Distributed "Nuclear Batteries" the New Infrastructure Answer? 611
thepacketmaster writes "The Star reports about a new power generation model using smaller distributed power generators located closer to the consumer. This saves money on power generation lines and creates an infrastructure that can be more easily expanded with smaller incremental steps, compared to bigger centralized power generation projects. The generators in line for this are green sources, but Hyperion Power Generation, NuScale, Adams Atomic Engines (and some other companies) are offering small nuclear reactors to plug into this type of infrastructure. The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical. They envision burying reactors near the consumers for 5-10 years, digging them back up and recycling them. Since they are so low maintenance and self-contained, they are calling them nuclear batteries."
why not just do this with solar. (Score:5, Interesting)
why bring back the risk of meltdown/contamination. This can be achieved using solar and wind. same distributed concept. Just instead of a power cell you have a house covered with solar panels or a wind generator.
Yes this wont' work everywhere but it is viable in many high demand locations ergo Southern California.
Re:Need more guarantees than that (Score:5, Interesting)
Most reactors are built in such a way that automatically prevents them from going over critical (critical is where you want to be, as someone already pointed out). The very nature of their design, assuming something doesn't mess up, keeps them safe.
The thing is, even though reactors are built with countless safety features, something could still go wrong. That's why you have professionals constantly (or at least daily) monitoring everything. Now, if you go and produce millions of mini-reactors, put them in the backyards of regular citizens, give them nothing but automated monitoring, and leave them going for awhile, something is eventually going to go wrong. It still might work on a one-community-at-a-time basis, though. As long as appropriate precautions are taken, nuclear power is extremely effective and clean (compared to coal).
Re:Need more guarantees than that (Score:2, Interesting)
In reality, they're actually quite safe. In fact, they're probably even safer than coal, especially as of the recent coal slurry disaster in Tennessee and the Mercury in coal smoke.
Attach the word "nuclear" to something and watch the fear level rise.
Re:Need more guarantees than that (Score:5, Interesting)
Summary is incorrect. The "nuclear battery" (incorrect name) would have a 99.5% chance of "going critical". After all, that's what nuclear power plants do. What they mean is that the plant would have an infinitesimally small chance of achieving super-criticality. Super-criticality would be a very bad thing, but even that can be mitigated with enough cement. End result? The reactor will be as safe or safer than installing a Diesel Generator in the same location. But it will be more powerful, economical, and environmentally friendly.
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:1, Interesting)
Nukes aren't "green". The production of their fuel produces nearly as much Greenhouse pollution as is emitted by the fossil fuels they substitute for. Building, maintaining and demolishing their plants consumes even more power. The maintenance of their toxic spent fuel consumes lots of energy, producing lots of pollution, indefinitely. Security for all those operations is also wasteful.
With nukes, there "isn't much" waste by mass compared to, say, coal or petroleum, but a little nuke waste goes a long way.
25 MW in a shed needs a lake to cool! (Score:2, Interesting)
Waste heat from one of these things is going to be comparable to the electrical output, and will require dissipating the waste heat. Either they'll need a cooling tower (the BIG part of any nuclear site!), or be placed next to a large river or lake. Folks sort of get upset putting nukes right next to their water supply and ecosystem, so both those alternatives suck.
Technical inaccuracy in summary. (Score:4, Interesting)
"The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical."
This statement is incorrect, a reactor has to be critical to produce power.
Criticality refers to the rate at which the chain reaction of fission is occurring. If the reactor is sub-critical, then more neutrons are absorbed then causing new fissions. In this state, the reactor power exponentially decreases to zero. When the reactor is critical, exactly 1 fission is caused on average for each neutron released, which means the reactor is at a constant power. Super-critical means the reactor is increasing in power. A special case of criticality related to nuclear bombs is called prompt-super-critical. For more info, see the wiki [wikipedia.org] article.
I am not sure of the details of these designs, but I bet they use a fuel type similar to university research reactors. This fuel is a uranium-hydride mixture. The moderation for the neutrons is built into the fuel itself, but it has an extremely strong negative temperature coefficient. This means that any increase in power, and thus temperature, reduces the reactivity, which lowers the power back to the equilibrium level. It is physically impossible for the reactor to overpower.
For a neat demonstration of this effect, see this youtube video [youtube.com]. It is the research reactor at Penn State performing a pulse. Basically, a control rod is hydraulically ejected from the core, causing the power to spike to thousands of times the rated power, but only for a microsecond. The power just as quickly goes back down to normal by itself, because of the intrinsic safety of the fuel design.
Re:Critical (Score:2, Interesting)
Solar panels don't explode, but every solar panel is manufactured with some pretty nasty chemicals. Is the guaranteed environmental impact of manufacturing billions of solar panels less of an issue than the minuscule risk of a melt down?
You say nuclear power's problems have been mitigated by learning from our mistakes, why would the same not be true for solar?
Re:Need more guarantees than that (Score:4, Interesting)
Summary is incorrect. The "nuclear battery" (incorrect name) would have a 99.5% chance of "going critical". After all, that's what nuclear power plants do. What they mean is that the plant would have an infinitesimally small chance of achieving super-criticality. Super-criticality would be a very bad thing, but even that can be mitigated with enough cement.
Even plain-ol criticality (or sub- for that matter) can be bad if it's producing too much heat for the system to take out. Say for example because whatever fluid is being used to extract said heat for power generation purposes stops flowing. Then you have a meltdown, i.e. the nuclear core melting. TFA says it's meltdown, not criticality, that is virtually impossible, so score another one for bad /. summaries.
The modern way to prevent this is with naturally self-regulating reactors (as opposed to say relying on control rods to cool the reactor down). Pebble bed reactors do it by having the uranium in the center of the pebbles so that at the right temperatures they are at the right density for a critical reaction. When they get hotter, they expand, and the reaction slows down. Natural, physical self-regulation. No machine to fail, no control logic to have a bug, it's the laws of physics saving your ass. I like that.
Here's the paragraph on how this one works: "When uranium hydride gets too hot, above 550 degrees Celsius, it will shed hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen flows out of the core and is stored in special storage trays within the reactor. As the fuel loses hydrogen atoms it begins to naturally cool. As it cools, it will retrieve the hydrogen atoms from the trays."
So again, self-regulating based on temperature, sounds pretty cool. The only thing I don't like is that it still relies on a fluid flow, so if somehow the storage trays were collapsed in a way that didn't let the hydrogen to escape, I would think that the increased pressure would mean the uranium hydride would hold onto its hydrogen at higher temperatures. But I'm anything but a chemist or nuclear physicist.
Re:Need more guarantees than that (Score:3, Interesting)
But right now nobody can build a wind farm that will run a city 24/7/365.
Large reactors don't bother me any more than large dams, or networks.
If you want carbon limted power today you have three choices.
1. Hydro if it available.
2. Geo thermal if you have it available.
3. Nuclear.
Re:Need more guarantees than that (Score:3, Interesting)
My friend, even if you spread generation out among everyone, how are you going to deal with people charging their vehicles using electricity? Large megawatt datacenters? Steel plants? While I agree wind and solar have a place, there are always going to be large scale electric consumers in the industrial sector that need a reliable base load. Nuclear fills this gap. It's safe (only one incident on US soil, Three Mile Island), it's almost zero-carbon, and the fuel can be recycled/reprocessed if not for idiotic laws put in place by ex-Presidents (Jimmy Carter, I'm looking squarely at you).
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:BIG psychological barrier (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Critical (Score:2, Interesting)
You say nuclear power's problems have been mitigated by learning from our mistakes, why would the same not be true for solar?
Because most of the mistakes in nuclear were already known at the time. The russians just didn't do the safety procedures that were in the books sitting on their shelves. Known problems with known solutions *then*, they've just designed things today so that hiring people to lazy to read the manuals wont kill everyone.
While its true that they can and will make solar panels with safer chemicals, eventually. The main point is that nuclear power has been safe for decades and its only because of FUD that it hasn't been in use.
A couple years ago I got a tour of SONGS the nuclear plant out here in California. I met the guys in charge of maintaining the water quality (my sister was a tech who did maintenance on some of the equipment they use for testing it.) These guys took equipment designed to measure particles in the millions and made it sensitive enough to measure particles in the *billions*. Without something simple like clean water the facility wouldn't keep running. And it has been running just fine this whole time. That dude knows his stuff and he was really nice to a teenager full of stupid questions.
Nuclears biggest problem is red tape. The easiest example I can give is they have a leaky faucet in the lab that he could fix with crap from home depot, but it would cost almost 50k in paperwork to get the authority to do it... so they let the faucet drip.
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Virtually no waste" translates into "Japan believes it has correctly accounted for all the plutonium in its reprocessing network even though accounting errors have resulted in a thousand kilograms going missing."
Reprocessing is clearly a desirable thing to do from all kinds of standpoints, but the issues of safe transport for the cores and actually maintaining a sufficiently accurate inventory on the fissile material create huge practical problems.
Remember, over a decade or two you will be moving millions of kg of material around for reprocessing, so if you inventory control is 99.9% accurate you will still have enough missing plutonium to make a hundred-odd nice little nuclear bombs.
Re:Critical (Score:5, Interesting)
You say nuclear power's problems have been mitigated by learning from our mistakes, why would the same not be true for solar?
The use of nasty chemicals in solar manufacturing is not a "mistake", it's an intentional and necessary part of the process. I won't say it's impossible not to, but that would be the discovery of a fantastic new manufacturing technique, not learning from a mistake.
Whereas Chernobyl was a mistake that we have learned from.
Re:Dead idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Yea...and small amounts of caffeine, if made airborne, can quite quickly and easily kill people. Yet when I was in high school I bought an ounce (enough to kill several people - more if airborne) with no questions asked. Just because something can kill someone doesn't mean it's unsafe. And hell, caffeine doesn't have near the benefit of nuclear power generation. Why aren't people complaining about that?
Hell, think about how many thousands of people are killed in a year in auto accidents. More people die _every month_ on our highways than were killed in, for example, the September 11th terrorist attacks. And yet we're petrified of someone _maybe_ _possibly_ _theoretically_ being able to get their hands on material that might make an act of terrorism a tiny bit more possible - yet nobody gives a damn about making our highways safer. Yea. Let's stop hundreds of potential theoretical deaths rather than worrying about hundreds of thousands of real ones. Great choice.
Yes, radiation could maybe kill people. But guess what? So do coal mines. So does pollution. So do natural gas explosions. So do high-tension power lines. No matter how we get our electricity, there are risks involved. That's life. Get used to it. Just because it's different doesn't mean it's more dangerous. And just because it's been implemented poorly in other areas of the world doesn't mean nobody should ever try to use it again. By your logic, we shouldn't use coal either - after all, in early coal mines, hundreds of thousands of people died from dangerous gasses, fires, mines collapsing, etc. More died from chemicals leeching into their water. More died from mines collapsing under them years later. Coal is extremely unsafe. Nobody should ever, _ever_ use it for power generation.
Re:Say Aircraft carrier (Score:1, Interesting)
WRONG, naval reactors are water moderated slow reactors. criticality is controlled via control rods. they require constant monitoring by personnel. i guess you are NOT one of those technologically informed people.
and there have been several nuclear accidents on naval vessels, for starters look up the "thresher" a nuclear powered submarine.
schleprock
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:5, Interesting)
Batteries aren't efficient for a large scale solution. They're short-lived, they're low capacity, and energy is lost in the charging process.
Batteries using crappy technology are all of those things, but there's one battery technology that was invented 108 years ago that still impresses: the Edison Cell; nickel-iron-potash. Yeah, admittedly it's bulky and heavy per kwh, and expensive, and capacity temporarily takes a hit in a cold environment, but it's not short lived. There are cases on record where these have been in service (or worse, put away and neglected) for 50 or more years, and are still in perfect condition with nearly 100% of their original as-built capacity.
They have no memory effect; they tolerate conditions that kill other types, such as being left indefinitely in a fully discharged state, or grossly overcharged, or kept on indefinite float charge; the plates do not degrade; electrolyte vapour or spills do not corrode metals in the nearby environment.
They can be readily acquired in cell sizes up to 1220ah 1.2v, even by individuals. The cells can be put in series and series-parallel to get any desired energy capacity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_cell [wikipedia.org]
http://www.beutilityfree.com/content/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=44&Itemid=129 [beutilityfree.com]
http://www.beutilityfree.com/content/pdf_files/NiFeFlyer.pdf [beutilityfree.com]
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:BIG psychological barrier (Score:3, Interesting)
Source please? Not that I'm skeptical - but I'd love to be able to comprehensively shoot down the next dude that says EMF is baaaad, mmkay
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:3, Interesting)