A sincere question to all nuclearfags - why do we even use enriched uranium for commercial light water reactors? There have always been natural uranium-fueled heavy water and graphite reactors with a stable chain reaction and sufficient power output:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_uraniumThis is because we are producing too much plutonium-239 from U-238 in such reactors (reactors of this type were used to produce military grade plutonium at Los Alamos in the USA and at the Mayak plant in the USSR), and we need to constantly shut down the reactor and remove all the plutonium from it? Also, shouldn't U-238 ignore slow neutrons (it not capture them in light water reactors), but somehow still capture them in graphite and heavy water reactors? Is this happens because graphite and heavy water do not absorb neutrons at all (light water does), but simply slow them down and store enough neutrons to transmute U-238?
I'm just trying to figure out all this shit, but I see that I am missing something important.
