Read Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom from Wired magazine to learn about new pebble bed reactors currently under development in China.

Those of a more technical bent can read about Pebble Bed Reactors at Wikipedia.

For those of you who like pictures, here is a diagram of a PBR (via euronuclear.org)

And a closeup of one of the pebbles

For those who chant “No Blood for Oil”, what would you have in its place? Wood? Whale Oil? Hemp-based biomass?

This is cool folks. Of course, all of this pre-supposes a world that doesn’t have nuts running around wanting to build dirty bombs.