America's Energy Department Works With Bill Gates To Test Mini Nuclear Reactors (washingtonexaminer.com) 394
An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Examiner:
The Energy Department is participating in a major push with electric utility Southern and a company founded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates to develop small nuclear power reactors that are less expensive and more efficient than their much larger cousins. "Molten salt reactors are getting a reboot," the Energy Department tweeted late Wednesday, offering a schematic of a battery-like power plant module that "could power America's energy"... The Department of Energy linked to a detailed description of how its Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other federal labs are teaming up with Southern Company, a big coal utility with several nuclear plants, and Gates' TerraPower to test and develop a type of reactor that uses liquefied sodium "as both coolant and fuel."
These liquid-metal reactors are sometimes referred to as nuclear batteries because they are small, self-contained units, which theoretically can be deployed anywhere, although the version being tested at Oak Ridge appears to be one requiring a permanent structure and housing. TerraPower was awarded a $40 million award by the Energy Department in 2016 to pursue the project.
Currently it's in the "early design phase" to assess commercial viability, but testing will begin in 2019, "which will help validate the reactor's safety systems for license certification by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."
These liquid-metal reactors are sometimes referred to as nuclear batteries because they are small, self-contained units, which theoretically can be deployed anywhere, although the version being tested at Oak Ridge appears to be one requiring a permanent structure and housing. TerraPower was awarded a $40 million award by the Energy Department in 2016 to pursue the project.
Currently it's in the "early design phase" to assess commercial viability, but testing will begin in 2019, "which will help validate the reactor's safety systems for license certification by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."
Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysterics (Score:2, Insightful)
Face it, a very large chunk of the price of a conventional nuclear reactor is built into the legal challenges that pop up whenever building a reactor is proposed.
If the anti-nuke hysterics follow pattern, it won't matter if they can build these reactors for $5.99+shipping, they'll have 30 years of court challenges to deal with before they can actually build the first one, and then repeat for every copy proposed....
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Nuclear reactors, designed and operated with the same technical vigor and moral scruples as MS-DOS and Windows? I think for once the hysteria is warranted.
Re: Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysteric (Score:2, Informative)
And too little too late, China is an order of magnitude more
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/china-spending-us3-3-billion-on-molten-salt-nuclear-reactors-for-faster-aircraft-carriers-and-in-flying-drones.html
Re: Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysteri (Score:5, Insightful)
Forbes claims to know how deadly each energy source is to people.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]
Nuclear power is by far the safest energy source we have available, that's especially true in the USA. There hasn't been a major incident in the USA with nuclear power since Three Mile Island, and no one died from that. Problems in Japan and with old Soviet reactors are not indicative of anything being built today in the USA. Even so the death count from Fukushima is zero, or so close to it that it's just noise on top of the signal from the tsunami that started it all. A once in a century tsunami that hit a reactor older than Chernobyl is not the metric we should use to measure the safety of nuclear power. Certainly not Chernobyl, a reactor with no containment dome and operated by drunken bureaucrats instead of properly trained technicians.
The question isn't if we should use nuclear power, we don't have much choice not to. The question is how quickly we should be building new nuclear power plants. The nuclear power reactors we have now are getting old and we need to replace them with something. It's going to be nuclear power or the lights will start to go out. Or, at least the lights will go dim. We can build devices to collect energy from wind, water, and sun, but that will never be enough for a society that wants to keep airplanes flying, and explore beyond the atmosphere. In space there is no wind, and even on Mars the sun gets pretty dim.
Using wind, water, and sun for energy might mean survival. Using coal and natural gas will mean continued air pollution. If we are going to keep Earth clean, and go even as far as low earth orbit, then we will need nuclear power.
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"death count from Fukushima is zero"
Sorry, this is utter bullshit and you know it.
Not only am I convinced that the deaths from the Fukushima Diiachi meltdown is zero, so are the experts at the United Nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Annex A of the UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee for the Effects of Atomic Radiation) 2013 report to the UN General Assembly[49] states that the average effective dose of the 25,000 workers over the first 19 months after the accident was about 12 millisieverts (mSv). About 0.7% of the workforce received doses of more than 100 mSv (Chapter II A(b) paragraph 35). No radiation-related deaths or acute diseases have been observed among the workers and general public exposed to radiation from the accident (Chapter II A(b) paragraph 38). Adults living in the city of Fukushima were estimated to have received, on average, an effective dose of about 4 mSv (Chapter II A(a) paragraph 30). No discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected among exposed members of the public or their descendants (Chapter II A(b) paragraph 39). Average annual exposure in the region from naturally occurring sources is about 2.1 mSv, and average lifetime exposure is 170 mSv (Chapter II A(2) paragraph 29). For comparison, the average dose from an abdominal and pelvic computed tomography (CT) scan, with and without contrast, is 30 mSv.
In the tsunami there were 16,000 people dead and missing. In all of that chaos and death people focused on the relative non-event that happened at the nuclear power plant. I will emphasize that didn't say the meltdown was a non-event, only that in the aftermath of the tsunami anything that happened at the power plant is minimal by comparison. I re
Re: Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysteric (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nuclear power becomes the back up for renewables and when not used for that, the energy generated used to increase recycling, to the point of zero waste cities, all waste reduced back to raw materials. You need back up energy ie imagine an the entire suburban landscape with solar panel roofs, enough energy to power the domestic needs of the entire city and most commercial need. Industrial would still require more energy. Now imagine a major hail storm, those panels will take months to replace and you can no
Re: Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysteri (Score:2)
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In civilized countries the city would be connected to a grid ... just saying.
And hail storms that destroy the solar infrastructure are so rare, I can assure you: you will have much server problems than lack of solar power in winter if that happens to your city.
Re: Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysteri (Score:2)
Re: Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysteri (Score:2)
imagine an the entire suburban landscape with solar panel roofs, enough energy to power the domestic needs of the entire city and most commercial need
In most places rooftop solar would not even be enough to provide domestic needs, let alone commercial needs.
People love to claim that their solar roof provides enough electricity to cover all their needs, and that part may be true, but that's because the people making that claim aren't using electricity for things like cooking, heating, and providing hot water. They are burning natural gas, and the amount of energy provided by that natural gas is much larger than the amount of electricity they consume. If
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You can't produce nuclear plants fast enough. Nuclear has been around more than half century, and it has failed to outcompete fossil fuels. The new designs are still just finding better ways to boil water. Even if they improve costs by an order of magnitude, solar and wind are still going to beat them.
Solar and wind are still enjoying exponential cost decreases, and at least solar is likely to continue on that path for a long time.
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You can't produce nuclear plants fast enough. Nuclear has been around more than half century, and it has failed to outcompete fossil fuels. The new designs are still just finding better ways to boil water. Even if they improve costs by an order of magnitude, solar and wind are still going to beat them.
Solar and wind are still enjoying exponential cost decreases, and at least solar is likely to continue on that path for a long time.
Nuclear has produced, and continues to produce more energy than wind or solar. In fact, no other scalable non CO2 emitting source has produced anything close to the production that nuclear has. Countries with higher percentage nuclear power have the lowest energy prices. Your statements ring hollow.
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Nuclear has produced, and continues to produce more energy than wind or solar. Not in Germany.
Globally, by a long shot. Its not even close. You can always draw a small circle. Unfortunately for Germany, their CO2 emissions haven't improved and their electricity costs have skyrocketed, as reflected in their pricing, in their quest to add solar and wind.
History is very relevant. I see you want to ignore it. We know how that ends up.
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Hae?
What nonsense do you talk now again?
Germanies CO2 emmisions have improved greatly in comparison to the US.
And energy/electricity prices have not skyrocked. They are higher per kwh than in the US, but that is compensated by the low consumption. An average German household pays less for electricity than an American.
As always: you have no c!ue, to sad.
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Hae? What nonsense do you talk now again? Germanies CO2 emmisions have improved greatly in comparison to the US. And energy/electricity prices have not skyrocked. They are higher per kwh than in the US, but that is compensated by the low consumption. An average German household pays less for electricity than an American. As always: you have no c!ue, to sad.
Germany's emissions have not improved at all. You are showing complete ignorance. Once again, its a pattern with you. You just say stuff you want to be true even though it isn't.
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Since you love to normalize on a BS number, lets go with it.
Germany went from 13.59 in 1970, down to 9.47 in 2016 (and has been flat/growing for the last 7 years). That is a 30% cut.
America went from 21.74 in 1970, down to 15.56 in 2016 (and America went down again in 2017). That is a 28% cut.
So, no, there really has not been much of a difference.
And no, the average german household pays similar to the low-
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Re: Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysteric (Score:4, Informative)
You can't produce nuclear plants fast enough.
Sure we can.
There was a time when the USA could build them "fast enough", and the USA has only grown in population, industrial capacity, and wealth. We can afford to build new nuclear. We can't afford not to. The USA built 99 reactors between 1967 and 1990. That's nearly 5 per year, but they were going online much faster than that at the peak.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i... [world-nuclear.org]
Just to keep up with the rate of expected closures of old coal and nuclear, and growing electrical demand, the USA will have to build about 2 new nuclear power reactors, of about 1GW capacity, every month. Once we've replaced all the old power plants we will have to keep building them at that rate to replace the ones we build today in 40 or 50 years. This is consistent with EIA projections of 20GW of new natural gas electrical generation capacity this year.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinene... [eia.gov]
I have heard from a nuclear engineer that a nuclear power plant takes no more materials or engineering than nuclear power. The only difference is in the paperwork. If we can get all the legal hurdles out of the way then we could be building new nuclear like we did in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nuclear power is safe, clean, reliable, and we can build it as cheap as anything. Even with all the current bureaucracy on building nuclear power it is competitive with wind and natural gas, and it's certainly cheaper than solar right now. It's not as cheap as natural gas just yet but it only takes a spike in demand, and therefore prices, to flip that around. I expect that to happen after a couple years of 20GW of more natural gas power coming online every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It seems all there is to say against nuclear are easily debunked lies. We will have more nuclear power, that not a question any more. The only questions to answer is how quickly we can ramp up production and what kind of nuclear power we will be building. We can build more light water solid fuel reactors like we have for decades, or we can move beyond that and build molten salt reactors.
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"However, most of these 4th gen are much cheaper and safer. ..."
Don't know about safer. But recent attempts to build state of the art reactors in the US, EU and Korea have been way late and way over budget. Only a year ago, Toshiba wrote off something like $6B due to losses in its nuclear unit.
Maybe the Chinese or Indians can do better. I hope so. But lets not count our cheap, safe nuclear reactors until they are on line and generating power and revenue.
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The fucking hippies won't give a shit. All they will see is "nuclear" and then they will lose their fucking shit. It happens every time. if it wasn't for the hippies we probably would have had this decades ago and global warming from CO2 emissions would nothing but a theory on paper.
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Re:Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysterics (Score:5, Interesting)
Face it, a very large chunk of the price of a conventional nuclear reactor is built into the legal challenges that pop up whenever building a reactor is proposed.
First World problem. In China there are zero protests, and in India there are few. Asia and Africa account for nearly all growth in energy consumption, and they currently have the dirtiest energy generation. If these mini-reactors work there, that is good enough.
Re: Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysteric (Score:2)
That'll work. Once China is pumping them out of an assembly line and selling them on AliExpress for $999 with free shipping, I'm sure our consumer culture will take over. Even hippies will be buying one to recharge their Prius.
Re: Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysteri (Score:2)
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To build a full-size multi-mega-watt nuclear reactor you need insurance cover against potential damage to the surrounding environment should there be an accident, enough concrete to guarantee that a direct hit by a jumbo jet won't cause a nuclear explosion. That alone makes a reactor unprofitable.
Re: Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysteric (Score:3)
The reason nuclear power plants are not being built has little to do with anti-nuclear hysterics and a lot to do with the initial cost of building these facilities.
The reason for the high initial cost has a lot to do with anti-nuclear hysterics.
Every 10 year (Score:5, Insightful)
The "mini-reactor" idea comes around every 10 years. And every 12 year someone discovers that the fixed costs of operating any type of reactor that produces enough power to be useful (e.g. a US Air Force or Soviet "remote base" or "small town" system) mean that a somewhat larger plant is much more efficient, and a somewhat larger plant more efficient than that, and so on into the economy of scale argument for power/steam plants around... 1000 MWe (3000 MWt). Which is what tend to get built today.
The basics of power engineering, nuclear engineer, security, and waste disposal are well known and aren't going to be magically 'disrupted' by anything other than Mr. Fusion.
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There are places that get their power from diesel or are forced to depend on solar + battery, mini nuke easily outdoes them.
Re:Every 10 year (Score:4, Insightful)
Small nuclear designs have been available for 30 years, yet are not built in any significant number. If so advantageous for these locations why haven't any been built? Other than for a few military applications and those were not too successful due to operating requirements, waste disposal, contamination...
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Outdoes them in what sense? Renewable+battery is pretty much unbeatable in that scenario, for cost and suitability (can't be giving reactors to just anyone).
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I'm sorry to crash your hopes and dreams, but nobody's going to power anything with a Krups Coffina 223 coffee grinder.
Re:Every 10 year (Score:5, Interesting)
Small scale reactor development has been pretty heavy for the last 20 years or so. It's not that someone discovers the cost being more expensive, the problem is "environmental and legal" costs associated with them, especially here in the west. The whole anti-nuke hysteria happens to drive things pretty hard. Live deployments of small scale reactors have already happened. China, India and Russia all have them. They're as small as 10Mw and as big as 220Mw. There's 3 or 4 going live in the next few years in the US, 4 here in Canada, 2 in S.Korea. These are all Gen4 designs to boot, and Gen4 reactors are far cheaper to build and maintain then any design.
One of the real big problems is "licensing" of the designs, especially US or designs based on US. This does make it more attractive for countries to take other designs that can use different types of fuel sources, low-grade and premade fuel like MOX for instance. And drastically cuts the possibility of terrorist groups getting their hands on fissile materials.
Re:Every 10 year (Score:5, Informative)
Links?
Please mod this guy down - he is simply making stuff up.
Here is a list of every power reactor under construction or planned in the world [world-nuclear.org].
There are a total of five reactors under construction, or planned, with Gross MWe of 210 MW or less (I presume this is the standard being used here for "small scale"). They are located in China, Russia, Argentina an no where else. And only three of these (two in China, one in Argentina) is a Gen 4 design.
There's 3 or 4 going live in the next few years in the US, 4 here in Canada, 2 in S.Korea.
These reactors exist only in your imagination there are no such actual projects in any of these nations.
There are a couple of dozen power reactors operating in the world with MWe output of 220 MW or less, but not one of these is a "Gen 4" reactor. There instead old designs (>40 years old) in Russian, India and Pakistan which would not be commercially viable anywhere else.
Now there is a company called "NuScale Power" which claims to have planned projects, but no actual projects have been announced (at least, that were not later retracted.) A press release does not equate to a reactor under construction, not have a "planned" reactor.
Re: Every 10 year (Score:2)
He might be overstating things somewhat, but here's a link for Canada:
https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy... [nrcan.gc.ca]
The government has suggested they want to build several small reactors by 2020. No, they are not currently being built, so he's wrong about that, but there's definitely interest in it, and plans to move forward with it.
Re: Every 10 year (Score:2)
Whoops; I misremembered. They actually said they want to "build a fleet over the next 20 years", not build several by 2020. So, yeah, slower development than he was suggesting, but it is actively being pursued.
Pretty sure Nuscale is legitimate..... (Score:2)
I've met some of the Nuscale guys and talked to them about their plant. The first planned one will still have a site output over 1,000 MWe. The 'Big Idea' is that by ganging several smaller reactors together, they can be small enough to avoid expensive ECCS and shutdown cooling systems, but big enough to pay for all the people you need on a nuclear site. Also, with a dozen smaller reactors on site, you can frequently have one in a refueling outage, so you can staff a constant, smaller crew for that. Then yo
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So the NDP didn't close coal power plants, and drive the price of electricity through the roof? To the point where they had to hard-cap both the electrical cost and cost for transmission? Good to know. You should really let Noltley and her MLA's know this, especially since they just passed that legislation.
If you got any stupider, you'd give Kathleen Wynne a run for her money.
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Fortunately - for the sake of your argument - materials science and applied physics never change whatsoever.
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A nuclear reactor large enough to produce a useful amount of power will require security 24x7x365.3. That's a fixed cost that will not change, And so on. The BBC pebble bed would have made an excellent mini-reactor design but no one bought it due to the economics not being there.
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That's what Detroit Edison said about the Fermi molten salt reactor. When the local fire department showed up and was told there as a molten salt fire (really bad news) and the molten salt was radioactive they weren't too happy...
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Ah, yes. And they have zero problems with, say, the contaminated water at Fuckushima these days, because we had such simple things figured out decades ago, right?
Note to people with actual insight: Don't risk making a mess that you do not know how to clean up.
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fixed costs of operating any type of reactor that produces enough power to be useful ... mean that a somewhat larger plant is much more efficient
Maybe so, but the same used to be true of steel mills, yet now steel "mini-mills" have replaced old-school steel mills
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Let me know how those mini-mills fare when the last blast furnace and BOF are shut down ;-)
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You know mini-mills that are primary steel producers are a thing, right? They typically use an arc furnace. They will never be as efficient as a blast furnace, but it turns out that power efficiency is not the only criteria for the success of a mill.
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I would have a no problem with a scaled up molten salt reactor they are safer by design than anything the power companies currently use plus additionally molten salt rectors could use thorium.
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Chernobyl reactor #4 demonstrated that water-cooled reactors lack this inherent safety.
You mean water-cooled, graphite-moderated, right? Without graphite moderator, surely the issues would have been much less severe.
Still the only real choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Nuclear power is the only alternative that has all the qualities you need to power civilization. It provides on demand power, it doesn't require very limited geographic features the way hydro or geothermal do, and it has the lowest impact of any power technology.
If we are lucky we will see its resurgence soon.
Re: Still the only real choice (Score:2)
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eh, well known nuclear is only useful for base load, when the peaks come power companies fire up the peak-shaving fossil plants. all nuke won't work.
of course nuke isn't necessary now, solar is efficient enough and storage tech exists. just need far reaching UHVDC lines and problem is solved.
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Now, the most of the 4th gen reactors are designed for load following (i.e. they can move up/down in load relatively quickly), and with the SMRs, they can bring up and down various reactors.
My reason for saying that we should not be say more than 50% dependent on single sources is due to national security reasons. We really need a matrix of energy sources.
A utility in Wyo
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Nuclear power is the only alternative that has all the qualities you need to power civilization
Fusion power is the only thing that scales, and solar is our only access to fusion power. Solar won't really work for industrial power, though, so fission may be a stopgap if we get really obsessive about carbon emission.
Mini plants like these, even if less cost effective than huge plants, might well make sense one day for industrial sites that generate their own power today (which is quite common for heavy industry). They'd need a track record of being idiot proof, but since we'll have the same problem i
Re:Still the only real choice (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuclear power is the only alternative that has all the qualities you need to power civilization.
Besides Wind and Solar, which you carefully did not mention in your comment?
It provides on demand power,
What? No it doesn't. Nuclear is the worst at following load.
it doesn't require very limited geographic features the way hydro or geothermal do,
What? Yes it does. It needs cooling water.
and it has the lowest impact of any power technology.
What? No it doesn't. Uranium is the least concentrated ore we mine. That means that nuclear is predicated upon massive strip-mines. The tailings from these mines always seem to wind up leaching into ground water, despite the ubiquitous promises that this will not happen.
If we are lucky we will see its resurgence soon.
If we are lucky, trolls will stop shouting about how battery banks like the ones built by Tesla don't work, and then we can get on with building out more solar and wind, the only power technologies which actually make sense today.
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Don't forget the CO2 emissions. Nuclear is right up there, it's not a solution to CO2 emissions at all.
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Nuclear power isn't on-demand, except in the sense that you can sometimes throw the output away.
Runnign a nuclear plant at 100% is not significantly more expensive than running it at 30%, and one running at 10% is generally dangerous. Running below 100% just means throwing money away.
This is unlikely to change in the new designs, nuclear fuel is cheap. Using nuclear power plants for base load is already uneconomical, using them for peak loads just adds another factor on top of that.
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Nuclear power isn't on-demand, except in the sense that you can sometimes throw the output away.
Does a heck of a lot better than waiting for the sun to come out, or the wind to blow.
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Does a heck of a lot better than waiting for the sun to come out, or the wind to blow.
I hear they have these things called batteries that store electrical energy now.
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And if you believe that, it is surprising that you even managed to learn to read and write. There are always alternatives. A real engineer knows that. Claiming something is without alternative is a purely political manipulation technique.
Hoping this gets done. (Score:5, Informative)
Because small, unitized reactors that can be easily dropped into place, and later removed and refurbished could make all the difference in the nuclear industry.
Then, you can strategically drop a reactor wherever you need steady power and encase it in a concrete/steel/lead sarcophagus and only address it again when the core needs replacing. This can help with the issues involved in building large nuclear facilities in danger-prone areas (like California).
Or, if you need more power, you drop multiples in and gang them together.
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Or, if you need more power...
According the the article, they're looking at producing an 1,100-megawatt prototype by 2030 so they've only got 0.11 gigawatts [youtube.com] to go...
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Yes, all "easy", "simple", "safe" and "cheap". When will you nuclear apologists finally stop the extreme lying and face that you are cheering for a failed technology?
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Problem is the places that need them the most are the places that you don't want to have them. The developing world, the countries you don't want to be developing nuclear programmes or handling dangerous reactors. I mean, even the developed nations can barely manage that, even if you aren't worried about proliferation. One of those would make a great dirty bomb.
Shipping (Score:2)
Design and build small, modular nukes for cargo ship power plants. It was tried once as a demonstration project [wikipedia.org]. Unfortunately, they pulled the plug on it just before fuel oil prices started to rise enough to make the Savannah economical.
Re: Shipping (Score:2)
Where produced? (Score:2)
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Take your pick, there's plenty of countries that don't have any restrictions on nuclear development like this. South Korea and Canada would be contenders, especially since they both have worked together for the last 40 years refining reactor designs including designs that can use multiple forms of fuel in the same reactor vessel. France is a good choice. Japan is good choice too, despite the anti-nuke sentiment among parts of the country. With the high number of earthquakes and reactors being in vulnerab
2030? (Score:3)
Perfect. This is will arrive the same time that fusion power becomes commercially available and the $35,000 Tesla begins production.
Ah yes, the answer is *sodium* (Score:2)
The big wheel of forgetting turns surely, if slowly. Plenty of countries have sunk bill-bucks into sodium reactors, and they all decided, nope, too unreliable, too risky, too radioactive, bye, Felicia. From Fermi 1, through the Soviet Alphas and others, through Japan, and I forget who else. They seem attractive at first, with their low pressures and high outlet temps but then the enthusiasm falls quickly with sodium leaks, sodium fires, and radioactivity. One can hope a new generation will learn fro
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A log of people made a lot of money off the sodium failure. Obviously, other hope to repeat that now.
2030 is a joke (Score:2)
By 2030 most of the world will have abandoned coal and most places outside the US will have abandoned natural gas for power generation as well. Even if it arrives on schedule (which nothing experimental ever does), we're probably talking 2040 until this design can be produced in the quantities needed to produce 1% of the world's power.
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Indeed. Basically the only thing that is not quite solved for renewables is off-hour storage and that will not take long now. Investing in nuclear now is a fool's errand.
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Natural Gas consumption increases between 1-2% per year. Some countries get 100% of their electricity from natural gas. It is only projected to increase in the coming decades. This information is readily available to read on the Internet.
You know what other information is readily available to read on the Internet? Increased natural gas production is based on fracking, which leads to seismic events and water pollution.
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It probably will go as you describe, because money. But it doesn't have to be that way, and it won't necessarily.
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Why did you say anything about NG at all?
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So you have absolute truth about the future? Impressive. But that was not the part of his statement I did agree with.
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Oh, and as a side-note: I do not care about 2030 in this thread. This ages old mini-reactor idea will materialize very likely not before 2040 and it may well be 2050 before you can actually get them, if ever. That is the timeline from the context. You do realize there is such a context, do you?
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I don't understand people like you two.
That is pretty obvious. What is also pretty obvious is that you do not understand the topic you are trying to discuss. Here is a hint: These topics are pretty complicated. Any simplified explanation will be wrong. That oversimplification may also be why you completely misinterpreted my statement.
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Don't forget Europe, with the huge amounts of natural gas that they're using. Or the fact that here in North America, we're building terminals on the east and west coast specifically for transporting LNG to Europe and Asian countries for both power plants, and home use. Seriously you don't sink $30-50B into terminal and then throw the entire thing over your shoulder in 10 years.
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Oh, great. Just like MS Vaccuum cleaners then (Score:2)
You know, the only product that if they made it would not suck....
Is this really news? (Score:2)
In 2007, Wired ran a brief article about Toshiba's micro-reactor [wired.com]. If this technology existed eleven years ago, then how is its current "development" newsworthy?
Molten sodium or salt? (Score:2)
I couldn't tell from the article. Are they talking about molten salt reactors or molten sodium? They mention both.
Also, any idea what the fuel cycle is? Some uranium isotope, thorium, or something else?
Re: (Score:3)
They're stuck in 1998.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that the main driver cost in NG power plants is the gas itself and the price is highly variable. It may be cheap now, but it doesn't mean it will be cheap in a decade, there's also seasonal variations (e.g. in the winter time it becomes a lot more expensive). It is also often tied to the price of oil in some cases. Russia usually does this.
Re: (Score:2)
That was my hope too... but apparently the infrastructure required to support multiple reactors pretty much all needs to be in place with the first— you can scale the reactors, turbines, power equipment, etc... but the cost is very much front-loaded.