Bill Gates' TerraPower Will Set Up a $4 Billion Nuclear Plant In Wyoming (interestingengineering.com) 243
Hmmmmmm shares a report from Interesting Engineering: Founded by Bill Gates, TerraPower, a company that plans to use nuclear energy to deliver power in a sustainable manner, has selected Kremmer, Wyoming as a suitable site to demonstrate its advanced nuclear reactor, Natrium. The decision was made after extensive evaluation of the site and consultations with the local community, the company said in a press release.
Last year, the Department of Energy (DOE) had awarded TerraPower a grant of $80 million to demonstrate its technology. The advanced nuclear reactor that is being developed by the company in association with General Electric-Hitachi, uses a sodium-cooled fast reactor that works with a molten salt-based energy storage system. Earlier in June, the company had decided to set up its demonstration plant in Wyoming and has recently sealed the decision by selecting the site of a coal-fired power plant that is scheduled for a shut down by 2025, the press release said.
The demonstration plant where the company plans to set up a 345 MW reactor will be used to validate the design, construction, and operation of TerraPower's technology. Natrium technology uses uranium enriched to up to 20 percent, far higher than what is used by other nuclear reactors. However, nuclear energy supporters say that the technology creates lesser nuclear waste, Reuters reported. The energy storage system to be used in the plant is also designed to work with renewable sources of energy. TerraPower plans to utilize this capability and boost its output to up to 500 MW, enough to power 400,000 homes, the company said.
Last year, the Department of Energy (DOE) had awarded TerraPower a grant of $80 million to demonstrate its technology. The advanced nuclear reactor that is being developed by the company in association with General Electric-Hitachi, uses a sodium-cooled fast reactor that works with a molten salt-based energy storage system. Earlier in June, the company had decided to set up its demonstration plant in Wyoming and has recently sealed the decision by selecting the site of a coal-fired power plant that is scheduled for a shut down by 2025, the press release said.
The demonstration plant where the company plans to set up a 345 MW reactor will be used to validate the design, construction, and operation of TerraPower's technology. Natrium technology uses uranium enriched to up to 20 percent, far higher than what is used by other nuclear reactors. However, nuclear energy supporters say that the technology creates lesser nuclear waste, Reuters reported. The energy storage system to be used in the plant is also designed to work with renewable sources of energy. TerraPower plans to utilize this capability and boost its output to up to 500 MW, enough to power 400,000 homes, the company said.
Uh oh (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot hates Bill Gates but has a hard on for untested molten salt reactors. Who will win this round?
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As long as he puts 5G chips into the salt, I'm cool with this.
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Molten Salt and Vinegar 5g chips?
Re:Uh oh (Score:5, Funny)
Bill Gates in charge of nuclear reactions? Gees, I hope he doesn't force them to run the whole place with Windows. TerrorPower indeed.
Re:Uh oh (Score:4, Funny)
Nuclear power generation technology and MS Windows
1. For no reason the reactor will stop working periodically and need to be restarted. When this happens all control system screens will show an image of Cherenkov Radiation.
2. When the new reactor goes online you will have to buy all new light bulbs
3. Apple will make a competing reactor that leaves spent fuel inert, requires little to no maintenance, and can be operated with little or no training. Unfortunately most appliances will not be compatible with the power it outputs and it will cost twice as much per KWH produced.
4. Occasionally the reactor will stop responding to operator commands until the operator simultaneously presses the start, stop, and SCRAM buttons.
5. All the status information and controls typically laid out in front of nuclear reactor operators will be replaced with a menu system which requires the operator to traverse a tree of options to find what they are looking for. This will become so cumbersome that they will add a search feature which requires you to type in the name of the function you are looking for.
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Bill Gates in charge of nuclear reactions? Gees, I hope he doesn't force them to run the whole place with Windows.
Nuclear power plants already effectively run on Windows.
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Slashdot hates Bill Gates but has a hard on for untested molten salt reactors. Who will win this round?
Hate to confuse you, but this is a test.
How exactly do you think you test things?
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Will they be against it because it's Bill Gates?
Will they be for it because it's Nuclear?
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You seem confused too, ArchieBunker was referring to the comments section here.
He seems to think that "untested" is a great slam. Well, this is testing.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Only two MSRs have ever operated, both research reactors in the United States
My mistake, only tested in limited research instances.
Re:Uh oh (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Only two MSRs have ever operated, both research reactors in the United States
The TerraPower reactor described in TFA is NOT an MSR.
It is a sodium-cooled TWR.
The molten salt is used for thermal storage. It is not part of the reactor.
Re:Uh oh (Score:4, Interesting)
It is a sodium-cooled TWR.
It's NOT a TWR (traveling wave reactor) but a regular fast-neutron breeder. The TWR has fizzled out because there are no construction materials that can withstand the neutron flux long enough for the TWR to become economical.
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He was pointing out that enthusiastically advocating a poorly tested technology ("hav[ing] a hard on for") is unwise.
That is quite a subtle distinction in the current popular debate format of "oooh, sick burn" though.
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You seem confused too, ArchieBunker was referring to the comments section here.
Will they be against it because it's Bill Gates? Will they be for it because it's Nuclear?
People surely do like to draw battle lines. I'm not concerned about the Bill Gates or Slashdot nuc cult. I'm interested in this experimental/operational reactor, although molten sodium is to me pretty concerning. Accidents in that loop will get pretty exciting pretty quickly.
Trying to think of a car analogy - maybe running gasoline in your radiator and cooling system? 8^)
Re:Uh oh (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed, the planned reactor only produces 345 MWe of heat, and the amount of electricity generated with be a fraction of that.
MWe means "megawatts electrical", the thermal output is either given just as "MW" or as "MWt". Yes, this is the electrical output as is clear from this much better industry news site [world-nuclear-news.org].
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According to TFA, they are planning on including thermal storage.
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That's something at least. What a waste of money though, they could just build wind turbines in a fraction of the time and connect them to storage. By the time this thing has been running long enough to prove if it works one way or the other it will be too late anyway.
We are already more than half a decade in. They wanted to build one in China but Trump's technology transfer blocks put a stop to it.
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Molten salt is only used to transfer the heat. The core uses sodium, which ignites when it contacts water.
So while you might not get a hydrogen or steam explosion, you still have a core that is melting through the containment vessel and which you can't extinguish with water. As it sinks it will eventually encounter ground water.
That also means the area around the reactor can't use water for fire suppression, or for anything much. Also means that when you decommission the reactor you can't just lob bits of i
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Molten salt is only used to transfer the heat. The core uses sodium, which ignites when it contacts water.
So while you might not get a hydrogen or steam explosion, you still have a core that is melting through the containment vessel and which you can't extinguish with water.
The Alkali metals are nothing to be trifled with. And previous molten Sodium reactors have been a bit of a problem in the past. They have some attractive technical aspects, but molten sodium is a genie that want's out of it's bottle very badly. And once it gets out, it's a very angry genie.
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Slashdot hates Bill Gates but has a hard on for untested molten salt reactors. Who will win this round?
To be precise, the reactor is cooled with liquid Sodium, and the salt is used to transfer/store the energy.
Let us hope that this sodium reactor goes better than the reactor at Santa Susana.
Color me interested, but nervously cautious. Had a little experience with the alkali metals some decades ago. You tend to get complacent with them until things go haywire. And when they go haywire, things get real.
If it messes up, it will be spectacular. I approve of it being placed in Wyoming if for nothing else t
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Yes, what better place to contaminate than where the most visited national park is located. Perfectly sound idea. Although, if anything does happen, there will be a new site to visit. In about 10,000 years.
This is in contrast to the Marcellus shale work in PA where everyone was encouraged to believ
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Slashdot hates Bill Gates but has a hard on for untested molten salt reactors. Who will win this round?
Well, obviously, "Trust the Science" side always wins.
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I trust science, but I do not trust "THE" science. The two are mutually exclusive.
Science is a means for learning about the natural world through experimentation, peer review, and willingness to re-evaluate everything as needed based on new evidence.
It is NOT a dogmatic body of fixed conclusions, enforced by a rigid priesthood, via government mandates and social media bans and "cancellation" and whatnot.
In current parlage, "trust the science" really means "trust the self-proclaimed 'experts'." Most of who
Re: Not in the habit of hating people (Score:5, Funny)
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No one's going to miss Wyoming. Plus it's an unhuggable state, though neighboring states might object to the extension part.
(I'm just joking. There are probably stupider and less significant states than Wyoming. But the story did produce a lot of Funny comments and Slashdot and I have been missing them in recent years.)
Re: Not in the habit of hating people (Score:2)
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If Musk had founded this company and IPOed right now, it would already be worth $1T.
What's more, a few thousand functioning units would already be in the hands of "trusted" beta-testers who would be operating them in public in order to iron out any problems. ;)
Nuclear power is how you reduce emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
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I suppose it's technically true that the reactor itself does not emit greenhouse gasses during normal operation, but the plant as a whole does. The fuel lifecycle involves lots of emissions too.
There is no way to generate electricity with absolutely zero emissions over the entire lifecycle. Every method requires stuff to be manufactured and installed. It's just a question of how much over the lifetime, and if it is low enough that we can offset it with capture.
Nuclear's emissions vary over a large range, de
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New nuclear plants in Europe generally have a 10 year planned timescale from planning to starting operation
Who cares? This is about Wyoming.
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According to the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), it takes about five to seven years to build a large nuclear unit.
http://large.stanford.edu/cour... [stanford.edu]
still way too slow
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According to the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), it takes about five to seven years to build a large nuclear unit.
Sure. That's how long it takes to build, but the GP was talking about time to get a new one up and running, which includes planning, approvals, construction, testing, and more. While your link does say 5-7 years for the build step, it goes on to say later:
In total, it takes about a decade or more to build one nuclear power plant.
...which seems to line up exactly with the GP's comment that, "New nuclear plants in Europe generally have a 10 year planned timescale from planning to starting operation".
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Add planning and all the problems they only find when they try to get it ready to run, and 20 years is more like it.
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Re: Nuclear power is how you reduce emissions (Score:2)
They will buy wind energy through an exchange. Who in turn will trade renewables for baseload thermal/hydro power to serve immediate customer demand. The customers can pat themselves on the back for buying 'green' energy. Even though that's just an accounting trick.
The growth of renewables has spurred the growth of a lot of thermal energy capacity.
Re:Nuclear power is how you reduce emissions (Score:5, Interesting)
We need stuff that we can get online in a year or two, and lots of it.
One of the things often not mentioned is conservation. I can use my own example.
I replaced my oil furnace with a super efficient gas furnace that extracts so much heat that it uses a plastic pipe as a chimney. super efficient blower motor. It paid off in less than 5 years.
Another layer of insulation in the attic.
All lights replaced with LED's.
Refrigerator and freezers are very efficient.
Our latest spa is also super efficient. And as an outdoor spa, it works harder than one in the house.
Our electrical bill is less than our neighbor's, who have none of the efficiency additions we do. After showing my one neighbor our heating savings, he installed a super efficient gas furnace.
So we're not shivering in the dark, we're living quite well and better than the neighbors, using less electricity, and spending less money overall.
If most people did that, they'd save money and energy.
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I suppose it's technically true that the reactor itself does not emit greenhouse gasses during normal operation, but the plant as a whole does. The fuel lifecycle involves lots of emissions too.
There is no way to generate electricity with absolutely zero emissions over the entire lifecycle. Every method requires stuff to be manufactured and installed. It's just a question of how much over the lifetime, and if it is low enough that we can offset it with capture.
Nuclear's emissions vary over a large range, depending on where the fuel comes from and how it is stored when used, and where the plant is built. Sometimes it can get low enough to be competitive (on emissions, not on cost) with wind+storage, but not in places like Europe.
Then there's no fundamental reason why the life-cycle GHG emissions in Europe couldn't also be competitive with wind+storage.
I noticed you said wind+storage but not solar, according to the Nuclear folks Nuclear has 1/3 the life-cycle emissions as solar [world-nuclear.org].
The other issue is that it's too slow. We need solutions now. New nuclear plants in Europe generally have a 10 year planned timescale from planning to starting operation, although it often over-runs to 20 years. Either way, that's too late. We need stuff that we can get online in a year or two, and lots of it.
It takes even longer if you never build it. That 10-20 year problem was true 10 years ago. If
Either way you're solving the wrong problem. Yes we need new low carbon energy sources next year, we also need new low carbon energy sources in 10-20 years. Why not s
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I don't but the World Nuclear Association's numbers, especially since nuclear emissions have a huge range.
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I don't but the World Nuclear Association's numbers, especially since nuclear emissions have a huge range.
Well I was pretty clear I was using an industry source, but they're also the only source I found with my admittedly brief search.
Either way Nuclear, like wind and solar, doesn't use carbon for the direct generation of electricity, so there's no reason that all three can't be have their CO2 emissions per unit of power brought to essentially zero.
Are so confident in wind + solar + storage that you're willing to bet the climate on them being able to supply 95% of our power?
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since you're a racist you don't care about that.
Calling someone a racist only works as an offense if the person isn't a racist. If they're actually a racist they just nod and say "yes, thank you".
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Not a racist here; was anti-racist (by the original definition) way before it became "cool."
But left-wingers and other insane and/or demonic people call me a "racist" all the time, in large part for advocating things that would actually empower poor and minority people, instead of those that would keep them mired in intergenerational poverty and dependency on taxpayers.
And from *those* people I consider the epithet as a badge of honor. It means, simply, "someone who isn't a hellbound, murderous, demon-poss
The Problem failure state (Score:2)
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Regarding the "infrastructure bill," that's because infrastructure is mainly a local/state responsibility.
Also because this "infrastructure" bill, like most of its kind, is mainly pork, i.e., a vote-buying tool for Demoncrats. Most of whom should be in prison, not in Congress.
Source: U.S. Constitution.
Disclaimer: NOT implying that Republicans are necessarily much better, or in some cases, any better at all.
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Do you know what percentage of wind turbines are deployed in a way that does not involve any kind of fossil-fuel baseload generators? I speculate that this number is close to 0%.
You are mistaken. It is 100%.
As a wind plant does not need base load "as backup".
It needs: balancing power. Technically they do not need any back up, as wind plants are small and localized, and wind patterns are huge. If my wind plant here does not produce power, the next one 100 miles away: does.
You do not even know the technical
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Do you know what percentage of wind turbines are deployed in a way that does not involve any kind of fossil-fuel baseload generators? I speculate that this number is close to 0%.
Your speculation is both worthless and untrue. It does nicely show the fundamentally defective "though"-processes of the nuclear fanatics though: Complete and utter failure at seeing reality.
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The Economics of Nuclear Energy [youtu.be]
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The plant itself does not emit much carbon, other than from the concrete it took to build it, but the ongoing mining, purification, enrichment, and milling of Uranium certainly does. According to this paper [iaea.org], a 1.3MW light water reactor's fuel for the year will take 38,000 tons of CO2 to produce. Now that's much less than the equivalent coal plant at ~8 million tons [source [gem.wiki]], but not necessarily less than other mixes that include renewables + gas. It will depend very much on how reliable wind or solar is
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Nuclear reactors do not emit greenhouse gasses and provides baseload power. Unlike natural gas powered generators coupled with wind turbines, nuclear is actually green.
Until the place undergoes a rapid disassembly.
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Re:Nuclear power is how you reduce emissions (Score:5, Informative)
It is not bad. Nuclear plants need about 0.77 kg of concrete per 1 MWh generated over lifetime. Just for comparison wind turbines needs about 9 kg of concrete per 1 MWh generated over lifetime. You do not see it but wind turbines have huge concrete foundations.
You can verify the data from these two sources: wind [freeingenergy.com], nuclear [berkeley.edu].
Wyoming Politics (Score:2)
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They probably understand that this will not have an impact anytime soon. Maybe they will have a reliable industrialized, proven design in 50 years, maybe later. But not before that.
Kemmerer (Score:3)
Not Kremmer.
Trivia fact; Kemmerer is the original home of JC Penney.
Good step but a little disappointed (Score:2)
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I agree but proving the reliability of the cooling system is what is important here. It's been determined that current reactors can be run using the thorium cycle by using uranium to prime the reaction. What we really need is someone to design thorium fuel rods. When this happens, we can refuel all our reactors with thorium. This would dramatically lower the amount of uranium refinement needed since we have literal megatons of stored away thorium. The reason nobody is doing this is because uranium is s
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I was really hoping they'd be building one of the 4th-gen reactors that ran on thorium or nuclear waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Hahahaha, no. The tech is not ready in the least. Maybe in 100 years.
enriching Uranium is wrong direction (Score:2)
It's Wyoming (Score:2)
As long as no horses are hurt, they're good.
And they don't even care less if it's just beside a reservation.
640W (Score:5, Funny)
640 watts ought to be enough for anyone.
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640 watts ought to be enough for anyone.
I dunno, horses need about 100 more for power.
Re: 640W (Score:2)
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Alas, I have no mod points to award, so I'll instead rate this post as 3.6: not great, not terrible.
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It is a crude metric, but 30kWh/day is a reasonable average home energy consumption. Peak average consumption is higher—maybe double during fall and winter evenings. Heating in the dead of winter would also be higher, but most of that is gas fired (on average).
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Maybe that's what you think because of the area where you live, but around here 95% of home heating is electric.
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in Wyoming electric is not how people primarily heat homes - no one has a heat pump, everyone has a gas furnace or fireplace with electric strips or space heaters as a backup.
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Maybe that's what you think because of the area where you live, but around here 95% of home heating is electric.
You might think that's normal because of the area you live in, but in fact that's a pretty dumb way to heat your homes.
Re: 500 MW, enough to power 400,000 homes (Score:3)
Please explain (Score:2)
Please explain why you think it's dumb. Electric heat pumps have an installation cost about the same as an oil or gas furnace, plus they are the only system that is more than 100% efficient (heating energy out is greater than electric energy in). Even if electricity is produced by burning coal where you live, carbon emissions are still lower than a furnace due to the efficiency gain, and
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The article is about Wyoming. I wonder how well a heat pump will work in the dead of winter in Wyoming? I know here in Maryland, it can get cold enough that people have emergency heat attached to their heat pumps, and we don't get anywhere near that cold.
I would expect that a heat pump would be a very bad idea in most northern states, but then again, maybe you know something I don't?
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Heat pumps work fine in Canada, why would they not work in Wyoming?
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Re: Please explain (Score:4, Informative)
Heating efficiency is measured as a ratio of watts of power in to watts of heating produced. And a heat pump can thus deliver up to 300% efficiency. If only you were a technical type you might know this.
Re: Please explain (Score:3)
Hint: heat pumps do not generate heat, they move it around. Kind of like your refrigerator moves the heat from inside itself to the outside, heat pumps move heat from the (colder) outside to the inside of your house.
It takes less than 100 W of energy (typically about 20 or 30 W) to move 100 W of heat.
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quick google search tells me the average home uses 30Kwh per day. 30Kwh over 24 hours is.... exactly 1250 watts on average. Probably not a coincidence.
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Maybe not a peak, but that is close to the yearly average watts of a typical home in the US, and the plant does include thermal storage.
It's actually more realistic than the typical PR on new generation capacity which usually assumes 1 megawatt can supply 1,000 homes.
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No, these problems were dealt with by engineers in the 80's.
A demonstration reactor (IFR) was run for several years by the National Labs.
Al Gore personally lead the charge to kill it. Can't profit from a problem with a known solution.
The original plan was to have 2500 of them running by 2020. No need for #ClimateEmergency summits.
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The original plan was to have 2500 of them running by 2020.
lolololol etc.
Can't do that without doing it unsafely, because of per-unit costs, inspections, transportation, etc. And then you wind up with 2500 toxic nuclear waste blobs at the end, shit plan all over.
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Better then all the coal plants around the world. Nuclear is a problem when it melts down. Coal is a problem from day one. Nuclear melt down is a maybe. Coal is definitely going to start spewing air pollution right from the start.
I think I'll take my nuclear, even if Bill Gates is involved.
Re: Liquid sodium and fast fission again? (Score:2)
False dichotomy is false, film at eleven
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The IFR at National Labs was cancelled because it was going nowhere. It created weapons grade material so proliferation issues meant it couldn't be widely deployed. Building lots of them would interfere with disarmament efforts.
Probably for the best. It wasn't very safe, given that the liquid sodium coolant would spontaneously catch fire on contact with air and explode on contact with water. They decided to use water for heat transfer. The Russians instead used molten lead in naval reactors for this reason.
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The Russians instead used molten lead in naval reactors for this reason.
Russia used lead-bismuth eutectic mixture (it melts at lower temperature than any of its components). The new BREST-300 reactor will be using pure lead for cooling. It will provide all the benefits of MSRs (atmospheric-pressure coolant, passive safety, high thermodynamic efficiency, possibility to use for process heat) while none of the disadvantages (corrosiveness, difficulties in control, dependency on just-in-time reprocessing).
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No, these problems were dealt with by engineers in the 80's.
Correction: Engineers failed to find good solutions for this in the 80's. That is why nobody sane builds these anymore.
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Don't fast neutrons tend to destroy the containment vessel? Isn't sodium dangerous when it leaks? I thought that was why there have been few reactors of this type supplying commercial power.
Yep, pretty accurate. Actually built designs proved to be excessively expensive because of all the unsolved problems and there were a few very close calls. It is pure chance none of them blew up.
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Behind every great fortune there is a great crime.
The USDoJ actually identified Microsoft's crimes under Gates, then decided not to punish them for them at all.
The paranoid might believe the whole suit was just a gambit to sign Microsoft up to join the panopticon, which seems reasonable since it was followed by the inclusion of telemetry into the OS.
Re:Ok let's do some basic math... (Score:4, Informative)
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You are over-inflated what your home actually uses in power. For the most part, your refrigerator probably is the single biggest user. Next is probably the water heater. If the AC is on, it likely beats out both of those.
I just recently put a solar energy system on my roof and it's rated at 5600w a year. According to my power bill analyzed over a year, that's about 10% more then I use. I wanted a system I could grow into and maybe if I get an electric car will be able to cover that as well.
With that said, I
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If your fridge is running continuously you should probably try closing the door.
Re:Ok let's do some basic math... (Score:4, Interesting)
That fridge is likely to use under 50W on average, unless it's broken or is in fact a supermarket cold store.
Actually 11000kWh/year is still a hell of a lot. In western Europe, you're more likely to see 4000 kWh/year, and those are by no means "impoverished" households. I run multiple computers 24/7, plus all the usual appliances and I rarely push 5000kWh/year electrical. And that's working from home. Heating and kitchen appliances more frequently run on gas here though, that has to be factored in.
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I feel like a fridge uses around 600w
You know what Europe calls those fridges? "American style". Funny enough Australia has a hard on for them as well and call them French style, while the French fridges are so small you can barely fit a baguette in them without chopping it up first.
But your math is off. It's 600Wh/day for an average large fridge, not 600w continuously. Our comically large "American style" fridge uses 100W while running the compressor for about 20min in any given 1.5h window, which is actually pretty damn good given it's size.
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1.2kW is a lot of energy, that's like an electric stove or a kettle running and you only have those on like an hour/day. A fridge is maybe 150w and everybody except the biggest nerds uses tablets and laptops now and even the high end PCs don't approach 1kW. Most of the day, nothing but the fridge is on.
The only thing that can consume a lot more is AC or electric heating.
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You are mixing up kWh with W.
Sure, your fridge draws close to 1000W. But only 4 times for 5 minutes during an hour. So it is not using 1000 kWh - during one hour, but only roughly 250 kWh.
And if your PC uses that much power, consider to get a mining rig for what ever you are doing and a laptop. My laptop does not even draw 70W.
So bottom line the only things using a lot of power is:
a) the fridge when it is actually running and not idle
b) the washing mahine during the heating phase, the washing itself does no
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No idea how you could produce numbers which are far from reality. If your refrigerator and workstation consume 1.25 kW average per day then you need to replace both of them.
A fridge uses about 100-250 W on average. E.g. an old 750W fridge with about 33% duty cycle leads to 250W daily average. Modern fridges are better - they may have higher wattage but lower duty cycle (better insulation).
There is no way your PC is consuming the rest (i.e. around 1 kW) if it is not also a cryptocurrency miner. A typical ave
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For most of us a refrigerator and a single workstation PC consumes that much
My fridge is currently using nothing because it's in the off part of its duty cycle, but when the compressor does kick in it'll use 100W for about 20min.
My gaming PC with it's cool 1kW power supply is also currently using 130W, and that's only because I have an old and very inefficient CFL monitor and not a modern LED backlit one.
No, your equipment does not use that much power. It may have the capability to draw that much peak load from the outlet, but that's it.
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You obviously don't know how nuclear power or any of the other heat based power generation schemes function.