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Comment by bassman9000 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting none of the MSR efforts were mentioned

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/542526/china-details-next...

In all, there are 700 nuclear engineers working on the molten-salt reactor at SINAP, Xu said, a number that dwarfs other advanced-reactor research programs around the world

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/china-spending-us3-3-b...

China will spend 22 billion yuan (US$3.3 billion) on two prototype molten salt nuclear reactors.

But, of course

The magazine of the global anti-nuclear community.

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I think it would be great if one of the new nuclear technologies actually panned out and was put into large-scale deployment.

But it remains to see if that will actually happen. And that means that for now, we need to assume it might well not, and push ahead as fast as possible with renewables.

The article says China's deployment plans are being derailed by cost and popular attitudes towards nuclear. The cost of new tech in turn is mostly driven by the chicken-and-egg problem of deployment. So you have to solve deployment, which means you have to change attitudes.

And to start doing so, you develop passively-safe technologies (walk away), where, by design, Chernobils can't happen.

Chernobyl couldn't happen on today plants anyway. It was a succession of ridiculous human errors, where e.g while stress testing the reactor, they disabled the automatic recovery system. Power plants are now using computers and they wouldn't allow such human stupidity.

Thus the passive/walk away.

Three Mile Island was a much better Western design, and still shit happened, although with a fraction of the consequences. Fukishima, same.

I don't want a computer to be the failsafe. Computers fail. I want safe systems by design. Like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAI1zVH5ir8

At TMI the core suffered a partial meltdown. Downriver is Chesapeake Bay.

Lucky doesn't begin to cover what happened at TMI.

Čerenkov-Blue Screen of Death then.

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