapor core) and ion core reactors. They are fluid-fuel reactors, but not demonstrated. Currently solid-fuel reactors hold the record for highest temperatures.

Fusion reactor runs hotter and again fuel is in fluid state.(Fluid: Liquid, gas & plasma.). But only runs for 10-100 minutes. Demonstrated fission reactors run for thousands of hours continuously.




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