In July, House and Senate appropriators zeroed out funding requested by the Biden administration for the Versatile Test Reactor at Idaho National Laboratories, a decision that could have disastrous impacts on America's role as a leader in the next generation of advanced nuclear technologies. The VTR would allow advanced nuclear reactor developers here in the U.S. to test fuels, materials and components for fast neutron reactors for the next 60 years or more.

These new reactor technologies offer a range of important safety, efficiency and economic advantages over large conventional nuclear reactors. They represent a critical pathway to cutting emissions to address climate change, especially in hard to decarbonize sectors of the economy such as steel production and refining. They are critical to assuring that the United States remains a global leader in advanced nuclear technology and nuclear security.

Predictably, opposition to the VTR has been led by entrenched opponents of nuclear energy, who have long attempted to regulate conventional nuclear power into obsolescence and fear that innovation of the sort that many U.S. nuclear startups are presently betting on might give the technology a second life. //

In service of that effort, the author makes all manner of easily falsifiable claims. No, the Natrium Reactor is not capable of having a runaway chain reaction like the one that caused the Chernobyl accident. The basic physics of the reactor core would shut down the fission reaction long before such a chain of events could occur. No, the Natrium Reactor does not require more uranium than a conventional reactor per unit of energy it produces. It uses its fuel much more efficiently.

These and other claims are drawn entirely upon a self-published report based, by the author's own acknowledgment, on his own "qualitative judgments," reviewed only by his employer, and contradicted by an enormous peer-reviewed and refereed literature, much of it based on technical evidence from decades of full-scale tests.

The author's position reflects not a considered position informed by the latest scientific and technological progress but rather a posture toward both environmental challenges and nuclear energy that has hardly evolved since the 1970s, before most people had ever heard of climate change, much less come to terms with the scale of technological change that would be necessary to address it.

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/advanced-isnt-always-better