Looking back I don't think that I did a very good job at explaining what I meant in yesterday's post about the AP1000. The point I wanted to make is that the power industry seems to be impossible to innovate / enter without a large amount of capital, and because of the regulation mess that can be the nuclear industry it is that much harder.
But there is hope, my friends! The wave reactor (promising design by TerraPower)! Basically the idea is to only have one fuel enrichment, and then breed the rest of the fuel during the reactor lifetime. Like a perpetual wave . . .? (Plotting the k's (ratio of neturons in current generation over previous generation, k=1 is sustained one to one chain reaction) versus time does kinda look like a wave). A design being perused by a joint Michigan / TerraPower venture is a molten salt design that has some problems, namely needing to pump the salt at 10-15 m/s (it's like pumping chocolate syrup at the 1.2 times the estimated average cursing speed of an unladen European swallow - hows that for an analogy?).
There are certain design aspects I would change. I would get rid of the fuel assemblies - they add unnecessary material which slows down the neutrons, but might be need to contain the fertile material in close proximity to the fissile material. I would dissolve the fuel into the coolant and then use chemistry to extract out the nasties (and actually you can make quite a bit of money selling some of the decay products). This way it could then be online refueling (currently you have to shutdown LWR for about a month every 1.5 to 2 years to refuel, the only online refueling are the CANDU reactors of Canada) without the problems of pebbles (they might crack).
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