Radiant Aims To Replace Diesel Generators With Small Nuclear Reactors (newatlas.com) 266
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: California company Radiant has secured funding to develop a compact, portable, "low-cost" one-megawatt nuclear micro-reactor that fits in a shipping container, powers about 1,000 homes and uses a helium coolant instead of water. Founded by ex-SpaceX engineers, who decided the Mars colony power sources they were researching would make a bigger impact closer to home, Radiant has pulled in $1.2 million from angel investors to continue work on its reactors, which are specifically designed to be highly portable, quick to deploy and effective wherever they're deployed; remote communities and disaster areas are early targets.
The military is another key market here; a few of these could power an entire military base in a remote area for four to eight years before expending its "advanced particle fuel," eliminating not just the emissions of the current diesel generators, but also the need to constantly bring in trucks full of fuel for this purpose. Those trucks will still have to run -- up until the point where the military ditches diesel in all its vehicles -- but they'll be much less frequent, reducing a significant risk for transport personnel. Radiant says its fuel "does not melt down, and withstands higher temperatures when compared to traditional nuclear fuels." Using helium as the coolant "greatly reduces corrosion, boiling and contamination risks," and the company says it's received provisional patents for ideas it's developed around refueling the reactors and efficiently transporting heat out of the reactor core.
The military is another key market here; a few of these could power an entire military base in a remote area for four to eight years before expending its "advanced particle fuel," eliminating not just the emissions of the current diesel generators, but also the need to constantly bring in trucks full of fuel for this purpose. Those trucks will still have to run -- up until the point where the military ditches diesel in all its vehicles -- but they'll be much less frequent, reducing a significant risk for transport personnel. Radiant says its fuel "does not melt down, and withstands higher temperatures when compared to traditional nuclear fuels." Using helium as the coolant "greatly reduces corrosion, boiling and contamination risks," and the company says it's received provisional patents for ideas it's developed around refueling the reactors and efficiently transporting heat out of the reactor core.
Here comes the triggering... (Score:5, Funny)
.... powers about 1,000 homes
Or 10 crypto-mining farms.
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> eliminating not just the emissions of the current diesel generators, but also the need to constantly bring in trucks full of fuel
But without diesel, how will they burn their poo like in the movie Jarhead?
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I'll call it Mr. Poosion
Re:Here comes the triggering... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do something useful when you can calculate hashes?
Re:Here comes the triggering... (Score:4, Informative)
There's a difference between calculating hashes for visiting an HTTPS website and calculating hashes that won't even be added to the blockchain because you didn't reach the target fast enough.
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Why not run the numbers on electricity per successful mine, dividing into it a the failed mining electricity?
Total elecricity worldwide per bitcoin will also work.
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Re:Here comes the triggering... (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the US Energy Information Administration [eia.gov] the average home in the US uses about 10,715 kWh per year, which averages to 1.22 kW. Not useful for sizing the service to your home, or even the utility's generating capacity, but still has some logic behind the spin.
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Being an average over 24 hours is why it's a useless metric. If you actually tried to power 1000 homes with this thing they would all experience a blackout every time demand rose above the average.
A nuclear reactor is a terrible choice for this kind of application, because it can't quickly ramp the output power up or down to match demand.
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That being said, isn't one of the advantages of small reactors like this that they are (fairly) easy to adjust? Nuclear has always been pretty good for 'how much powe
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Until you add a half-day worth of batteries - then it's fine.
If you're designing an electric grid, you have to concern yourself with peak demand. If you're designing one tiny generating component to plug into that grid, average demand is far more relevant.
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Because nuclear only needs a half-day of batteries, and that only if it can't handle peak loads - otherwise a few minutes of batteries are enough to handle the transients that coal/gas/etc. normally handle.
Renewable in contrast needs around a week worth of batteries to handle worst-case weather, etc. And the price of that dwarfs the generation capacity. For now at least, there's some real promising tech like that on the horizon like salt-water iron batteries that could blow lithium out of the water in pri
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Re:Here comes the triggering... (Score:4, Informative)
A nuclear reactor is a terrible choice for this kind of application, because it can't quickly ramp the output power up or down to match demand.
You state that like it's an inherent characteristic of nuclear reactors. It's not. It's a design criterion. The commercial reactor designs from the 60s and 70s were not designed to be able to ramp up and down quickly, so the statement is true of most, if not all, existing commercial reactors. But naval reactors, for example, are designed to be able to ramp power output up and down to match demand, because that's a requirement for that application.
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Why have a problem (Score:4)
When you can have lots of problems.
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Good point, but devil's advocate: No single point of failure? Less power loss/degradation due to reduced physical length of transmission? Difficult to target in an attack (state actors)? Fault tolerance? Load balancing? Network distribution is cool?
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How is it going to cope with huge demand swings?
Part of the problem with small reactors is that the demand swings are even larger, due to not being so distributed over area and over timezones. Isolated grids can't simply export or import power as needed.
Storage would help, but then you start to wonder why you are bothering with a reactor at all when there are cheaper, cleaner options.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
This is sad (Score:4, Insightful)
1.2m will barely pay for a machine shop and the people to run it for about a year or two.
Ain't no one gonna be building no prototypes. This is just a PowerPoint factory.
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I came here to make this point. $1.2M angel round is basically funding the recruitment of real VC money.
I wonder if they applied for NSF funding first. NSF would give them $2M and not even take any stock for it.
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m waiting for the furthest left wing to flip their cards over on nuclear power on the basis of it producing less carbon.
Because it's a political identity, not science, you will still be waiting for that when the last scrap of ice melts.
In the same way, I'm preparing to be the last living Republican, because I'm the one who vaccinated.
Re: This is sad (Score:2)
1.2 mio is probably just for the 4 or so devs to CAD it to completion and do the necessary simulations, plus travelling expenses for 1 CEO. Once they have that, they'll have (1) a tream, (2) a product, and (3) a market. Pulling in another 30 mio to build a small series of half a dozen prototypes is then a no-brainer.
Re:This is sad (Score:4, Insightful)
1.2m will barely pay for a machine shop and the people to run it for about a year or two.
The company I work for was started by some clever bods with doctorates, but not a lot of capital. They won a contract for the British Army, building training kit for bomb disposal. The contract was very lucrative. The company grew organically off its sales revenues after that. Eventually, venture capital investment was needed to fund further growth, but we had a healthy business before that investment.
In the early days, we rented some property, and one of our neighbours was a more typical startup. I chatted to one of their directors a couple of times. They were in the "burn phase", he said. I am not sure if they were selling any product for a profit. Maybe it was just demos to attract more funds.
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1.2m will barely pay for a machine shop and the people to run it for about a year or two.
Ain't no one gonna be building no prototypes. This is just a PowerPoint factory.
Yep, this sounds like a way to funnel VC money into the owners bank accounts. I should probably patent that.
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Re: This is sad (Score:5, Informative)
You do understand that nuclear reactors of one sort or another power ships, submarines, and sometimes lighthouses and stuff launched into space?
You do also realize that radioactive materials are shipped by sea, rail, air, and sometimes in the back seat of someone's car when you're talking about things like cancer treatments prepared in one hospital to be shipped across town to another?
Perhaps you just have an irrational fear of anything with the word "nuclear" in it. It's understandable. When MRI scanners were being developed in the 70s and 80s, they were originally going to (accurately) call then nuclear magnetic resonance imagers. But they dropped the nuclear because of people like you.
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The kinds of reactors used on military ships and submarines are extremely expensive. They have to be built to survive sinking. If these guys think they can build something that expensive that only produces 1MW and find a market for it, good luck to them.
People like you just want to bankrupt us to get your pet project up and running. Sorry, we are not willing to pay for it.
All these guys have is some PowerPoint slides, no solutions to the problems they face, no completed or tested designs, no serious plan fo
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>They have to be built to survive sinking.
Oh, a fair bit more than that. A military vessel is designed specifically to operate in an environment where enemies are going to go to great lengths to try to destroy it. The reactors have to be built to survive the ship being blown up while the reactor is operating at full power
And pretty much *any* reactor is going to be far more fragile when in full operation than when completely shut down. And a reactor that's specifically designed to be easy to transport
Re:This is sad (Score:4, Informative)
Generally speaking most reactors are not radioactive until they start operating. Not even if fully fueled. Fission fuel is fertile (fissions in response to neutron bombardment), *not* appreciably radioactive (undergoes spontaneous radioactive decay). As evidenced by the half life in hundreds of thousands of years - anything that takes that long to decay, is NOT decaying quickly.
Granted, once such a reactor starts operating it generates nuclear waste which *is* highly radioactive. so you have to deal with that before or during the return. However, depending on the particular design it can be pretty safe - at the extreme end several similar-scale liquid-fuel modular reactor designs can simply be deactivated and allowed to cool into a solid inert block of lead, etc. Still radioactive enough you probably wouldn't want to sit directly on it, but not something that's going to break or leak during shipping, even in the event of the ship sinking or truck crashing. Yeah, you'd probably want to recover the reactor off the sea floor eventually, but it's not an urgent environmental disaster the way an oil leak is.
And really, that high transportability is pretty much a trademark of all modular reactors - it has to be since the plan is to ship them to power stations around the world rather than building them in place at enormous expense as we do now. Until we start building reactors in factories, nuclear is unlikely to ever become truly cost effective. And it's hardly difficult - every internal combustion engine from 2-stroke weed-whackers to massively sophisticated and intricate rocket engines is designed to not only handle the shocks and vibrations of transportation, but to operate at near-peak efficiency while doing so. A nuclear reactor is neither dramatically more complicated nor dramatically more delicate than a Raptor engine.
Military Fun, Ding-Ding-Ding! (Score:2)
Accelerator-driven fission (Score:2)
One problem fusion is supposed to solve is the long future when we run out of available fission fuels, but there are fission cycles to deal with that concern for the lifetimes of the next generation of power plants.
The other problems fusion is supposed to solve is that if you pull the plug, fusion just stops because it is so hard to sustain in the first place -- you don't have buildups of fission products leading to a Chernobyl situation, and you don't have the Fukushima problem of buildup of heat when t
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The problem is that fusion is one of those technologies that is PERPETUALLY "10 to 20 years away". And has been since the 40's.
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The "20 to 30 years" away is because for decades they haven't been getting the investment needed to make them happen even on that timeline.
The real problem is that while large scale tokamak reactors along the lines of ITER are almost certainly viable once engineering problems are worked out, from an economic perspective they're hard to distinguish from large scale multi-gigawatt fission plants with no clear way to scale downwards -- you get extremely capital intensive plants (billions of dollars for gigawat
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Well. I was TRYING not to be TOO hyperbolic.
And, under it all, I'm still a nuke booster.
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What about space mirror based solar, tapping an already stable fusion reactor with billions of years of fuel? NASA has some solid studies on orbiting very thin solar mirrors hundreds of meters or even kilometers wide to gather solar energy and beam it back to ground stations as microwaves. There are safety concerns, especially if the rig can focus the energy tightly, but focusing it tightly is not needed. Optical inspection to prevent weaponizing them should be easy: a real space industry, supported by the
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Re: Accelerator-driven fission (Score:2)
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So long as we're building it on Earth, it's likely a challenge to make cost effective. Once we have orbital industry though, it's trivial.
They're confusing two different technologies though - orbital solar-power plants are expensive and can only theoretically beam energy back to Earth using microwave or laser technology that thus far been demonstrated at less than 1% the required range. (Assuming geosynchronous orbit). Also - you're talking prime orbital death ray material.
Orbital mirrors in contrast can
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..has raised 1.2 million.... (Score:2)
That won't even get them face time with the NRC!
So they expect these to be approved...NEVER?
This is what I'm talking about with the punitive pricing structures built into nuclear...
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This is what I'm talking about with the punitive pricing structures built into nuclear...
Your argument can be boiled down to "it's expensive to do this right, why don't we just do it wrong?"
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No. Actually it's not.
Nice try though.
My point is that the government regulatory agency that oversees the industry is deliberately set up as a roadblock and a money sink.
And that a million bucks sub-chump level change.
RTGs have been around (Score:3, Insightful)
There are several of them missing too, but the Soviets were heavy users of them.
I think Hitachi (and/or Fujitsu) has a design like this as well thatâ(TM)s small and portable for a few villages or a small island, just need a source of water nearby for cooling.
These things are on submarines and boats, itâ(TM)s not hard to do. The only problem is the NIMBY and Greenpeace folks that rather burn oil and coal in search for a solar/wind utopia rather than actual green energy. But I guess then theyâ(TM)d be out of a crisis to solve.
Re:RTGs have been around (Score:5, Informative)
Very, very different use case.
RTGs are for when you need a small amount of completely maintenance and oversight free electricity for decades. Specific energy values for RTGs are in the low single-digit W/kg range. They're great for lighthouses, remote listening stations, deep space probes, and the like, but you're not going to run more than a few lights off of one.
Compact fission reactors will, depending on the design, require some degree of maintenance and monitoring. The upside is that specific energy for a compact fission reactor starts at about 50 W/kg and only goes up from there.
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First of all, the Soviets also did miniature nuclear reactors for their satellites.
Generally small reactors like on submarines and boats require highly enriched fuel and hence are super expensive to run. But if you want to pay 1000x the electricity price you pay now, by all means, go for it. Will teach you to be frugal, I guess.
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Interesting that this was modded "flamebait", because it's clearly not flamebait and makes a very valid point. When you can't win the argument, silence the opposition I guess.
What does the whole system look like? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: What does the whole system look like? (Score:2)
I'm wondering how they intend to shield these micro reactors from bad men who want to use the material inside to build a dirty bomb.
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Ceramic fuel pellets and inherent high temperature design
You cut off the flow of coolant and the pellets expand and the temperature takes the fuel out of the energy band to absorb neutrons and fission/
It's inherently safe and not the first to do this
https://www.energy.gov/ne/arti... [energy.gov]
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As I understand it, TRIGA teaching reactors are supposed to be meltdown proof. They use uranium zirconium hydride fuel rods, which are, per my notes, supposed to shut down nuclear reactions once they hit a certain temperature, thus preventing meltdowns. This property also prevents them from generating more than 1MW of continuous power (I did a tour of a TRIGA reactor a few years back).
Maybe this reactor would employee a similar type of fuel.
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Residual heat after scram actually isn't a concern for small reactors at all. In large, grid sized reactors of 100MW of larger, the square-cube law means they hold onto heat quite well. In SMRs, a reactor can passively cool residual heat without a coolant system.
This fact actually played a role in the Three Mile Island meltdown. The men in the control room had come from the Navy. They learned reactor safety on Rickover reactors for subs. On a sub, you don't have to worry about residual radiation creating o
1.2 million (Score:3)
Buys you a modest home on a not so big lot in much of California.
Chernobyl II, "The suburban resurrection" (Score:2)
Chernobyl II, "The suburban resurrection".... coming to a cinema near you.
The ultimate gift (Score:2)
The ultimate gift for millionaire Hollywood types who want to virtue signal how they they are 100% carbon neutral while they jetset around the world.
A military nuclear reactor... good idea. (Score:2, Insightful)
How do you spell "please bomb this place" in Arabic?
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"USS Enterprise"? [wikipedia.org]
We've been using military nuclear reactors since the 60s. It's not a novel concept.
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Yes, but we usually put them out of reach of people who can just sneak up to them. Sneaking up on a submarine or a carrier is kinda hard if you're not, say, a dolphin.
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We've been using military nuclear reactors since the 60s. It's not a novel concept.
Yea, its a naval concept.
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Well, it's easier for terrorists from $country_US_goes_to_war_to to bomb stuff in $country_US_goes_to_war_to rather than the US.
They have less of a problem getting in.
Cooled by Helium? (Score:3)
Is this the same "please don't inflate balloons because MRI machines are running out of helium" helium?
Another reason why we should be careful with it. (Score:2)
Re: Another reason why we should be careful with i (Score:2)
Re:Cooled by Helium? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this the same "please don't inflate balloons because MRI machines are running out of helium" helium?
Presumably, the helium cooling is closed circuit, and the helium can be recovered when the plant is decommissioned.
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Recapture radioactive Helium? Guess NOT.
How would the helium be radioactive? I looked up isotopes of helium on Wikipedia. In naturally occurring helium, 99.9998% is 4He, and 0.0002% os 3He. Both isotopes are stable, i.e. not radioactive.
Helium is one of the least recyclable element. Once released, it floats to the top of space and gone forever.
So don't let the helium leak out of your system. One big advantage for recycling helium is that it is chemically inert. You don't have to do any chemical processing to recycle it.
Re: Cooled by Helium? (Score:3)
Re: Cooled by Helium? (Score:3)
I agree Helium is hard to contain, but if you stick it into a chamber it doesn't take long for any other elements to settle out. There's plenty to take issue with this planned design but contaminated He is probably the least of them.
Re: Cooled by Helium? (Score:2)
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Implying that low grade party helium has anything to do with MRI machines?
safety (Score:4, Informative)
I noticed that "safety" is absent from the feature list, though I'm certain it was thought about.
Small nuclear reactors, if they can be made fail-safe (or fail safely) are the future. Our current energy model is questionable, not just because of how we generate electricity, but also because of the networks. Keeping the electrical grid up and running is a daunting task. I imagine (though I'm not in this field, correct me if I'm an idiot) that a kind of interchange station where local grids (largely powered by renewables plus small nuclear reactors) connect to a larger power grid to exchange excess or draw additional power when available/needed would be easier to handle, with blackouts if any occur being more local instead of half a country. And you probably would need less capacity on the large overland power lines.
Renewable energy will always fluctuate. Wind, water and sun just aren't constant, and while you can balance it out somewhat geographically and by using different sources, there will always be days in which both wind and sun are low and water power can't compensate fully.
But the green parties are opposed to nuclear mostly for ideological reasons. Better to keep old coal and gas plants running, right? Maybe we can convince them with facts. (who am I kidding?)
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I question the sanity of anyone who argues that "maintaining a power grid is a daunting task, so let's build lots of nuclear reactors".
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Nuclear reactors make it far easier to provide the huge quantities of electrical power with low carbon emissions that a stable grid needs
meh [wiley.com]
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Interesting paper. Still, itÃ(TM)s not like the renewable alternatives are much better over the whole lifecycle,
No, but they are better.
and they come with their own issues.
Sure, but their issues don't include nuclear waste, and they don't include The People having to pay to insure them and to pay to decommission them because there is never enough set aside. Nuclear waste is an only-partially-managed problem already, adding more reactors won't make that better.
Meanwhile, the simple facts are that we do not need nuclear, and we can build renewables faster. Those two facts assembled should be frankly all we need to know to know that nuclear is not the bes
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In the UK your problem is that you just left the union that made it possible for you to get cheap interconnections with other nations to get power from outside, and your land masses are the size of postage stamps so you have a real problem with renewables sometimes not producing over your entire service area. So you may well indeed to have to resort to nuclear in order to get a stable grid, and in the process it's going to cost you a whole lot of money that you wouldn't have had to spend without Brexiting.
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If your neighbour was the type to cut your power lines after a disagreement, would you want to stay in the neighbourhood?
You haven't left the neighborhood, all you've done is made your neighbors dislike you more and want to do business with you less. It's not like you started your country up and drove it away.
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If the price I pay for living in an actual self-governing democracy is via an increment on my power bill, I can live with that.
It isn't. That is, you will pay the increment, but you still won't get an actual self-governing democracy.
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Claiming that the U.K. is not a democracy while discussing Brexit, which was a consequence of the biggest democratic vote ever in the U.K. makes you look rather silly, no?
Flag as Inappropriate
No. It doesn't, because in polls the remainers consistently outnumber the brexiters. Obviously your democracy isn't functioning correctly. Note I don't claim ours is, but that's irrelevant to the current discussion, and I mention it only to head off a dumb argument.
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But the green parties are opposed to nuclear mostly for ideological reasons. Better to keep old coal and gas plants running, right? Maybe we can convince them with facts. (who am I kidding?)
Your logical fallacy is false dichotomy. If you ever discover a valid argument on behalf of nuclear power, by all means make it, but it's not gonna happen.
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The key economic requirement is designing a reactor small enough to be built in factories, like aircraft.
Too big (Score:2, Funny)
Make one that fits in a cellphone or car. Maybe an RTG or something like what the Voyager probes have. I wouldn't mind a car that can run for decades without needing a charge up or refill. I suppose collisions could be a problem, but it should be fine as long as it doesn't collide with velocity enough for it to go super-critical.
uh? (Score:2)
, who decided the Mars colony power sources they were researching would make a bigger impact closer to home
Wait, and SpaceX doesn't mind? or is it actually SpaceX that has split this from their company for restrictive/financial reasons. If the company I'm working for is funding my research, I cannot just take it and setup my own company, the actual research belongs to the company, not me.
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Colin Powell was suffering from terminal cancer and was immune-suppressed.
Re: Lets Go Brandon (Score:2, Informative)
The unvacinated fools murdered Colin Powell (Score:3)
You're feeding a troll and propagating another troll's Subject.
But it wasn't just Colin Powell who was murdered by the selfishness of insane anti-vax idiots. Too bad we can't figure out which idiot did it.
How do I define "insane" these days?
"My great, competent, powerful, brilliant, rich, and wise leader knew there was going to be massive fraud in the election but he and ALL of his minions somehow failed to capture a SINGLE piece of evidence of the fraud."
Insane. (Not the only lie, but the biggest.)
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Ivermectin is proving to be far more [...] effective than the jabs.
Perhaps, but that's not very useful to peope not currently infested by parasites.
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It wasn't the jab. It was the jabaneros he had at dinner.
Re: Great... (Score:3)
The material inside is enough to build an effective dirty bomb, and make the public go waa, thus insuring the target country's government goes extra-fascist on their own people, which is what the terrorists are really aiming for.
Yes, the 9/11 attacks were not about the sheer distruction, but rather weaponizing our own government against us, to make life much harder for the US public, as well as using our government as a sort of amplifier for the terror that they wanted to instill in the US pu
Re: Great... (Score:3)
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The helium typically loses a neutron to be just ordinary helium, quite safe though very difficult to contain. And tritium, when not combined with oxygen to make a form of heavy water, is even less easy to contain than helium. And it's *reactive*, and most fusion designs expect to use the spare neutron from DT fusion to generate more tritium from lithium coolant and harvest the quite dangerous tritium. I'd worry about the fuel for fusion as much or more than typical fission fuel.
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Yup.. thus the need for helium escape valves on deep sea diving watches.
Re:Helium as coolant? (Score:4, Insightful)
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What's wrong with Helium?
It doesn't need a leak to escape, it just finds its way out through the structure of the materials surrounding it.
Any container of Helium is slowly going to lose it all over time, no matter what the container is made of.
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I don't think that's the case. Their website is almost completely devoid of information about what their reactor is, but they phrase it very oddly: "meltdown-proof fuel".
That sounds like it can overheat and bad things can happen like explosions due to high pressures, but hey at least the fuel itself won't turn to corium and start sinking into the water table.
Just because a reactor can't melt down doesn't mean it can't fail in other catastrophic ways, and they don't present any detail on how they have mitiga