There is no excuse for any power reactor to not be “walk-away safe”. We have over 100 operating nuclear power plants in the US and because of political opposition to a national repository for spent fuel, those power plants are now forced to store spent fuel onsite. Most of those storage facilities require ongoing active cooling.
For me the issue isn’t that the cooling and safety won’t be maintained by competent and dedicated crews. The issue is: what will be the consequences when maintaining cooling is impossible due to some cause that is beyond the ability of the crews and infrastructure to recover from.
This is exactly the case at this very moment in Japan at Fukushima where a tsunami destroyed the ability of the facility to maintain cooling of the spent fuel pool.
It took many years for us to get in this mess. The sooner we start to work our way out, the sooner we won’t have the risk of this kind of disaster to worry about.
There is no excuse for any power reactor to not be “walk-away safe”.
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Yeah that’s part of the genius of thorium lftr reactors. they are walk away safe.