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Nuclear foolishness: Bill Gates and his sci-fi reactors

these outlandish designs are extremely unlikely to be produced commercially and offer only another nuclear distraction from the far more urgent problem presented by climate change.

More sci-fi reactors Nuclear Reaction – 26 March 2010, It certainly seems a week for crazy nuclear inventions. Yesterday we had Bill Gates and his sci-fi reactor……The realities of the baseload myth and decentralized energy production seem to have finally occurred to nuclear boffins and they’re trying to catch up with the rest of us.

Unfortunately, just because you make a nuclear reactor smaller it doesn’t mean they don’t have the same problems as their larger cousins. Sometimes the problems are even worse. Take the Russian idea of taking the reactors out of their Alfa-class nuclear submarines and plugging them into the grid. There’s just one big problem: [I]n the Soviet submarine model currently advanced by a Moscow company, the spent fuel ends up frozen along with the reactor and stored away. No engineering solution has been devised yet to decontaminate the fuel….
We can imagine mobile nuclear reactors attracting terrorists like moths to a flame. The thing is, does the nuclear industry need this right now? It’s got enough trouble trying to solve the problems it already has, what with runaway costs, mountains of nuclear waste, and endless safety problems without adding to that long list. Let’s be frank: these outlandish designs are extremely unlikely to be produced commercially and offer only another nuclear distraction from the far more urgent problem presented by climate change.

Nuclear Reaction – A Greenpeace blog about nuclear power: More sci-fi reactors | Find Your Green Ability

March 26, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear spin, nuclear technology, nuclear wastes, nuclear weapons, renewable energy