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@mustardness
- Low pressure coolant reactors are much safer due to lack of possible steam explosions.- The higher heat reservoir for higher temperature afforded by molten sodium or molten salt mean cooling mechanisms of spraying water on the reactor are less necessary.- No hydrogen explosions either.- Many thorium breeding cores can’t be used for proliferation as U233 is a hard gamma emitter.- The extra plutonium generated is not a problem, it’s what breeders do. Breed new fuel.- Sodium is more dangerous when exposed to air, but is less problematic than dealing with super high pressure radioactive steam and water at super high temperature.- Positive void coefficients are only one part of the equation as long as the reactivity of the core as a whole is negative, it’s not a problem. It’s certainly not large enough to be able to cause an uncontrolled steam explosion due to thermal runaway.
I have taken the liberty of bolding the parts of my previous post that you don’t seem to be interested in addressing.
Pressurized water reactors must operate at very high steam pressures and have major issues with hydrogen explosions in emergency scenarios as the zirconium cladding of fuel rods at high temperature reacts with water.
Sodium is dangerous due to its reactivity - but must of the issues you’ve mentioned about it are untrue, or not really issues: the PVC isn’t an issue when the reactivity of the core is taken as a whole. You don’t need to spray water on the core.
There is limited amount of uranium reserves in the world and despite your claims to the contrary, while the worlds remaining supply is measured at the scale of centuries - this is based on current consumption. Increase and scaling up of generation is necessarily going to drop this down - and as more convenient, and more prevelant nuclear power may get - the more need there is for higher efficiency reactors.
Saying this, I would prefer to see more research into LFTR reactors - they are by far and away the most interesting of the Gen 4 designs.