Viva Christo Rey!
when i was shopping earlier i saw a product where, instead of there being a price tag, there was a qr code. and they wanted you to scan it to get the price. i wonder what it would feel like to be a wolf and to full force bite onto something's throat. your hunger satiated and your thirst quenched. your enemy defeated. in one swift follow-through.
This is revolutionary. Never again will we have a Chernobyl disaster or a Fukushima tragedy where old people literally sacrifice their remaining life in order to take care of the reactor. Every single one needs to adapt to this immediately
This is in fact exactly what I do for a living! I agree that it is an incredible development BUT I'd like to politely point out that the technology that enables these safer reactors is FAR from new. China is the first to push it to a full-scale reactor, but they are not the only people on the cusp of being able to use it commercially.
The US and UK began work on "TRISO fuels" in the 1960s. They were more or less a cool but impractical idea until about 2002 when the US DOE decided to start funding more research on some serious improvements. For the past 22 years there has been intensive work by dozens of people in industry and government in the US alone. At least two companies in the US are already working in concert with national labs to bring this tech to a final product.
Each pebble in that reactor bed is actually thousands of tiny spheres. Every sphere is basically a gobstopper; there's a bit of uranium in the middle, and then there are a very specific series of layers deposited that are designed to contain the fission products even under EXTREME circumstances.
One of the cool things about these is that the pellets don't need the same huge containment tech that traditional reactors had to be built around, so you can make much smaller / more modular reactors that are just as safe (if not safer!).
Here's an easy read about the technology and its history / future plans: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/triso-particles-most-robust-nuclear-fuel-earth
Here's a scientific paper that gives a good overview if you'd like something more technical: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780128197257000799?via%3Dihub
NUCLEAR SCIENCE POST
h-o-r-n-g-r-y
