Re: location, location, location..
Water moderated reactors are built that way to contain steam explosions. If you don't have water in contact with the radioactives then you don't need nearly as much mass in your containment building
If you don't have containment buildings like that to contain steam explosions in water moderated systems..... well, Chernobyl is one example
the issue is that the limiting temperature of fission reactions is 1150C (doppler effects), so you need a coolant which doesn't boil below that temperature.
Water works for demonstration purposes. The Nautilus reactor was small and effectively a "laboratory glassware demonstrator". Alvin Weinberg was pretty unhappy that industry took his design and scaled it up to silly sizes. That's why he came up with a much safer industrial prototype design (the molten salt reactor)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
