OT
OT: neroden, what do you think of Gen IV nukes?
Ridiculous, dangerous fantasy material.
Most are fast neutron reactors.
The really dumb designs are the sodium-cooled and salt-cooled designs, which generate intractable strontium and cesium waste, which is *very* expensive to clean up. Look up Dounreay and the US prototypes for examples of trying to clean it up -- it costs over 10 times what it costs to clean up a normal nuclear reactor, and that's saying something! Using the waste from existing reactors is nice enough, but dealing with the strontium/cesium contaminated salts is FAR worse. Mind-bogglingly expensive.
The lead-cooled designs are terrible too, prone to even higher corrosion than the usual reactor designs. They leak.
The helium-cooled reactors (including the "very high temperature reactor") are unsustainable. We're already running out of helium, which is a nonrenewable resource generated very slowly from radioactive decay.
In addition, the graphite-moderated designs (including the "very high temperature reactor") create giant blogs of radioactive graphite, one of the more annoying types of radioactive waste to deal with.
The supercricial water cooled reactor is just like the existing reactors but more likely to blow up.
The gas-cooled fast reactor is basically like some of the older designs, but more likely to blow up.
In other words, it's all hype. They're all massively expensive generators of waste which is extremely expensive to clean up. All of them are full of toxic materials and full of rare materials which are permanently contaminated and wasted by the reactor processes.
Every one of them is basically an exceptionally dumb way to generate heat, followed by a highly inefficient thermal engine. Solar and wind, which generate electricity *directly* with no wasteful heat step, are far better in every possible way.
