Nuclear 'Power Balls' May Make Meltdowns a Thing of the Past (wired.com) 186
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A new generation of reactors coming online in the next few years aims to make nuclear meltdowns a thing of the past. Not only will these reactors be smaller and more efficient than current nuclear power plants, but their designers claim they'll be virtually meltdown-proof. Their secret? Millions of submillimeter-size grains of uranium individually wrapped in protective shells. It's called triso fuel, and it's like a radioactive gobstopper. Triso -- short for "tristructural isotropic" -- fuel is made from a mixture of low enriched uranium and oxygen, and it is surrounded by three alternating layers of graphite and a ceramic called silicon carbide. Each particle is smaller than a poppy seed, but its layered shell can protect the uranium inside from melting under even the most extreme conditions that could occur in a reactor.
Paul Demkowicz is the director of the Advanced Gas Reactor Field Development and Qualification Program at Idaho National Laboratory, and a large part of his job is simulating worst-case scenarios for next-generation nuclear reactors. For the past few years, Demkowicz and his colleagues have been running qualification tests on triso fuel that involve putting them in a reactor and cranking the temperature. Most nuclear reactors today operate well below 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and even the next generation high-temperature reactors will top out at about 2,000 degrees. But during the INL tests, Demkowicz demonstrated that triso could withstand reactor temperatures over 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Out of 300,000 particles, not a single triso coating failed during the two-week long test. "In the new reactor designs, it's basically impossible to exceed these temperatures, because the reactor kind of shuts down as it reaches these high temperatures," says Demkowicz. "So if you take these reactor designs and combine them with a fuel that can handle the heat, you essentially have an accident-proof reactor."
Paul Demkowicz is the director of the Advanced Gas Reactor Field Development and Qualification Program at Idaho National Laboratory, and a large part of his job is simulating worst-case scenarios for next-generation nuclear reactors. For the past few years, Demkowicz and his colleagues have been running qualification tests on triso fuel that involve putting them in a reactor and cranking the temperature. Most nuclear reactors today operate well below 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and even the next generation high-temperature reactors will top out at about 2,000 degrees. But during the INL tests, Demkowicz demonstrated that triso could withstand reactor temperatures over 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Out of 300,000 particles, not a single triso coating failed during the two-week long test. "In the new reactor designs, it's basically impossible to exceed these temperatures, because the reactor kind of shuts down as it reaches these high temperatures," says Demkowicz. "So if you take these reactor designs and combine them with a fuel that can handle the heat, you essentially have an accident-proof reactor."
And when depleted (Score:4, Funny)
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i got some depleted balls for ya
Actually, to make carbon-14 diamond batteries. (Score:3)
And when depleted ... the Triso fuel pellets can be used in playground sandboxes, filler material on professional sports fields, or can be mixed with asphalt to pave roads.
Hah hah. (That method of "plowsharing" nuclear waste actually got proposed as a way to keep freeways clear of snow, early in the atomic era before the hazards of radiation were well understood.)
But seriously:
At pellet end-of-life a substantial amount of the carbon will be carbon 14. This could be separated out and used to make the cores
Re:Actually, to make carbon-14 diamond batteries. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because nobody would ever throw some electronic gadget into the trash (not because the battery died but the telecoms declared 5G to be EOL, effectively rendering millions of gizmos useless). And that trash would never be shipped to third world countries where kids would throw it into open fires to extract valuable metals.
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From what I get from the description, you don't even need to deplete it.
Just pierce it by mistake, and the dust could spread very well over playground sandboxes, sports fields and asphalt roads.
Nuclear power balls? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Nuclear power balls? (Score:4, Funny)
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"The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in 292,201,338."
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Lord Dark Helmet: WHAT?! [hides his nuclear power balls]
Lord Dark Helmet: What?
Col. Sandurz: We need you sir!
Lord Dark Helmet: KNOCK ON MY DOOR! KNOCK NEXT TIME!
Lord Dark Helmet: Knock on my door next time!
Col. Sandurz: Yes sir!
Lord Dark Helmet: Did you see anything?
Col. Sandurz: No sir, I didn't see you playing with your nuclear power balls again!
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Yep. All I came here to say is that nuclear power balls would surely impress the ladies.
Thas's what she said (Score:2)
Pebble Bed (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems like the pebble bed design that's been around a while. TFA calls them a kind of pebble bed. The cross-section goes down as the temp goes up to prevent meltdown. These have a shell that alternates silicon carbide with graphite. IIRC, the old design was just graphite. Maybe these won't catch fire as easily? That was a bit of a danger with the original idea.
It's been a while, but IIRC pebble bed had some problems in the case if water intrusion. Anyone remember the details?
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Re:Pebble Bed (Score:5, Informative)
Yep, this is nothing new, TRISO is the standard fuel of a pebble bed design. Nothing new of course, breathlessly hyping the bloody obvious is Wired's house style after all.
So what is conspicuously missing from the article is how they solved the radioactive dust problem: the friction and and heat expansion damaging the outer layer and creating dust.
And hopefully they solved the issue of massive Cs-137 and Sr-90 production inside the reactor; which at AVR managed to escape through a coolant leak.
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breathlessly hyping the bloody obvious is Wired's house style after all.
I used to really hate Wired because of that. Now they haven't changed anything, but I don't hate them because the rest of the journalistic world has fallen apart around them. At least Wired does a little bit of fact checking.
Old news (Score:3)
This has been around for over 30 years. Sure some improvements I will give you that, but you can't do chemistry on them thous you wast 80% of the full. After that you have the disposal problem.
And the real news is we should have been using liquid reactors all along. Liquid reactors where proven fail safe in the 1950 and should have been use since then. The problem was lobbyists that wanted to sell solid uranium pellets got the ear of the Congress and got the Liquid project caned.
Re:Old news (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pebble Bed (Score:5, Informative)
I remember a German prototype had problems with recirculation of the pebbles, which in one occasion got stuck [wikipedia.org]. They needed to physically open the line and fix the issue, releasing primary fluid in the environment. No one noticed since this was by chance in the same days as the Chernobyl accident, and blamed the radiation spike on the Russians, but the same reactor raked up dozens of accidents in just a few years of operation.
Another pebble-bed reactor [wikipedia.org] is currently the worst beta-contaminated site worldwide.
So yeah, pebble-bed reactors have a horrible safety record. And astronomic decommissioning costs. But hey, no meltdowns yet...
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"in 1978 operators bypassed reactor shutdown controls to delay an emergency shutdown during an accident for six days" - you can make something idiot-proof, but the universe will just build bigger idiots.
Okay, but... (Score:2)
All this assumes it gets built right, e.g. the fuel really can withstand those temperatures and they didn't screw up somehow. So maybe the fuel could be tested to say 200% temperature for 7 days just to be sure, before being put into use.
Even then though I suspect it will be too expensive to be economically viable.
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So maybe the fuel could be tested to say 200% temperature for 7 days just to be sure, before being put into use.
I'm not sure I like that idea. It sounds a lot like Accelerated Life Testing, and that's supposed to be done on random samples, not on product going 'out the door'. I would imagine extended testing at 4,000 degrees might make the protective layer more prone to failure if the material was put into a reactor.
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So maybe the fuel could be tested to say 200% temperature for 7 days just to be sure, before being put into use.
If it wasn't done during manufacture you might want to run 'em up to 1200 for a bit. If there's a little oxygen around (and it doesn't burn up the graphite) that makes the Silocon Carbide form a glass passivation layer that makes it even more acid resistant than the pure quill.
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All this assumes it gets built right, e.g. the fuel really can withstand those temperatures and they didn't screw up somehow. So maybe the fuel could be tested to say 200% temperature for 7 days just to be sure, before being put into use.
Even then though I suspect it will be too expensive to be economically viable.
s/suspect/hope/
Humanity keeps tempting fate (Score:5, Insightful)
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And a geek who was undateable.
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I read about a ship that was unsinkable, too...
I hear you loud and clear, and I used to be profoundly anti-nuclear. Then AGW became a thing, and I realized that humankind might not survive without a replacement for fossil fuel. I'm not convinced that solar and wind can fully support even our current levels of energy extravagance, never mind the next few decades' worth of growth, so I got on board with nukes.
We could instead abandon our planet-ruining wealth-concentrating equality-destroying economy, curtail our population growth, and go back to living m
Re:Humanity keeps tempting fate (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do think solar and wind which get cheaper and cheaper can not fully support us although there are many studies which show that they can?
Why do you think nuclear power can do this although it is very expensive and scaling up nuclear power to cover the world's energy demand will take quite a long time? This would also likely require a closed fuel cycle which is also not exactly cheap. In my opinion, it is unrealistically expensive to prevent AGW with nuclear power.
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Why do think solar and wind which get cheaper and cheaper can not fully support us although there are many studies which show that they can?
I've never heard of such a serious study and even some back of the napkin calculations can show you just how far off solar and wind are compared to what you need to power a grid. There are limiting factors to solar and wind (mining of certain rare earths) which are far lower than you realize. Also, the 20 year cycle of these materials means we have to be able to produce enough solar and wind in 20 years to replace fossil fuels and that actually takes considerably more mining than just extracting the fossi
Re:Humanity keeps tempting fate (Score:5, Interesting)
Tell me more about your back-of-napkin calculations that show that solar and wind a far of to power a grid (in germany they produced 55% of electricity in the first half of 2020). I am also interested to hear more about the rare earth problem. Is it impossible to build electric generators without rare earths? I am also especially interested to hear about why "the laws of thermodynamics say otherwise". BTW: I am a physicist. Good luck.
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The big problem, I suspect, is not so much the power portion, but the non-power portion. Lots of fossil fuel use goes towards heating things during manufacturing (e.g. anything involving making or using ingots of metal). Switching the heat source to electricity is presumably much less efficient than burning fossil fuels directly.
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We could instead abandon our planet-ruining wealth-concentrating equality-destroying economy
Or you could move to Russia.
Re: Humanity keeps tempting fate (Score:4, Insightful)
Sadly, not even nuclear energy will save us from exponential growth. The only solution is to either stop growing or send people out of the solar system: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/201... [ucsd.edu]
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We could instead abandon our planet-ruining wealth-concentrating equality-destroying economy, curtail our population growth, and go back to living much simpler lives. I think that would be best, but I know it will never happen; so I support nuclear because it's probably necessary to save us from our collective narcissism, vanity, and wilful blindness.
Who chooses the 6 billion folks who need to leave the planet (die) to make that happen?
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Reactor designs that cannot melt down are not new. They have existed for as long as I can remember (I am in my fifties, and they existed when I was in elementary school). Usually, however, there is a compromise in efficiency and typically facing a level of diminishing returns when scaling the design to provide more power.
The bottom line is that it typically costs more to both build and maintain.
This does not mean that it is always financially unviable, however... and compared with the costs associat
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The bottom line is that it typically costs more to both build and maintain.
Sure. However, smaller designs have enormous cost advantage when it comes to decommissioning and disassembly costs, which is usually "forgotten" about.
How to chop up all the big contaminated pieces on site and move them safely somewhere is so daunting it has only been done a few times ever -- it is easier to leave everything in place and kick that can down the road. But something that can be lifted out as one piece, sealed into a protective container, and trucked to a specialty decommissioning facility (o
So pebble bed reactors? (Score:3, Insightful)
Glad to see research continuing on this but it's not new and the article doesn't even acknowledge the term "pebble bed", just the development that a company is trying to lower the cost on manufacturing the balls of fuel. That should save you a click, it simply otherwise just summarizes the concept.
That said I am glad to see some continued limited development on Type IV reactor designs but its all too slow to matter i fear. Nuclear power fears have crippled our ability to shift our baseline electric supply off gas and coal and is probably the worst mistake the environmental movement has ever made.
We should have and still should have a NRC/Government approved reactor design that can be built to a spec and avoid the massive regulatory hurdles that come with our current one-off plant method. Look to France for how it can be done successfully. It's not something the free market can do alone and renewable sources can only supply so much with our current transmission infrastructure.
If we had put some real effort into pebble beds, thorium, lead/bismuth reactors, and breeder reactors and had the political will to finish Yucca mountain we could be looking at a far different environmental picture today.
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That's why they invented Hastalloy-N at Oak Ridge, to contain molten radioactive salts wtihout corroding.
It's expensive af, but it works.
Re:So pebble bed reactors? (Score:5, Informative)
the article doesn't even acknowledge the term "pebble bed"
FTFA:
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Ok, you got me there. If i had points i would give em to you.
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If we had put some real effort into pebble beds, thorium, lead/bismuth reactors, and breeder reactors
Once again, pro nuker ignoring the breathtakingly obvious. It wasn't for a lack of interest in the thing itself. It wasn't political, and it is never NIMBYs. It is always absorbent and insane cost that is what turns interest away from these designs. The most common design in use is the most practical only because of cost, and even then, nuclear power has always been the single most expensive way to generate electricity. Fix the problem of insane cost, make it profitable, and you will have to fight away inve
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You ignored the second part of my post about having the government take it over with standardized designs similar to the way France/Canada does it. I agree the cost is too high, it's not something the free market can do. Nuclear power and profit motive do not mix. The government involvement has to be more than just the NRC putting out fires and finding Westinghouse's design flaws.
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You ignored the second part of my post about having the government take it over with standardized designs similar to the way France/Canada does it.
So make everyone pay for it (the taxpayers)? Tax payers already paid for the research and development of nuclear power in its entirety, and never saw reimbursement. Taxpayers also cover decommissioning and cleanup. How long do you think that can go on?
I agree the cost is too high, it's not something the free market can do. Nuclear power and profit motive do not mix.
Then that is the ballgame. If it can't be profitable, if it can't even compete with alternative energy, then it can't and should not be pursued or implemented. Stick it with a fork, nuclear is finally done and dead.
The government involvement has to be more than just the NRC putting out fires and finding Westinghouse's design flaws.
Irrational and unsupportable. Great idea!
Re:So pebble bed reactors? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, everyone pays for it. A national energy grid. I got no problem with that. I think solar and wind are great and we should build as much as we can, but feasibly the energy usage of the country is not gonna decrease over the next 10-20-30 years and fusion will always be decades away. It's been shown that countries can build a safe reliable nuclear energy ecosystem and we can replace the gas plants in this country.
If you're tired of not getting reimbursed then maybe lets not let the private market dictate access and expansion of a critical, if not the most critical part of our local and national infrastructure. Superfund sites just prove the point, some things are just too big to leave to the private sector.
If nuclear is "dead and dusted" what's the alternative for long term base-load energy supply? It's only not profitable in the short term, over decades nuclear makes it's money back. It's the private sector that does not want to bear the outlay over that time, so take them out of the equation. It's been done.
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True, I don't think pebble beds will work for space now since they are not really space or weight efficient. The safety factor I agree could be pretty good, I doubt a rocket explosion would damage the spheres. I think future rockets like Starship/New Glenn will have the extra capacity to have a large safety factor for something like the NASA SNAP design though. You'll be able to carry enough extra protection to protect it during launch and ditch the weight once in orbit. Exciting times on that front.
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I agree, the free market should have never been trusted to work up their own designs and operate it themselves. The NRC tries and for the most part has kept things safe in the US but nuclear power is not something that works with a profit motive. The France model (and to a lesser extent Canada with the CANDU designs) of a mostly state-operated system has proven itself to be more flexible and safe so far. Standardization of design goes a long way to keeping things safe and makes correcting flaws a much ea
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The free market generally fails any time the ROI payback time is more than about five years. Solar Power Satellites were probably economically viable by the late-'70s/early-'80s, but with a payoff time of 20-30 years they were a non-starter for any for-profit company.
Re:So pebble bed reactors? (Score:4, Interesting)
The France model (and to a lesser extent Canada with the CANDU designs) of a mostly state-operated system has proven itself to be more flexible and safe so far. Standardization of design goes a long way to keeping things safe and makes correcting flaws a much easier process.
You might want to work on that argument a bit. The CANDU design is the least safe design in the west. Its the only design with a positive void coefficient although its a small coefficient unlike the RBMK reactors used by the Soviets (the one that melted down after 17 hours of the operators trying to create a near meltdown) that had a large positive void coefficient. Also, the French designs are nothing to write home about (but they are better than the CANDU). The designs produced by the free market were often far safer than the government models with one major exception, the MSRE. I suspect this has to do with insurance even with the special laws around nuclear insurance. Also, with the huge amount of power in such a small package, nuclear can afford to often go the extra mile with safely due to a limited number of generation sites compared with other sources of power. Most of the cost of nuclear has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with lawyers and politicians and activists (none of which are known for their engineering knowledge).
The MSRE was killed by Nixon and has never been approved for civilian research even though it is far safer than any other design. Its not very useful for military applications which is part of why it was killed. Also it was made in TN while the competing breeder design was in CA which has more electoral votes. Those breeder designs have now largely been abandon due to safety issues. Humanity doesn't so much walk forward as stumble.
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Try cleanup costs after an accident as a metric. And come back once wind has racked up a couple of billion dollars, like Fukushima. In the meantime, you can take your industry shilling and shove it up your arse.
Re: So pebble bed reactors? (Score:2)
Kinda (Score:5, Funny)
"it's basically impossible to exceed these temperatures, because the reactor kind of shuts down as it reaches these high temperatures,"
Basically...
kind of...
If these terms are meant to instill confidence in the technology, they should consider a new copywriter.
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This will NEVER have an accident. NEVER I tell you. Is that enough confidence for you?
Re:Kinda (Score:4, Funny)
mild burns...
some screaming...
SubjectIsSubject (Score:3)
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That's what he said.
Great balls of fire! (Score:2)
virtually meltdown-proof (Score:3)
Come again when you can buy insurance from any company on this planet.
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Normal insurance companies might be unable to deal with them even if they are inherently safer due to the relatively low number of units precluding insurability [wikipedia.org].
If you don't have enough units to allow the law of large numbers to apply, the actual risk will not necessarily approach the statistically calculated one, exposing the company to potentially much more coverage claims than expected.
LOL, famus last words (Score:2)
"So if you take these reactor designs and combine them with a fuel that can handle the heat, you essentially have an accident-proof reactor."
Lol, an "accident proof" nuclear reactor, thanks for the chuckle.
Banana (Score:2)
There are nuclear reactions going on in the banana you had for breakfast. Well, now in your belly.
Watch out for meltdown?
...and the day after tomorrow... (Score:2)
Unless there will be
- an earthquake
- a tsunami
- a serious accident within the containment or at the nearby
- a terrorist attack
- a war
- a declining of law and order (I know, it is impossible, as every well-established state lasts longer than that)
Fission technology is immoral: you enjoy the benefits now, and export the costs to the forthcoming generation
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Anything with a half-life that long is, by definition, not that radioactive. Just because the state of California would slap a prop 65 warning on something for 35,000 years doesn't mean it's really worth worrying about for 35,000 years.
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The original ban on reprocessing was meant to prevent nuclear proliferation. I'd say that cat is already out of the bag. That and now we have the option to reprocess where the actinides are never separated out making the resulting fuel useless for bombs but still usable in a suitably configured reactor.
I wouldn't suggest using water to dilute uranium, concrete would be a better choice. The ore that came out of the mine was uranium oxide in rock, why is it suddenly more dangerous if we put it back where we f
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The sun is one of the more difficult places to get to in the solar system, the necessary change in Delta V is quite large. It would make much more sense to drop it in a convenient crater on the Moon.
In actuality the term "nuclear waste" is for the most part a misnomer. If an element is still radioactive then it still has useful energy that can be extracted. When fuel rods come out of the core of a standard nuclear power plant the majority of the energy is still intact, only a portion has been expended.
Dont worry, it will never be built in large scale (Score:4, Interesting)
Even coal beats nuclear in cost. But coal is dead anyway, natural gas is way cheaper.
Even natural gas is on its way out, most of the recent natural gas plants are retrofits to coal plants being converted.
On shore wind is the lowest cost producer, solar not far behind. Off shore wind is competitive with natural gas.
The biggest draw back is solar does no generation at nights, and wind is also variable. Solar tracks the grid load so well, batteries can tame the neck of the duck curve. Almost all the retiring peak load power plants are being replaced by battery banks. Not puny ones. We are talking 350 MW x 4 hours or 700 MW x 4 hours.
Having 2.8 GWh of storage plays havoc with the profitability of spot market. There is enough time to call for offers, compare prices and order power. Just matter of time the spot market vanishes and all electricity is traded on long term contracts with fixed prices.
Nuclear plants are not in the picture. Once the existing ones die off, we will just have the mess to clean up. That is all.
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Can you imagine the amount of toxic chemicals inside a Multi-Mega-Watt-Powerbank?
Well, lets just say it is a pretty big load.
When a Tesla was burning at a local super market parking lot the fire department didn't dare to extinguish the fire or touch the wreckage and removal took two full months. The decontamination of the parking lot, the super market and the neighborhood did cost close to one million.
Lets say a 10Gwh power bank would catch fire... it would be even more deadly than every nuclear incident be
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On shore wind is the lowest cost producer, solar not far behind. Off shore wind is competitivewith natural gas.
Is that current? I was under the impression solar had passed even onshore wind (but haven't looked at the numbers lately).
If not, it will get there:
Photovoltaic is a semiconductor tech, with similarly-scaled hacks available (quantum dots, infrared-window pigment coatings, fabrication improvements, rectenna-style energy capture, ...). It has a way to go to reach physical efficiency limits and bene
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Nuclear could still make sense for power generation in areas that don't have the geography or open space for wind/solar/geothermal/hydro. Also for large ships.
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oh dear... (Score:2)
When I was a little kid... (Score:2)
Alas, this design wasn't fireproof. If the vinyl-uranium plates would catch fire, the vinyl would burn aw
What happens if? (Score:2)
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If I'm reading TFA correctly, nothing: the silicon carbide ceramic outer coating keeps oxygen out.
When I was 19 (Score:2)
I remember when I was 19, I had nuclear power balls, too!
Using a LFTR is a better alternative (Score:2)
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Nobody is going to get a permit to build a graphite moderated reactor in the US. Not a chance after Chernobyl.
Really? (Score:2)
"can protect the uranium inside from melting under even the most extreme conditions"
I'd think that if a reactor goes critical, the core temperature will increase until something melts. I guess you could design so the containment melts first and you have a molten puddle of steel, rock , and ceramic Uranium pellets that melts it way into the earth like a giant glowing gopher. Still not clear you can get the heat out before you turn the rock and steel to vapor, and at that point I suspect the pellets fail as
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Technically, if a reactor doesn't go critical it's not doing anything, it's just sitting there cold.
That's nice but (Score:2)
You still have the old problem of where you store the spent fuel.
Are these not Thorium reactors?? (Score:2)
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Great Glowing Nuclear Power Balls Batman!! (Score:2)
Sorry it had to be said.
Nucelar is the saftest and cleanest energy. (Score:3)
**This spent fuel is tiny compared to the pollution and waste created by all other energy sources, solar, etc. Its life is a few hundred years, not hundreds of thousands, and with further development -- which has been happening, they might be able to completely deplete it, or maybe even recharge it.
Even with the problems caused by older reactors -- which were designed mainly to enrich uranium for bombs, or natural disasters, or gross Communist incompetence, it's still the safest and cleanest energy as of this time.
Oil companies ran a massive propaganda campaigns against nuclear power, because it was in direct competition when it came to heating homes. So many people which thought they were saving the environment, were really just parroting big oil propaganda.
The reaction of many to just abandon this fantastic source of energy is quite sad. We could really use more Nuclear plants right now, modern plants, not less.
Meltdown temp normal operating temp (Score:3)
While it sounds like a neat idea, testing against normal operating ranges with a bit of buffer seems a bit overly simplistic. If we look at meltdown conditions for Fukushima and Chernobyl, the upper bounds were estimated around 2300C (4172F) and 2600C (4712F) respectively. While testing at 3000F is nice, he seems to be about 2000-3000F short of the mark to demonstrate safety.
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I see we've now covered the obvious.
At this point, nuclear fission is just too messy. There's something stupid in every reactor design that has been overlooked, something that in the right set of really unlikely circumstances will cause a catastrophic failure.
Most reactors will reach end of life before those circumstances happen. But a few won't, and you get Chernobyl.
Even when there is no catastrophe, there's still the matter of waste disposal. And there's just no good solution at this point, and none c