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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (9150)	5/17/2009 10:45:04 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24235

Russia's Unique SVBR-100 Nuclear Reactor Posted by Gail the Actuary on May 17, 2009 - 9:54am ] This is a guest post by Christopher Babb. Until 2007, Christopher worked as a Ph. D. Economist. In 2007, he retired early to work on issues related the peak oil problem. His background in physics is from undergraduate coursework and from studying about it on his own. The Significance of the SVBR-100 Modular Nuclear Reactor Many analysts expect that societies in the post peak oil period will go through a “power down” scenario that will force their economies to be reconstituted using the primitive energy systems of the eighteenth century. However, not all analysts share this expectation. Since the accident at Chernobyl, an important group of Russian scientists has taken it upon themselves to rewrite the energy future of technically advanced civilizations. Those scientists have chosen to turn away from the dangerous sodium cooled breeder reactor technology, and have turned instead to their own “home grown” “heavy metal” alternative. At present, the Russians are forging ahead to develop and build two different types of uranium fueled “heavy metal” reactors that have most of the favorable characteristics that engineers and policy makers would want in a nuclear reactor. In my opinion, those reactors have the potential to usher in a new era of almost unlimited low cost electric power. The Russian’s SVBR-100 reactor, which is the subject of this short essay, is the first of those “heavy metal” reactors. (SVBR is the Russian acronym for “lead-bismuth fast reactor”). The first SVBR-100 will go critical and begin generating commercial electric power by around 2020. There's more… (2604 words) theoildrum.com