India's Most Advanced Nuclear Reactor Approaches Finish Line (NDTV)

[NNadir]

3. Well, we have to keep in mind that the worst nuclear reactor is still better than the best fossil fuel plant.

One has to navigate a number of issues in dealing with complex technology; one of those is the supply chain. It's probably cheaper and easier to do things the old way; more difficult to be innovative, since efforts at innovation can be costly simply because not everything works the first time.

There are some innovative approaches in the new era of nuclear creativity. For example, although I'm not really a FLIBE (BeF₂/LiF eutectic) kind of guy, Kairos has made an effort to bring this new supply chain issue forward for its high temperature reactors. For FLIBE it is probably still true that the optimal structural material is probably that developed in the 1960's, the nickel alloys Inconels and/or Hastelloys. (I say that without being, as my son is, a materials scientist.)

In my own thinking, I have tended not to pay much attention to sodium cooled fast breeders in any other than a general sense. I'm more of a "breed and burn" kind of guy, which work rather like a candle, as Sekimoto put it, although I would modify the concept by employing liquid metal fuels, low melting plutonium alloys, of which there are many of note. This would require, I admit, quite a bit of research, almost certainly costly research.