Triso Particles: The Most Robust Nuclear Fuel on Earth | Hacker News Reader

Triso Particles: The Most Robust Nuclear Fuel on Earth

energy.gov

9 pointstwsttest7 comments

Safe up to 1800C, but Chernobyl reached 1600-2600C during meltdown!?

It’s not gonna cause the kind of runaway effect that allowed the Chernobyl reactor to get that hot, from what I can tell.

It is for use in reactors cooled with gas, so there is nothing to boil up and explode. And higher temperatures allow for smaller and more efficient reactors.

Smaller also means cheaper.

Yeah, but high temperatures mean that if there is a problem, all these super secure grains will burst/melt/rupture doesnt it?

High temperatures does not mean high pressures, so there is nothing to disperse the nuclear material outside reactor.

There wont be steam explosion (which is what Chernobyl incident boils down to)

I am not even taking into account that Chernobyl depended on engineering to not blow up, but gas reactor produces less energy if fuel becomes hotter due to the physics.

That's all fine, but then what's the point?

Triso is safer because we wrap the fuel, only the wrappers will melt/fracture at the temperatures we know may occur at the exact time we need them not to melt/fracture. So we might as well not bother right?

The point is to be able to have way less exclusion radius, not 10 km but 500m, as nothing will fly out of there.

Chernobyl occured because of graphite/fuel configuration went wrong. In this fuel it just cannot go wrong as it never changes.

As for temperature being too hot, pebble reactors have a so called melt-plug, which will melt at temperatures much lower than would be threaten the pebbles

Once the plug melts, pebbles fall down via gravity into lower part of reactor where they are dispersed in a way that stops energy generation and they can be cooled by natural convection.

Walkaway-safe is huge deal. You can't overheat this reactor even if you set out to do so.

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