Toshiba Builds Ultra-Small Nuclear Reactor 683
DeusExCalamus writes "Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs."
A slogan (Score:5, Funny)
Sony (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sony (Score:5, Interesting)
No, why should they be liable for the collateral damage? You get a new reactor, dammit, greedy bastards those customers...
Re:Sony (Score:5, Funny)
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Such an old fellow, for such a high user ID...
Re:Sony (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sony (Score:5, Funny)
Duhhhh. It was uphill both ways.
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Re:Sony (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Sony (Score:5, Funny)
I'll get my coat.
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Re:A slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
If you took all the toxins, etc., from coal and condensed them on one place, the greens would have a fit no matter where you tried to bury it.
Besides, did you turn YOUR air conditioner off last summer?
Anyway, this will never fly in the US - I can guarantee that the big utilities will lobby congress and FUD it to death.
Re:A slogan (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A slogan (Score:4, Funny)
BUZZES IN: What is the planet Mercury?
Re:A slogan (Score:5, Informative)
Even when they do apply, that's at least partially wrong. Hydro power is about as un-green as you can get. It does more environmental damage than coal.
Traditional hydro power blocks rivers, which causes problems for fish migration. Hydro power creates pools of water where plant matter dies, releasing large amounts of methane, which contributes directly to global warning. And so on. Hydro power is really relatively nasty stuff. It's fine if you already have a dam for flood control reasons and are just taking advantage of the water flow, but otherwise, it's generally a bad idea.
Solar power is also nasty, at least if you're talking about photovoltaic cells (the only type of solar power practical for anyone but large power companies). The chemicals used to produce the cells are really horrible for the environment. There are cleaner cell chemistries on the horizon, but AFAIK, nothing in mass production yet. The giant solar tower designs don't have that problem, though they are impractical except for large installations and require substantial energy storage to provide power at night. Depending on the energy storage mechanism used, that can be pretty nasty environmentally as well. If they do use a clean storage mechanism, though, such as storing heated water underground, it is relatively green. Notice, though, that with so many "ifs", a large chunk of solar power isn't green at all.
Wind power, bird risks notwithstanding, is relatively green.
Nuclear power is also relatively green. Its only emission is water vapor, which quickly settles out of the atmosphere. The nuclear material, while a waste product, was radioactive on the way in, too. You aren't really producing nuclear waste. You are simply taking advantage of a natural process that would occur inside the ground and harnessing it for power by bringing it up out of the ground. By any sane standard, it is every bit as green as wind power.
Another one you didn't mention is tidal power. This is pretty different from traditional hydro power, and is generally considered to be fairly environmentally sound, AFAIK. It is also limited to coastal regions, which makes it pretty much useless in large percentages of the world, but it's a start. :-)
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Guess where that CO2 came from. That's right: The trees got it from the air. Burning trees won't add anything to the air that wasn't already there in the first place. Burning coal and oil adds CO2 from millions of years ago, which is the real problem.
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The only way to use trees for carbon sequestration is to cut them down and build houses out of them. Seems like you should earn carbon credits when you buy lumber.
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Wrong. If you burn the trees, the patch of land they grew on is now empty, so more trees will grow there, sucking up the CO2 you released from burning the previous patch. On the other hand, if you burn coal, the land is still occupied by the tree
Re:Where we live ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where we live ... (Score:4, Interesting)
But you eventually run out of space to put the trees and you cant cut down old trees without letting out the CO2 (either by burning or by decay over time) though people have talked about sequestering carbon in trees which are cut down and shipped to the poles where it is too cold for them to decay, but I imagine the carbon foot print of the shipping would make that impractical.
I'm not sure trees are a good example here though because they take a long time to grow, but the same argument is made for bio diesel, that every years crop is turned into CO2 that is consumed by the next years crop.
Re:A slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily. I've seen reports that some geothermal plants are plagued with stuff like sulfer and heavy metal releases.
If you're in a spot where the Earth is conducive to it, the technology has been licked.
Then you use it where it makes sense. Meanwhile what are the rest of us in the world supposed to use?
Oh, and it's not in your post, but hydroelectric(Dams) actually do have some rather serious enviromental concerns [bbc.co.uk]...
Re:A slogan (Score:4, Funny)
And I didn't get turned on!
Re:A slogan (Score:4, Funny)
Plutonium-238 is no good for going boom. (Score:3, Informative)
As fo
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You can't just pack a bunch of explosives around a nuclear reactor and expect to get a nuclear bomb. And even the 'dirty bomb' scenario has been shown to be a pointless tactic.
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Wind doesn't always blow, tides come and go, Hydro requires large damns, Solar requires land area in the square mile range, geothermal is limited to areas which have large geothermal activity(iceland, yellowstone).
Though personally Solar has the best bet for the future. just two technologies need to be perfected. Crank up solar cell effeciency to 30-40%, and
Are you kidding? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee, I guess I'll be selling all my extra power to the grid.
I love it when someone from Arizona tells me that solar power is going to solve all my power problems here in northern New Hampshire.
Re:A slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends how you define "clean" - hydro power is usually environmentally quite damaging. Tidal power can also be quite damaging if done inappropriately (I'll point at the proposed Severn Tidal Barrage as an example of how do do a lot of damage to the environment through harnessing the tides). Thermal solar based systems are probably pretty clean, but photovoltaic systems use quite a lot of rather nasty chemicals in their manufacture which must be handled carefully (kind of like fission products in fact...)
Re:A slogan (Score:4, Insightful)
I think on of the biggest problems with the environmental movement (or at least their PR) is that they seem more than happy to pursue perfect solutions at the expense of good solutions.
Re:A slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree entirely. Although the other problem seems to be that they take a solution that might be more or less perfect, given perfect conditions/location and push it so hard they end up putting it in conditions/locations where it either doesn't work or causes a lot of damage. I'm all for installing in "renewable" power generation systems where appropriate, but I also recognise that they are often not appropriate and that fission is a pretty good solution (with appropriate handling and reprocessing facilities for the spent fuel).
Also, whilst I can forgive the general public for overreacting based on misinformation (e.g. the "nuclear is bad" attitude caused by its association with nuclear weapons, Chernobyl, etc.), it seems that the big environmental groups who attract the media's attention are often just as badly informed. For example, Greenpeace is opposed to ITER and other fusion research, stating that it is dangerous, a waste of money and that it should be spent on renewables instead. So they seem to not want research into a technology that could producer cleaner (although not completely clean) energy. Yes, we may never get useful power out of fusion reactors, but we won't know until we try - I for one am hopeful.
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Whether or not these are *greener* is open to debate. They all have serious consequences as well. Some eat of land, removing it from its natural form and use. Some flood large areas of land, again destroying its natural use, and destroying the original aquatic use. They all modify the area in which they are used. Geothermal is probably the one with the least known consequences of all, but I am not holding my breath once we start dealing with leaks in a geothermal system at its lowest points. There i
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Or operating the thing yourself.
It's an interesting technology, but the chances of having one of these for your apartment are not very good.
Re:A slogan (Score:5, Interesting)
Toshiba manages that
Or operating the thing yourself.
No need, it's completely automated. The only thing you worry about is putting water in one end and running the steam through the turbine on the other.
It's an interesting technology, but the chances of having one of these for your apartment are not very good.
It'd be expensive overkill, yes. Now, a few for the local military base... I mean, they already have highly enriched uranium buried all over the place...
Might as well save a few million(and let the local coal plant off the hook a bit).
Wait a second...
Let's say that this is a large apartment complex. 200 apartments. Each apartment averages ~8 amps, 1kw each. At 10 cents per kwh, that's $73 each, average bill*. We buy/sell electricity to the grid to balance load just like most people with solar panels(net metering). Selling electricity at 10 cents a kw/h to our tenants is more than enough to cover the cost of the plant. Heck, we break even if we can sell it to the power company at 5 cents.
Still, this reactor system isn't going to be 100% efficient at turning heat into electricity. Since we have the heat source on site, we build a trigeneration [cogeneration.net] plant [wikipedia.org] instead of a straight electricity generator that also heats the water for use in the apartments, runs a building heat system of some sort, and utilizes an absorbtion cooler to provide AC.
This should allow me to sell electricity to my tenants and the grid to cover the cost of the reactor, and provide heating & cooling to by tenants for essentially the cost of the generation equipment. Heating and cooling can easily equal the electricity cost, so the potential profit is high. At the very least, the lower costs would allow me to offer a lower rent price to keep the apartments full while still offering perks such as 'heat, AC, and hot water included!'.
*Just assume that they're running around with inefficient electric appliances and use their electric stove a lot.
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The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet
Someone should have told the students (Score:5, Funny)
Incredible. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Incredible. (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and this is old. I believe it was around 3 years ago that I first heard of this. They were talking about installing one in a remote village up in Alaska that gets all it's power from diesel because it'd be too expensive to connect it to the grid it's so far away.
Then the greenies* heard about it and killed it. The villagers were pretty much all for it.
*Can't really call them NIMBY, unless they count the entire planet their backyard in this case.
Different reactor (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Incredible. (Score:5, Funny)
Yup (Score:5, Insightful)
this should be great news to MIT (Score:4, Funny)
Good thing I am not a kid anymore (Score:2, Funny)
WTF? (Score:2)
Now THAT should get interesting
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That said, there are good reasons why such systems would be easier to license than a full sized reactor. For one thing, they can be leased, and when they're at the end of their useful lifespan the company takes them back. It doesn't solve the nuclear waste problem, but it at least identifies who is responsible for clean up (although I'd make them post a bond to make sure disposal/recycling is paid for).
In any case, I don't think we'll see every apartment block wi
Lifetime cost (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok, so I guess it wouldn't run at full capacity all of the time, but even if you half it, or quarter it, it's still a big number.
Slightly more silly: if you were to use the MIT students from the previous article [slashdot.org] and you assumed they worked 24 hours a day to produce 200kW, and you paid them $10 an hour you'd need 1600 of them and it would cost $5.8bn over the same time period.
I guess that's why we have nuclear power.
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Re:Lifetime cost (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're off by a factor of 1000. I get $3.5 million. That's far more practical. You're numbers come out to $50/kWh.
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I thought your figure looked wrong because a full scale gigawatt nuclear reactor would be expected to cost around the same amount during that time, depending on figures ($1B-3B in construction, some for more for overhead).
I think you multiplied by 200,000 instead of 200. Remember it's
It's about double the cost of a conventional nuclear plant, but as noted, it's extremely small scale, s
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This is heavy, Doc. (Score:2, Funny)
Fuel (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fuel (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think that's what it said. I think it said the lithium was a replacement for control rods to absorb neutrons and keep the nuclear reaction under control. I don't think the article specified the fuel at all.
Now I am not a nuclear reactor engineer nor a physicist, so if you know more about how this works it would be great to get a better explanation than the one the very short article gave.
BTW, never trust anyone who says "nothing can go wrong with it." Something can always go wrong. If they say "these are the risks, but we've assessed them and their mitigating factors and we ultimately believe the ristks aren't big enough to cause concern," you can start paying attention again.
Re:Fuel (Score:4, Informative)
TFA says it'll use lithium-6
But Lithium-6 [wikipedia.org] is stable, i.e. not radioactive. It can be used to produce Tritium [wikipedia.org] by neutron activation, which in turn is used in thermonuclear weapons. But for Neutron activation [wikipedia.org] you need another radioactive source. So, what's this source? Or is Toshiba using a totally different process?
I doubt that these are properties of an export hit ...
Re:Fuel (Score:5, Informative)
The lithium is a regulator and shielding component of the reactor, not a fuel. It'll be fuelled by moderately enriched uranium, much like a Slowpoke.
Interesting fact: 40% of electricity generated in Canada is lost to transmission lines and conversions. One of the big gains from tech like this would be the reduction in transmission losses.
Self contained (Score:4, Insightful)
ominous (Score:5, Funny)
Cannot Find (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone?? I'm wondering if this is even real.
my search here [google.com] (you may have to filter for medical results)
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/business/worldbusiness/07nuclear.html?pagewanted=print [nytimes.com]
LONDON, Feb. 6 -- Making a big bet on the future of nuclear power, Toshiba of Japan agreed on Monday to buy Westinghouse Electric, the atomic energy division of British Nuclear Fuels, for $5.4 billion.
The purchase price is about three times the amount analysts estimated in July, because of competition for the unit. Toshiba outbid global giants like Mitsubishi Heavy
My Apartment (Score:2)
No more just in one size. (Score:5, Interesting)
be wary (Score:2)
Hasn't this idea been floated before? (Score:2)
How about nanoscale reactors? (Score:2)
IANANPh, but I'd guess there'd be problems with shielding as I don't think radiation scales very well, but I could be wrong... anyone know?
ka-boom (Score:2)
Thanks, but I'll settle for Solar Power and saving (Score:2)
Re:Thanks, but I'll settle for Solar Power and sav (Score:2)
Have one myself? Not likely, but possible. Wanting my dumb-ass neighbors to have one? No way.
Re:Thanks, but I'll settle for Solar Power and sav (Score:3, Interesting)
Low-service nuclear is the way to go in these cases.
If I had to live off-grid, I would rather have solar or solar-thermal where I live (a mile south from the Tropic of Capricorn), but nuclear also seems a nice option for "power-anywhere problems".
Re:Thanks, but I'll settle for Solar Power and sav (Score:3, Insightful)
Temperatures this past summer held in the mid nineties with 80% humidity. Winters can be just as brutal with lows near zero and winds gusting to fifty. You are going to find very tough to lower your power consumption "by an order of magnitude" under those conditions. There are no easy or obvious alternatives for the neighborhood, the nursing home, the single family re
Moon or mars (Score:3, Insightful)
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A interesting thought (Score:5, Interesting)
A gallon of gasoline has something around 35kwh. 35kwh from this thing would cost you $1.75. If you had a fleet of electric vehicles, you could continually charge batteries off this thing and swap them out.
A 200kw reactor would produce the equivalent of almost 140 gallons of gasoline per day. Effectively this is more energy, if your vehicles operate in the city, because you don't expend energy idling the engine. You could operate a fleet of electric cabs, locking in the equivalent of a $1.75/gallon energy cost for the next forty years.
Warning... (Score:5, Funny)
small reactors have been built before (Score:5, Informative)
So the USSR, US and french have designed and built small spaceworthy reactors before. Some of these things have flown on actual space missions, particularly the russian Topaz-I system, weighing only 320kg.
They even built and tested nuclear powered aircraft both in US and USSR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_aircraft [wikipedia.org]
Wonder why it never went anywhere ?
Re:small reactors have been built before (Score:5, Informative)
Because one of the test teams died miserable deaths: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 [wikipedia.org] . They found one engineer pinned to the roof several days later.... "The third man was not discovered for several days because he was pinned to the ceiling above the reactor by a control rod. On 9 January, in relays of two at a time, a team of eight men, allowed no more than 65 seconds exposure each, used a net and crane arrangement to recover his body.
The bodies of all three were buried in lead-lined caskets sealed with concrete and placed in metal vaults with a concrete cover. All had major physical injuries, including severed limbs and fragments of the fuel assembly in their wounds. Richard Leroy McKinley is buried in section 31 of Arlington National Cemetery."
The radiation levels were too high for the rescue teams to get near the reactor and figure out what happened. After they recovered one body, they use the radation levels of his body and the rare isotopes they found on his possessions (Gold 198 anyone?) to prove the reactor had gone super critical.
Much nuclear space research was put on hold after the effects of the Starfish Prime experiment were understood.
The radical change of Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, it's all, nuclear is bad, nuclear is evil because "The terrorists might get it".
Listen to yourselves. You've eaten the terrorist propaganda the government has been feeding you, AND YOU LOVE IT.
"We can't do this because it might help the terrorists."
"Yeah, that's cool, but what about the terrorists?"
"If it weren't for terrorists, this would be awesome."
George Bush loves you guys, he's got you on his side and you don't even realize it.
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Submarines (Score:3, Interesting)
My brother-in-law was on an attack sub and I got to tour it (my father in-law actually got to drive it!). We weren't allowed aft passed a certain point, but give where we were in the sub, you could get an idea of how small the reactor was. Always thought it would be fun to put those reactors to use for domestic power generation, even if just for special purposes like powering server farms.
-Chris
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Now, the reactor itself is just a fraction of this volume. The data are classified, but as a comparison the reactor in Dodewaard (an experimental nuclear plant in the Netherlands, decommissioned a few years ago,
Wikipedia has more info about it (Score:4, Informative)
This is interesting. As stated in the previous nuclear reactor article entitled "China goes Nuclear" [slashdot.org], uranium is kept in small pebbles made of graphite, which is a neutron reflector material.
Both reactor designs have a "negative temperature coefficient of reactivity" simply means that an increase in core temperature will cause a decrease in core power. If the temperature increases too much, the core will shut down. I don't know if the pebble-bed design does, but the 4S still produces heat after being shot down (I'm not sure if the pebble-bed reactor does), so there must be some mechanism provided to remove the generated heat.
More interesting facts: pebble-bed reactors [wikipedia.org] use helium as coolant instead of water, and helium is much more resistant to becoming radioactive - this deals with the possibility of having a radioactive cloud in case of an accident. The 4S, in comparison, uses liquid sodium as coolant [wikipedia.org], allowing the reactor to operate 200 degrees hotter than if it used water. This means that the reactor is depressurized, as water at this temperature would run at thousands of pounds per square inch.
However, I'm not sure how safe sodium is, and we all know what happens when sodium comes in contact with water [youtube.com] - and heated sodium explodes just as easily [youtube.com] when it's exposed to air. Helium, instead, is an inert gas.
IANANS (I am not a nuclear scientist), but the pebble-bed design seems very well-thought, requiring less control mechanisms than the 4S, so I think I'd go for the pebble-bed design.
Is there any nuclear scientist around to give more info and comparisons, and correct any mistakes I may have made?
Re:Wikipedia has more info about it (Score:5, Informative)
To address your points:
"...uranium is kept in small pebbles made of graphite, which is a neutron reflector material."
Technically, graphite is a neutron moderator, to allow the neutrons to slow down and interact with other nuclei in the fuel matrix. The Chicago Pile 1 used the graphite bricks as the moderator matrix. The downside of graphite is that if a graphite fire starts, it's very difficult to put out. So the pebble bed isn't quite the ideal, IMHO.
"Both reactor designs have a "negative temperature coefficient of reactivity" simply means that an increase in core temperature will cause a decrease in core power. "
This is but one part of current regulatory requirements. The General Design Criteria [nrc.gov] govern the design of nuclear plants in general, and cores in particular. The downside of having too strong of a negative temperature coefficient is that in an overcooling scenario, you get the opposite effect. This is why Main Steam Line Breaks are considered in the core design.
"More interesting facts: pebble-bed reactors use helium as coolant instead of water..."
Personally, I've always liked the gas-cooled (especially He) reactors. BTW, this has been done before at Fort St. Vrain in Colorado. Unfortunately, because it was a first of a kind (here in the US, anyway), it was plagued by more mundane issues, like seal leakage, etc. Nothing catastrophic, but a pain in the ass operationally.
Sodium on the other had was intended to minimize the impact of metal corrosion. Think about it: with a liquid metal coolant, the fuel, piping, etc. would maintain integrity pretty well. The bad thing is that yes, Na is a dangerous thing to deal with - especially on a large scale. The Experimental Breeder Reactor in Idaho was one such, I think. This is where a lot of the operational problems were discovered.
We learn by doing.
Hope this helps.
More info (Score:5, Informative)
A blog entry [blogspot.com] with more information and links about this and other small reactors.
It seems to be fairly safe, though I can't imagine the red tape they'll have to get through in order to begin installing them, especially in North America. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US has about a 60 month process to certify a reactor from the time the application is filed, Toshiba probably has a head start on this application from 2005 with its "4S" mini-reactor, but this new Lithium version will probably need its own application process. They plan to build these things at least 30m underground, encased in steel and concrete walls that probably put most bank vaults to shame, so I don't think tampering will be a major issue.
Mostly ridiculous article (Score:5, Interesting)
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Reactors don't scale down very well. The surface area (through which you lose neutrons) goes down slower than the volume (which creates the neutrons). Anything below a Fermi-1 size reactor, you need enriched uranium ($$$$$$). For a car-sized reactor, you need highly enriched uranium ($$$$$$$$$$$). That's not only expensive as heck, but a bomb-maker's dream. LIthium as a reflector helps some, but not al that much, and has its downside too.
Utter nonsense. There are nuclear-powered wristwatches. The nuclear-powered pacemaker, which was safe enough to IMPLANT IN PEOPLE'S CHESTS, has been around for 40 years. Yes, they require relatively expensive fuel. Weighed against it's power density and longevity, enriched uranium is fairly cheap. Plutonium, like they used in the pacemakers, *IS* quite expensive. But even plutonium isn't that expensive given it's power density. The lithium-oxide batteries that replaced plutonium in pacemakers cost nearly 1
Article author shouldn't embellish (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone who knows anything about nuclear reactors knows that control rods certainly do not initiate reactions. They regulate or halt it by absorbing the neutrons that cause it. Maybe the author at "Next energy news" should become a bit more familiar with his/her subject before writing about it.
Nuclear Even Better For Non-electric Uses (Score:5, Insightful)
I once worked for a company that designed an intrinsically safe urban reactor designed to make hot water. We had convinced the city of Helsinki to buy it and were within hours of signing the contract when the Chernobyl Reactor accident occurred. Helsinki would have used it as a district heating plant big enough to heat all the buildings in the city.
Nuclear reactors are much better at making hot water than they are at making electricity. Heating is a major consumer of energy in many locations. Therefore, replacing a fossil fuel heat source with a nuclear heat source is more beneficial to the environment than replacing an electric power generator. There are other applications, aluminum smelting for example, that need copious quantities of heat, not electricity per se.
Instruction manual (Score:5, Funny)
I can just imagine the operating manaul:
"Thank you to use Nuclear-Friend. The main characteristic in machine of control rod moves in with slim middle, can nimble neutron dependable work send, of via sea warmness thusly turbine twist out machine-wind.
ALERTNESS, magnet-imprison with ionisation threatening badass. Fleeting bioluminescence in bird appendage observation, conjunction Cherenkov neon likeness, linking chain of no command (barking!) to blinking indications. Personages of vicinity ascending fucking with sparks! Ability detriment remove with "fast-neutron-sheilding-blanket" (slowly neutrons with alacrity) to mammalian sex babylove machine faulty. As packing box inside includes dosimeter for life-spirit guard dog is. Un-normal witness with e=mc2 of cloudy fungus c.10km bigness, warranty glue not connected."
Radioactive material issue (Score:3, Insightful)
One could make a logical argument regarding the true danger posed by a dirty bomb, but the US Government seems to have completely abandoned logic as a basis for any of their actions.
The Islamists of the Middle East, who have the largest share of the world oil reserves, seem to have conveniently made it very difficult to get approval for their main energy competitor. In the end we may come to understand that their objective is financial rather than ideological.
I Just Knew... (Score:3, Interesting)
They have more electrical power than they actually need. They waste more electrical power AND nuclear fuel because a reactor for a small group of homes is inefficient. They will cause more problems (explosions, radioactive contamination) because they are clueless about properly maintaining their nukes and will likely come very close to meltdowns more times than I care to imagine. They will be stupid enough to trust the repair and maintenance of their nukes to companies that will employ neanderthal techs who are poorly paid and have little care for making mistakes. (Hell, if a phone company can blow up a house by hitting a gas line [this happened in Strongsville Ohio in August 2007. Look it up.] and very likely shirk all responsibility, you can just imagine what the private sector will do with nuke maintenance) But most of all, these people who seem to think they need locally generated power for their cul de sac will like use VERY little of the power generated and the rest will be wasted in the name of convenience.
Yes, I believe that energy companies are vultures and most of the CEOs and administration in those companies should be lined up against a wall... But I also think that part of the equation to really being smart about electrical energy consumption comes down to conservation. Instead of Toshiba making nukes as a first line of energy crisis solutions, they should instead be working on ways to make their devices more power efficient. Even if it means INCONVENIENCE for the end user. ALL of the consumer electronic companies should be doing this. Make sure all devices actually turn completely off and drain NO power when a user is not using it. Make sure that all computing devices that need to have a saved state do so with solid state drives and better battery technology. Re-work home computing so that all you need is one central resource module that hosts CPU, RAM and storage and interacts with wireless devices that are the "terminals" or "thin clients" while still providing something that feels like a regular PC experience. Make sure that one central module does NOT run an OS at all, but simply hands out resources to the authorized devices. That way you can buy one decent unit that might last a decade instead of new PCs every two to three years. And GET USED TO INCONVENIENCE. It's better than destroying the planet. I'll happily ride the bus to work instead of drive if it means I'm one less polluter. (I do ride the bus to work for just that reason) If you can't bring yourself to inconvenience yourself, you've failed in your civic duty to others.
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There are two possible explanations for why middle eastern nations might want nuclear technology. One is that they want to blow us up. The other is that there are vast areas of their counties that don't have electricity. We accuse them of wanting to destroy the planet and we're the ones who ordered 300 new coal plants this year, knowing that industrial coal is the single largest contributer to greenhouse emissions. We should be helping Iran build nuclear power plants, not encouraging th
Re:Eh... (Score:4, Insightful)
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They may view it as a loss of sovereignty regarding power generation. My guess is that Iran, as a member of OPEC, is well-aware of what can go wrong when you depend upon other countries for energy.
Or nukes. Obviously, MAD is just effective now as during the cold war.
Re:Eh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Iran only has to build expensive reactors, and buy the fuel from the US (or whoever provides it) which will of course be sold at a profit (so it's not exactly a huge concession on the provider's part)
That'd work right until the provider decides it doesn't like something going on and says "No more fuel for you!".
Then what happens is that Iran gets rolling blackouts, and gets stuck with lots of expensive hardware they can't use, because if they had enough power without the reactors they wouldn't be building them in the first place.
Yes, I don't understand why anybody wouldn't sign up for a great deal like that.
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