[MikeNomad]

The article content does not match the title. Lots of talk about how the guy grew up, what shaped his outlook, etc. I saw nothing about how he is building a "small, waste- and carbon-negative reactor."

Is it even possible to build a reactor that meets those criteria, let alone be financially viable?

[sideshowb]

I presume waste-negative means it can take existing waste as fuel, and make it less dangerous while making energy still (as current fast breeder reactors can, though not on a small scale afaik). Carbon negative presumably just means "uses less carbon per kwh over the whole lifecycle than the diesel generator it replaces" which shouldn't be too hard to achieve.

"Small" presumably makes this harder.

You're right though, some more technical details would be nice.

[julie1]

When nuclear was developed, it was foreseen the waste of the first generation could still be reused by a "next generation" reactor and maybe turned into non radioactive matter. Nuclear reaction and transmutation says that the most stable atomic number is around 49 so with N>100 for actual nuclear wastes there is still potential energy usable.

Then oil went cheap investments were frozen.

As everybody noticed the "most advanced" deployed IIIrd generation of nuclear reactor are not really a success (EPR).

And the 5th?/4th supposed to come generation is promising a lot, but still has not delivered a lot. We are lagging way behind schedules, notably because cheap oil has been a curse.

Oil is getting more and more costly to extract.

PV and wind turbine activity do not follow our 9am/7pm seasonal activity. Eolian is so massively subsidized in USA Texas had negative prices this summer on their grid.

So cheap and convenient (non subsidized) energy seems to be our past. Not the future we will live in.

I guess some activity will slowly disappear ... And that the part of energy in Internet's price will have to be paid more fairly among users.

Cheap energy is physically soon to be dead. The watt consumed per software use will matter as soon as government will stop subsidizing the market with public money. And Artificial Intelligence may not beat human intelligence and adaptive workforce when costs are fully supported by the software makers.

Human have more value than what google and uber thinks, and their technological dystopia based on clean non human work force and cheap energy is a nightmare for both the workers and the ecosystem.

IT industry is not sustainable in its actual trend to not care about efficiency. Agile is a symptom of it, and we need government to stop their politic to deregulate on one hand so that those who waste energy don't pay their bills and on the other hand subsidize the market in favor of those producing so called cheap energy (fracking, PV, eolian, batteries) that are polluting.

Sorry, but sails, men, mechanical windmill and horses are some of the trivially cheap energies that will be available in the future.

[colechristensen]

Not sure about the carbon-negative part, but several types of breeder reactor can be fed nuclear waste exclusively after an initial charge.