Reply To: Competition from the Thorium reactor

[Axil]

Exelon would not buy the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) because this reactor type was too small at 600MwT. These small nuclear reactors cannot gain any commercial traction from the users of nuclear power because they are too small.

Recently, the Chinese bought four new Westinghouse Ap1000s instead of PBMRs as their baseload power producers.

The fixed overhead of a reactor in terms of licensing, inspection, and operation will run about 10 million dollars a year even if the reactor equipment only cost less than $500K.

That is the reality of the nuclear industry today. A small 5 megawatt FF reactor will need to be incased in a crash and proliferation proofed containment stature because it is “nuclear” and as such subject to proliferation abuse and must be guarded.

High energy ions can produce plutonium just as readily as neutrons using beryllium and U238!