A Safer, Cleaner Nuclear Reactor | Popular Science

I can't stop reading about this startup and all the advantages of a molten salt nuclear reactor. It takes waste uranium, and recovers the vast amount of energy left over in it and (in so doing) turns it into far safer waste material. The reactor is "walkaway safe" in that if everything fails it chemically shuts itself down with no intervention. The full-scale reactor makes electricity cheaper than coal.
http://www.popsci.com/leslie-dewan-and-mark-massie-are-reviving-nuclear-dream
http://www.transatomicpower.com/

"Traditional nuclear power plants, however, come with two inherent problems...threat of a meltdown...and the fuel must be manufactured in long rods, each encased in a thin metal layer, called cladding...Dewan and Massie’s design seems to solve both problems at once."..."To explain the second trick—modifying the reactor to run on nuclear waste—Dewan explained a key subtlety of nuclear physics: a neutron can only split an atom if it is moving at the right velocity, neither too slow nor too fast. Imagine cracking eggs: if you bring the egg down too softly on the lip of a mixing bowl, it will not break. In the bizarre world of atomic physics, the egg will also fail to break if struck too hard."
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-new-way-to-do-nuclear
"although there were hard problems left to solve...in 1973, when the program was defunded, it was “in spite of the technical success of the MSRE.""..."One of the main reasons funding for the project was stopped...is that the breeder reactor wasn’t a good source of plutonium...for use in a nuclear weapons program. Today, the lack of a weaponization potential is a selling point, not a showstopper."
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/is-nuclear-power-ever-coming-back/373315/


http://youtu.be/4UXXwWOImm8

A related discussion/tour of salt-based nuclear reactors. This documentary has blunt and choppy editing, but contains some rare and interesting interviews with the octagenarians who worked on the original project and if you pay attention it actually follows a thread explaining a lot about the reactors.

https://youtu.be/xIDytUCRtTA