This is revolutionary. Never again will we have a Chernobyl disaster or a Fukushima tragedy where old people literally sacrifice their remaining life in order to take care of the reactor. Every single one needs to adapt to this immediately
Curious to know more!
These reactor designs are very interesting. They've been proposed since the 40s but no one has ever built a fully functioning one yet.
They run at a much higher temperature than most reactors, which eliminates the need for a lot of cooling (which is the source of a lot of complexity and danger in a standard reactor: what if the cooling fails?).
Instead they're set up so that the fuel being cool is what makes it burn faster. So you speed up the reactor by cooling it off. This has the nice property that if you stop cooling it for whatever reason (you got hit by a tsunami or your containment just blew up), it ends up heating up, which makes it make less power, which cools itself back off again.
This makes it way safer! All the runaway reactions that could happen if something fails in a regular reactor simply can't happen here.
I think the worst thing that could happen with a PBR is that if your containment broke (which should require like twice the temperature these run at, but someone could always try to explode it or crash a plane into it) you might get a fire, because the graphite surrounding each pebble might burn, because the inert gas would get out and oxygen would help them burn. That's still a relatively minor failure mode as it's very unlikely and you could restore containment by just smothering the reactor in something that doesn't burn.
So yeah. This is very good news for nuclear power: these reactors are safer and simpler than the types we use today. They're also potentially fuel-agnostic? You could run them off thorium or unenriched uranium, which greatly lessens the proliferation risk.
One last thing: they're also easier to maintain because you don't really need to disassemble them as much to refuel them, because they're designed like a gumball machine:
You dump new pebbles in the top, and used ones pop out the bottom!
(the used ones get reused a few times: but each time they go through, they can be checked for any issues and disposed off)
