http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor

I’m actually coming around to believing this type of nuke plant might be worth pursuing. If I can believe the many accounts about it, the sodium cooled integral fast reactor could be the best bet to deal with spent fuel and will produce CO2-free energy while doing it.

I was a little apprehensive about the liquid sodium coolant thing but they practically won’t work w/o it. The history of sodium cooled reactors is a checkered one. Numerous lengthy plant closures - permanently in some cases - have resulted from water somehow mixing with sodium in the heat exchanger.

But the more I look at that, the more manageable the sodium thing seems. One possible solution is to use CO2 or even helium at high pressure as the expansive medium in the turbine. Just take water out of the picture.

A laudatory article about IFRs appeared in the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-kirsch/climate-bill-ignores-our_b_221796.html

I wouldn't be so inclined to favor these things if not for the terminally intractable problem with nuke waste disposal. We can’t promise to safely store the stuff for 50,000 years. IFRs reportedly will ‘burn’ spent fuel such that the resultant waste is much reduced in volume, and rendering it much safer, with radioactive half lives in the hundreds of years instead of the hundreds of thousands of years.

It sounds great but I don’t want to naively fall for self-promoting hype.

Amory Lovins wrote this piece disputing born again nuke booster Stewart Brands proposals:

Stewart Brand’s nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic 

He didn't mention the issue of IFRs processing existing spent fuel into safer components.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K