Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[asymmetric_implosion]

I would love to know what they mean by 40X more efficient than conventional reactor designs. A conventional light water reactor is about 27% efficient (thermal to electricity). You can’t be 40 times more efficient than 27%. Mr Carnot does not approve in a thermal sense and neither does the second law of thermodynamics. I hope they mean fuel utilization i.e. burn up which would be a substantial improvement in fission systems. A high efficiency, low waste fission system is a real threat to the future of fusion. It’s hard to argue against injecting a few neutrons to start an easily sustained chain of reaction. Well, nothing is free so time will tell what the real costs (waste, insurance, regulation) really are.

I’ve seen similar systems based upon thorium instead of uranium. If the reactor would burn thorium that would also be a game changer as there is ~100X as much thorium as uranium. Waste is a bit of a problem but the big problems of nuclear waster remediation is the heavy actinides. Thorium cycles are far less likely to produce plutonium which is reason that we don’t reprocess nuclear fuel. “We can’t take the risk that plutonium gets diverted and turned into bombs,” says the gov’t.