...as will die in the next 24 hours from air pollution.

The biggest "short cut" in the world is burning dangerous fossil fuels, which are responsible for about half of the 19,000 human beings who die each god damned day while people still carry on about Chernobyl.

Nuclear energy saves lives.

It's amazing even though aircraft, automobiles, and of course, air pollution kill continuously and at a grand scale and yet the same assholes who carry on about Chernobyl never call for banning planes or automobiles.

In fact, hundreds of thousands of people have died from tsunamis in this century, and the same people who call for banning nuclear power never call for banning coastal cities, even though all of the deaths at Fukushima involved drowning and buildings collapsing.

Come to think of it, how come no one ever complains about the engineering of buildings and talks about banning them when they fall in an earthquake.

The reason that the atmosphere will now permanently contain more than 400 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide is entirely a function of the selective attention of small minded clowns.

Nuclear, no nuclear; doesn't matter either way.

And calling me a small-minded clown doesn't change that.

FWIW: There is a significant difference in meaning between "A small minded clown" (no hyphen) and "A small-minded clown" (with hyphen). Given the context I imagine you meant "a small-minded clown" rather than a small, but minded clown.

I have little patience for the "do nothing" crowd that can sit back and merely complain rather mindlessly about imperfection, making perfection the enemy of the excellent.

It does seem to me, after consideration of all the small probabilities involved in the origin of life, that this planet may be a very special place in the universe, particularly given its molten core, the nature of which is, ironically enough, partially derived from the presence of large amounts of uranium and thorium in it. It is difficult, for instance, to imagine life surviving very long on a planet without a magnetic field, but I could be wrong about that.

In any case, I'm not so cavalier as to just say, "we should accept the extinction of ourselves and other forms of life because a few people died at Chernobyl from radiation." Nuclear energy is clearly imperfect, but it need not be perfect to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is. It's the last, best shot we have, but the longer we delay while offering silly sarcastic remarks about Chernobyl, the less chance we have. That is clear.

Somehow, it seems to me that doing our utmost to save the planet is more important than worrying about the placement, presence, or absence of a hyphen, but I could be wrong about that as well.

Thanks for your illuminating comment. Have a nice day.

It's a liquid-sodium-cooled fast-breeder reactor designed to burn some of their weapons-grade plutonium.

Question: is the resulting fuel it generates capable of use in nuclear weapons, or does it render the weapons-grade plutonium useless for military applications?

...is the "Kessler solution," about which I wrote elsewhere:

On Plutonium, Nuclear War, and Nuclear Peace

This involves mixing weapons grade (or reactor grade) plutonium with either neptunium or americium in order to generate ²³⁸Pu which generates enough heat (and neutrons) to render the chemical explosives necessary to denote a nuclear explosion (with plutonium) useless.

It will never be impossible to have a nuclear war as long as uranium exists, and there is so much uranium on the planet - with approximately 5 billion tons in the ocean - that humanity will never be able to fission all of it.

Actually if we were concerned seriously about diversion of energy materials to make weapons of mass destruction, we should be more concerned about oil. Only one nuclear war has ever been observed, which curiously enough, started as an oil war, at least where the Japanese and the Americans, as well (partially) the Russians and the Germans were concerned.

Oil wars, by contrast, are nearly continuous, and the death toll from them in the last 2/3 of a century easily dwarf the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nakasaki both in terms of destruction and lives lost.

My understanding is Russia's predominate reactor design on the market today is the VVER, which is similar to Pressurized Water Reactors in the United States. Do you foresee Russian liquid sodium designs gaining favor over the VVER at some point? I ask because in a separate thread I see that FBaggins posted an article that Russia wants to build 11 new reactors, including two BN-1200. I imagine that information learned from this BN-800 is going to influence the design of the first BN-1200 which is built. Granted a lot could happen, but does Russia currently view liquid sodium as the future of the nuclear industry?

There's no question that the VVER line is cheaper at this point since it has a long line of serial production. They're trying to acquire enough operational experience to evaluate the economics for the future - so that the potential benefits of a closed fuel cycle can be weighed against the disadvantages.

If they see it as the future of nuclear energy production, the shift is still a couple decades off. They have a newer GenIII+ VVER design that will be their primary choice for some time to come.

...LMFBR.

I think that the world's decision to rely on liquid sodium is unfortunate, and many of the larger sodium cooled reactors have been problematic, the Monju in Japan, and the Superphoenix in France.

India has just built another example, the Kalapakkam reactor, which should go critical soon.

I'm sure that as in any engineering enterprise, experience, including the experience of problems has allowed for significant improvements, but that doesn't make me feel all warm and fuzzy about sodium coolants.

To be clear, the worst nuclear reactors in the world are infinitely safer than the best fossil fuel plants, but that doesn't mean that we should not innovate and build better reactors.

Russia has long experience with sodium cooled reactors, having commercially operated the BN-350 which ran as a combined power generating unit and desalination device on the shores of the Caspian Sea in the last decades of the 20th century.

The economics of the reactor will be tied to the economics of plutonium. I am in favor of the plutonium/uranium cycle, perhaps integrated (as India intends) with the thorium cycle, but the economics of plutonium depends quite a bit on the type of chemistry that is utilized for recycling the fuel. I'm rather tired, personally, of the traditional Purex process, and believe that there are much better options. What the Russians intend I can't say.

I suspect they built this reactor to utilize their surplus weapons plutonium rather than bury it, and not for economic reasons. This is a good idea. If one includes external costs, which is unfortunately not done very often, the economics cannot be worse than dangerous fossil fuels. As dangerous fossil fuels are destroying the planet rapidly, their economics are tied to the cost of replacing a planet.

The Russians also have experience, the only important operational experience in the world, with LBE, (lead bismuth eutectics) coolants, and while I'd personally not go with the bismuth portion to avoid the accumulation of Po-210, there are actually, particularly after the development of modern materials science, an infinite number of possible liquid metal coolants. The Soviets were very sloppy with LBE initially, as the K-19 event showed, but I'm a lead coolant kind of guy in spite of that, for reasons I discussed elsewhere.

I may write more on this at some future point.

Thanks for your question.