Originally Posted by cmac2012

A buddy on another site is a booster for life of the integral fast reactor (IFR) for which there is apparently no other available suitable coolant/energy transfer medium than liquid sodium. I'll admit it's an attractive solution in many ways - it could consume much of waste nuclear materials currently in haphazard storage and is allegedly meltdown-proof. The downside from what I can gather is that so far practically all of them have suffered debilitating sodium fires. What could go wrong? Liquid sodium separated from water by a thin metal membrane? Oh boy. Maybe if the sodium could heat another medium which is then transferred to the water/steam component - sort of a buffer step - might be more reliable.