The technology is always advancing

Also they don't match a fraction of what coal and natural gas produce power wise

It’s not to the scale of replacing anything we currently use. Only supplementing.

Sure

Tbh I'd like more geo thermal power

The US is sitting on top of one the biggest volcanos on earth and they're just letting all that energy go to waste

New reactors using the latest designs would be good too

Geothermal at scale? Has anyone done that?

Iceland

Not really

But it's nowhere near the size of the US

Fuck dude Hawaii would be perfect testing

So it's a practical unknown

We desperately need to be putting R&D into more modern nuclear

And thus no one wants to sink money into ut

I want fusion reactors

It

But it’s such s political hot button

Thing is

I want nuclear. Fuck NIMBYs, yes in my backyard

Even hardcore anti-nuclear folks are coming around

Front yard too

So nuclear is becoming a partisan issue

We need stopgap reactors that can be built quickly with the latest safety designs built in until fusion can be deployed on a large scale

Fusion doesn’t exist tho

It does

But not on a >produces more energy than it took to start

Scale

Then it doesn’t exist

Or: it’s not power generation

Molten salt reactors are practically within arms reach

And they don't need uranium to burn, just enough to start the reactor

Molten salt is already a functional technology.

Doesn't mean it's commercially successful

The Russians were using lead-bismuth eutectic reactors in the Alfa class back in the Cold War

Which is where it needs to be

They put out shitloads of energy in a tiny package, and propelled the Alfa to ludicrous speeds

I mean shit, most Gen III plants already have the infrastructure for relatively simple Gen IV retrofits.

Also, I'd like to point out that molten salt reactors do require a constant amount of radioactive isotope to keep the "molten salt" part hot. It's just that the fluid acts as the moderator and poison all at once, so you can just dump some neutron activated thorium in there and let it go.

And since you can use thermoelectric conversion, you don't need a high pressure water core to generate steam

Then as the isotope decays, you pump it through a different loop until you get some pretty harmless waste by the end of you 4+ loops