The Experimental Breeder Reactor 2 on what is now the Idaho National Lab was the first reactor to demonstrate full passive safety in 2 related tests in 1986. In the first, they turned off all primary pumps and did not insert the control rods. The reactor shut itself down and established natural circulation decay-heat removal. This class of event (unprotected loss of flow) would melt the core of almost any other kind of reactor. Then they did a unprotected loss of heat sink to the same result. My dissertation advisor was there, and said that it was glorious. They knew that they had finally achieved truly safe, socially acceptable nuclear energy. Less than a month later Chernobyl happened and the advanced breeder reactors with their inherent safety have still not been developed commercially.

Breeders use low-pressure coolants with very high heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and boiling points so they can go to natural circulation easily at decay heat levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...

Breeder reactors are as noted by acidburnNSA extremely safe.

And yes they're a weapons grade problem, thats the point, if we want to store nuclear "waste", which to be honest is just unused nuclear fuel. The way to do that is to make it more radioactive so that its half life is lower.

It is a tradeoff, if we wish to complain about storing unspent nuclear fuel for 10 000 years, we have to accept that we are willingly ignoring other options that can solve that problem of long term storage.

> Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?

Is there a specific insinuation here? Why do you consider this a constructive way of arguing your point whatever it may be?

Careful how you phrase that. There are lots of storage options that are viable - batteries, gravity, thermal, compressed air, etc - but none that have become major commercial products or installed on the grid at scale. Yet.

But there is no reason it should be impossible, or even outrageously difficult, to store enough offline energy to make a solar/wind grid viable. And, given modern software's ability to manage an automated pricing market from diverse sources, there's tremendous pressure to do just that.

This is why we're seeing massive active investment in storage products - not just Tesla, but many competitors. And not government funding, but rather venture capital. This is a technically feasible market worth hundreds of billions to whoever gets there firstest with mostest.

So I'm not the least bit concerned. Storage options will happen, and they will happen very quickly.

I can build a house today in the Northeastern US that's completely solar powered and off-grid. It adds about 15% to the cost to build. (2500 square foot home, 68k for panels, 18k for batteries, an extra 5k for a heat pump instead of a gas or propane heater.) The price of the panels and batteries is only going to drop.

For on-grid solar, the panels are already the cheapest form of energy available, when paired with a heat pump instead of natural gas. (When paired with using a giant resistor they cost equivalent to natural gas.)