[ RadSafe ] Bill and Melinda Gates Inteview on 60 minutes. What's Killing The Nuclear Industry?

[George Stanford]

David:

       No, not heavy water (not even heavy water could make depleted 
uranium go critical -- CANDUs can use natural uranium).

   .  TerraPower's TWR (Travelling Wave Reactor) is a variant of the 
IFR (Integral Fast Reactor) developed at Argonne National 
Laboratory.  It will use metal fuel and be cooled by liquid sodium 
(no moderator).

      Both IFR and TWR need an initial charge of fissile material 
(U-235 or Pu-239), and then they breed enough new fissile to keep 
themselves going indefinitely, using ~1 ton of depleted uranium per 
GWe-year of energy produced.  The main difference is that the TWR 
would be loaded with 60 years-worth of fuel from the start (i.e. 
something like 80 tons per GWe), whereas the IFR would recycle its 
fuel much more frequently, adding fresh depleted periodically, and 
thus would be very much smaller.

      George S. Stanford
      Reactor physicist. retired from Argonne National Laboratory

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At 06:30 AM 5/17/2013, David Lee wrote:
Radsafers,

Here is the video interview 13 min. on "60 minutes"

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50146679n
Laser mosquito zapper interesting too, huh?
Not much of reactor design details. Moderator gotta be heavy water.
No one else would keep the neutron field critical with depleted uranium
fuel.
Reactor controls sequences must be very different from the present days.