Several US Universities Want to Use Micronuclear Reactors (apnews.com) 69
The University of Illinois plans to apply for a construction permit for a high-temperature, gas-cooled micronuclear reactor, reports the Associated Press, "and aims to start operating it by early 2028."
And they're not the only ones interested in the technology: Last year, Penn State University signed a memorandum of understanding with Westinghouse to collaborate on microreactor technology. Mike Shaqqo, the company's senior vice president for advanced reactor programs, said universities are going to be "one of our key early adopters for this technology." Penn State wants to prove the technology so that Appalachian industries, such as steel and cement manufacturers, may be able to use it, said Professor Jean Paul Allain, head of the nuclear engineering department. Those two industries tend to burn dirty fuels and have very high emissions....
"I do feel that microreactors can be a game-changer and revolutionize the way we think about energy," Allain said. For Allain, microreactors can complement renewable energy by providing a large amount of power without taking up much land. A 10-megawatt microreactor could go on less than an acre, whereas windmills or a solar farm would need far more space to produce 10 megawatts, he added. The goal is to have one at Penn State by the end of the decade....
Nuclear reactors that are used for research are nothing new on campus. About two dozen U.S. universities have them. But using them as an energy source is new.
Other examples from the article:
And they're not the only ones interested in the technology: Last year, Penn State University signed a memorandum of understanding with Westinghouse to collaborate on microreactor technology. Mike Shaqqo, the company's senior vice president for advanced reactor programs, said universities are going to be "one of our key early adopters for this technology." Penn State wants to prove the technology so that Appalachian industries, such as steel and cement manufacturers, may be able to use it, said Professor Jean Paul Allain, head of the nuclear engineering department. Those two industries tend to burn dirty fuels and have very high emissions....
"I do feel that microreactors can be a game-changer and revolutionize the way we think about energy," Allain said. For Allain, microreactors can complement renewable energy by providing a large amount of power without taking up much land. A 10-megawatt microreactor could go on less than an acre, whereas windmills or a solar farm would need far more space to produce 10 megawatts, he added. The goal is to have one at Penn State by the end of the decade....
Nuclear reactors that are used for research are nothing new on campus. About two dozen U.S. universities have them. But using them as an energy source is new.
Other examples from the article:
- Purdue University in Indiana "is working with Duke Energy on the feasibility of using advanced nuclear energy to meet its long-term energy needs."
- Abilene Christian University in Texas "is leading a group of three other universities with the company Natura Resources to design and build a research microreactor cooled by molten salt to allow for high temperature operations at low pressure, in part to help train the next generation nuclear workforce."
Put experimental nukes in classrooms (Score:1)
Students love to fiddle with tech.
Article needs a whatcouldpossiblygowrong flag.
Re: Put experimental nukes in classrooms (Score:3)
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Protect it too, can you not? Yoda.
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Georgia Tech had a research nuclear reactor on campus for over 30 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neely_Nuclear_Research_Center [wikipedia.org]
Re:Put experimental nukes in classrooms (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea and Purdue has had one for more than 60 years now. Any engineering college that has a nuclear program probably has some sort of small scale teaching reactor, it would be criminal not to if you're offering a nuclear engineering program
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The U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had a TRIGA reactor for many years, but itâ(TM)s shut down now. They undoubtedly want a new one to get back into the hands-on training game. Not to worry, though, there are thirty other universities that have reactors to train with if you are committed to becoming a nuke engineer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Itâ(TM)s a shame that the new reactors donâ(TM)t have the swimming pool water moderated design; students will never get to see the beautiful b
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You need to check your editor settings. Unless, of course, you want all your "it's" to come out as "itâ(TM)s".
I'm not sure you're doing the industry any favors telling us how we should get into engineering while failing Internet 101.
we have an homer on staff we will be fine (Score:3)
we have an homer on staff we will be fine
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We're still not sure how he caused the meltdown, there wasn't any nuclear material in the truck!
Re: Put experimental nukes in classrooms (Score:4, Interesting)
Not much can go wrong (Score:2)
Article needs a whatcouldpossiblygowrong flag.
Modern nuclear reactors are so foolproof not much can actually go wrong with them.
They are lots after than probably a ton of other lab equipment on a modern campus.
Witness a Ukraine nuclear plant taking direct hits in an active war zone with no incidents.
Re:Not much can go wrong (Score:4, Informative)
one day, maybe like 30-40 years ago we'll invent reprocessing and breeder reactors.
I know it's a pipe dream, but the french have been doing this for years; other than political issues stemming from the Carter era, there's no reason we couldn't do it as well.
The half life of that 'waste' goes from centuries to decades, all while providing power. But, scary people might somehow steal it and turn it into a bomb, so it's best we just shove all our nuclear waste under a mountain somewhere forever.
This is what happens when politicians are allowed to make policy decisions based on feelgoods vs science.
Re:Not much can go wrong (Score:5, Informative)
A good compromise is a very simple re-processing that separates the actinides with the uranium and plutonium from the rest. Some heavy water reactors can directly use it as fuel, it's harder to further refine into weapons grade material than natural uranium, and the remainder is only dangerous for 250 years.
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France built 3 breeder reactors.
Rapsodie
France's first reactor, a prototype, no electrical generation. Rapsodie operated for 15 years, and suffered two leaks, and is currently being decommissioned.
Phénix
The second breeder reactor in France. Worked for a couple of decades but then started having severe safety problems, including unexplained large power transients. Another decade later they fixed those issues and got it recertified. At peak it produced 233MWe, but after the flaws were discovered th
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> which should serve as a warning to us
We don't need to look to France for warnings about breeders. Really, does *no one* know about Fermi-1?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_1
It, like practically every reactor ever, went *way* long and way over budget during construction. It melted down shortly after starting experimental runs, never having come close to its operational conditions. They fixed it and restarted, but by that point, the AEC had pretended it didn't exist (literally not even mentioning it)
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> I know it's a pipe dream, but the french have been doing this for years; other than
> political issues stemming from the Carter era, there's no reason we couldn't do it as well.
It has nothing to do with political issues from the Carter era. All of "the west" and the USSR and other countries had breeder programs. Not one production breeder has gone into operation. Carter did not stop the USSR from building breeders. Or the UK. Or anyone else.
The reason we don't have breeders is very, very simple: they
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Waste is waste.
It does not produce power.
It costs power to co it.
The Frensh have only mitary breeder reactors.
The civilian breeder project got canceled 40 years ago.
What about it? No issues. (Score:1, Informative)
What about in 50/100/250 years from now?
What about it?
Nuclear reactors can easily run that long [utilitydive.com], so they are also safe that long.
Nuclear waste is still a problem.
Everything you think you know about nuclear waste is wrong [substack.com].
Even nuclear "waste" is a boon. Unless you hate cheap energy.
If we had just discovered nuclear power right now we would think it was a miracle and drop all other forms of power in a rush to move everything to truly zero-carbon nuclear. But instead we are still fight against the ever linge
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All arguments against nuclear power are actually only issues because of the fools who tried to stop it.
Apparently, one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the old USSR.
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> Everything you think you know about nuclear waste is wrong
So your entire argument is a substack post from an advocacy group without a single representative from the power industry or anyone else directly involved in nuclear power?
A true believer indeed.
> All arguments against nuclear power are actually only issues because of the fools who tried to stop it.
Companies that sell power do so to make a profit. The key to making a profit is to buy low and sell high. Nuclear "buys" power at a higher cost th
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So your entire argument is a substack post
That is one of a million arguments; the fact you can't find others shows proof you are literally retarded so I'll not waste effort reading anything else you have to write.
Good day, retard.
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Oh yeah, that makes it look like someone who makes calm, rational arguments. Would you like to overturn the table on the way out?
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Every single reactor deals with immensely, mind-bogglingly toxic materials, covering every possible combination of chemical properties. By definition.
And don't expect a 10 MW microreactor to have a several meter-thick concrete containment structure able to resist tank shells.
Lastly, until this war is over, I wouldn't be breathing any sighs of relief about the ZNPP. It's still being used as a military base, will need to be retaken at some point, has huge number of casks of spent fuel just sitting out in th
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> several meter-thick concrete containment structure able to resist tank shells.
Tank shells will easily penetrate several meters of concrete. Any modern round will go right through the containment building, through the reactor, and through the other side of the containment building.
One "problem" is that penetrators go right through such targets, if you are trying to destroy it then this is not ideal. For that reason, the US has things like the AMP round, which is destined to penetrate up to 8 inches of
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Re:Put experimental nukes in classrooms (Score:5, Insightful)
This was a private company or corporation that wanted to run nukes I would worry about it because they would inevitably cut corners for the sake of profit. But for the same reason I don't worry about nuclear subs I'm not worried about this.
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Sounds like the private operators come later, or maybe not. It might have high power density, but the price is likely to more than offset that in all but some very niche applications.
Yeah, if private operators roll in (Score:2)
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It always shocked them to learn there was a nuke reactor in "that building right over there"....
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Students love to fiddle with tech.
Article needs a whatcouldpossiblygowrong flag.
New source of steam heat for the student dorms. Replaces fossil fuel powered plants used at many Universities in the US.
Nukes (Score:2)
Quite a few large universities already have experimental nuclear reactors. You can watch Youtube videos of them turning on so you can see the cool glowing Cherenkov radiation.
Oh great, Penn State with a nuke (Score:3)
Penn State is the biggest party school in the US. Is it really a good idea to give 50000 drunken college students easy access to a nuclear reactor?
Re:Oh great, Penn State with a nuke (Score:5, Informative)
Penn State is the biggest party school in the US.
The partying students and the nuclear engineering students are disjoint sets.
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The partying students and the nuclear engineering students are disjoint sets.
Not necessarily. Also, TFS seems to indicate most of these new reactors are mainly for power generation, not for research.
But that's all beside the point with regards to my joke.
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Penn State is the biggest party school in the US. Is it really a good idea to give 50000 drunken college students easy access to a nuclear reactor?
Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com].
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Pro nuclear or anti nuclear, the OP has a point. :)
Thought that was not possible (Score:3)
and aims to start operating it by early 2028
I was assured by the smartest minds of Slashdot that every nuclear reactor takes no less than ten years to build.
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Given that the head of the university's nuclear department promoting it thinks that the alternative is "windmills", I'm not sure how much confidence to have in that claim.
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Given that the head of the university's nuclear department promoting it thinks that the alternative is "windmills", I'm not sure how much confidence to have in that claim.
Windmills would probably be good for teaching fluid dynamics, but students will probably learn a lot more physics from a reactor.
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This is a windmill [wikipedia.org].
This is not a windmill [wikipedia.org].
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Common usage trumps pedantry every time.
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And that is common usage.
Re:Thought that was not possible (Score:4, Insightful)
I was assured by the smartest minds of Slashdot that every nuclear reactor takes no less than ten years to build.
To build? No.
To fight the lawsuits along the way? Yes.
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Micro reactor, micro building time.
Hopefully they don't keep the trend of making em smaller too much, or we might end up with phones that have tiny nuclear reactors in em.
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I was assured by the smartest minds of Slashdot that every nuclear reactor takes no less than ten years to build
Ones that will power cities? Yes. Ones that will power five or six houses? Oh yeah, you can totally build it in fairly quick fashion. But comparing the reactor they want to build here and the kind we build at say Watts Bar in Tennessee is like comparing the water delivery of a straw to a municipal water system. Yes, strictly speaking they both are moving water from point A to point B, but I'm hopeful the difference between them is apparent.
Now you might ask about this part from the story:
Microreactors will be “transformative” because they can be built in factories and hooked up on site in a plug-and-play way
And the thing
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> Oh yeah, you can totally build it in fairly quick fashion
Name a single example of a rapidly built production microreactor design in use today.
Oh, there are none?
This needs to be pointed out because the industry has a 50-year history of telling us how they fixed construction problems with large designs and then building the next one even slower. For instance, Westinghouse stated that the AP-1000 was going to take five years to build. It did not. They went bankrupt as a result.
So I think it is a good ide
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Building it isn't the problem. Getting past all the regulatory approvals and NIMBYs is the problem.
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They all "aim" to build reactors much faster, what actually happens though...
Thing is this is a little 10MW unit. It's purely for research, it makes no commercial sense to build them that small for anything but the most niche applications. In 99.999% of cases it will be cheaper to get electricity some other way.
You have many of the downsides of of larger reactors, the security, the oversight, the waste, the safety systems - but you only produce a piddly 10MW. They are only doing it because they want a nucle
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What actually happens is that the NIMBY's sue everyone involved in the design, construction, and approval of the reactor. And as soon as any of the lawsuits is rejected, they'll sue again. And again...and again....
They continue suing till the project is cancelled.
Then they go home, pat themselves on the backs for saving civilization again, and then complain about air pollution, blackouts, and AGW,,,,
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If that's true then as frustrating as you may fine it, it's a thing and it needs to be addressed. Thus far calls for NIMBYs to be prevented from filing lawsuits seem to have failed, as do efforts to change the law. So what is your novel solution?
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Don't have one.
I'm old enough I probably won't survive the next round of lawsuits (or possibly the one after that), and so I don't really care much what humans do to themselves or the planet anymore.
In other words, enjoy your AGW, guys. Or your collapse into barbarism, whichever comes first. ;-p
Future superfund sites (Score:2)
Clearly there aren't enough of them already.
bigger is better (Score:2)
Bigger is better for nuclear reactors. In terms of logistics for maintenance and security. For amortizing development costs. And for managing waste. Even the efficiency is better with a large reactor.
We're wasting time and money any time we're doing something other than putting multiple 500MW+ reactors on a single site. If you're not running a gigawatt then you should consider a battery system with a wind farm or solar panels or a small hydroelectric plant. If you want a nuclear power plant but don't want a
Re:bigger is better* (Score:2)
*given a fixed technology.
High temperature reactors have an opportunity to be significantly better at an order of magnitude or two smaller scale than a conventional reactor. When you scale them up to the 100MW-1.5GW range they would be even better, but as a "research" reactor starting small is smart.
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> High temperature reactors have an opportunity to be significantly better at
> an order of magnitude or two smaller scale than a conventional reactor
Many high-temperature reactors have been built and operated started in the 1960s. They have all failed to be remotely competitive with conventional LWR designs.
For instance, the entire UK fleet of AVR reactors is high-temperature. This was, in fact, their big selling point when they designed them in the 1960s. They said that by matching the output of the
Distributed Nukes (Score:3)
Research is one thing, but if these reactors are there just to generate power, this is the totally wrong way to do nuclear. To reduce the potential number of fuckups you want to concentrate the reactors in exactly the right locations, with exactly the right crew and security. The number of proper locations (no earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, etc) is small and probably not where some random school is. Distributed nuclear just sounds like more points of failure and a larger attack surface to me.
The job of nuclear power is to get us off fossil fuels. It's a civilization-level endeavor. Build the reactor in the right spot and, from there, transmit the power to your school or steel mill or whatever. If that's not feasible, move your mill. Move your school. Don't move the reactor.
Maybe it's time for a commercial nuclear nonproliferation treaty.
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If the technology is inherently safe then fewer precautions are necessary. High temperature solutions offer a lot of possibilities, without reliance on centralized generation and lots of transmission capacity.
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University Heating Infastructure (Score:1)
Ok, DO IT! (Score:2)
If it's good enough for Penn State, it should be good enough for me...
I've got 4 acres. Let's do some math and compare this against solar.
I did a rough calculation and found that, if I wanted to, I could install about 1MW worth of solar panels on my property. Scaling up to 10MW would take my nearest 10 neighbors, but lets roll with it. Cost would likely be in the range of $2/watt installed. (DIY I'm looking at $1) So call it $10m. In my area I pay $0.0981 per kWh, and I generate about 1400kWhr/year with a
My Bold Prediction (Score:2)
None of these will be built.
These are rather odd projects. Are the supposed to be cost-effective power generators? Research tools? The story also mentions prototypes for industrial adoption.
Small power plants as cost-effective power generators are fighting the general rule that larger generators produce power more cheaply. Yes, the modular power companies expect that factory construction of a standardized design will get costs down - but that my just mean that cancel out the small size disadvantage. Indeed
Christians & a nuclear reactor (Score:2)