The fast breeder reactor designs generate and consume plutonium. There are several. I suspect that France's Phenix came out of the same stable as France's atomic bombs, to which Greenpeace rightly objected. Since then, in opposing civilian nuclear power, Greenpeace has been, presumably without realising it, helping the fossil carbon industry. One big baseload nuke, or ten of ARCnuclear's ARC-100 SMRs, can replace a 1000 MW coal burner. Solar and wind cannot.The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) project created a design that, like the LFTR, produces very little, short-lived, waste per gigawatt-year. Actually, less than a ton. It is even designed, like the LFTR, to have load-following capabilities. Currently deployed reactors have to worry about the powerfully neutron-hungry isotope of xenon that lodges in the ceramic fuel, until it decays. It captures neutrons that you want to use for the next fission, so you have to adjust the deliberate neutron-capture "control" rods. Both the IFR and the LFTR have the fuel and coolant under an atmosphere of argon, and the xenon diffuses up into it, away from the neutron flux. The design of the fuel rods of the IFR is such that the xenon makes pores that release the gas. Marvelous!Both are meltdown-proof, and operate at atmospheric pressure -- no superheated high pressure water desperate to burst out. The IFR was canceled, not because of technical flaws, but because the Sierra Club and the Clinton administration regard "plutonium" as anathema -- even when the reactor can consume more than it generates.
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