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."
Critical (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it has to go critical (k=1) if there is a constant power output...
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Critical (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly right, but people prefer letting the papers think for them.
I don't know if that's it so much as the "papers" seem to know what they're talking about. I don't. Critical? K? These are things I know nothing about. There are people on /. who swear on all things holy that nuclear power is completely safe, almost to the point of suggesting Chernobyl and 3 mile island were trivial, not actually radioactive, or hoaxes. There seem to be other people who say there is no such thing as safe nuclear power. Both camps seem to know a lot more about it than I do. You guys work it out and then tell me which it is. In the mean time, I'm pulling for solar power. It works for plants, and I have yet to hear any controversey about will solar panels explode. And don't suggest that people who don't know the ins and outs of nuclear power are dumb or I'll start quizing you on developmental neurobiology.
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
Also Chernobyl was due to bad design and poor saftey and maintainence procedures.
Nuke is not 100% safe, but you could also get crushed under a solar panel or more-likely have the chemicals and other pollutants used in making the panel poison you.
Nuke can be safe and clean as well as relatively cheep with proper care and maintenance. It isn't a gift from Maya the Earth Goddess but then again it isn't a scheme by some villain from Captain Planet either.
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
Very true but perhaps understated. Even the poor procedures at Chernobyl were ignored. From what I have seen, the operators in the space of an hour managed to do practically every DON'T in their procedural manual, including overriding the safety systems to withdraw more control rods than was permitted under any circumstance.
That coupled with an inherently unsafe design and wildly fluctuating power output (due also to operator error) perfectly set the reactor up for a thermal runaway.
With appropriate fuel reprocessing, nuclear has the potential for the LEAST environmental impact of any power source including wind (kills birds, spoils view), solar (takes up large land areas), and hydro (kills fish, prevents return to spawning grounds).
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
I remember reading that it takes more energy to build a Solar power system than that system will deliver in it's expected lifespan. Is this true?
No.
To elaborate: picture a 200W solar panel [solarhome.org], it weighs about 30lbs and has a lifetime of 20 years or more. In those 20 years, if you average 8 hours a day of full output, that's 1.6kWh per day, or over 11 Megawatt hours. A moderately sized factory might consume [wikipedia.org] 11 megawatts, but if it's that big, it had better be turning out more than 1 solar panel per hour.
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Well, that's not entirely accurate. They also take into account materials used to build them, extraction of those materials, etc.
However, the argument is silly when it comes down to it.
1. The only reason other fuel sources don't have this issue is because they have a constant consumable that is not going to last anywhere near as long as the sun.
2. It completely ignores the possibility of recycling solar panels.
3. It completely ignores the effect that a substantially increased demand for solar power will hav
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PV on rooftops is a fine source of supplemental power and I'm all for it, but it will not be enough to shut the base load plants off. You're forgetting all that electricity used for factories and other industrial operations. There's simply not enough room on their roof for enough PV panels to run the plant. Especially considering the ones that run 24/7.
Part of why residential PV costs are coming down is that they typically use the grid for 'storage' and backup. If your objective is to be off the grid, it'll
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: That's not to say that we haven't learned anything in the 40 years since TMI was designed. I find it absurd that we stopped making nuke plants. We should be building shiny new safe ones so that we can decommission all the old time bombs.
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
The "saving the day" was way after the meltdown. The big concern was the hydrogen bubble formed in the reactor vessel by the reaction between steam and the much hotter than normal Zircaloy fuel cladding. The problem was the risk of the hydrogen causing an explosion that would rupture the vessel.
The meltdown was a concern from the regard of waste handling (as you can't simply pull the fuel cells out of the core like for a normal refueling) and due to the risk of destroying the first layer of containment (the reactor vessel). Even if the melting core material had ruptured the vessel however, that's why reactors in Western nations have a containment vessel to hold the contaminated material (and keep radiation levels outside the containment vessel at background levels).
Keep in mind that TMI-2 was scrammed the entire time the core was melting down -- this was not a runaway nuclear reaction, this was a loss of core cooling (a nuclear core will generate "decay heat" for some time after it is shutdown). So a meltdown is not a concern for radiation generation per se but rather for nuclear plant integrity.
Are nuclear meltdowns an issue? Of course they are -- they wreck a tremendously expensive nuclear core and the cleanup is it itself even more expensive than normal. But it is nowhere near the same league as Chernobyl (which violently blew up due to managing to achieve "prompt criticality [wikipedia.org]", which is the criticality you want to avoid).
Re:Critical (Score:5, Insightful)
3 mile island was trivial. Chernobyl was due to crappy Soviet engineering, management, and maintenance. We've had plenty of time to learn from their mistakes.
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?
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.
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Uhhh, so who do you trust? It's all well and good to bitch and moan, but if you don't have a better idea, that's all you're doing: bitching and moaning.
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Three mile island was fairly trivial. You can't go into the site for a few hundred years, that's about it.
Chernobyl was not trivial in the general sense of the world, but considering that it was essentially a practical worst case for design, administration, and maintainence and was built by a country that couldn't even make simple machinery work more than one time in three as a worst case benchmark it's remarkably benign.
No one is saying that nuclear power is 100% without risks. What we're saying is that of
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What happened at Chernobyl (in a nutshell) was that the presence of steam in their water-regulated reactors increased the reaction rate. (This is called a "Void coefficient" greater than 1.) You can see where this leads: more steam --> more reactio
Sexay! (Score:5, Funny)
Three-headed fish coming to a pond near you!
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:why not just do this with solar. (Score:5, Informative)
Solar takes a lot of space and puts out a lot less power. It's also costlier. And the process of manufacturing solar panels is horrible for the environment.
Nuclear power is, believe it or not, the cleanest technology we have available, even if you consider the highly radioactive waste and the (typically minute) risk of meltdown.
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Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pebblebeds, here we come!
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Some modern nuclear reactors can also use thorium, which is much more abundant than uranium, and virtually untapped. The reserves of uranium are large.
I think the "peak uranium" people are forgetting that after the Chernobyl disaster there were practically no new reactors built in several countries, so the uranium miners had to compete against high grade uranium from decommisioned nuclear warheads, and mining and discovery efforts had to be reduced accordingly. This is why we are after "peak uranium", but t
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you dense? Nuclear = 24/7 power. Solar = sometimes power.
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Solar + battery = usually power. Solar + battery + grid = 24/7 power. Who's being the dense one?
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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]
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Lets see it's fission is the only current clean source that can deal with our expanding power needs. These sound like RTG's pretty much a ball of radioactive material at the center of something that looks like a transformer. It makes heat and as the heat moves though the wires it generates electricity. Were talking no moving parts simple. The problem is they are big and do not put out much power more like a few hundred watts sustained for decades.
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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.
I like this concept. *cough* Get something that could meltdown, but lets just bury it and forget about it, cause everyone makes things that just don't fail. What's the worst that could happen if it DOES fail?
The lights go out, but it's okay, because everyone glows...
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:5, Funny)
I like this concept. *cough* Get something that could meltdown,
Better get that cough looked at, might be from the local coal plant.
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:4, Informative)
Advantages of nukes. (Score:5, Insightful)
They are more flexible and more reliable.
1. You can site them anywhere. Solar and wind have to be sited where there is solar and wind.
2. They are available 24/7. Solar and wind are up to mother nature.
3. They have a higher power density. You need less area to power a bunch of homes. This translates into more safety, and ultimately a lower land use footprint, leaving more room for, well, things that live in the environment.
4. Lower environmental risk. We have barely studied the long term effects caused by draining energy out of the wind, or, of robbing the ground from solar energy to convert to electricity. The aggregate effects of billions of windmills and solar panels upon the earth are not understood. With nukes, we know the risks. We might have a meltdown, some radiation, and a leak, but that's about it.
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Oh whew! I was worried something bad might happen.
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Sorry, but issues of draining energy out of the wind or robbing the ground of solar energy are bogus.
Im not saying that there is no impact, but any impact there may be is negligable next to the same impact derived from any city you care to name. Buildings block the wind FAR more than a windmill could and pavement changes the way the land absorbs energy as much as solar panals do and is far more pervasive than any solar plan I have seen.
Stick to arguments about making the solar panels. There is substance t
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:4, Insightful)
Windfarms are only profitable with government subsidy; wind mills cost more energy than they make in there serviceable lifetime (Hence the need for subsidy). Bad for bat populations, which are already in decline.
Solar panels are fantastically bad environmentally. They require the production of green house gasses far worse than CO2, lifetimes are limited and exponentially decay. They require toxic batteries to work, and are unreliable due to weather. 14% efficiency. Also, bad for ground-level wildlife.
The only real alternatives are:
Those are listed from worst to best in terms of available output.
Wow; combat garbage with more garbage, eh? (Score:4, Informative)
The subsidies are far far far less than what is plowed into Coal, oil, OR NUKES. In addition, with our the subsidies, wind produces less than
As to the bats, well, how much life do you think is dying from Mercury, lead, etc. emission in the air by coal and oil. How many died from that recent ash release?
Solar panels are fantastically bad environmentally. They require the production of green house gasses far worse than CO2, lifetimes are limited and exponentially decay. They require toxic batteries to work, and are unreliable due to weather. 14% efficiency. Also, bad for ground-level wildlife.
You are kidding, right? Green House gases far worse than CO2. Like water? Limited Lifetime? You mean 30-50 years? They require energy storage to work 24x7 (i.e. base power), not necessarily toxic batteries. 14% efficieny? The systems vary any where from 7% (thin film) to 35% on newer products (using mags). Bad for ground-level wildlife? You mean something on the roof is bad for the ground? Hmmmm.
Of course, the worse part about your statement is that it assumes SOlar PV. Solar Thermal is actually at the same cost as coal.
The only real alternatives are:
Solar algae (2-4% efficient)
Geo-thermal (limited places)
Wave/tidal (possible local environmental impacts, high maintenance costs)
Nuclear (low risk, high output, radioactive half-lives are down to 200 years)
Again wow. Just wow.
Solar Thermal was missed in all your stuff.
Algae 2-4% efficient?????
Geo-thermal. Have you even read the current study by MIT? Google for it. If you consider only shallow geo-thermal, then USA will only produce about 10GW of power via it. BUT deep geo-thermal can produce more than 1/2 of America's total power need (that assumes everything on electrical) before 2050.
Nukes half-lives down to 200 years? ONLY if you run it through IFR. Of course, that was killed and the program needs to be re-started (if nothing else, just to use our nuclear waste up).
Look, I am a big fan of nukes (more of the IFR), BUT, spreading garbage about AE does not help the cause. This is
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't Nuclear energy pretty green? Yes, there's some amount nuclear waste, but there sure isn't much.
Seems like it'd be better to say that there are "other" green options.
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:5, Informative)
to be fair there would be virtually no waste to worry about if reprocessing were allowed.
Our current problem is that spent fuel still contains much fissle material, and reprocessing fuel rods to get the material out is disallowed by the DOE.
If you reprocessed the fuel to make new fuel, and were left with only the low level waste then the radiation hazard would be fairly comparable with coal ash.
-nB
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.
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Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:5, Insightful)
The best would be to recycle the waste and whatever is left over put into a subduction zone.
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why fire it into the sun? Reprocess it, and throw it back in the reactor. Do that enough times, and the stuff you pull out at the end would be "cool" waste: easy to store, not all that radioactive.
The waste problem right now is extreme because the amount of fissile material left in the waste is huge. The reason we don't reprocess is essentially political; reprocessed waste can very easily be "bomb grade" fissile material.
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear is only 'green' when you exclude the waste issue.
And the (radioactive) pollution caused by uranium mining for the indigenous people of northern Niger and other places.
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This is a common misconception and comes from letting non-scientists frame the waste disposal argument.
See, the natural ore is radioactive before it is ever processed and put in the reactor. It was going to be radioactive for thousands of years, no matter what human beings did. Not our fault, it just is.
When we concentrate it and use it in our reactors, the
Didn't the Russians do this? (Score:2)
I seem to remember watching a show about little reactors put in out of the way places all over Russia to power navigation aids and stuff. The show I watched, one had been opened and guys were taking turns trying to get the radio active material into a container to get it moved. Some hunters had found it and got radiation poisoning.
Mr. Fusion (Score:2)
Re:Didn't the Russians do this? (Score:4, Informative)
I did on-site service work recently for a 'union man' who did some work at a nearby nuclear power plant. He told me that after they were suited up they walked in and decided they were bill gates, mr burns, and homer simpson. They were told to move a radioactive part and 'burns' asked 'gates' if he was going to go get that. He said, "Hell no, I'm not moving that fucking thing. I'm Bill Gates, I'll buy homer a six-pack and that dumb bastard'll do it". Apparently the staff at the plant didn't find it as funny as they did.
He also had screen by screen pictures of the computer-based nuclear safety exams they all used to cheat their way in and could have walked right off the set of the sopranos but that is another story.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Use [wikipedia.org]
Re:Didn't the Russians do this? (Score:4, Informative)
Probably RTGs [wikipedia.org], which the USSR put in a lot of lighthouses and other remote places that needed power (with poor documentation, so nobody knows where all these things are anymore). They take a radioactive source (preferably a pure-alpha emitter, since they're easy to sheild, but theoretically any radiation will work) then use the Seeback effect to generate electricity.
What it sounds like they're doing in this article is having an actual nuclear reactor with fissionable material, rather than just generating power off of radiation. They seal it up, bury it, and don't expect to have to do any maintenance for 10 years or so. The fuel source is unsuitable for weapons (it could, of course, make a dirty bomb, but those are more about fear mongering than an actual threat), and has the same self-regulating properties as a pebble bed, where fission simply stops if it gets too hot. At $30 million each, I could easily see these getting bought by medium-sized municipalities to cover their energy needs, though it's a bit much for the totally decentralized grid that the article talks about.
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According to Wiki there have been several cases of both innocent travellers and thieves being irradiated to death - the travellers slept by them for th
Re:Didn't the Russians do this? (Score:4, Funny)
> the travellers slept by them for the tens of thousands of watts of heat they throw off
When I travel in cold climates I often like to sleep next to tens of thousands of watts of heat. Really takes the edge of a frosty night. Of course I'll sleep by megawatts of heat if I can find it, for a real warm night.
BIG psychological barrier (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, there are still people out there that think powerlines cause cancer, and that vaccinations cause autism, despite scientific evidence.
Nuclear uis a huge red button. I don't think this option is politically viable except in rare circumstances.
I can see it working for small islands and other population centers that are far away/cut off from other population centers. If you are talking about a largish island that has no power supply on it, then it might work. Or an Alaskan town far from everywhere else.
But I can't see someone putting one of these things say in the middle of NYC, Los Angelos, or even on Long Island
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your correct, but don't rule out that psychology changes also. The US as a country is in such a mental flux right now anything that seems viable that could produce jobs and get us out of the middle east would be acceptable.
Perhaps not a Millstone 1, &2 but a little shed under ground that no one is even aware of maybe ?? yes no ?
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OTOH, if you pick a few reasonable-sized cities (not a "major" one) open to the idea, install the generators, and make a big fuss over "oh, how great is this cheap power, especially for my new Volt", then you can hit the "fluctuate power" button on some of the cities opposed to the idea and watch them cave.
Try putting 1000 of them in LA and Greater NYC (Score:3, Insightful)
So these reactors power about 20,000 homes. That means that to power LA and the greater NYC area you'd need about 1000 of them. Good luck with that. People get annoyed enough if you want to put cellphone towers in their back yards.
And think of what NYC looks like during a garbage strike, and imagine what it'd be like if the garbage is now radioactive waste :-)
And yeah, sure, putting one in Alberta tar-sands country is fine, because the only people living up there are the oil workers.
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The Woodland Cree First Nation and the folks in the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation would be fascinated at their "non-person" status.
I used to work with a guy from Fort Chip called Noel Mercredi. It was the name the Catholic priest christened him with. I guess Christmas came on Wednesday that year. He was a person too. He once told me that the name of his tribe meant "The People
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The nuclear option is not politically viable. The other options are not physically viable. The only reliable, cost effective, clean, and sufficiently abundant source of power available with forseeable technology is nuclear.
Solar - takes lots of space and panels are costly
Wind - intermittent and insufficiently abundant to power a continent
Ethanol - not cost effective
Natural Gas - still releases CO2
"clean" coal - still releases CO2
Tidal - Only works on the coasts.
Not that I'm saying these are all worthless.
Re:BIG psychological barrier (Score:5, Interesting)
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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
Peace through mini nukes! (Score:5, Informative)
The liquid metal reactor takes advantage of the physical properties of a fissile metal hydride, such as uranium hydride, which serves as a combination fuel and moderator. The invention is self-stabilizing and requires no moving mechanical components to control nuclear criticality. In contrast with customary designs, the control of the nuclear activity is achieved through the temperature driven mobility of the hydrogen isotope contained in the hydride. If the core temperature increases above a set point, the hydrogen isotope dissociates from the hydride and escapes out of the core, the moderation drops and the power production decreases. If the temperature drops, the hydrogen isotope is again associated by the fissile metal hydride and the process is reversed. The chemical isotope splits chemically when it gets too hot. Just like water boils and turns into steam, you can design the water system to not exceed the boiling point of water. You would have to keep the water under pressure to force higher temperatures.
The safety systems will be similar but the reactor cores are different between the Triga (fuel rods in a pool type reactor) and the Hyperion Power Generation Uranium Hydride (liquid metal) reactor.
If you were going to blow it up, it would take a lot of explosives -like blowing up a 15-20 ton buried bank vault. A lot of explosives to penetrate the concrete cask and then more to blow through however many feet of dirt it is buried under.
It would not add much to the cost to have sensors and digital video camera security to these things. So extreme tunneling, attempts to move it or blow it up should be easily detectable and action taken.
For the amount of effort and explosives it would take then just take those explosives and add radioactive material (available in mines and in less secure facilities and sources) and then put your dirty bomb anywhere. Thus there is no incremental risk.
The nuclear material is tougher to turn into nuclear bombs than using raw uranium, which a terrorist could get from natural sources (mines etc...). Again no incremental risk (we are adding no new risk as there is an easier existing path).
For getting oil from oil shale this system can supply heat instead of natural gas. Hyperion also offers a 70% reduction in operating costs (based on costs for field-generation of steam in oil-shale recovery operations), from $11 per million BTU for natural gas to $3 per million BTU for Hyperion. Over five years, a single Hyperion reactor can save $2 billion in operating costs in a heavy oil field. A lot of the initial one hundred orders are from oil and gas companies.
A single truck can deliver the HPM heat source to a site. The device is supposed to be able to produce 70 MW of thermal energy for 5 years. That means that the truck will be delivering about 10.5 trillion BTU's to the site. Natural gas costs about $7 per million BTU which would would cost $73 million.
It would be better to compare the HPM to diesel fuel, which currently costs about 2 times as much per unit of useful heat as natural gas and still requires some form of delivery for remote locations. In some places, fuel transportation costs are two or three times as much as the cost of the fuel from the central supply points.
In certain very difficult terrains, or in places where there are people who like to shoot at tankers, delivery costs can be 100 times as much as the basic cost of the fuel.
Initially these units will be in remote areas near oil sand projects and they will not be directly under people's houses. Do people live directly over power transformers or oil refineries ? The first few thousand can be placed on the site of existing nuclear and coal plants which have a few square miles of space. Even if there eventually there was one for every twenty thousand or ten thousand homes, they would be situated in some industrial zoned area. For eastern europe and island developments, the units will be sited several hundred meters from where people
NIMBY (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup. (Score:3, Insightful)
Smells like bologna (Score:2)
and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads
IIRC, weren't nuclear warheads the first large scale application of this technology? In this field it's the older technology that scares me the most.
And if they're too small to make warheads out of...what happens if you steal two or three of them?
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I am fairly certain that the actual radioactive materials used in warheads are not the same as those used in nuclear power generation. I could be wrong.
Ok, so let's say you steal two or three of them. Now what? You'd have to have a pretty interesting "house" to be able to take radioactive materials and turn them into a bomb, presuming they're even the correct type of material. I don't think making a nuclear bomb is exactly one of those basement projects... not to mention that most nuclear reactors of a
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Put on a Hank Paulson mask!
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week before I head out to Vegas for a show at MGM..
Not exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Hyperion Power Generation Inc. has developed a garden shed-sized nuclear reactor that can produce enough heat to generate 25 megawatts of electricity for up to 10 years.
That's enough energy to power 20,000 homes, but still tiny by current nuclear standards."
These are not going to be burried in peoples back years.
A small town might have one city may have a few scattered around. A factory may have one or a data center.
As too what could go wrong? Well maybe they are as safe as they say. I would be willing to bet that they are pretty dang safe. If so then they could be great. Think of all the small villages in Northern Canada or Alaska that depend on diesel fuel truck or flown in. Or think of small nations like the Bahamas.
Yea this sounds great if it is safe.
nuclear warheads? (Score:2)
BBH
Re:nuclear warheads? (Score:5, Informative)
There are two kinds of nuclear bomb-- Uranium and Plutonium. In order to get a Uranium bomb, you have to have highly enriched Uranium (a high U-235 to U-238 ratio). These reactors don't have anywhere near the U-235 ratio for that. The second option is Plutonium which is not a naturally-occurring substance. It is the by-product of some kinds of fission, and can be made in a specially designed nuclear reactor. These aren't those kinds of reactors, so you're not going to get enough Plutonium to be useful in weapons development.
Thus, one of these things wouldn't be much of a head-start over just mining some Uranium ore.
Rapid discharge nuclear battery... (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/images/w87-design.jpg [globalsecurity.org]
Say Aircraft carrier (Score:5, Insightful)
These have been working of submarines and aircraft carriers for decades.
It is high time some of that military tech comes to civilian use.
If you are afraid of nuclear power, you are on the wrong website.
This is supposed to be for technologically informed people.
Yes, start in remote areas. Islands etc where running power lines is a major expensse would be the best places to start. NY and LA prefer to export the pollution to the suburbs.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And those situations limit the alternatives and mean that an incredibly expensive nuclear power source is still a really good idea. Once you get onto dry land those power sources do not look as good because there are a lot of other alternatives.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> These have been working of submarines and aircraft carriers for decades.
Incorrect. The pressurized water reactors that were used in subs and ships were adapted to produce the big 1000 MW reactors that scare the antinuclear types that we all know. This design (TRIGA) preceded PWRs by decades, and was designed for college research departments to "play" with safely. It hasn't had the reactor-years of PWRs because it isn't as suitable for commercial use when joining the grid.
Power Generation (Score:3, Insightful)
I always get a kick out of this... (Score:5, Insightful)
But America gets half its power from coal, which dumps literally tons of thorium and uranium and mercury into the air due to fly ash every year.
Re:I always get a kick out of this... (Score:5, Informative)
One reactor design is made to prevent critical events from forming. Toshiba's 4S reactor. The reactor uses a neutron reflector to bounce neutrons back at the reactor core, heating it up as the reflector moves up and down. The faster the reflector moves, the more energy is produced. Something breaks, meeting SCRAM conditions, the reflector simply stops moving, the reactions stop, moving back down to relative background conditions. The design is modular, the core is sealed at the factory and moved to the site in a single piece containment vessel. Being sodium cooled poses risks, but is manageable.
This design will provide 10 MW @ 75% capacity for 20-30 years.
Triga reactors (Score:3, Informative)
TFA says they will be using TRIGA reactors, which are open pool reactors. From WikiP [wikipedia.org]
"Pool reactors are used as a source of neutrons and for training, and in rare instances for process heat but not for electrical generation."
So how exactly are these "nuclear battery" TRIGA supposed to actually create useful power? The flow of hydrogen atoms to the "hydrogen trays?" It doesn't say protons.
Of course, I am treating wikipedia as infallible here. Maybe that is the flaw.
What about the "Not in my backyard" folks? (Score:2)
Also allows communities who want to pursue "Cleaner" (aka Hydro, Wind, Solar, etc) energy credits if they can overproduce.
We don't need a radically different infrastructure to implement technologies like this -
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
My backyard is already full of dead bodies. If I bury a nuke back there, the radiation will turn them all into zombies.
And I bet they would be *real* hungry after they clawed their way above ground.
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.
Nuscale "backgrounder" (Score:3, Insightful)
The "backgrounder" turns out to be a 4-page brochure with explanatory text.
What is immediately apparent is the following:
- the Nuscale reactor is an ordinary boiling-water reactor with one cooling circuit: the heat exchanger is inside the reactor vessel itself, and steam from the secondary circuit is lead out of the reactor vessel to the generators
- it uses control rods like any other BWR, but which does not contain coolant pumps. Convection takes care of coolant circulation.
- it uses standard low-enriched reactor fuel which needs to be replaced every 2 years
From the brochure:
Thermal capacity: 150 Mwt
Electrical capacit: 45 Mwe
Capacity factor: > 90 percent
Dimensions: 60 feet x 14 feet cylindrical containment vessel module containing reactor and steam generator
Weight: ~ 300 tons as shipped from fabrication for shipping
Transportation: Barge, truck or train Manufacturing: Forge and fabricate at any mid-size facility
Cost: Numerous advantages due to simplicity, modular design, volume manufacturing and shorter construction times
Fuel: Standard LWR fuel in 17 x 17 configuration, each 6 feet in length. 24 month refueling cycle with fuel enriched at 4.95 percent.
In summary: this is a conventional Light Water Reactor which has been simplified and scaled down. I personally wouldn't want to see anything like that near where I live, or even in the same rainwater basin. I can just about live with large nuclear reactors which are situated in large concrete structures on carefully selected sites and monitored ever minute of their life-cycle by people who know something about them, but this little boondoggle is something else.
I don't care if it has a low operational risk. If you install thousands of the things (as you must because of their limited capacity) throughout the country (and close to population centers remember; that's the whole idea) and then run them for 50 years (carting spent fuel and fresh fuel to and from all those sites every 2 years), there is bound to be a catastrophic mishap *somewhere*. A meltdown, bent control rods, an earthquake that tears the reactor vessel open, and aircraft that crashes on top, a terrorist attack, fuel transport trucks that are ruptured in a traffic accident, or even good old criminal blackmail.
I'm not against nuclear energy per se, but this sort of nuclear micro-reactors makes me nervous. Very nervous. If we are going to have micro reactors, then conventional ones are fine. If we are going to have nuclear reactors, big is beautiful.
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: (Score:2, Funny)
Suicide with a gun is extremely effective and clean (compared to with a knife).
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Suicide with a gun is extremely effective and clean (compared to with a knife).
I'm not convinced. Why don't you demonstrate it for us?
Re: (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: (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 idioti
Re:Need more guarantees than that (Score:5, Insightful)
So you know the full environmental impact of covering deserts with solar collectors, do you? You wouldn't half look stupid if your desert became a wetland in a short space of time because you cooled the region too much.
Removing significant amounts of energy from waves and tides could also have interesting environmental side effects.
Basically you're going to get some form of side effect whenever you convert large amounts of energy from one form to another. The questions are: what are the effects, and are we willing to accept them?
Not saying nuclear is better. just pointing out the downside (never mentioned, possibly unknown) of the so-called "renewable" energy sources.
Re:Need more guarantees than that (Score:4, Insightful)
"So many more sane options than nuclear."
Umm not at all. Western Nuclear power stations have a great safety record. The soviet reactor that people like to throw out would never be built in the west.
Also tides and waves are to different things and tidal power only works in certain locations and could have a large impact on the environment.
We don't have ample power from dams and geothermal. They are limited as well.
Calling nuclear power insane is just mindless FUD.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
give them nothing but automated monitoring, and leave them going for awhile, something is eventually going to go wrong
Read up on pebble-bed reactors [wikipedia.org]. They cannot, under any circumstances, run away.
Re: (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, Informative)
The irony is that a Coal Plant is actually MORE radioactive than a Nuclear Plant!!
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste [sciam.com]
Hint: It in the ashes and it affect 1 mile around it. Don't eat stuff from your garden!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The problem was a flood overflowed the mine tailings dam into the town water supply. Several people were reported ill before the problem was identified. Due to the high rainfall and topography of the area the tailings dam has overflowed on several occasions but this was the first time it was reported to have contaminated drinking water.
I brought this example up since so many nuclear advocates think the stuff runs off m
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: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: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think in general the idea of full reactors spread out over many sites is a bad idea for terrestrial(ie not orbiting or beyond) based operations.
Large scale nuke reactors can be more easily guarded and monitored over a longer term than small-scale battery reactors.
Nuke can be safe but it has to be well monitored and maintained to be so. In other words it involves a long-term commitment, not an unbearable one, but a commitment none-the-less.
reading is hard.... (Score:4, Funny)
I think that you'd have to be realy drunk to drive 75mph UNDERGROUND.
Re:Edison wins, in the end (Score:4, Informative)
The concept of "local power" was first advocated by... Thomas Edison. He was advocating small power stations all around a municipality for local distribution via his DC-based systems.
Westinghouse's AC system, however, allowed for transmission of power great distances. Despite using his name, and some patents, most of what we use today owes more to Westinghouse than Edison.
Just for clarity (and to shake my fist at Schoolhouse Rock), if you're going to refer to Edison's DC, then you should refer to Tesla's AC (not Westinghouse's). And the only reason Edison "advocated small power stations all around a municipality" was because that's the only way his baby, DC, would work. DC just doesn't travel well.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Just for clarity (and to shake my fist at Schoolhouse Rock), if you're going to refer to Edison's DC, then you should refer to Tesla's AC (not Westinghouse's). And the only reason Edison "advocated small power stations all around a municipality" was because that's the only way his baby, DC, would work. DC just doesn't travel well.
To be more precise - it's the low voltage does not travel well (both AC or DC), and in that moment no-one knew how to change DC voltage.
Once they've figured out how to make AC electric motor, Edison's DC system was doomed.
Nowadays, somewhat paradoxically, high voltage DC is even preferred for long distance transmission.
Re: (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 _ev