MIT Designs Less Expensive Fusion Reactor That Boosts Power Tenfold 337
jan_jes writes: Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak (donut-shaped) fusion reactor. The stronger magnetic field makes it possible to produce the required magnetic confinement of the superhot plasma — that is, the working material of a fusion reaction — but in a much smaller device than those previously envisioned (abstract). The reduction in size, in turn, makes the whole system less expensive and faster to build, and also allows for some ingenious new features in the power plant design.
Smaller, but still pretty big (Score:5, Informative)
From T(first)FA: the major radius is 3.3 m and the minor radius is 1.1 m.
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Whoops, make that T(second)FA, i.e., the abstract.
Re:Smaller, but still pretty big (Score:5, Insightful)
"Smaller, but still pretty big"
Down from 5m and 2m. That's substantial progress.
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Down from 5m and 2m. That's substantial progress.
Agreed.
Re:Smaller, but still pretty big (Score:5, Insightful)
It really could be a game changer. REBCO tapes are still pretty expensive but their prices should drop to competitive levels when scaled up. This could cut costs 1/2 to 1 order of magnitude for the same amount of power generation. And beyond that, smaller reactors are much easier to get funds to build, and are more useful in that they can supply power to smaller markets.
The "30 years" joke is annoying; the amount of advancement that's been occurring has been huge. But the projects are so big and expensive that you don't go through iterations very fast. So again the ability to "scale down" is a massive benefit.
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Maybe, in honor of the anniversary, he is including the atom bombs?
Re: Smaller, but still pretty big (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like saying we shouldn't use ethanol as a fuel because of all the lives that have been ruined due to alcoholism.
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Lol sarcasm assumed unless by freakishly large you mean 0.
No. Deaths from nuclear power are low compared to coal, but certainly not zero. There were 60 immediate deaths at Chernobyl, and likely thousands more from cancer. There have been deaths at uranium mines, and more deaths from concrete that used mine tailings as aggregate.
Re: Smaller, but still pretty big (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if it works (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Only if it works (Score:4, Insightful)
"Tokamaks work. Their flaw is that they are energy-negative."
So they don't work since the premise to be a "working device" is not fusion, you can easily get that with a bomb, but doing it in a controlled (i.e.: not a bomb) and energy-positive way (i.e.: not a home farnsworth fusor).
Work = Achieves Goals (Score:2)
Re:Work = Achieves Goals (Score:5, Insightful)
All fusion reactors absolutely generate energy. What they don't do is generate more energy than they consume (ie: they're net-negative.)
It would certainly be nice if they can make it commercially viable, but there's plenty of science you can do in an net-negative reactor and advancing the tech is still an overall benefit to mankind -- just not necessarily a financial benefit.
Re:Only if it works (Score:5, Informative)
According to TFA it should be energy-positive, producing at least 3x the energy it consumes with room to expand that to around 5x.
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As all thermodynamic systems require a source _and_ a sink, the cooling requirements are going to be mind-blowing.
Re:Only if it works (Score:5, Informative)
It depends. Building a wood-fired steam engine is pretty easy: the amount of heat is fairly small and a slow trickle of water can take it away (turned into steam, driven past turbines or used to power pistons), keeping the boiler at an equilibrium temperature. Move up to a denser fuel and the engineering becomes harder - you need higher water pressure and to get the steam out faster. Move up to fission and the coolant cycle can get quite large - remember, if you're moving the water past the nuclear reaction then stray neutrons are going to turn it into heavy water and you're not going to want to just dump it (though you might want to extract the tritium for other uses), so you need a closed cycle where you can cool the water down enough that you can feed it back over the reactor in a loop, taking the energy out in the turbines somewhere. You often do this with a couple of loops of coolant, where the coolant that's run over the reactor heats something else which then drives the turbines, so your turbines are not having to pass irradiated coolant.
Scale it up more and it becomes an even more difficult engineering challenge. For comparison, look at a 100W lightbulb and a 100W Pentium 4. Both need to dissipate 100W, but one is doing it over the surface of a large bulb, the other over about a square centimetre on the top of the package - the total heat is the same, but it's a lot harder to keep the P4 cool than it is to cool the lightbulb.
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Except, of course, that a lightbulb does not dissipate 100W of heat from the bulb's surface, it dissipates 100W of electromagnetic radiation from the filament. The glass absorbs - and thus diss
The articles write themselves (Score:3, Insightful)
"The sun was too far away from my solar panels, so I built a closer sun."
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Hardly a Mr Fusion, but about the same size as one of the generators at Glen Canyon.
For variable values of "faster" (Score:3)
Still, it is good that research in that area is still ongoing. We need to find out pretty soon whether this planet has to go all-renewable in order to survive. Working fusion within the foreseeable future would be very much desirable.
Re:For variable values of "faster" (Score:4, Insightful)
Go where? Mars? You are kidding yourself.
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I agree that we need to keep researching, but I think we need to speed it up and "go like hell" and get off this rock even if the process is a bit dirty. I mean, what do we do when renewables aren't enough or some fast moving rock is on its way to destroy our rock or some idiot does something really stupid with a virus or two. Let's go!
Go where? Compared to creating a self-sustaining colony on Mars, Earth's problems are trivial. Hell, compared to a dino-killer asteroid hitting Earth staying would be preferable. And Voyager 1 is 36 light hours out on a 4.24 light year trip to the nearest star. Not that we actually know any better exoplanets to go to either.
Re:For variable values of "faster" (Score:4, Interesting)
but I think we need to speed it up and "go like hell" and get off this rock even if the process is a bit dirty. I mean, what do we do when renewables aren't enough
Any and every problem we face on earth can be addressed more cheaply and reliably here on earth than sending people to another planet.
The Antarctic is full of water, it's more hospitable than Mars our only quasi hospitable nearby option and if you run low on oxygen you can open a window. Once the Killer Virus/Civil Unrest/Meteor Dust has passed you can return to the continents on an inflatable zodiac not launch a hundred billion dollar equivalent rocket mission back from Mars.
If you want to preserve the human race, it's better to have 10 isolated and easy to sustain missions than one vulnerable and barely sustainable colony that can't be easily resupplied or connected with.
Very few eggs should be put in the tokamak basket (Score:5, Interesting)
Tokamaks are so unworkable that even a tenfold improvement leaves them wanting. My money's on Lockheed's design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Does Lockheed believe in that design? Where's $$? (Score:5, Insightful)
At the ICOPS conference (International Conference on Plasma Science) I asked a couple of professors what they thought of this.
They thought it was pretty telling that Lockheed wasn't investing a lot more money in this concept than they are.
If Lockheed isn't putting significant money into it, maybe you should think twice about putting your money (figuratively speaking) into it.....
That said, I really hope Lockheed does succeed with this, and starts shipping units like crazy and displacing coal power production worldwide.
--PM
Useful fusion (Score:2)
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The real question is: will fusion achieve real energy production before our civilization collapse because of power source exhaustionN
Considering how much coal and uranium there is, let alone wind, solar, hydro, wave, tidal, geothermal etc, such a thing is so far off as to be ignorable for a few generations. Handy to use liquid fuel is a different story which a lack of makes transport more expensive, but there's a lot of other energy production.
Effect on Polywell designs. (Score:2)
It would be interesting to compute what the effect of using this tape, rather than copper windings, would have on the scale of Bussard's/EMC2's polywell [polywellnu...fusion.com] fusion machine prototypes. The Polywell is essentially a big gassy vacuum tube that produces fusion-powered electricity from hydrogen and boron.
The proposed 100 MW machine is 3 meters (about 6 1/2 feet) in diameter - because the scaling rules (5th power) include both volume and mag field strength, which both go by power laws (3rd and 4th respectively) of t
For Now, Fusion Is A Sexy Pipedream (Score:2)
Never mind things that already work such as, wind and solar, as well as things that likely will such tidal pools.
Put all your money in something that m-i-g-h-t someday work.
Waste's Going in Your Yard. (Score:2)
Still gonna make waste.
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I think I will blow up kids party balloons with the waste.
Wait, they made that joke in the article. (Score:3)
Damn it. That'll teach me not to read TFA before failing at first post.
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Lockheed Martin says 5 [universetoday.com]
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Published almost a year ago, so, 4?
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The military has been using it for years.
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That would be Project PACER [wikipedia.org].
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Afaik, the total amount of matter actually reacting at any given moment is less than a gram, if you cut that supply the reaction will auto-extinguish in micro-seconds.
Re:Failure mode ? (Score:5, Informative)
No, don't "see fukushima".
With fission, the challenge is stopping the reaction from running away. With fusion, the challenge is keeping it going. If you suddenly lose containment, what happens is that the hot plasma burns into the walls of the reactor, damaging them. Annnd.... that's it. There's a small amount of tritium there, but it's not a great amount, and tritium isn't that hazardous of a material compared to most radioactive elements. There's some induced radioactivity in the reactor, but it's quite limited because you can choose what to make the reactor out of (and iron's not all that bad for induced radioactivity anyway, it's generally the heavy stuff that's problematic). The lithium blanket is harmless (except for, again, breeding tritium - which is constantly removed). There's beryllium in there, but it's not dangerous when not in gas or dust form. Some work had looked into using lead as a neutron multiplier, which could have indirect breed polonium or other problematic compounds, but beryllium works a lot better than lead.
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Umm, no.
Tritium has a halflife of 12.3 years. Even U235 has a half life of 700 megayears. In other words, tritium is intensely radioactive compared to uranium (or most natural radioactives).
Note also that uranium is an alpha emitter. You can protect yourself from it by wrapping it in old newspaper. It takes (slightly) more to keep tritium from being a problem (say, three sheets of newspaper)....
Re:Failure mode ? (Score:5, Informative)
Contrats, of all of the many thousands of radioactive isotopes created by man or nature, you picked the one with the 32nd longest known half life. Try compared to nuclides in general [bnl.gov].
There's a balance in terms of half life. The shorter the half life, the more intense the radiation - but the shorter you have to deal with the problem. The longer the half life, the less intense the radiation, but the longer you have to deal with the problem. The only way around this is a product that has a very low energy in its radioactive decay. And indeed, that's just what tritium is .
Tritium's decay energy is only 18.591 keV, which is tiny by the standards of radioactive decay - by comparison, U235's decay energy is 4678 keV - 251 times more intense. Furthermore, alpha radiation, while harmless outside the body (like tritium's ultra-weak beta), is (unlike beta) terrible inside it - its biological effectiveness is 20x that of beta. Hence a decay from a atom of U235 inside of you is 5032 times more damaging than a 18.591keV electron (beta). On top of this, you have biological half lives. Uranium's is only slightly longer than tritium's, 15 days instead of 12. But, again, U235 is not normally a problematic radioisotope. 239Pu, 90Sr, 226Ra, 45Ca, etc have biological half lives so long that they're effectively with you until they decay or you die. Oh, and on top of all of this? All of the energy of beta decay doesn't go into the electron; a higher percentage goes into the muon antineutrino, which escapes harmlessly off into space. The average energy of the beta particle from tritium decay is only 5.694 keV. Net result? Before controlling for the difference in half life, U235 is 20540 times worse for the body than tritium.
Now, of course, due to 235U's incredibly long half life, its radioactivity rarely a problem - which is why fresh fuel rods are not considered very dangerous, but spent ones are. People's concerns in nuclear accidents center around the fission products: strontium, iodine, plutonium, etc - things with shorter (but still problematically long) half lives and strong biological effectiveness. Versus them, the ridiculously low energy tritium is almost irrelevant in terms of biological effect, even if present in similar quantities. Combined with the very small amount of tritium that's in the torus at any point in time, it's just simply not even remotely comparable.
Did I even bother to mention that gaseous tritium tends to rapidly escape wherever it is and ascend up and out of the atmosphere? Tritium in the form of heavy water can be problematic in higher quantities, but of course, there's no "higher quantities" of any form of tritium in the torus.
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Tritium doesn't bioaccumulate significantly (10 day biological half life), unlike Strontium and Iodine isotopes.
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Hazard of a radioactive material isn't merely how "hot" it is, but also how biologically active it is. Radium, while outside the body, isn't a particular problem (IIRC an alpha emitter), if it gets inside you your body uses it like calcium so it stays in your bones, irradiating you from the inside, for a large amount of time. Tritium on the other hand doesn't linger in the body, it remains for a fairly short time period, so ends up being a lot less dangerous than some much-less-hot radioactive elements that
Re: Failure mode ? (Score:5, Informative)
Injection is relatively easy; one uses pellet injectors. They basically bore tiny pellets of a mixture of deuterium and tritium ice and shoot them into the middle of the core with a tiny gas gun.
Removing the helium "ash" is harder, and requires something called a divertor. The plasma naturally pushes the helium toward the outside, as it's heavier. The divertor basically juts out into the outer edge of the plasma stream and skims off the plasma, acting as sort of an exhaust system. But it's an incredibly hostile environment, and not just because the temperature (it has to operate continuously at thousands of degrees, and that's after water cooling!) - it's being pelted by high energy alphas all the time! Regardless, it provides not just a way to get rid of helium but takes up many megawatts of heat that are used for power generation.
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Re:Failure mode ? (Score:5, Informative)
Fusion's 17 MeV neutrons are nothing compared to spallation's neutrons, which can approach (or in some designs even exceed) a GeV. 17MeV neutrons are most eminantly stoppable. Yes, they have a longer penetration distance, and yes, there are some differences in behavior (they tend to cause (n,2n), (n,alpha), (n,d) etc reactions a lot more often while lower energy neutrons usually only do (n,gamma) transmutation), But these are not fundamental differences nor fundamental problems.
Fusion reactors do not use "layers of lead" as shielding. You have some misconceptions about how shielding works. Lead is an excellent shielding material for gamma and beta, but it's terrible for neutrons. It does not moderate them down at any relevant rate due to its high atomic mass, it has a low (n, gamma) gross section, and when it does undergo neutron capture it breeds bismuth - which is fine, except when bismuth undergoes (n, gamma) it breeds polonium, which is really, really nasty stuff. There's also a variety of other neutron reactions lead can undergo which lead to other radioactive products. You don't use lead for neutron shielding. Quite to the contrary, lead is used as a coolant in some types of nuclear reactors because of how little it interferes with neutrons.
Neutrons by contrast are generally best blocked by light elements. Hydrogen is the most effective moderator, although you want both to moderate down the neutron energy and have a high neutron cross section. And of course you don't use pure hydrogen because that's an explosion hazard. So if you want liquid shielding, something like borated water is your best bet. For solids, borated plastics are best.
However, the neutrons in a fusion reactor are not seen as an undesirable thing, but as a critical part of the process to keep it going. Because you need tritium to run it, and tritium doesn't grow on trees, you have to breed it. D-T gives one neutron and it takes one neutron to make one tritium, so if you didn't have any neutron multiplication, the *best* you could possibly do (with no losses and 100% capture) would be breakeven. The reality is that you have to do neutron multiplication to get enough to operate. So the reactors use a lithium-beryllium blanket, of a thickness to absorb the overwhelming majority of the neutrons. Outside of this there will always be stray neutrons that escape, you're not going to want to just stand next to the thing, but it's not going to be a Glowing Ball of Death.
Now, obviously, for structural materials, you're not going to be building it out of borated water, borated plastic, or lithium. Beryllium, mind you, is light and an excellent structural material, but it's super-expensive and difficult to work with, so it's only generally used structurally in key areas. Aluminum (better, lithium-aluminum) is great and undergoes almost no induced radioactivity, but its low melting point limits its use in high temperature applications. Graphite would be great, and is great in some cases - but it undergoes Wigner energy problems if not operated at high enough of a temperature. Composites, which aren't as Wigner energy sensitive, usually can't take the heat. So altogether, one generally deals with iron alloys (steels), with the alloying agents chosen based on what gives the desired properties while undergoing the least problematic transmutation reactions. With proper design, the level of transmutation can be kept pretty low.
Why would it be low? Well, the vast majority of iron is 56 iron. There are also a few percent of 54Fe, 57Fe, and a fraction of a percent of 58Fe. Let's trace the neutron capture paths here.
54Fe becomes 55Fe. This is radioactive, but the half life is only 2,7 years - hardly "forever". It decays to 55Mn, which is stable. If during the 2,7 years average it captures another neutron, it becomes the common 56Fe. If the 55Mn captures a neutron, it becomes 56Mn. 56Mn is radioactive but only has a halflife of 2,6 hours. It decays into 56Fe. So either way we get back to 56Fe with no long-lived product
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TFA makes no mention of what happens if you stop supplying the energy required to confine the plasma. This could be a weak spot in the system.
It explodes in a 40MT blast. Didn't you see Aliens?
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TFA makes no mention of what happens if you stop supplying the energy required to confine the plasma. This could be a weak spot in the system.
It explodes in a 40MT blast. Didn't you see Aliens?
Yes, but I watched it from orbit. It was the only way to be sure.
Re:Failure mode ? (Score:5, Informative)
TFA makes no mention of what happens if you stop supplying the energy required to confine the plasma.
Getting the right conditions for more-out-than-in fusion is REALLY HARD. So far it's pretty much only been done momentarily - using atomic fission bombs as working parts to apply enough heat and pressure.
So when there is ANY problem in the confinement, the fusion stops.
You're left with the energy in your plasma - several camera photoflashes' worth - and your superconducting magnet - which probably is unharmed and still running.
If the magnet is not properly quenched, at most it's got the energy of a large electrical fire or small bomb - on the rough order of a few hand grenades or laptop battery fires. This might be enough to throw around the small amount of low-level-radioactive material created by months or years of neutron bombardment of the reaction chamber walls and the like.
This is not in the same ballpark - by many orders of magnitude - as the few tons of molten, activated, coreium you'd get from an old-tech fission plant meltdown (all set to become an UNcontrolled, UNcooled, operating reactor if it manages to be puddled into a compact volume), or the fuel assemblies full of recent fission products still putting out, for months, heat enough to melt, ignite, or partially vaporize themselves if the coolant level drops enough to uncover them.
It's the difference between Fukushima or Chernobyl and, at most, a transformer fire in a warehouse with a substantial number of ionization smoke detectors installed.
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If you fail to contain the reaction it very rapidly dissipates. That's in fact the whole problem with this type of reactor design - no one (as of yet) has succeeded in keeping the plasma confined for long enough to generate more power than they put in to start the reaction.
Batch processes. (Score:2)
That's in fact the whole problem with this type of reactor design - no one (as of yet) has succeeded in keeping the plasma confined for long enough to generate more power than they put in to start the reaction.
Actually I understand that one of 'em recently DID reach theoretical breakeven (more fusion energy produced than input energy consumed) for a moment.
But that's still a "factor of several" from ENGINEERING breakeven (more put into the grid than pulled from it). There's still a long way to go.
Not count
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Unfortunately, somebody could also skip making the hole and just set it off in a city.
Honest question, I think I'm missing something - wouldn't that require the construction of a NIF-level facility at the target site or a similarly-powerful orbital platform aiming its lasers at whatever hohlraum-equivalent you've dropped on the city?
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see, fukushima
For what? An example of the damage that can occur when the magnetic containment system in a fusion reactor fails?
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Um, not exactly.
Look, it's like laptops or commercial fission reactors.
They were first built for military uses (I had a laptop in 1982 in the Army, and a better one in 1985), and fission reactors were built for submarines and other uses we're not supposed to talk about way before they were commercially available.
So, if your question is "Will there be nuclear fusion reactors on military planes and ships and other things by 2025?" then the answer is Yes.
Will you see one in your city before 2040? Probably not.
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People really need to understand that we are nowhere near breaking even on fusion reactors (e.g., producing more energy than you put in) and any fusion reactor designs are purely for research in fusion physics and similar...
FTFY
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You might not be quite so pessimistic about the topic if the research had been properly funded, rather than being repeatedly cut back to the point where fusion is always n years away. I do appreciate the sentiment though and I'm frustrated that we collectively achieve so little on important stuff like this.
However, given the progress to date and the many different approaches that are being explored, to say we'll never develop the technology suggests that you either have some deep and unique insight into the
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I wonder when you thorium freaks will get off it. LFTR technology is nowhere near the maturity level for large-scale power production. I'd be surprised if a pilot plant could be built in 30 years. MSRE had numerous serious/fatal problems which LFTR advocates conveniently never mention. Even if LFTR does work, it would likely be INSANELY EXPENSIVE, in terms of final cost per delivered kWh. There are very good reasons why LFTR would be horrendously expensive, and I'll explain them if you want to know. But suf
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Since they typically go on about the 1950s experiment and know nothing about what India is doing with it today, probably never.
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Nuclear waste doesn't take up much space, but I fail to see the relevance to the argument. It's easy and (fairly) cheap to decommission wind farms. It's extremely expensive to handle nuclear waste and decommission nuclear power plants.
> Wind proponents seem to forget spinning things require maintenance and eventually simply wear out - who pays to take them down? No-one apparently.
Disingenuous. There is already a huge market for decommissioning wind farms and many places around the world set aside money f
Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready (Score:5, Insightful)
Or... we could spend the money on solar and wind (and battery storage) which we could implement in just a few years using proven technology.
Why wait 20 or 30 years for something that might (or might not) work when we have a solution now that we know works.
Nuclear has gone from "too cheap to meter" to "too expensive to matter".
Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the sure signs of an idiot is an easily repeatable phrase
The primary reasons that Nuclear is expensive is the constant lawsuits and attempts to derail efforts to implement it
And even after all of those efforts, the only reason that Nuclear is more expensive than Coal (the only competitive power generation, solar is waaaay off the mark) is because Coal does not have to contain the waste that it spews from its smokestacks, which contains mercury, uranium and enough CO2 to cook a planet
It is painful that the idiots who carry around signs like "you can't hug a child with nuclear arms" and want to save the planet from nuclear power are the same idiots who are forcing industry to use Coal power
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It is painful that the idiots who carry around signs like "you can't hug a child with nuclear arms" and want to save the planet from nuclear power are the same idiots who are forcing industry to use Coal power
Indeed. Where would we be now in terms of CO2 emissions if the goddamn 'green' movement hadn't shat all over nuclear energy?
I suspect that we'd have a great deal more electricity to play with today and that the abundance may have been enough to spur interest in electric vehicles much earlier.
Pure speculation of course. One thing I'm sure of though: we'd be considering the CO2 problem from a much better position than we are now.
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The primary reasons that Nuclear is expensive is the constant lawsuits and attempts to derail efforts to implement it
How is it that NIMBYs and greens are so good at keeping nuclear down, yet fail to stop fracking or coal plants or oil drilling? Why is nuclear so uniquely vulnerable to their lawsuits?
The reason nuclear is dying out is the cost. Simple as that. Governments don't want to spend that much subsidising it and providing unlimited liability insurance any more, power companies don't see it making enough or any money for them. Even France, the biggest proponent of nuclear power in the world, realized that its nuclea
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Yes, I live downwind of one of the largest nuclear plants in America
Not a problem for me or three million other people in the same area
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do you live downstream of hanford where the waste will end up?
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Hanford is a military processing facility, it does not store commercial nuclear waste
Currently commercial nuclear waste is stored on-site, until a national repository can get through all of the legal hoops that it has been forced to jump through
The constant lawsuits against the national repository has limited the amount of safety available for waste storage, but it is still much safer than living downwind of a coal power plant
I notice that you post a lot of opinion about nuclear power, you are either a magn
Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you want to live near nuclear plant? I don't, no matter how new and shiny with latest "bug-free" design it is.
Well done, NIMBY. I hold you arseholes partially responsible for the fucking mess we're in today. Thanks so much for your efforts!
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Let me fix that for you
One of the sure signs of a person with the mentality of a three year old is an easily repeatable phrase
pedantic enough for you
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Did you just claim that the validity of an argument is dependent on the manners of the messenger?
That sounds like something an idiot would say...
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Provided you can get rid of your NIMBYs, wind and solar will some day be developed to its fullest potential. So then what baseload source will the other 80% of our industrial needs come from? We're not Germany, so it's not going to be coal.
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Ah yes... the mythical baseload. I know there is a surplus of electric supply overnight since you can buy electricity for next to nothing during the night. I'm not sure there is much demand for baseload. Perhaps street lights? ... but they could each have a solar panel and battery to run just fine. There may be some factory somewhere which operates overnight and runs some machinery.
We don't know how the grid will evolve but there doesn't seem to be much baseload demand and what there is could easily be met
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I don't know how cheap nuclear plants are going to be. The Ontario government was going to build two new ones but stopped when the proposals came back with a price of $26 billion. In 2013 they said the cost had gone down a bit but not enough to justify building them. (Not that I trust the Liberal government with anything financial. They are the ones that paid $1B to cancel a gas powered electricity generating plant in order to win a riding.) For info about the price of the nuclear plants see here http: [financialpost.com]
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'solar is starting to get below COAL in cost"
cite or GTFO
Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready (Score:5, Funny)
He means after epa fines for using coal.
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According to the US EIA, in 2012, the overnight capital cost per kilowatt (effectively the construction cost) for coal ranged from $2,934 to $6,599, depending on the type and size of the plant. Solar thermal was at $5,067, and photovoltaic was $3,873 to $4,183 per kilowatt, placing it squarely in competition with coal. That was three years ago; since then, solar power installation costs have dropped even further, while coal has likely stayed about the same, or perhaps even increased slightly.
However, it's
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I do not know where you are getting those costs, but here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Coal comes up about 1/4 to 1/2 the cost of gas turbine
This is using LCOE, which takes into account the entire lifecycle of the fuel source
The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is a measure of a power source which attempts to compare different methods of electricity generation on a comparable basis. It is an economic assessment of the average total cost to build and operate a power-generating asset over its lifetime
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Go on Alibaba. You can build systems capable of taking 4 homes entirely off-grid with redundancy backup power in case of some 2-3 day long solar eclipse. Cost? $8K or so. I've already sold and installed several systems for about 2x that amount for businesses.
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Then there's other potential-energy solutions like lumps of concrete on inclined rails (if you have hills but no water), kinetic storage flywheels on magnetic bearings, flow batteries with arbitrary-sized tanks of electrolyte, compressed-air storage, reversible hydrogen fuel cells, UltraBatteries.. the list goes on [wikipedia.org].
Nearly all of these are well-established technologies. All have an efficiency cost, of course, but the cheaper the solar/wind input gets the less this matters. Renewable + storage is absolutely a
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none of those are as good as artificial lakes that you pump water into.
the best source to pump it with? nuclear. duh.
the real problem is that a certain ceo said at a product release that the whole usa could be powered by batteries and the public bought the idea without blinking...
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So, your solution to the energy problem is wiping out 29 out of every thirty people now living?
LOL, maybe you need to learn more about nuclear power
Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready (Score:5, Informative)
You do understand that Chernobyl used a flammable material for the neutron moderator and poring water onto the plant, where necessary, caused a significant amount of radiation to become airborne, even after the steam explosion blew it apart. What eventually brought the situation under control was the partial burying of the core in lead and sand to reduce the radiation so a makeshift containment building could be hastily assembled over the blown apart reactor.
Also, the problem with Chernobyl was more about the lack of safety engineered into the system, than a fault of Nuclear power persay. In Soviet Russia times the imperative was to generate power cheaply, and NOW. They literally built a house of cards, with inadequate safety, cut corners on all kinds of safety systems, and had complex interactions between seemingly unrelated systems. Then they skimped on operator training and safety standards. It's no wonder that this reactor design didn't blow up more often. It truly was an accident waiting to happen.
Modern reactors can be designed to be fail safe. One design I saw claimed that you could literally walk away from it running at full power and it was both thermally and physically safe. It would insert the control rods if it got too hot and there was nothing that could stop it. At that point, even a total loss of coolant pumps would not result in a melt down as a number of plugs would melt, flooding the area around the containment vessel and allow the conduction/convection cooling of the core. Even then, if the core continued to heat, it would release the fuel assemblies which would fall into deep pools of reserved cooling water and end up far apart in the bottom of the containment building. All this didn't require ANY operator input, or power to accomplish, it was totally mechanical and automatic and only required the reactor containment system to remain in tact and right side up.
There are a number of very safe and practical designs for nuclear power today, it's just impossible to get a permit to actually build one because the environmentalists won't let that happen..
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There are a number of very safe and practical designs for nuclear power today, it's just impossible to get a permit to actually build one because the environmentalists won't let that happen..
The energy corporations don't want to builld new reactor plants, they want to keep old ones in useage, this costs less money. The environmentalists fear that new reactors will be built to insecure standards to spare money.
This problem is a political one. It hardly is a technical one.
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Well funded fossil fuel interests who use loud mouthed environmentalists as a reason for their muddle-headed politicians to respond to the environmentalists by acting in the fossil fuel industry's favor
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RBMK (Chernobyl) reactors also were advertised as absolutely fail-safe in their time.
I'm not sure that marketing was really considered credible. Here is a Washington Post artcle from 1978 that has a very skeptical tone regarding Soviet "safety". [washingtonpost.com]
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Uhhh... Chernobyl dissipated all the heat in its reactors in real time while running... That's the whole point of a nuclear reactor. The issue comes when cooling is shut off to the reactors, and the heat is allowed to build up.
With fission (at least with 50s designs), that's a major problem, because you can't just turn it off.
With fusion, it's not a problem at all, because you simply stop providing fuel to the reaction and it'll shut down immediately. Getting fusion reactions *not* to shut down is the pro
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Does anyone want to venture a guess as to which will come first, the Year of Linux on the Desktop, or the widespread availability of this fusion reactor technology?
The jury is still out on both.... Somehow I think I'm going to die before either of those happen, and I have 20 years of work left before retirement..
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Waste heat? Heat is generally what they want to produce to make steam to run through turbines to make electricity. Heat can also be used to separate water for H fuel, desalination etc etc etc. Or current designs are wasteful because they do only one thing and throw out a lot of energy. It's mostly a PR and regulation issue people would say the desalinated water could be radioactive and the regulators want to oversee anything even tangentially related to the plants.
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That seems to be the elephant in the room WRT fusion, producing 3x as much energy out as you push in won't help with global warming if you produce 100x as much waste heat as you do usable energy out.
The amount of waste heat produced by all human activities is trivial compared to the energy the Sun puts on Earth. Waste heat has nothing to do with anthropogenic global warming.
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There are actually many uses of this waste heat. For example, it could be pumped around a town to provide hot water or heat in the winter, or it can be used by industrial processes which otherwise would use conventional means to generate heat. Besides, all existing power plants produce a lot of direct heating (with the exceptions being solar and wind).
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Please, make an account and stop posting anon, because I'd love to subscribe to your comedy newsletter.
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good luck with that.
Neutrinos don't interact with matter very much at all. Like to the point that it took abandoned mines full of water to catch enough of the neutrino blast coming from the sun ALL THE TIME to make enough blinks to finally prove they really exist.
If you're really worried, put your home's Mr. Fusion in the back yard rather than under your bed. (The inverse square law is your friend.) Remove any granite countertops from your kitchen or granite gravel from your driveway, to more than compen
Let's put some numbers on that... (Score:2)
Neutrinos don't interact with matter very much at all. Like to the point that it took abandoned mines full of water to catch enough of the neutrino blast coming from the sun ALL THE TIME to make enough blinks to finally prove they really exist.
Homestake Mine experiment: The chlorine in 100,000 GALLONS of C2Cl4 liquid caught about ONE electron neutrino every two DAYS. Even if you're a real couch potato you're a lot smaller target than that big tank - like by four orders of magnitude, which will swamp vari
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One nice thing about low, constant, levels of ionizing radiation is that they actually slightly REDUCE the incidence of cancer and the like. (This is part of why Denver residents don't have horrible cancer rates compared to those living nearer sea level.) Apparently the ionizing radiation provokes the production of inducible enzymes that repair DNA and scavenge free radicals - preventing more damage from both radiation and free radicals from the cell's own energy production than the radiation causes. Up to the saturation of the induciblity it's a slight net gain. Unfortunately, the neutrino flux from fusion reactors would be too low to confer this benefit.
How's that kool-aid you're drinking? I think there isn't a strong conclusion on really low doses but that doesn't mean that they are safe.
There is evidence that pre-exposure can help with an exposure, but the pre-exposure still causes health effects. There is also in interesting NBER paper showing health effects that are higher than an LNT model would predict.
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