Okay, so even though the whole molten-salt debacle was a rust-laden flop, there is hope: pebble bed reactors!
So for all the “lol nukez are great and gen IV will solve climate change” on Slashdot 25 years ago we now have… one reactor!
On one hand, that’s more than I thought so in some ways this is good news.
I still resent all those delayists who were like “we can keep blasting with impunity because we will have awesome nuclear power really soon” because during these past 25 years the Earth has gotten really messed up and it’s gonna get way worse while we’re trying to turn the ship around.
And the news aren’t that great. Okay, yeah, the “gen IV” part of this is that it’s probably safe from meltdowns. For that reason, it’s a much better nuclear reactor than anything else in production. The extent to which our previous generations of nuclear power have been playing with the wildfires of Hades is unfathomable.
But that’s the end of the good news.
It’s still uranium-235, the same rare and expensive isotope of uranium that any other nuclear plant uses, and it can still easily be turned into bombs, and the waste situation is still beyond the aeons of annals. Current estimates are that it’ll take one million years to decay. That’s one hundred times as long as the entire holocene so far.
It uses helium as a coolant which is another rare and limited resource, although I guess I’m glad it doesn’t use water.