Russian Nuclear Deals: News

But if Russia could price their breeder reactors well they could have over half the African continent and Asia in their back pockets.

Call me naive but this isn't about Russia trying to control Asia and Africa... this is about selling to them at a fair price the solid reliable energy they need to grow and develop without western control or ownership holding them back.

What do you think about thorium reactors? Supposedly they produce much less radioactive waste, are more efficient, etc. Is this the future supposedly? Work on this type of reactors is mainly carried out by India and China. There is much more thorium than uranium. I wonder if Russia will also go in this direction.

"LFTR reactors will dramatically reduce the size and long-term radioactive activity of their waste. For comparison, the fuel of light water reactors consists of over 95% of uranium-238, part of which is transformed through transmutation into plutonium-239, a highly toxic isotope belonging to the transuranium group. As you can see, just one reaction separates almost all of the light water reactor fuel from becoming long-term transuranium waste. The half-life of Pu-239, which has the largest share in transuranic waste from light water reactors, is 24,000 years. Transuranium waste along with Pu-239 is perceived by society as an insoluble problem. In contrast, the LFTR reactor will use a thorium fuel cycle in which thorium is converted to U-233. Because thorium is a lighter element, the formation of transuranium elements takes a longer time, requiring more neutron absorption than in the U-Pu cycle. The U-233 in the LFTR will be 90% fissioned and then the remaining 10% will be 80% fissioned to produce U-235. The percentage of fuel that will be converted to transuranium Neptunium-237 will most likely be only 2%, which is approximately 15 kg per 1 GWe-year[58]. This is a twenty times smaller amount of transuranium elements than that produced by a light water reactor, where their weight is 300 kg per 1 GWe-year. It is important that with such a small amount of transuranium elements being produced, LFTR will be able to perform ongoing recycling and introduce them into the core for final burning. Neptunium-237 returned to the core will absorb a neutron and then undergo beta decay to form Plutonium-238, which is a sought-after fuel for radioisotope thermoelectric generators that power space probes. However, in the case of reactors operating on U-238, full recycling is difficult and expensive due to the presence of a much larger amount of transuranium elements."

"Thorium is at least 4-5 times more abundant in nature than all of uranium isotopes combined; thorium is fairly evenly spread around Earth with a lot of countries[52] having huge supplies of it; preparation of thorium fuel does not require difficult[51] and expensive enrichment processes; the thorium fuel cycle creates mainly Uranium-233 contaminated with Uranium-232 which makes it harder to use in a normal, pre-assembled nuclear weapon which is stable over long periods of time (unfortunately drawbacks are much lower for immediate use weapons or where final assembly occurs just prior to usage time); elimination of at least the transuranic portion of the nuclear waste problem is possible in MSR and other breeder reactor designs. "

The fast neutron closed cycle gets around 50 time more energy out of Uranium than the conventional reactor approach.   Thorium can
be converted to Uranium-233 inside fast neutron reactors in a practical way.   The infrastructure for this is in place with a closed fuel cycle.  
Fuel reprocessing is something the west forgot to the point that America couldn't even reprocess its nuclear warhead fission cores.

The fixation on nuclear weapons from fast neutron reactors in the west is demented. State actors can organize nuclear weapons production
as they please. So the world is supposed to sit there and not use this amazing reactor technology because "terrorists" can supposedly
strip reactors and reprocess the fuel into dirty bombs and other shit in some warehouse. Yeah, right.

What do you think about thorium reactors? Supposedly they produce much less radioactive waste, are more efficient, etc. Is this the future supposedly? Work on this type of reactors is mainly carried out by India and China. There is much more thorium than uranium. I wonder if Russia will also go in this direction.

Fast breeder reactors essentially turn Uranium into a fully recyclable material where the radioactive waste is consumed in the normal processes of generating energy and used uranium rods refuelled in the process of storing them near the reactor pile generating power from enriched fuel rods.

Being a closed cycle with no excess radioactive waste to deal with why would Russia spend money and time creating a new processing system with a different material?