Another Sodium Cooled Fast Nuclear Reactor Licensed in Russia.

[NNadir]

3. Perhaps those words are far too strong, particularly because the Russians have long successful experience with sodium.

I just really, really, really prefer other metals. I have been discussing with my son a liquid metal coolant that to my knowledge, no one has ever suggested, but should. (I very seldom think of something the first time without finding out that someone has thought extensively about the same idea well before I did.) Japan and France both had huge difficulties with sodium cooled reactors; their efforts were failures.

I did say that the worst nuclear reactor is better than the best fossil fuel plant, which is true. I would include in this description the RBMK reactor that Chernobyl represented, and which was very similar to reactors at the US Hanford weapons plant. Despite the fetish about Chernobyl, it certainly didn't kill as many people as will die in the next five or six hours from fossil fuel waste, aka air pollution. It is an intellectual and moral problem that people obsess about Chernobyl but don't give a shit about the 19,000 people who die every day from air pollution.

There are many approaches to fast reactors, including some actually explored in the early days of reactor development. As my son is working on his Ph.D. in nuclear materials, I am collecting lots of phase diagrams, which hopefully he'll come across after I kick off and he becomes curious about his old man's thinking by going through my files.

As for San Andreas, I can think of no place on Earth that could profit quite so well from nuclear power as California. Among other things they have a huge inventory of valuable used nuclear fuel.

It is neither true nor ethical to suppose that fossil fuels are allowed kill people continuously in California during normal use because people fear that a nuclear accident might kill someone some day.

The Exxon/Mobile refinery on Crenshaw Blvd in Torrance had (and may still have) an inventory of liquid hydrogen fluoride, a cracking catalyst, that could easily make Bhopal, and for that matter, Chernobyl, look like a cub scout picnic. The 2015 explosion at that plant was a very serious near miss.