points by akiselev 9 years ago

> A technology whose proponents's best answer even today is "wait until the next breakthrough".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb

This was researcher was completed by the United Aircraft Corporation in the late 60's and early 70's before it was canceled by Nixon along with the Mars program. It was under a NASA contract for space exploration so the literature is in the context of a rocket engine but it is even more compelling as a terrestrial reactor as it uses a tiny amount of fuel (tens of kilos instead of tens of tonnes) and actively keeps that fuel at supercritical so if power is lost the entire thing fizzles out. This is a fast neutron design with an extremely high neutron cross section, far beyond that of any other reactor, easily allowing you to feed nuclear waste into it and very efficiently transmute much of it into fuel or more manageable waste that is then separated out by centrifuges (which are already in the design to separate usable UF6 from the neon exhaust). UAC was set to win a contract to test the reactor with nuclear fuel when NASA pulled the plug so the anti-nuclear crowd isn't to blame for that line of development dying.

However, all of the technological breakthroughs in computation, material science, and nuclear engineering needed to make this happen at an industrial scale have all been discovered since the project was canceled. If it weren't for all the anti-nuclear hysteria, we might have actually had someone willing to take the risk to bring the nuclear lightbulb reactor to market. Sadly, almost all of the scientists and engineers that worked on this design have passed on so the institutional knowledge is gone and the design was classified for a while so no other nations picked up on it in time. You may be able to find the original papers on NASA/JPL's archives but AFAIK they were reclassified a few years ago.