ET, August 21, 15:09 – I too am intrigued by the molten salt nuclear reactor designs, but development was cancelled and now we don’t have time to catch up. We should probably try building some reactors based on the Integral Fast Reactor and similar designs, because various countries have had experience in building something like it, eg. the 1959 Dounreay Experimental Breeder Reactor. Hitachi have a design called PRISM which they claim to be commercial. These reactors can burn spent fuel.
There are various other small, simplified reactor designs, several of them PWRs. These reactors create spent fuel.
I expect PWRs are what will get built because, what with submarines and icebreakers etc., there’s far more experience with them than anything else. But I guess storing the waste until fast reactors are developed is a trivial problem compared with trying to get all that CO2 back out of the atmosphere.
Greenhouse gases trap in more heat basically just because they are bigger molecules than nitrogen (N2) and oxygen (O2). Emitting greenhouse gases is like putting sugar in your tea – it’s a lot more difficult to take out again.