US Plans "Disposable" Nuclear Batteries 297
holy_calamity writes "A US government program is in the works to design small nuclear reactors for use by developing countries. The work continues despite fears about security and nuclear proliferation. Plans include having reactors supplied with fuel by the US and other trusted nations, or to build reactors with their whole lifetime of fuel packaged securely inside — like a giant non-user replaceable radioactive battery.' '"
Whatever you do . . . (Score:5, Funny)
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I've got an old-old still-sealed 2oz. bottle of radium paint from my Grandfather - still glows pretty well. And yes, it's kept in an appropriately-shielded container.
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But as
Re:Whatever you do . . . (Score:5, Informative)
He started with smoke detectors (americium), moved up to radium, the uranium.
"When David's Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors from his mom's house, he decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place" and began to disassemble the reactor. He hid some of the material in his mother's house, left some in the shed, and packed most of the rest into the trunk of his Pontiac."
"At the shed, radiological experts found an aluminum pie pan, a Pyrex cup, a milk crate and other materials strewn about, contaminated at up to 1000 times the normal levels of background radiation. Because some of this could be moved around by wind and rain, conditions at the site, according to an EPA memo, "present an imminent endangerment to public health."
After the moon-suited workers dismantled the shed, they loaded the remains into 39 sealed barrels that were trucked to the Great Salt Lake Desert. There, the remains of David's experiments were entombed with other radioactive debris."
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Re:Whatever you do . . . (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Whatever you do . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Hardly... (Score:4, Informative)
The reason the reactor was closed down was:
a) This is Germany, the land of green
b) It happened two weeks after Three-Mile Island when the press was full of nuclear nightmare stories.
Pebble bed reactors are not as 'safe' as people say
Yes they are. Nobody's claiming 100% safety - there's always unexpected idiots with metal poles.
Besides, if "safety" is your concern: Do you have any idea how much radioactivity and other contaminants the average coal fired power station releases into the air per year? How many coal miners die every year to feed that plant...?
Pebble-bed reactors are orders of magnitude cleaner/safer than coal-fired generators, it's just that coal seems "natural", it comes out of the ground and hippies can hold it in their hands.
Re:Whatever you do . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Proliferation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you read the "developing countries" bit? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Personally I don't put that much faith in US foriegn policy. The way I see it the US, Australia and a few others want to monopolise nuclear fuel production because they think it will be a big part of 'clean' energy over the next 50-100yrs. They claim that they are doing this because they are 'responsible' nations but how this "responsibility' is determined is beyond my understanding.
These kind of patronising schemes have ever
Re:Proliferation? (Score:5, Informative)
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Anybody who wished to proliferate already has access to more uranium than they could possibly want, with all this stuff supplying the black market. There is no proliferation threat any more, because i
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There's a reason why natural uranium resources (which are fairly abundant) don't need even minimal security while uranium stockpiles are (or should be) tightly guarded.
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Why worry about proliferation? They're not going to be sending these things to Iran -- if they're ever built -- and any financially and technologically stable nation can already build nuclear weapons. There's over 100 research reactors operating around the world, hundreds more medical reactors, and all the power-generating ones as well. Sounds like a good plan to me.
Nuclear reactors of this size scale will have hundreds of thousands to millions of curies of activity left over when they decommission. In a day where we worry about a 5 or 10 Ci dirty bomb being able to be made, this would be intensely idiotic.
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Besides, the most likely source of radioactive materials today for a dirty bomb is medical radiation sources.
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It has been happening anyway and really is not related to devices like this. We don't have to worry about the Iranians wanting them either. Iran would also most likely be able to do something as good or better by this point since nuclear power research in the USA stalled long ago and is far behind the South African (pebble bed), Chinese and Russian technology that is available to the Iranians.
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It probably makes more sense than you think (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It probably makes more sense than you think (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'll help you with that link.
Can we have severe safety problems in the country of design and shut half of them down, CANDU! [anthonydepalma.com]
Can we generate much greater quantities of spent fuel than light water reactors, CANDU! [wikipedia.org]
Can we generate large quantities of tritium and expel it into the biosphere, CANDU! [wikipedia.org]
Can we generate large quantities of Plutonium 239 for weapons proliferation, CANDU! [wikipedia.org]
Can we make a reactor harder to operate safely than a Yanky reactor, CANDU! [wikipedia.org]
Can China, India and Pakistan, R
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Last time I read up on the Candu it used natural uranium not depleted.
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The things are very popular. Even Australia breifly considered buying one of them when it was flirting with the idea of a nuclear weapons program a bit over 30 years ago (cabinet papers released under the 30 year rule).
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FFS (Score:4, Insightful)
Fer crying out loud. It's bad enough that we're running out of fossil fuels, but between the hardcore environmentalists and paranoid first world countries, we're not making much traction on the nuclear issue, which is a shame. Talk up your fave green project all you want, but all of us need to get on the nuclear power plant bandwagon sooner rather than later. cheap fusion's not going to be here for a while.
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Re:FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
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We already see this with the way coal plants continue to be built today instead of other technologies. We could power everything with renewables using today's technology if demand wasn't far outstripping supply.
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So a deliberate effort to reduce power consumption is part of the puzzle, it doesn't fix anything. Take your example of Coal plants
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Nuclear is a reality right now.
If governments wanted to, they could switch over to nuclear + renewable in a couple of years.
Add electric cars and bye bye a *lot* of CO2.
Re:FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FFS (Score:5, Interesting)
The power consumption of devices is really important to me. For idealistic reasons I buy devices featuring high energy efficiency. Plus there is an economic dimension: In my country one kWh costs around $0.31 and one gallon is aroung $7.5. I must admit that the current dollar/euro ratio inflates these prices, but even if the exchange ratio was 1.30 the numbers would still look rather high. But even when I give preference to low-power devices I have no doubt that anything saved by me (and the western world in general) will be compensated by higher demand in emerging markets.
Btw: A high share of the prices mentioned above go into subvention of biofuel, wind- and solar-power. But even with high subventions the market share of regenerative energies is around 5% over here. In my very greenish opinion the best way to archive sustainability is the following: Tax energy consumption, but use the money coming from it for something else than subvention. This will make sure that demand is reduced on the customer side. On the production side legislation should regulate: Install a emission trading system like in Europe (but better) and sign international treaties like the Kyoto protocol. Producers could still use coal plants, but the economic benefit would strongly favor other sources of energy. I strongly believe that any other system will result in billions spend in nonsense.
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Well, they could make money and reduce everyone's power consumption by raising the price of power.
Is there any reason why people can't buy solar panels and put them on their roofs? Are they too expensive? Ugly? Do they not provide enough power for the average home?
I still live in my parents' house so I don't have a say in the matter.
Only problem with solar is that it's too expensive (Score:5, Informative)
1. Nope
2. Very much so
3. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
4. Sure, you just need a lot of them, not to mention a storage bank if you want power when the sun's not out.
Limited exceptions aside, the only thing keeping solar from being part of the standard roof installation is that even with 50-75% subsidization on the part of various government agencies the payback is over 20 years in most cases. If you assume a 5-10% cost of capitol, many systems would never break even.
Cut the cost of panels in half and double the cost of electricity and it makes sense in orders of magnitude more places, such as areas where electricity is extremely expensive, such as some European countries and California when the legislature is having a particularly large cow.
Get the cost of an install that'll cover ~50% of a home's needs down to ~$2-4/watt and I'd expect them to be building factories to build the panels left and right. I say 50% because more than that and you'll likely need battery banks($$$) to go off the grid otherwise the power companies will start doing things like charge a monthly connection fee to pay for infrastructure and maintenance, and refuse to buy power because they have no demand when you have power to sell.
A single watt of panel can be expected to produce ~2-3 kwh a year. If you're paying $.30 a kwh, you're looking at a payback period of around 4-5 years. That's reasonable. The problem: I haven't seen a new panel kit for less than $10/watt, and I only pay $.10 per kwh. So I'm not installing them anytime soon.
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I like my fantasy more than yours.
Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can build desalinization plants around the nuclear device, it would be easier to secure, and immediately noticed if someone started tampering with it. i.e. the loss of power.
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Not that I've ever bothered to look at how modern desalination is accomplished.
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There are two things that I DO NOT underestimate: The extent of God's mercy, and the corrosive power of salt.
what do you think ships use (Score:4, Informative)
Re:what do you think ships use (Score:4, Informative)
A heat exchange device is used to transfer heat from the sealed coolant system to another system using ordinary methods to dissipate.
No salt water every actually goes into the reactor, or even near it. That would be idiotic.
Re:what do you think ships use (Score:5, Informative)
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All atomic reactors use heat exchangers.
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Also, heavy water itself as very little to do with fusion bombs. Heavy water is used as a neutron moderator, which basically means it slows down neutrons, giving them a better chanc
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the obvious solution, is to not use a pump that requires a seal, or to design a seal that doesn't react to liquid sodium.
but it caused an unshielded test reactor to melt down, albeit in a desert, but it was the worst atomic accident that the government doesn't want people to remember.
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(Which, incidentally, we have used before in submarines... UNDERWATER.)
Let's hope it works (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't resist urge to make puns (Score:5, Funny)
I apologize profusely.
At Last! (Score:2, Insightful)
CopperTop Size Dx10^238 (Score:3, Insightful)
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Why reinvent the wheel? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S [wikipedia.org]
And Toshiba's not the only game in town as far as micro-reactors go. Why would the government spend a boatload to develop something that already exists commercially? Why not just allow countries to select the best commercial design that fits them and ease the regulatory barriers to permit easier US fueling of self-contained sub-50 megawatt reactors? Seems like the AEC is just caught flatfooted in response to new technology, that's all -- no need to develop anything, just rework the regulations to take into account new technologies.
Re:Why reinvent the wheel? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why reinvent the wheel? (Score:4, Informative)
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Either way, with the industry's track record with lithium ion I think making nuclear batteries will have to be done with a wee bit of caution
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Why reinvent the language? Above is misleading (Score:2)
While it is a habit lately to redefine words at whim to win arguments the old meaning of viable is a bit different to this and the old meaning of deploying is something other than very early design stages. The old meaning of "already exists" is also something that I'm a little happier with than the redefinition where ideas can be described that way instead of physical objects. While t
I can't wait till these get smaller (Score:3, Funny)
Cool!
What's wrong with running undersea cables? (Score:2)
I understand AC has it's transmission limits, so lets backpedal a bit here.
Put the reactor under the ocean at some insane depth near the 3rd world country, and run undersea cables to the shore.
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Tagged: (Score:2)
Proliferation and security (Score:5, Insightful)
I think TFA misses the point entirely: the main reason for the work is to address security and nuclear proliferation fears. Packaging reactors that are not particularly useful in an arms program with a complete lifetime of fuel and making them available to developing countries is intended as a minimize both the reality and the appearance of a legitimate need for developing countries to have their own civilian (or merely "civilian") nuclear programs, which could more easily be converted to (or covers for) military programs.
Clearly, they aren't proliferation proof, but traditional reactors, especially built and developed locally (even if with outside assistance) are even less proliferation-proof, and those are spreading in the absence of any effort to provide an alternative. This is an attempt to lessen the both the actual need and the political viability of the claim of a need for those kind of independent programs.
The alternative to this program is not that the developing world gets no nuclear material and no reactors.
This is bad (Score:3, Interesting)
What if, say, Peru plans a solution to US health care problem and decides unilaterally to deploy that solution to the US?
Re:This is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Do nothing and a hue and a cry goes up for leadership. Do something and a hue and a cry goes up because we're insufferable bastards forcing or will on the rest of the world.
You don't get it both ways. Either we lead the way or we don't. I haven't seen a plan like this put out by any other first world nation, though I suppose I could be lacking information.
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So, like, they'd open a chain of free health clinics or something? Using Peruvian tax dollars? Okay.
Foreign aid is better given as specific goods and services, rather than cash. Money has a way of disappearing when gifted to 3rd-world governments. (Or any government, really, but it's worse in some places.)
I knew it. (Score:3, Informative)
The iPod Yotta cometh. Steve's gonna be pissed that it leaked.
(The news, I mean. If the battery leaked, you would have to evacuate the city.)
Trusted? (Score:5, Insightful)
Trusted by who?
Nukes NOW (Score:3, Insightful)
1. In today's economy, energy availability is one of the keys to economic growth and a reasonable standard of living, especially for developing nations.
2. The general consensus is that carbon fuels are harming the environment.
3. "Alternative" energy sources such as solar and wind are much more expensive per unit of energy than carbon, and developing nations have little interest in them.
Therefore, AFAIK, the only feasible source of energy that can lift people to western standards of living without burning huge amounts of fossil fuels is nuclear. Even so, developing nations have no interest in nuclear (except Iran and DRK) because it is still more expensive than coal. To spread nuclear power will require incentives and R&D taylored to small nations.
Nuclear power is by far the safest source of energy that can be deployed anywhere in the world (sorry hydro and thermo), and I think a program such as this one could be one of the greatest developments for the world's poor. Even the US could use 100 new nuclear plants today to achieve its environmental goals.
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I firmly believe that our new president, assuming McCain doesn't win, will side with the people that believe it would be better
I have only one question: (Score:2)
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I guess it sucks to be you. Bob Geldof says were doing the right thing in Africa and they pretty much appreciate it. Columbia is happy with us (I get that from the Columbian national programmer sitting next to me at work). The eastern European countries like us to for some weird freedom/democracy issue (especially in Kosovo). Cuba, Russia, Serbia, China, Syria, Iran, N.
Adapting Steven Wright (Score:2)
Any reactor is disposable, if you have the place.
As for arguments that the design precludes abuse and proliferation, never underestimate those of persistence, regardless of intent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_boy_scout). They tend to take explanations of supposedly difficult things (like http://science.howstuffworks.com/uranium-centrifuge.htm [howstuffworks.com]) and hack an easier method, such as using the "centrifuge" part but not the "gaseous diffusion" part.
Here first please. (Score:3, Insightful)
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They are realy NAQUADAH REACTORs (Score:2)
I hard that homer simpson is working on this (Score:2)
Fixed it for you (Score:2, Insightful)
Problem Needs a Solution, Not Political Bickering (Score:5, Insightful)
The rest of you - we can't go on like this. Other countries are "coming on line" soon and will need their share of oil, too. There's just not enough to go around; not in the long term. All the wishful thinking in the world isn't going to change this - we need to find another energy source, go back to the stone age, or fight World War Three to secure what's left of a disappearing resource.
Those who think that hydrogen or ethanol are the solution - go to the back of the bus. There's no free hydrogen on this planet and to obtain free hydrogen you need to add energy. Current methods for obtaining hydrogen: electrolyse water (big energy) or catalytically extract it from natural gas (limited supply). There's no free energy here, hydrogen is an energy storage medium, not an energy supply.
The ethanol solution is also based on mostly fantasy. Sure, you can ferment carbohydrates at virtually no cost other than the carbohydrate source. But distilling it to obtain the ethanol is a high energy operation. Can ethanol be distilled using less energy than can be obtained by burning it? Maybe someday, but using today's technology it's a losing proposition. And don't forget that the carbohydrate source is the same one that we call "food". Our government's current push for ethanol is the reason that Mexican farmers are plowing under their agave crops and planting corn instead. When you notice that the price of your tequila has skyrocketed, thank your government.
When looking for an energy source, forget just looking at things you can burn to release energy. Look at things that can be found naturally in a state where they can be burned to release energy; these may be useful energy sources. That eliminates hydrogen and ethanol, both of those require energy input to manufacture.
Until something else is discovered, other than oil the only primary source of energy we know of is nuclear power. You can demonstrate against it - and it is indeed an imperfect source of power; disposal of the "exhaust" is a very difficult problem. But it's the only thing that we've got to work with in the long term.
Wind and water may provide some energy, but they won't be enough. If you don't want nuclear energy, suggest something else that will provide a positive energy result.
New Eveready Mascot (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Good use of taxpayer money? (Score:5, Informative)
http://markc1.typepad.com/relentlesslyoptimistic/images/foreign_aid_chart1.GIF [typepad.com]
Most of that aid goes to (semi)developed countries like Colombia, Israel and Egypt for political reasons, or to Iraq and Afganistan (which we fucked up in the first place), instead of to the poorest countries in the world:
http://static.flickr.com/51/189662626_257b15004f_o.jpg [flickr.com]
Re:Good use of taxpayer money? (Score:5, Insightful)
The US Government is not the USA.
But your link is useless (Score:3, Interesting)
David Roodman, from the CGD, attempts to adjust the aid numbers by including subjective factors PDF formatted document:
* Quality of recipient governance as well as poverty;
* Penalizing tying of aid;
* Handling reverse flows (debt service) in a consistent way;
* Penalizes project proliferation (overloading recipient governments with
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How much is it worth to have a massive floating hospital visit your shores, treating tens of thousands of people in the course of a few weeks?
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It's much like the tax argument. Many people think that the rich should pay more taxes to be fair, but the flip side of the argument is that the wealthy already pay much more in taxes than anybody else.
The only way the US gives more money away is if we increase taxes - which 90% of us think we pay too much already. I'm not going to pay yet another tax so that the peopl
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Charity is kind of like people voluntarily taxing themselves to help out people they'll never meet. Kind of shoots a hole in the ugly American myth, but there you go.
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