Lockheed Martin bets big on...nuclear fusion?

[PamW]

19. If memory serves..

Light water reactors were a more mature technology courtesy of the US Navy.

I don't think there was anything particularly "wrong" with MSR; it just didn't get funded by the politicians. Who knows what their reasons were.

As far as waste, the projected answer to that was reprocessing / recycling. It was only later, at the end of the '70s and into the '80s that Congress outlawed reprocessing / recycling in the US, and passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in the early '80s which said the USA would not reprocess / recycle but would use a "once through" fuel cycle with geologic repository storage.

Fast reactor technology dominated in the '70s and early '80s as the DOE was pushing the Clinch River demonstration plant. That got cancelled in the early '80s.

Argonne then did the IFR work until 1994 when President Clinton cancelled that too.

Again a lot of the research really doesn't have to do with what was promising or not. The research that gets done is the research the politicians fund, and I'm still attempting to figure out how they chose what and why.

PamW