US Moves Toward Supplying Romania With a Modular, Low-Cost Nuclear Plant (nytimes.com) 139
tomhath shares a report from The New York Times: The United States said on Monday that it would supply Romania with a training simulator in preparation for building a new type of nuclear power generating plant in the country. If an agreement on moving ahead with a power station is reached, Romania could become the first country in Europe, and perhaps in the world, to have such a plant, known as a small modular reactor.
The one in Romania would be built by NuScale Power, a start-up company based in Portland, Ore. The government announced that the plant would be built in Doicesti, at the site of a shuttered coal-fired power plant about 55 miles northwest of Bucharest. [...] NuScale's approach to nuclear energy involves constructing relatively small reactors in factories and then assembling groups of them at the actual site for generating power. The aim is to reduce costs as well as the time required for construction. Conventional modern nuclear plants can cost $10 billion or more.
The plan involves building a power station composed of six of the modular units. The plant would generate 462 megawatts of electricity, making it the size of a medium-size conventional power station. Such a plant might cost around $1.6 billion, according to figures published by the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest. The hope is to have it operating by the end of the decade.
The one in Romania would be built by NuScale Power, a start-up company based in Portland, Ore. The government announced that the plant would be built in Doicesti, at the site of a shuttered coal-fired power plant about 55 miles northwest of Bucharest. [...] NuScale's approach to nuclear energy involves constructing relatively small reactors in factories and then assembling groups of them at the actual site for generating power. The aim is to reduce costs as well as the time required for construction. Conventional modern nuclear plants can cost $10 billion or more.
The plan involves building a power station composed of six of the modular units. The plant would generate 462 megawatts of electricity, making it the size of a medium-size conventional power station. Such a plant might cost around $1.6 billion, according to figures published by the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest. The hope is to have it operating by the end of the decade.
Good for Romania (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is it? (Score:5, Informative)
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Romanian here. We'll just lower them at the bottom of the cyanide lakes kindly created by the Canadian gold mining companies.
Re:Good for Romania (Score:5, Insightful)
I would love to see a solution that is cleaner and safer, reliably delivering the same amount of power. I can think of nothing that doesn't involve carbon-based fuel except hydro, which I don't know is a possibility here.
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I would love to see a solution that is cleaner and safer, reliably delivering the same amount of power. I can think of nothing that doesn't involve carbon-based fuel except hydro, which I don't know is a possibility here.
We are on the cusp to two technologies which should provide very cheap, clean power for millions of years: Molten salt thorium reactors and deep hydrothermal.
Molten salt is looking extremely likely, construction of commercial plants should be booming within about 20 years. The dollars-per-megawatt value is so fantastic that after the first commercial reactor is proven then deployment rate will be insane. Deep hydrothermal is more uncertain, but if it works then it will last until the sun goes red giant
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I would love to see a solution that is cleaner and safer, reliably delivering the same amount of power. I can think of nothing that doesn't involve carbon-based fuel except hydro, which I don't know is a possibility here.
We are on the cusp to two technologies which should provide very cheap, clean power for millions of years: Molten salt thorium reactors and deep hydrothermal.
Molten salt is looking extremely likely, construction of commercial plants should be booming within about 20 years. The dollars-per-megawatt value is so fantastic that after the first commercial reactor is proven then deployment rate will be insane. Deep hydrothermal is more uncertain, but if it works then it will last until the sun goes red giant in billions of years, whereas we might run out of thorium in millions of years. Practical technology for drilling super -deep wells does not exist, though it seems kind of feasible with further R&D.
That sounds great for the rest of the world, but in the US, the nuclear regulatory commission has a policy of increasing required safety levels to prevent any commercial nuclear facility from being cheaper than other power sources. This gives us maximum radiation levels, for example, that preclude some normal building materials(like granite tiles).
(the NRC get dinged for things like 3-mile island, but does not benefit from nuclear power actually being used, so it is in their interests to block or prevent n
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(the NRC get dinged for things like 3-mile island, but does not benefit from nuclear power actually being used, so it is in their interests to block or prevent nuclear power for civil use)
Then maybe the individual states should take over the job of the NRC and issue the licenses to build and operate nuclear power plants themselves.
Re: Good for Romania (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good for Romania (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Good for Romania (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I'm saying that we can shape demand with pricing. For example, if we know that the wind is going to be particularly strong at 7 PM, we can drop the cost of electricity around that time. We already have smart car chargers that use real-time pricing data to only charge when either the price is below a threshold or when the car needs a certain amount of energy by some deadline.
Things like refrigerators can be made smarter too. Say the power company anticipates high demand at 2 PM. It could signal to smart devices that they should use energy now. The fridge might drop the temperature by an extra degree, to avoid needing to run the compressor during the high demand period. Same with AC, people won't notice it being an extra degree cooler than their set-point.
Another example is cloud servers. Say a business has a compute task. They might opt to only run it when energy is abundant, in exchange for a discount. There would be some guarantee that they get a minimum number of compute-seconds per week. The data centre, which is powered by renewable energy, can use that to sell energy to the grid during peak demand periods when it can make more money that way than selling cloud service.
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No, I'm saying that we can shape demand with pricing.
Welcome to the world when you are told when you can use electricity, and how much.
They already have a system like this in places like Nigeria. Nobody wants to be Nigeria.
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No, it's the world where demand is shaped by pricing. You can still use electricity when you want, and however much you like of it. The demand is just being shifted around to minimize the necessary storage or non-renewable generation needed to meet it.
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"Base load" is an outdated concept.
I'd mod you funny if I had points.
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Meanwhile they could be investing in cleaner technologies with higher growth and lower cost, and more domestic involvement.
What makes you think those can't all happen at the same time?
How to not build a nuclear power plant. (Score:5, Interesting)
Assume you want to get in on the nuclear power plant business but lack all the lawyers and stuff to figure out the licensing for a nuclear power plant in some foreign nation. Well, you build a ship. Call it a supply ship, a research ship, a hospital ship, or whatever gets the people inspecting the boat to ignore the nuclear reactor in the middle that has yet to get any fuel.
You see, a nuclear fission reactor isn't a reactor until it has fuel and/or a moderator. Maybe it is full of water but that's not a moderator in a reactor. It's just water in a tank. A tank in a part of the ship surrounded by slabs of concrete. Why concrete? Not for radiation shielding because that's not a reactor. It's to control the center of gravity on the boat. We use cement instead of water because we see no need to ever pump it out, we need that mass to stay put. Because reasons.
Why triple hulls? Um, to protect against torpedoes, because we might need to cross waters with pirates and we don't want a lucky shot by some pirate slowing us down by flooding too much of the ship. Or maybe to manage storms better, we can keep the fuel ballast and water ballast separate. We won't have to flood the fuel with seawater to lower the draft. Because this is a hospital, um... I mean research vessel we need it as calm s possible in here.
Then when done you float your ship to the people needing a nuclear power plant and get some nuclear engineers aboard. They work on finishing the cement in the hull spaces for the radiation shielding. They drain out the water in the "research tank" for heavy water to go in later. They weld in the bits to hold the fuel rods in place. They double check the oversized turbines and generators are the correct phasing, produce the right frequency of AC power when up to speed, the gearing allows keeping the propellers from spinning. And on and on to convert the ship to a nuclear power plant.
Because much of the heavy work was done overseas this new nation didn't need the big cranes and such for the heavy lifting. They just had to do the last 10% that finished out the reactor.
Once modification are done they can fire up the reactor and test all the systems installed at the first port. They can power up the water desalination, the oxygen and hydrogen gas electrolysis, the fuel synthesis system, air compressors, refrigerators, communications, power lines to shore, and get the kitchen fired up for some hot food finally. When done there's a floating nuclear power plant that can double as a hospital ship in cases of disaster.
Maybe this is the home port for this ship. Maybe it will be sold off to some other nation looking for a nuclear power plant but lack the technical expertise to build it themselves and are looking to short circuit the licensing of a power plant in their nation too.
Nations are wanting nuclear power quickly and there are ports all over the world capable of putting nuclear power plants on ships, such as the USA, Russia, Canada, and likely more added all the time. The process to license the plant is long but if the plant is built someplace else and there's three potential buyer's, all about 50/50 on buying one then there is low risk on building such a ship. This is especially true if the ship could be used by the builder as a template, office space, work space, training grounds, and so on until it is sold.
Floating nuclear power plants are a thing. Expect more ships to get nuclear power going forward. Hospital ships might be a good place to start. People should be reluctant to try to sink a hospital ship. Nuclear power means they need no fuel for years, and can synthesize fuel for ambulances and other support vehicles. They have a big power plant for producing oxygen (not just for patients but cutting torches to get people out of buildings and car wrecks), preparing meals, keeping food cool (and bodies cool, but let's hope not), provide power to shore if necessary, provide lights to the area, provide communications. With a big enough flight d
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not sure why you got marked as a troll other than not a likely commercial scenarios (until it is). but what you just described (minus the concrete) is a US Air Craft Carrier during a natural disaster..
The goal of these SMRs are to be shipping containers with minimal onsite connections and assembly. and they are damn close or some of them... Putting them on a ship and moving where power is needed by contract, is an interesting business model....
It's the economy, stupid (Score:2)
Not many details in the article, but the key proposition in SMRs is to shift economies of scale from site to assembly line, i.e. from building a single multi-GW plant to many identical plants in the 100-MW class built in a central location and then shipped to the site. Of course this can make sense only if the assembly line produces dozens or hundreds of these SMRs, and even then there is no experience in how much these economies of scale are and how they compare to the previous onsite-scale approach.
The i
Re:It's the economy, stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
There are three things slowing down the adoption of this approach - 1) outdated regulations created for legacy power plants. 2) proliferation concerns. 3) being new and "untested". Not the reactor itself, but the whole process of building a power plant like that.
1 can be fixed by the local government, 2 is not applicable for countries that already have nuclear plants, 3 is the key one. I think when one or two projects prove "successful" in the sense they were delivered on time and within budget, they will skyrocket in popularity. Almost no one will be building nuclear power plants the old way. Maybe only countries that can produce all of the components locally.
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Well, it is certainly a good idea to try this. Just do not expect it to do much for climate change. They "hope" to finish it by the end of the decade, which in nuke-speech means 2040 or later and at 4-10x the cost. These people have never, ever kept their promises and they are not about to start now.
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You have not done anything good for the planet in your life. It is funny to see you worrying about it now.
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Are you on drugs? Because your comment is not based in anything real...
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The choice has never been between nuclear and fossil. Water, for example, has been an option for ages (generation _and_ storage) and other things have been too. Solar and wind have been cheaper than realistically priced nuclear for a long, long time albeit a lot more expensive than fossile fuels. But mainly I was for driving solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, etc. and storage onward with real determination. We could have been 20 years ago were we are now and then we would have been able to avoid most of the
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Untested is a major issue. Look at the trouble EDF is in, their new plant in China has some design flaws that have been replicated in European builds and are now costing more time and money to be fixed. Rushing to mass production on a new design is probably a bad idea, they will want to start slow and make sure they correct any issues before they become extremely expensive.
Remember that it's only the reactors that are being factory built, the rest of the plant is built with local labour and materials. There
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For what it's worth, NuScale has been testing everything they can - they have facilities in the US, Canada, and Germany where they've been testing individual components, and then an electrically-heated integration testing platform at Oregon State University's nuclear engineering school that is a 1/3 scale system that is everything but the Uranium.
Yes, things are different when you introduce neutron flux, but that's mostly a material science issue that we know a lot about from the last 50 years of PWR operat
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They thought that the RBMK was safe when they designed it. Same with Fukushima. Testing helps but it's hard to predict all the failure modes.
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They did not think the RBMK was safe. They knew it was a flawed design but nobody told the people operating the plant what could happen if the graphite tipped control rods were dropped into an already unstable RBMK reactor. There were people in the Soviet Union that knew this was a very unsafe reactor. They chose to declare it "safe enough" and not put in the extra layer of protection that the rest of the world required for similar reactors, and that is a large concrete containment dome.
This is very much
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When the RBMK was designed it was thought to be meltdown-proof and inherently safe. That was one of the reasons why they didn't bother building a containment building for it.
In 1975 flaws were discovered in the control rod design, but by then they were already committed to the RBMK design and didn't want to make costly retroactive upgrades. The flaws were classified and buried, thought to be extremely low risk because they only affected the reactor when operated right at the limits. In normal operation it w
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They must have known even at the beginning that a graphite moderated reactor is less safe than a water moderated reactor, regardless of the control rods, right?
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This is complete nonsense. The design was Russian and dwarfed anything in the West. It was designed to be cheap, using ordinary water and not requiring a containment building because it was so safe.
They thought that it couldn't fail because the emergency scram button would always work, but in certain narrow circumstances it could actually cause an explosion.
That wasn't discovered until 1975, and the information was buried as the USSR wanted everyone to think it's reactors were flawless.
It wasn't until 1989
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Wind farms typically co-exist with regular-old-plant farms - the "concrete and asphalt" requirements are minimal.
As much as I like nuclear (and I really do like nuclear), decentralized wind and solar does have many good points, and for the past little while (and more so in the future), low cost has been one of them.
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The area where this reactor is supposed to be installed is already concreted, asphalted and a bit radioactive.
A lot of the "good" coal deposits mined during the communist regime in the Carpathian mountains were located next to the uranium veins.
Do not take a geiger counter with you when getting near any old coal-powered electrical plant in Romania - it will start making very annoying sounds.
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Well considering that there is research that shows that wind turbines actually can be beneficial to the crops growing underneath them [iastate.edu], I'd say the amount of land is minimal, and the impact is beneficial.
Next question?
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Hmm...100MW reactor is about the size of a submarine's reactor. Which have been used with no problems for, what, 50+ years now?
Now, I doubt that they'll be submarine reactors, since they don't have to be mobile or anything like that. But there's nothing intrinsically difficult about designing and building 100MW reactors by the score rather than making every reactor a one-off design.
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Setting aside that for reasons of power density these reactors use weapons-grade fuel rather than ordinarily enriched uranium and the related proliferation risk, you do realise that the military does not have to worry about budgets? If you are OK paying $1000 a MWh you can of course use a submarine reactor.
On top of that, a small reactor will require about the same number of personn
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There are a lot of differences between naval reactors, and anything planned for commercial use. For example, naval reactors use incredibly restricted highly enriched uranium to make the reactor vessel more compact, and reduce refueling intervals which require cutting a giant hole in the side of the ship and removing the reactor vessel in one piece.
Also, anyone building a nuclear naval vessel usually doesn't care that much about cost, because they are more interested in capability. Commercial power plants
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You may or may not be correct on the cost of nuclear power versus renewable energy. A problem for Europe is not having enough land to put all the windmills and solar panels. A study was done by the UK department of energy. Using that data we get a graph like this one:
http://www.inference.org.uk/su... [inference.org.uk]
Nuclear power plants produce 1000 watts per square meter. There is room in Europe for those.
If the politicians are serious about lowering CO2 emissions then they will be serious about solutions that don't re
Economically Braindead (Score:2)
Building new nuclear electricity is economically dead in 2021.
It costs double to four time all the other alternatives, fossil or renewables.
SMR make the problem even worse, because it costs even more per generated electricity.
It's basically a startup fad that will dry out funding without useable result.
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Building new nuclear electricity is economically dead in 2021.
That's because Democrats in US Congress effectively criminalized nuclear fission power in the USA. Other nations all over the world passed similar laws in their own nations.
It costs double to four time all the other alternatives, fossil or renewables.
That's what happens when the government gives money for research and development for the last t 50 years. Development means "building things". If there's no real world example to test your simulator against then the simulation will lead to the wrong cost estimates when development does come around.
SMR make the problem even worse, because it costs even more per generated electricity.
Every first of a kid carries with it
This reminds me (Score:2)
This reminds me of when Hitachi was going to build SMRs for Alaska. How did that turn out?
Odd arrangement? Anyway, go, go, go! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is the government involved, if a private company is building a power plant in Romania? Is the US government considering this a prototype for possible US reactors?
In any case, this is definitely the future! Modular, mass produced reactors instead of every pipe and bolt being a custom job. License the design once and then build a thousand of them.
The next step is to get fuel reprocessing to be equally standard and boring, since uranium-based reactors like this burn only a fraction of their fuel.
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In any case, this is definitely the future! Modular, mass produced reactors instead of every pipe and bolt being a custom job.
There is a trend towards modular off-site construction in general. I work for a business that supplies various high-tech products and services to the construction industry. An economics analyst working for us said construction is currently a very low user of modern technology to improve efficiency and quality. Only agriculture comes lower. The way a lot of construction is done is almost pre-industrial. Nowadays, you can do large scale 3D printing of concrete, which I know some of our customers are developin
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Why is the government involved, if a private company is building a power plant in Romania? Is the US government considering this a prototype for possible US reactors?
Political risk reduction and likely money to support it.
Why Romania? (Score:2)
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I wonder why a US corporation wants to build an experimental nuclear reactor in a foreign country?
...because they're a private corporation that bid on a project and won the contract? Had they bid on a project in the US and won the bid, they'd build it there.
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I wonder why a US corporation wants to build an experimental nuclear reactor in a foreign country?
...because they're a private corporation that bid on a project and won the contract? Had they bid on a project in the US and won the bid, they'd build it there.
Don't bother with logic. These slashdot rubes don't care about logic, but outrage, suppositions, and tinfoil hats.
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Re: Why Romania? (Score:2)
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Here's a 16 page NuScale letter to the NRC (Score:2)
Mostly complaining about vagueness in regulatory approvals, enforcement, and appeals. [nrc.gov]
There are some valid points but the goal seems to be primarily aimed at opening up this kind of shit to a tech boom (i.e. wild west, speed at all costs kind of thing).
NuScale completed the first NRC review of an advanced reactor application, and overall the NuScale
DCA review was a success. Staff completed review of the first small modular reactor design in 41 months
following docketing of the application. The review was thorough; it involved over a quarter million review
hours, about two million pages of documentation made available for review or audit, and about 100
gigabytes of test data. The ACRS conducted some 40 meetings 1 totaling approximately 440 hours.
While successful, the level of effort for reviewing the NuScale DCA may not be repeatable for future
reviews. Significant resources were expended on issues with little bearing on the safety of the design,
matters well beyond the purview of reasonable assurance of adequate protection. Several issues were
left unresolved by Staff, which could have been avoided were the recommendations here in place. During
the course of review, NuScale identified several overarching problems with the review process and review
criteria that could yield significant efficiencies in the review of future applications, without impacting the
effectiveness of NRCâ(TM)s review.
I didn't read the whole paper but 2 million pages of documentation seems like a vast space for errors no one will ever see until it's too late.
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But plenty of space to find errors that most definitely will be found, highlighted, zoom-and-enhanced, and otherwise amplified the second something goes wrong.
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Mostly complaining about vagueness in regulatory approvals, enforcement, and appeals. [nrc.gov]
There are some valid points but the goal seems to be primarily aimed at opening up this kind of shit to a tech boom (i.e. wild west, speed at all costs kind of thing).
I've worked with the NRC. Sometimes it feels like the approach is delay so you don't have to make a decision since you can't be punished for not making the wrong decision.
Trying to see if it works in a country far away (Score:2)
If it all goes wrong, at least we don't have any fallout at home.
The U.S needs some of these (Score:2)
Every time this year I hear about how California and other states may have rolling blackouts because of the heat / air conditioning use and last year we heard about how the Texas power grid almost collapsed and yet the United States government is giving these things to other country's. And it just makes no sense to me why other countries get them but the U.S. doesn't when some states are in dire need.
Low cost? (Score:2)
You mean waste management, governance, public safety and insurance isn't priced in?
I got a (Score:2)
Lol (Score:2)
Modular, bla bla bla... might work by the end of the decade, ie. within 7.5 years
So either the modules are still on the drawing board, or it's very slow to manufacture them. Or the Romanians sit on paperwork for years anyway
It's irresponsible that nuclear energy as an alternative hasn't been fast tracked, esp. since 2014 (Russia's first wave of invading Ukraine). Eight years elapsed since
SL-1 Accident Was Agonne Low Power Reactor (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
htt [youtube.com]
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Can we do Texas next? (Score:2)
After Romania, can we put these in Texas for the next time we have a freeze or a highly predictable heat wave in May that stresses the hillbilly power grid? Anyone? Texas, next, please!
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Re:Too bad (Score:5, Informative)
We can't have nice things like this in the US.
Yeah, it's not like TerraPower is planning a plant JUST LIKE THIS [energy.gov] at an old coal plant in Wyoming or anything....
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I don't know what you're complaining about. NuScale plans for a US installation have had regulatory approval for years. The reason we haven't built one here is that they don't have a product yet. They haven't even submitted a final design for NRC approval.
That's expected to happen some time this year, and the design is expected to be quickly approved, since regulators have been studying NuScale's preliminary designs for years. But they can't approve the final design until it's submitted.
We can (Score:2)
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Note: I'm Romanian.
I'm not sure where you get your information from, but while metal thieving is still a thing, it's happening wherever there's abandoned infrastructure (and I mean abandoned for years, if not decades).
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You don't have to go that far back.
There was a big spike in copper theft about 15 years ago & more than a few idiots got crispy-fried trying to steal from substations.
Back then I had a roommate who worked for a company buying, renovating & flipping old homes & I suggested he collect the wiring from the demolished houses.
He'd sit in our living room watching Seinfeld reruns & strip the insulation off of what he'd collected. Took him about 3 months to collect enough to sell for $5000.
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Ha! You want to see copper thievery come to Kentucky. We have the best in the business here.
Around here the current thing is catalytic convertors stolen from parked cars. They slide under with a battery powered angle grinder and can be gone in minutes with a part that can fetch $500 at a scrap dealer for it's precious metals.
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in NC its so bad you have to have an HVAC license to scrap an AC Unit or condenser coil - i couldn't even scrap an old split unit..
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I've seen the security and proliferation argument, and I can't wrap my head around how someone would steal reactor fuel and transport it in anything approaching a clandestine manner.
The casks that carry the fuel are ginormous and heavy, and usually require transportation by rail. You're talking about something that weighs TONS. How do you steal this and sneak it across multiple borders or oceans?
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Re:Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
We had refrigerators and washing machines stolen from off the floor and nobody knows how this was done.
Don a sears shirt. Walk in with a fridge moving doohickey. Roll it out to the collection entrance and put it in the back of a truck.
That or be an employee, then you don't need to source a sears shirt.
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Don a sears shirt. Walk in with a fridge moving doohickey.
This sort of infiltration is common in the movies. In real life, if you try to impersonate an employee, the first real employee you meet is going to say, "Who are you?" A store will have a few dozen employees. They all know each other.
That or be an employee, then you don't need to source a sears shirt.
Bingo. Most retail theft is by insiders.
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As a former customer of Sears (I haven't been there for years) I remember having great difficulty finding an employee. Maybe it's not so hard to dodge real employees. I've not actually tried this, so I can't really attest to the efficacy.
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I hear it is even harder to find an employee now.
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I'll keep that in mind the next time I need a fridge
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the first real employee you meet is going to say, "Who are you?"
Yeah, not really. Maybe if you're in small store with 3 or 4 people. But the turnover at a place like Walmart is so insane that the Store Manager likely couldn't pick 75% of their floor employees out of a lineup. (Sears wasn't any better, when it was a real store.) It really would be nothing for two people to pull off walking out of the store with something large, you just have to have the balls to do it. Buy a vest off E-bay [ebay.com], find one of the carts that are left all over the place in the store, put a 70"
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If you really want to be careful, buy a TV. Then pull your heist as described but if anyone challenges you, show the receipt. They're not likely to check the date or time on it.
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Cheaper, yes. Safer? There's no such thing for anything Russia-provided.
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Cheaper, yes. Safer? There's no such thing for anything Russia-provided.
Which you can state as: cheaper in short term, more expensive in the long term.
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Interesting)
While on a global stage, I can see how the USA might be seen as some kind of villain due to their involvement in many things, but for Eastern Europe the main villains in recent history are Hitler and Stalin. And while Germany officially denounces and renounces Hitler, in Russia Stalin is increasingly celebrated as a great leader. A leader that Russia needs again to get back to glory.
If you have roots in that region (I'm from Romania myself), with Stalin's men having murdered your great grand fathers and raped your great grand mothers even years after the war, as well as having suffered under Nicolae Ceauescu who turned full neo-Stalinist in the 80's, with a personality cult and violent oppression of any perceived dissent, you might have second thoughts about a country whose leadership appears to want to bring back those times.
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
I live in the UK. I met some Romanians recently. The were fitting some wall insulation to the flats where I live. The sound of their language was unusual, so I asked them where they came from. They said "Romania". This was after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Ukranian refugees were fleeing west. Poland had the biggest number of refugees, followed by Romania. I expressed my support for Ukraine. This won me instant friendship with the Romanian builders.
I have some colleagues from Poland at work. I know that my friend Michal really does not trust Russia. This appears to be a common attitude among former Soviet Union satellite states. On a recent BBC radio programme, a Latvian said he would rather live on the slopes of an active volcano than live next door to Russia.
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The Romanian language is rather odd, as it is a Romance language way off to the east, where I think most languages are Slavic. Some years ago, some Romanians opened a shop near me. I went in to see what they were selling -- mostly jars of pickles from the home country. What surprised me is that I could more or less read the labels. I certainly could not do that if it was a Polish shop. Sad to say that the Romanian shop did not thrive. My area of Birmingham is quite cosmopolitan, but there was an insufficien
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The Romanian language is rather odd, as it is a Romance language way off to the east, where I think most languages are Slavic. Some years ago, some Romanians opened a shop near me. I went in to see what they were selling -- mostly jars of pickles from the home country. What surprised me is that I could more or less read the labels. I certainly could not do that if it was a Polish shop. Sad to say that the Romanian shop did not thrive. My area of Birmingham is quite cosmopolitan, but there was an insufficient density of Romanians for financial viability. My area is known for gimmicky shops and restaurants. A new one is called Kimchi. I guess there might be a demand for Korean pickles, if not Romanian pickles.
That's too bad. The same thing happened with some Romanian restaurants down here in my neck of the woods (South Florida). Awesome food, but not enough of a concentrated Romanian presence to keep these restaurants afloat.
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Interesting)
"The Romanian language is rather odd, as it is a Romance language way off to the east, where I think most languages are Slavic."
The Romanian has a lot of words borrowed from the Slavic group of languages (many of them are now archaisms, as they were eliminated from the current language by new words borrowed from Latin, French and - now - English/American).
Our alphabet is (almost) Latin, but Cyrillic alphabet was used (for example) for the "Declaration of 1848" - when Romanians joined the wave of revolutions that shook the continent:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
Re: Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
No, burning hate for what the Russkies have inflicted on their neighbors in the past and now Putin is attempting a Mulligan. And he has that nice Russian Orthodox Church behind him telling him that God is on his side. I would call countries in the former Eastern Block (outside of Russia) realists. They know that periodically Russia produces homicidal maniacs for leaders and want no part of it.
Re: Too bad (Score:3)
blah blah tribalism
Thank you Russia, for producing leaders that unify the rest of the world. The Fuck Putin tribe I guess we're calling it.
And Russia, you're more than welcome to join.
Re: Too bad (Score:2)
It's actually not that hard to identify Romanian - whenever I believe I've heard some Italian sounding words in a less familiar sounding language, it's Romanian.
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not so sure. What do you think the cost of re-building Mariupol will be? How safe has kharkiv been the past few months?
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"Would be terrible if thieves flooded the world market with fissile material."
Market? It's not like one just sets up a table and sells nuclear fuel like one does vegetables. No power plant outside of Russia is just going to buy it out of the back of some theif's van! That stuff is traceable via isotope ratios anyway.
The only one who might steal it is Russia. But if Russia sends it's orcs to Romania, a NATO nation it's going to isotopes of hydrogen and helium not uranium that the world will be concerned abo
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As Russian gas is fueling a war with tens of thousands dead and billions of dollars worth of damage amid an ongoing genocide, no, I don't think it would be "safer in all respects."
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Oh yes, there are, plenty. Would you like some? We ship in bulk :)
(Note: that was a joke, in case anyone is daft enough to wonder)
Re: (Score:2)
You are a very angry person.
You know that NuScale wouldn't be building there if YOUR government didn't want it, right? Perhaps you should have a talk with them.
Re:Hmmm .. (Score:5, Informative)
You wonder why a US company isn't building this much needed energy plant in the US first. I wonder if it has something to do with safety as it's new tech.
They are building one in the US: https://www.energy.gov/ne/arti... [energy.gov]