Slashdot Mirror
Toshiba Pushes Safe, Small Nuclear Reactor Design
core plexus writes "This article describes a proposal from a Japanese corporation that wants to thrust the Interior Alaska community of Galena into international limelight by donating a new, unconventional electricity-generating plant that would light and heat the Yukon River village pollution-free for 30 years. There's a catch, of course. It's a nuclear reactor. Not a huge, Three Mile Island-type power plant but a new generation of small nuclear reactor about the size of a big spruce tree. Designers say the technology is safe, simple and cheap enough to replace diesel-fired generators as the primary energy source for villages across rural Alaska."
Hell, I want one for my house!
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Too many luddites are trying to reverse the tide of technology. Don't /.ers love technology? Nuclear technology is a triumph of physics--it's something no other animal has mastered.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
It all depends on whether you want to kill the people immediately (near future) with the carcinogens produced by coal/diesel/etc or you want to contaminate the land with nuclear waste... Hmmm...
;)
On the plus side, at least it isn't N. Korea donating the plans for the reactor
----
In Soviet Russia, the overlords welcome you!
I don't have much faith in them. I had a toshiba laptop once, I kept it on for a week and it melted. :(
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Gives new meaning to the term "Northern Lights".
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
And what, exactly, am I to do with my radioactive waste?
I already have issues just trying to dispose of radioactive cat litter ( what you get when treating a cat for cancer )
comment directly in my journal
Last time I checked, physics still applied to this universe, and Nuclear Power plants still produced nuclear waste.
;)
I wonder why they some small "village" in Alaska - perhaps this technology isn't as safe as they might like us to think?
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
They obviously thought a lot about this because if something went wrong with the reactor and say, bombarded everybody in the village with gamma rays and everybody turned into a green hulk, at least the hulks would be trapped in the Alaska wilderness instead of being in a major city trampling everybody. Good thinking Toshiba!
Alaskan homes need a lot of heating.
And if something goes badly wrong, is anyone really going to trek through the snow and ice to check things out? Just kidding.
While the Japanese nuclear "industry" is one of the worst in the world in terms of safety, it's impressive that reactors are this small, and maybe this will eventually come to be the standard for electricity generation in places where the other fossil-friendly alternative - namely hydroelectric power - is not an option.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
...waste containment facilities.
Blar.
Considering what I've seen my town waste $20 millon on, this thing seems like it could be downright affordable. How's a power hungry (I mean that in many ways) local governement to decide? More control over the local power grid (they love control) or nuclear material in town (there probably already is some, but ignorance is bliss). Such a dilema.
Let me hook one of these up at the house. IIRC, the power company has to pay me for any excess power that I feed back into the grid. So, the model goes...
1. Install Newfangled Reactor
2. ?????
3. Profit!
The only real question is what am I going to do with all the money I make?
The preceding comment has been reviewed and declared to be compliant with HIPPA Phase II regulations.
TERRORIST: hmmm... where could I get some radioactive material for a dirty bomb... I know, i'll just hook that generator up to my pickup truck...
At least it is good to know that if something should happen and reactor goes crazy or something the radiation should make everything glow. If everyone/thing is glowing then they don't need to worry about the lights going out.
Your laptop had a meltdown?
:D
Sorry, I couldn't resist taking the bait
Reactors such as these, if they are indeed safe for residential use, would go a long way towards preventing another regional blackout (like the one we enjoyed several months ago in the US). Decentralizing the power grid has always been a challenge, and this could make it simple - if it is indeed safe.
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
Pitr bought out Toshiba, and started up his plutonium-powered UPS device again?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"The word 'nuclear' makes me nervous," said Randy Virgin of the Alaska Center for the Environment. "But we've long seen the problems with diesel, and I'm pretty excited about the prospect of a clean source of energy," he said. "It sounds very promising, but I'd approach it with extreme skepticism."
There is soooo much less polution from nuclear reactors given the probability of worst case scenarios versus the diesel they are currently using. Why are we still burning fossel fuels!@!#@#!@!#
They arent in a location very suitable for wind/solar either, so nuclear seems like the best non-renewable solution.
Such a backwards society we live in, when technology is available and safe, and we delay in implementation.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
...from a long way away.
#4 the "big spruce"
Ok, yeah, mod me down, old Monty Python gag.
Really though, cool tech, but size compared to "a big srpuce"? Is comparing reactors to trees anything like weighing clouds in elephants?
jesus christ, get a fucking life.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
Now THAT would be a story.
- Safe.
- Small.
- Nuclear Reactor.
Pick two.I don't understand, how much is that in VolksWagens?
Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast.
They live in harsh conditions and don't romanticize about it. Something like this would make life easier...wonder how many gallons of fuel oil a village goes through a year.
Blar.
( ) fully addressed my question
( ) partially addressed my question but could be more complete or detailed
( ) did not address my question at all
[ SUBMIT! ]
This was already done in remote parts of Soviet Russia. The problem is that the devices went without supervision and were subsequently plundered by scrap metal thieves. See http://archives.tcm.ie/breakingnews/2001/05/24/sto ry13735.asp for an article about the problem.
It doesn't matter how clean it it. If it contains the word "nuclear/nuculer" it will automatically be branded as evil and must therefore be stopped at all costs (and be corrected for spelling in the case of the latter).
Not noteable, IMO a rubbish article.
Are we supposed to take this article seriously? Randy Virgin? Either his parents didn't like him, or this is some kinda spoof!
That should be eough to power a several thousand node beowulf cluster. Heheh
But on the other hand, what about security? I dont think we want some extremeists to walk away with the "battery" in the middle of the night
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
When are we going to switch to using Mako reactors?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Now the terrorists won't have to drive very far to get the material for their dirty bombs.
i'm all for nuclear reactors -- and when the juice is used up we can burn it for fossil fuel
Anyone remember that movie with David Soul (Hutch) where the Soviets invade via Alaska? Cool concept at the time. This sort of idea reminds me of the whole "Alaska is very big. Like, I mean, VERY big." concept. Even on a map, Alaska looks very big, even when taking into consideration the fact that the map is just a very small representation of something else that is much larger. Know what I mean?
Seems that our rogue, zealot enemies (no, not linux zealots) could try to do some damage/steal stuff in a remote area with a small population. Security of the nuke material, especially during transport of waste, etc., would be my main concern here.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
author of parent post is a known karma whore, spammer, troll and terrorist. please mod down.
Maybe the Greenies in nantucket would prefer a few of these inplace of the windmills being proposed.
they are only 70 feet tall!!
they could be installed on-island and generate all the electricity they need.
comment directly in my journal
The article says nothing about the nuclear waste or any other byproducts, toxic or not.
Could history repeat itself?
The SL-1 was a 200 kW nuclear reactor designed for electric power production for remote Artic stations. It was being operated by three men on the night of January 3, 1961. It had a two-month history of sticking control rods and the reactor had been shut down for maintenance. The crew was to assemble the control rod devices and prepare for startup.
Radiation alarms sounded, monitors a mile away gave alarms and health physics people rushed to the reactor. The building was intact and the lights were on, but they measured a level of 25 rads/hr at the entrance and 200 rads/hr as they approached the control room.
On a rush to the reactor, they found it a shambles and found radiation levels over 500 rads/hr. With protective suits, they rushed to the reactor building and found two of the men, one still alive. They found the third man impaled by a control rod, pinned to the ceiling.
Once the bodies were removed, they measured over 400 rad/hr from the bodies, too hot for a normal burial.
This was a non-pressurized system. No meltdown occurred and less than 10% of the radiation was released, but it represented the worst nightmares about nuclear accidents.
Be quiet!!! I order you to be quiet.
How many VW Beetles to the big spruce tree?
The latest Slashdot meme.
TOSHIBA makes new NUCULAR reakt0rs.
nucular reakt0rs bl0w up at pred3t3rmined time.
t0$h1ba 0wns us.
Skynet virus mak3s its3lf kn0wn @ t0sh1ba
too late.. Skynet nukes t0$h1b4 wh3n th3y try to k1ll virus.
Governor Arnie in new movie.
+5 Lame
I have to say after reading the article, the reactor design does sound very safe. Here is a quick rundown of reactor advancement...
-Big hunk of uranium in a pool of water*. Water heats but is under pressure so it can't boil. The water (contaminated and radioactive) is then piped through fresh water (in sealed pipes) from a lake or river transferring heat so the fresh water will boil and turn turbines. Neutron absorbing control rods are raised or lowered into the big hunk of uranium to control the reaction. Problems can occour with pipes corroding and releasing contaminated water*, control rods can jam, leaks in the coolant water* can cause a loss of coolant leading to an overheated reactor.
-Little pellets of uranium in a pool of water*. Same principle as above, only there are no control rods. As the pellets heat up, the expand, increasing the distance between the pelets. This is much safer because there are no control rods to jam. Loss of coolant can still be a problem, but easily solved by simply moving the pellets further apart.
-And now, this reactor.. a Big Rod of Uranium is immersed in a pool of water*. The rod of uranium is sub-critical so it can't sustain a (large) heat producing reaction on its own. A sleve made of neutron reflecting material (google for nuclear bomb neutron reflector) slowly makes its way along the BRoU over the reactors 30-year lifespan. Only the uranium surrounded by the sleve can react. If the sleve moves too fast, then the reactors lifespan is simply shorted - it will never produce more heat than can be made via the reflector. If it moves too slow, the reactor simply produces less heat. Overall a very good design. If I were to have a reactor in my backyard, I definately would choose this style.
I've gotta hand it to the toshiba people.. I wouldn't have thought of this... pretty cool.
*Note: Water may not be water. Water is often used because of its high specific heat, but many other liquids have been used as coolant. In the toshiba reactor, liquid sodium is spec'd because its non-corrosive. A big plus in a maintenance-free environment.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
That's why Toshiba is testing it in Alaska, and not in Japan, right?!?
WOW! You must be some sort of comedic genius!
The reactor has no operator or maintainance personnel
I can just picture the breakdown in the middle of a cold Alaskan night, Papa running around glowing green, shouting for Mama to fetch him the anti-radiation suit.
You have to be darn sure your machine (a NUCLEAR REACTOR!) works before you decide to leave it running in the heart of a rural community in the middle of bloody ALASKA without personnel. How long is it going to take before qualified people can even get up there?
Seems like you could scale the tech down even more and provide one of these bad boys for every home. So now instead of a plumber, you call some overpriced nuclear engineer (named "Buddy") and have him expose his butt crack while he works on your reactor. Of course he'll never have the "right" part with him and he'll have to fly back to Japan to pick up that spare "reflector thingy" and schedule another service call. In the mean time, the husband will come home and rig something up with cardboard and aluminum foil so he can still watch "the game".
Radioactive hockey. Truly the finest sport known to man.
Now Coming to a Chrismass Tree near you!
Remember the 'Foundation' series? This sounds like it came straight out of there. Minature Atomic Reactors. Of course Asimov assumed that 'Atomic' was the brave new future and was envisaging reactors the size of a walnut.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
And how many Library of Congresses would this power? I mean sheesh, real numbers would be nice:P
Jesus saves, everyone else takes full damage from the fireball.
Wow, I had a Toshiba laptop once (1998), and oddly enough its still sitting next to me working just fine.
It's Alaska. Who the fuck cares?
that you've never had a pet.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
How about six?
You would never have thought of this? My God, stop the presses! Everyone!!! Someone thought of something that this fucker wouldn't have thought of! It must be a great idea! Give Toshiba a fucking Nobel prize!
I'm thinking about fucking your mom. I'm not sure if you ever thought of that. Pretty cool, huh?
Now you can do hours and hours of 3D rendering on your laptop without needing to recharge!
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
I would say that if people are already living there, they have figured out the logistics of providing heat and energy. It's Earth, you can do that.
But on some other planet...this is where I see the experience coming in really handy. I mean, you can't exactly run out and chop down a tree on Mars. Small nuclear power plants will be essential to any space colonization attempts. Perhaps the reactor could be launched along with the personnel ship, in an unmanned cargo vessel. Probably couldn't run it in space, but if so that would be pretty useful as well.
...
So is this one of those situations where limelight = green glow?
This is the best idea ever. And once we have cheap, safe affordable Spacelift - that is, the ability to get into space with stuff - then all our spent fuel can easily be disposed of.
Once in orbit, you simply sypersync it toward the sun... or even better, use space elevators to directly fling the stuff to the sun. It doesn't travel thruought the cosmos to wreck someone else's problems, and there is no need to bury it in anyone's backyard. You can even use nuclear powered spacecraft to do it if you dont have a space elevator. At the sun, the spent nuclear fuel will be broken down into hydrogen and energy.
Small nuclear generators are the key to a pollution free future - you can even use them to get hydrogen for portable use.
Honestly - the so-called envrionmentalists who poo-poo everything nuclear do not remotely have the environment as their main conern - else they would work with the technologists to this ultimate solution of 100% nuclear powered planet with the spent fuel being dumped into the sun.
Their main driving forces are their politics - neo-communist luddites. Just look at the Nantucket catch-22 they are in. Wankers.
fuck them.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
"can be removed and replaced like a flashlight battery"
"welded into the bottom like the eraser in a pencil"
"as immune to attack or theft as a missile in its silo"
This guy's use of the simile is like a water molecule from a firehose.
Your laptop had a meltdown?
Are you the kind of person that says, when someone tells you a joke about a snowman. OMG IT'S FUNNIES BECAUSE HE WAS A SNOWMAN LOLZ%&%(* ?
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
If oil drilling in remote reaches of Alaska failed, there's no freakin' way this will pass.
"There's a catch, of course. It's a nuclear reactor."
You are adding to the irrational ookiness of all things "nuclear"
What you should have said is "As an added bonus, it's a nuclear reactor"
Randy Virgin sounds like a villian in an Austin Powers film
And you'll be able to buy it now for $50 on Ebay.
60 percent of the time, my comments are right everytime.
"We know we can build 100 of them, but the one-time costs to meet all the licensing is beyond any one company or country," he said.
The main reason they want to build this for Alaskan villages, the article says, is because only a combined Japanese/U.S. investment can provide enough money to develop the thing. Just how much is this little miracle going to cost? The article calls it a "$20 million gift", but I'm assuming that's just the raw cost.
The most dangerous thing in the design looks like the coolant.
You're right; that's an outrageous name. But a quick googling suggests he's legit.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
The power comes from a core of non-weapons-grade uranium about 30 inches in diameter and 6 feet tall. It would put out a steady stream of 932-degree heat for three decades but can be removed and replaced like a flashlight battery when the power is depleted, he said.
People have enough trouble safely disposing of normal batteries; what makes us think it'd be any easier to dispose of a battery that huge?
Methinks Toshiba's a tad too optimistic (or naive) about the ease of disposing nuclear waste.
we can always use fuel cells...
Oh, and perhaps you should have a look at this
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
"The power comes from a core of non-weapons-grade uranium about 30 inches in diameter and 6 feet tall." Volume = 50893 in^3 231 in^3 / gal Volume = 220 gal So this thing seems to generate about 4 x 55 gallon drums worth of waste over a 30 year period, or an average of 1 drum every 7.5 years. Oh, I see the problem! Won't somebody please think of the children?!?!? Feel free to correct me if my math is wrong. -Steve
3MW according to my source
I googled for "bomb neutron deflector"... should I just ignore the black helecopters that just landed outside my house?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yes, what to do with the spent fuel is a problem, but is the cost of storing the degrading material higher than what we pump into the air each year? Let's face it Solar and wind are not there yet. (Although if your looking to make a worth while investment in your home, consider adding solar cells if you live anywhere outside of the pacific northwest, my father did and uses it to heat water and some applices and its paid for itself in 3 years. Me I still rent, so someday)
I wish people would get over their nuclear phobias and NIMBY additudes because something needs to be done, and adding more gas turbines and coal plants are not the best solution.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I'm very comfortable with the whole small reactor concept; they have a reactor of a similar size at Reed College, where I did my undergraduate work. They let students operate the thing (after taking a year-long course), right in suburban Portland, Oregon. It's a TRIGA reactor (General Atomics corporation). TRIGA stands for Teaching, Research, Isotopes, General Atomic. There are plenty of these reactors in the US, a number of colleges have them. The core is the size of a garbage can and sits at the bottom of a 26' pool; it is inherently safe by design (even if the primary and secondary coolant failed, even if the control rods were completely removed, it will not melt down as thermal expansion would limit the reaction).
Except that its in a hardened, sealed concrete enclosure, meaning there would be no way to access the material short of digging it up, and then using a jackhammer and doing some welding to get inside the facility. On top of this you'd have to shut the reactor down, so you'd have an entire village that knows something is up. Add to that that this is NON-WEAPONS grade Uranium, and there is much less motivation. If a bad guy wanted just plane radioactive material there are far far far easier ways to get a hold of it, than these reactors.
the only reason nuclear power plants are so big right now anyway is because of all the backup systems and coolants in case something does happen, so a meltdown won't occur. and c'mon, as much as we're afraid of nuclear waste, it's not as bad as smog.
so does anyone know if there's any limitations on the size of this thing? It doesn't seem to mention needing critical mass or anything of the sort, so is there any reason (aside from maintenance) we couldn't scale this type of reactor down even more and use it as a battery, and have a semi-big one power your home, and tiny ones for portable devices?
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
We have already been using similler type nuclear reactors for years inside Aircraft Carriers, and in Nuclear Submarines. People worry about safety when there is probably about 10-12 (more or less) nuclear reactors of about the same size in Norfolk Harbor as I type this. (depending on which ships/boats are currently in port) This is a step that has been bound to happen.
(please excuse spelling mistakes. I had to give up spelling for other knowledge)
"The power comes from a core of non-weapons-grade uranium about 30 inches in diameter and 6 feet tall."
Volume = 50893 in^3
231 in^3 / gal Volume = 220 gal
So this thing seems to generate about 4 x 55 gallon drums worth of waste over a 30 year period, or an average of 1 drum every 7.5 years. Oh, I see the problem! Won't somebody please think of the children?!?!?
Feel free to correct me if my math is wrong.
Please forgive me for the earlier poor formatting. I don't comment that often.
-Steve
You seem to imply that in Soviet Russia, you build small nuclear reactors.
In Soviet Russia, small nuclear reactors build YOU.
One problem with things that are considered "safe, simple and cheap" is that suddenly people find themselves trusting Homer Simpson to be in charge of it.
Other than fear there seems to be little overt in the design that can't be managed. And in the end that's what all problems come down to.
We don't SOLVE fossile fuel pollution, we manage it. Likewise we can't SOLVE the nuclear waste/radiation problem, we manage it. It would appear that this is a manageable design.
Disclaimer: I am a nuclear customer today.
Small nuclear reactors would be great for any space based missions.
This would be a perfect power supply for a moon base or something.
Without a water table to worry about there is virtually no chance of contamination.
The only problem is that it is still steam driven.
If we could get a decent direct heat to electicity converter developed we could eliminate most of the overhead in this design.
it's impressive that reactors are this small
Accoring to the headline, the reactors are about the size of a big spruce tree.
Why is this impressive? US subs and aircraft carriers are powered by nuke plants which are in the same rough size, if not smaller as a spruce (which, according to this pages stats are roughly in the range of 30-60 ft tall and 20-30 ft wide). And the boat and ship nuke plants have been around for many years, too.
What would be impressive, though, is if they CAN indeed run trouble free for 30 years.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
The fucking A is way the fuck on the other side of the keyboard! How the fuck did you misspell that? I could see moiles or mniles, but mailes?
Fuck man. I mean, fuck!
want it. I've got some spare room in the backyard, and I'm more worried about the electricity company trying to gouge me than I am about some paranoid dystopic view that all forms of "nuclear" power are bad. It looks safe, heck, I'll even let my kids play near it.
I won't even charge the electric company full price for all the power I pump back into the grid either. I'll undersell them and watch capitalism take its toll on the slow movers.
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
Is there some reason they want to test this way out in the middle of nowhere? Let's see... nuclear reactors... why would you want to put a nuclear reactor as far away from civilization as possible? hmmm....
TMI is a great advert for nuclear power! Everything that could go wrong went wrong, and the operators made mistakes. The core melted, but no-one was killed or injured. The same can not be said about coal mining disasters, Bhopal (a chemical plant in India which exploded) or oil rig accidents. If you have a social conscience you will support nuclear power. Other energy industries regularly kill its employees and members of the public. Alaska suffered terrible environmental damage when Exxon Valdez crashed. To prevent that happening again we need to embrace clean new clear power!
"Have no fear for Atomic Energy" - Bob Marley in Redemption Song
$20 million for 10 Mw? - what they need to make is a smaller one - I would pay 100K for a 100 kW reactor to put in my back yard. Oh, wait, I live in Chapel Hill, and the greenies would much rather burn tons of coal and wood. Never mind.
It's got a design where it needs mechanical energy to stay critical, so it can't break down and stay critical, and over-production won't increase the production rate. It doesn't irradiate the parts that could need to be serviced or any liquids. It contains the fuel needed for 30 years, which isn't that much in terms of a big plant (121 days supply for a normal-sized plant). Won't need to be changed for 30 years, and it'll be pretty obvious if someone tries to steal the core.
The only problem I can see with it (aside from public perception) is that it involves a shaft dug into permafrost. I'd be somewhat worried that a wet fall followed by a sudden cold spell could lead to the shaft getting crushed.
Of course, it will be hard to sell people on, despite the fact that this is probably a much safer thing to have in your back yard than a gas main. I'd like one in my back yard, except for the fact that it's not cost-effective to run, unless you're in the middle of nowhere in a place without sunlight.
Best. Nuclear post. Ever. :)
If the mass of the fuel rod is sub-critical, they you can't steal it and make a bomb out of it.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
The typical response with most nuclear devices is "not in my backyard". However, the technology used in modern reactors is exactly the type I DO want. And yes, they can put it in my backyard (heck, they can put it on my property for free, in exchange for free hydrogen, electricty, and heat). I hadn't considered Alaska as a retirement location, but where do I sign up?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Last time I checked, no private insurance company would insure a nuclear power plant(this liability is typically taken on by the US Federal government).
Now since Chernobyl and Three Mile Island we have a pretty good idea of the cost of a serious accident. Who is going to bear that cost here?
I don't think nuclear power is nearly as bad for a small village in Alaska or Siberia as in a densely populated area like France. Still, there _are_ risks here. I don't mind the government handling major infrastructural items-but I have serious reservations about the ability of government to accurately judge the magnitude of these kinds of risks.
Oh wait, wait........imagine a beowulf cluster....oh fuck it.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
"1.21 GIGAwatts?!?!?"
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
"...about the size of a big spruce tree..."
at least it isn't a big redwood....
sounds pretty good to me
It's not weapons grade material. If they've got the facility to convert it to weapons grade, then they've got the cash and technology to get it much easier than digging it out of concrete in Alaska.
I used to work at a US reactor in IT. At the time I was both amazed and stunned by the 1960's erz technology in use in the plant.
Because it had to be "certified" and documented, the cost was outrageous. Each section of pipe had to come from a certified company built by a certified company and using materials (ore, etc) from a certified place, all documented of course. Makes you feel better about the construction, but costs a lot and requires lots of maintenance.
At the time I saw some specs for a new, simple design to be used in Asia and submitted to the NRC. It used less people, more gravity fed pumps and flows, and should have lowered the cost of plants from billions to hundreds or even tens of millions.
Nothing came of it and it was a larger scale than this, but it was a good idea. Nuclear has a place when built well and conservatively, which it seems this design is.
Even on a map, Alaska looks very big...
Um, ok Alaska is big, but not NEARLY as big as it appears on a map, sort of like, Greenland is not nearly that fsking big. It is a byproduct of the mercator projection...
Sheesh doesn't anybody watch the westwing anymore??? (Cartographers for social equality).
Frontline, a great PBS documentary series, had a show on this, called Nuclear Reaction. Highly recommended.
What would be the hack value of modding one into a nuclear bomb?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Check out this google link:
o J: www.em.doe.gov/cercla97/inel.html+SL-1+Reactor,+Id aho+Falls&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:Y_6OuW5LWN
Looks like cleanup of the 1961 accident was still being discussed in 1996!
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Sounds like just the power plant to light up their aircraft carrier of a 17" laptop they're selling...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
are not afraid to over clock and overheat thier computers without burning them out, howlong do you think it will be before the good ole' boys in the yukon decide to overclock there nuclear reactor? I can just see it now:
"We're getting power shortages, turn that sucker up."
"Dude, is a rerun of techtv really worth a meltdown?"
And if its the size of a spruce tree, what prevents Al Queda from hijacking to turn it into a dirty bomb? I can see it now: we must stop the evil ones, the christmas tree killers.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
See! See! These Lunix terrorists are even discussing nuclear devices on this intarweb-forum!
Think about the children! What will happen if we don't stop these evil-doers now!
sincerely,
Darl McBride
We say something is safe if it does not push us over the brink of deminishing returns. If there is never a mistake, it seems these reacters would be safe, but what is the level of ecological damage at worst case senario. If worst case senario happens once every 100 years will this destroy the envirnment completely? What about every 300 years? The question is does the act of testing so totally f*ck your envinment that it is not worth it?
Sex is what happens when people think no one else will ever find out
If there's a leak every so often, so what? Christ, there are diesel spills big enough to make the news at least a couple of times a year across Alaska...even if one of these things BLEW UP it would still be a more environmentally friendly option than what's in use today.
These plants would be a Good Thing.
All the "waste" is recycleable, for more energy than the first use resulted in. The US is the only (that I'm aware of) country with a waste problem. Everyone else recylces their waste.
... for a cheesy new Steven Segal movie. This time he falls for a cute nuke scientist turned environmentalist named Dr. Thanksgiving (sorry 007, and make your own turkey jokes...) and saves the alaska earthworm...
....otherwise I could see these things randomly locking up all the time like their laptops.
Hmmm, I wonder if they will come with Bluetooth?
The design of the reactor itself seems safe, but the proponents are ignoring the fact that after its 30 year lifespan, what is left over is going to remain radioactive for the next 10,000 years. After putting up some yellow police tape around the area, who is to say that the reactor building itself won't corrode and decay in the next hundred or two hundred years, and then the secondary nuclear waste is exposed to ground water?
I'm a bit lost on the numbers.
$20 mill for the project. 10 megawatts output. 30 years reactor life.
10 megawatts = 10,000 kilowatts
30 years = 30 * (365.25 days per year) * (24 hours per day) = 262980 hours
10,000 * 262980 = 2629800000 kilowatt hours
$20,000,000 / 2629800000 kilowatt hours = 0.007605141 $ per kilowatt hour.
The diagram in the article mentioned a price of $.11 per kilowatt hour IIRC. That's a bit of a mark up.
I must have missed something. Anyone care to offer some insight?
John
I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it. jya.com/ap.htm
Who says his map is a Mercator projection? You know what? Alaska is, in fact, really fucking big. I have an elliptical projection, and it it looks pretty damned huge.
Oh, and the idea that maps which overstate the size of Greenland lead to social inequality is soft-headed hippy tripe.
And those who don't waste their time debating the wisdom of technology use it to kill those who do. Now that's wisdom.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
There has been talk about this for many years. One way to handle it is to drill a hole into the earth and put the reactor way down there, then fill the hole up with only the power bars coming out. Once the thing is spent, short the bars together causing the reactor to self destruct - melt into an amorphous blob - way down in the hole and then just leave it there. Safe, clean and zero maintenance.
N/T
When I read the title, I was thinking more along the lines of an 'unlicensed proton accelerator on my back' kind of small. Oh well, so much for my ghost busting dreams.
But solar, wind, hydro, gas turbine, biomass, geothermal, are all totally impractical. Yeah I realize it's Alaska and they don't get much sun in the Winter, but that's quite a budget.
I haven't been to Galena, but I've been a few hours north of Anchorage by plane and is seems that the interior of Alaska is riddled with rivers and dense tundra that grows so thick in the summertime you can hardly walk.
Maybe they could burn all those damn mosquitoes.
I bet ya they bring in the diesel on boats by river. The place has more rivers than wisconsin. Now I agree hydro sucks too and there's the freezing in the winter. But in the summer it would be fine.
Nonthless, with $20 million in the budget I don't see why geothermal is out of reach. For all the nuke fetishist this ought to be close enough. After all, it's just another form of nuclear energy, right?
Man... I read that headline, and had an image of a bright green Alienware-esque laptop with a really really bright screen.
"Derp de derp."
Reading the article, I can't help but feel a great sense of loss in my current situation. Paying too much money for energy, failing powerlines, unthrusty neighbours who cross powercables and make the juice stop...
This idea would really bring a solution! Now, provided they miniaturise it even more, I can have a nice small reactor in my dorm room. It would fit neatly next to my server, and as an added bonus will probably provide me with enough heat to keep my room warm!
In the winter, when it is cold outside, I could lift up the carbon a bit to let the reactor produce a little more heat. I could place my feet on it and feel nicely warm and all. And it will last me 30 years !
When my mother-in-law drops by, I can even remotely lift up the carbon a bit more to keep her nicely warm too. This would even save me more energy, as I can switch off the lamps when I get back, and watch my mother-in-law light up the room!
When I feel sick, and don't want to go to the doctor, I can make my own rontgen-photo's, wouldn't that also look cool on party's !
Then, as a final bonus, when I have had it with the dorm room, I can simply remove the carbon all together, and watch the mushroom cloud from afar!
Three times hurray for nuclear energy!
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Back feeding lines is an issue, but not as big as you might think. In nearly all cases your house is not the only one isolated, thus when you start backfeeding lines, all your neighbors think they have full grid power and start to use it, but since you don't have an unlimited supply of power, the breakers (and fuses) on your generators trip. Thus you are forced to correct the problem before you can use your own backup. That said, back feeding does happen, and it is dangerious. Dangerious enough that line workers short known dead lines before touching them so they are not a good path.
Second, in many states (Minnesota where I live for sure) the power utility must hook up any residentialy co-generation plant and use all power supplied. The amount they pay you is regulated somehow, but I'm not sure of the details. (You won't make enough to pay for a gasoline generator, but for wind, hydro or solar uses it can break even)
Am I hearing "security through obscurity"?
Here in the UK there's been a bit of a scandal about a powerplant in the north of Scotland where they literally threw low level waste (sounds friendly but would you want your kids bringing it home from some field they found it in?) in to a hole behind the plant. Including shooting at some paint cans containing waste with air rifles when they refused to sink. Guess what, the hole in the ground is next to a cliff and the cliff is now eroding into the sea...
"Spaceships... with engines the size of walnuts!"
"Walnuts... with engines the size of spaceships !"
- This Moxy Moment brought to you by the King of Spain
The size of a big spruce tree? Huh? I'm a slashdotter, do you think I have -any- idea how big trees are? Like I'd actually ever go outdoors...
I'm afraid I'm going to need that converted to Volkswagon-beetles, the universally accepted mass media unit of size.
If you think nuclear waste will need to be kept around for hundreds of thousands of years, check into actinide burners.
It looks like we may be able to break down the seriously radioactive stuff from nuclear fuel and turn it into the stuff that is only slightly radioactive (think dangerous for about 100 years.)
So we reprocess the spent fuel, which we aren't doing now. That's 90% of your mass right there that you extract and put back into the reaction.
Now take that 10% and extract the 2% plutonium that is in it and use that in one of the nuclear plant designs that can run on plutonium/uranium mix.
Now with the 8% that is left, process it in an actinide burner and you have a small amount of material that needs only to be kept for 100 years before it isn't really very radiactive. In practice, the closer you get to the 100 year mark the less dangerous it becomes.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Just harness the high-voltage arcs that result from putting Bill Gates, Scott McNealy, ESR, and RMS into a room together. Cloning technology will soon be to the point where everyone can have an ideology reactor in their own home! Place your order today!
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Criticality is not an issue of mass alone. The reactivity of a reactor is establish by the rate of neutron loss and the rate of neutron production. A reactor that is said to be critical has zero net production of neutrons. A reactor in this state will continue to produce a constant amount of heat.
If the neutron production decreases to a negative value, the heat produced will drop and the reactor is said to be sub-critical. If the neutron production increases, the heat produced will increase and the reactor is said to be super-critical.
A reactor that has positive reactivity sufficient to exceed the control system's ability to add negative reactivity is said to be prompt-critical. This is highly undesirable.
It is a misapplied term to say that some arbitrary mass of fuel is sub-critical. It is appropriate to characterize a specific nuclear reaction as critical, sub-critical, super-critical, or prompt critical.
A reaction that is prompt critical is not necessarily a nuclear explosion. Chernobyl went prompt critical, but was not a nuclear explosion. Same with SL-1. Please note that I am not saying that these are not radioactive messes.
A nuclear explosion is a reaction that is by necessity, prompt critical.
Later,
JC the AC
ps: Is this the guy who used run ftp.cdrom.com?
Does something of this size produce enough waste heat (ie, post-turbine steam) to effectively heat some buildings in one of these villages?
There have been some articles in the local press here in Minnesota about the (unfortunate, IMHO) demise of "municipal heating districts" in some small communities. Basically they make steam in a common plant and pipe it all over main street as well as some residential homes. I believe some systems generate electricity as well and merely use the waste heat from that process for heating.
Many of the systems date from the 1910s and 1920s and are being phased out because of deferred maintenance, dying main streets and a desire to get the city out of the steam business. Which is sad, considering its more energy efficient generate steam centrally versus a ton of individual furnances (particularly if its waste heat from electrical generation), many of these systems are actually quite resiliant considering they haven't seen significant maintenance in 25 years and are 75 years or older.
Nuclear has the advantage that you can go completely fossil-free, but I'm not sure that it's the most cost-effective. For that matter, neither is hydrogen. When you compare the losses in powerplant -> battery -> motor with powerplant -> electrolyzer -> compression or hydride storage -> fuel cell -> motor, it's obvious that hydrogen is a losing proposition on the basics and needs some other advantage to bring it up to parity. Aside from the possibility of compatibility with current engines (though not vehicle designs due to inadequate size of fuel tank spaces), I don't see what that advantage could be.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
I believe it was the move the China Syndrome in which the "certified" pipe-plans prooved to be a copy of one original pipe-plan.
It seems, and most likely is, far stretched that this would happen in reality, but with so much regulation going on, something is bound to "slip by" the bureaucratic paperwork every now and then...
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Discussions like this usually begin with, "What is the best way to deliver x (well, okay, n) megawatts to this community? But as Amory Lovins and others have pointed out, the starting point has to be determining how much energy is really needed. The least-cost approach would look at efficiency improvements first, because anything that reduces demand at a cost of less than $2000 per KW is a better buy than this power plant.
It was selected for many reasons including its progressive environmental stance. They have even banned plastic trash bags.
These folks are desperatly trying to find an alternative to diesel. Fuel spills are a very common occurance in rural Alaska. Not only will the reactor provide a new source of electricity for homes, Toshiba plans to use excess power to produce hydrogen which could be used to power ATV's and snowmachines... (I am from Alaska and we call them "Snowmachines", not "Snow-Mobiles"). I have yet to see a fuel cell powered ATV but it might be possible.
The chemical plant at Bhopal did not explode. The disaster was caused by a leak from a storage tank. See this overview for more details.
A reactor of this type and size has never been built anywhere in the world
This reactor is certainly a new design, but, I remember reading a National Geographic from the late fifties or early sixties. There was an article that featured an Air Force base and I can't remember if it was in Alaska or Greenland. It was covered in snow year round (so I think Greenland). There were a couple of photos of it's electric power source: a nuclear reactor about the size of a pick-up truck. Does anybody else remember that reactor?
Bet you feel like a dumbass now, eh?
>>It doesn't irradiate the parts that could need to be serviced or any liquids. It contains the fuel needed for 30 years, which isn't that much in terms of a big plant (121 days supply for a normal-sized plant).
Big plants have 18 to 24 month fuel cycles. In each fuel cycle, about 1/3 of the core is replaced. So each fuel bundle lasts about 6 years. A typical reactor produces about 1000MW continuously for most of the cycle.
Typical fuel is less than 5% enriched U235.
Uh,
There is NO MATERIAL that has the ability to truly block nuclear radiation. The best any material can do is absorb nuclear radiation.
Thus nuclear power will produce irradiated material around it. That's EVERYTHING that's used in the generator. All of this material then becomes nuclear waste. Not only must it be dispossed of but it changes chemical properties, creates effects like brittleness that allow leaks to occur. This problem is present both in the reactors and in the waste dumps that the materials from the reactors are placed in.
If Japanese reactor technology is so good, why is Japan still importing so much oil?
heh, thanks for reminding me of Richard Pryor playing a nerd and pulling the salami trick!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
In just about any other context, the use of liquid sodium would raise a couple of eyebrows.
Heck, the use of solid sodium would raise a couple of eyebrows.
In a nuclear reactor, it's just a detail. Not to worry, I'm sure that steel is very thick...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The harm is that right now we don't have a way to contain the waste that we're sure will last as long as the waste remains radioactive. Maybe something will be found but until then I'd rather not generate tons of waste without a good plan to handle it. Not just storage, but also transportation to the storage site and security from would-be thieves. And as much as I support the space program I have a hard time with the idea of loading the waste into a launch vehicle that could life it into the stratosphere before blowing up. I'm not being a luddite, just cautious. Brakes were just as necessary an invention as the engine.
This is a great step forward in reactor design. But let's get the waste solved, THEN implement.
With more reactors scattered around, security of the system as a whole is more expensive and harder to do. The uranium may be sub-critical, but it could be processed into something more dangerous.
If you have one of these reactors powering a tiny town of say, 1000 people (large!), how many of these people can you spare (and pay) to guard the reactor and its uranium? Back of the envelope: I pay about 50$ per month in electricity. $50 * 12 months = $600. $600 * 1000 people = $600,000 per year gross revenue from the reactor. I don't know what the reactor actually costs direct (though the article throws around a $20M figure, you have to figure that as cap. ex. still leaving operating costs). $20M / 30 years is $666K, which is already greater than the revenue my back of the envelope calculation produced.
Regardless, all this comes down to not being able to spend millions yearly on the security of this thing. So these reactors could easily be targets for people trying to collect radioactive materials... especially being in the backwoods of Alaska.
Big problem.
1. 2.
I can't tell a spruce from a fir.
Why don't they just say it is VW-beetle-size?
a run away reaction from one these would degauss every brain on the planet
(I used to operate a nuclear reactor, so I have some idea what I'm talking about here).
I'm a bit skeptical about the reflector mechanism: certainly, it makes sense to use a neutron reflector to modulate reactor output. But the business about "if the sleeve moves too fast, then the reactor's lifespan is simply shorted" doesn't make any sense to me.
The lifetime of most reactors is determined by the buildup of "poisons" (neutron-absorbing waste products) in the fuel, which is why reprocessing plants work so well: unlike a coal plant, a nuclear plant generally doesn't get more than a small fraction of the available energy out of its fuel, so you can chemically repair the fuel and use it again.
But the buildup of poisons in the fuel is dependent on the total amount of energy released so far. So moving the reflector too fast should either (A) produce more heat or (B) not affect the lifetime of the core very much. Toshiba seems to be claiming (not-A) and (not-B), which doesn't jive (prima facie) with reactor physics.
If both guns and uranium were equipped with standard child safety locks, neither would be able to leap out and attack anyone.
Won't someone think of the children!?
Chris DiBona
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
Canada developed a reactor called the SLOWPOKE. Three versions were developed from the 60's to the 80's, ranging from 20kW to 100MW. Its needs minimal maintenace, has natural convection cooling and is engineered to shutdown automatically in case of a failure (it is designed to have the nuclear reaction stop if it overheats).
It was intended to heat facilities and towns in the Canadian Arctic. Although the program was cancelled due to lack of interest, an number still exist in Canadian Universities for research and educational purposes.
I lived in rural Alaska (the bush) for almost ten years; up until I graduated from high school. I can tell you this would be a godsend for many villages. The diesel generators typically in use are notoriously unreliable and provide dirty power on the off chance they are actually operating. Plus fuel costs are so ridiculous due to the fact that it has to be barged in from Seattle or Anchorage and then only in the summer when there is open water. My only concern is who is going to maintain something like this? I mean the average rural Alaskan is amazingly self reliant and can work on a diesel engine by the time they are out of high school but not many have this kind of expertise. I doubt Toshiba is going to pay a tech to live in Galena year round. After thinking about it, I think this would just add more cost to already impoverished villages because they would have to maintain a redundant diesel system. Sure would be cool though.
It is not enough to succeed, others must fail. - Gore Vidal
Small reactors in subs and ships can provide enough clean power to run small cities.
(I think this is a GOOD idea as long as they don't use Russian reactors...)
As I remember, they brought two aircraft carriers to New York to provide power after 9-11. I don't remember if they used them or not but they brought them in to do it. Two aircraft carriers could have provided enough electricity to handle a LOT of the city.
That's pretty amazing and damn, that's a LOT of power. Beats the hell out of burning fossil fuels and polluting the air we ALL breathe and posioning the land, sea and air, making plants, people and wildlife sick, some of it dying off forever and god knows what genetic damage is being done.
In 1,000 years, provided anyone is left alive, "people" are going to be so badly mutated that they won't be recognizable as humans...
I would like to see the total abandonment of fossil fuels in favor of non polluting technologies, solar being the prefered (where feasable) because it is silent and has minimal impact on the enviroment, provided that they are manufactured and installed with the enviroment in mind.
The reactors, handled PROPERLY and responsibly are a damn sight better choice than fossil fuels..
We've just refueled my plant, and fuel fresh out of the reactor literally glows purple. It does this for a few weeks.
I haven't seen it in person, but I have seen pics from previous refueling operations here, and my friends have seen it. I need to go out to the spent fuel building to see this before it dies off...
Sorry, I haven't been in the nuclear industry to describe the phenomina that causes the glow.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Sodium also is a very good conductor of heat, it was no coincidence that they chose it for this purpose. This same trick is used in the stem of exhaust valves in a lot of automobile engines. The exhaust valve is often the hottest part of the entire engine because it is immersed in the hot gas right after combustion, during the period that the valve is open. It's a relatively small part and is nearly completely immersed in this very hot gas. The only paths for heat to leave the valve is through the narrow stem, and through the valve seat in the head when the valve is closed and seated. This also explains why you will burn a valve if you manually adjust the clearance of your lifters and leave too little free-play. If the valve doesn't seat all the way it will have very poor heat conduction.
Anyway, to aid the heat transfer down the valve stem, often the core is filled with sodium. I believe it does the same phase-change convection cycle as mentioned in this article, where the sodium is heated at the hot end and rises to the cool end and then back again, improving the process of removing heat from the valve.
This is basically a Slowpoke3 reactor, modified to generate power through a sodium heat transfer instead of the boiled water originally envisaged. Check out www.nuclearfaq.ca - "In the early 1980's AECL developed a higher-power variant of this technology, called SLOWPOKE-3, which could act as a district heating source for remote communities. Such locations are often heated with networked hot-water systems that require a constant fossil-fuel supply." BTW burning coal releases far more radiation into the atmosphere per kWH than any nuclear power plant. Check it out
MIT has been working on an even safer method for years: Pebble Bed reactors. The idea is: seal the uranium in bocci-ball sized graphite balls (uranium reaction won't get hot enough to melt the graphite balls). to stop the reaction roll the balls away from each other. when the fuel is spent, the U is sealed in graphite.
http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/
Also, whenever people invoke Three MIle Island, I'm always obliged to point out that ZERO nuclear waste was released during the accident. It was all completely contained. Most people think it was like Chernobyl, but the fact is: the safety standards worked for 3-mile.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Boy, thats a laugh!
The Nuclear Industry sure has had their brain washing done on you. To say that Nuclear Power is pollution free is just plain wrong. The pollution created by these power plants has to be securely stored for thousands of years.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
While I have no concerns about the safety of the plant, and with a bit of will it is possible to get rid of the waste properly, I'm not convinced by the motto "small is beautiful" as applied to nuclear power stations. It seems to me that a small nuclear power station would just be easier for a terrorist organisation to hit. While it might not have enough fuel, or suitable fuel, for a proper nuke, the radioactive material would certainly be suitable for a dirty bomb, especially towards the end of the plant's life. What's wrong with a few giant power stations?
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
For each element, there is a small list of stable isotopes. If a nucleus becomes unstable for whatever reason, it attempts to return to a stable configuration. There are several ways this can happen, including radioactive decay and fission.
The nucleus of any atom is held together by binding energy, and tries to fly apart due to electric repulsion between the protons. The binding energy per nucleon has a broad maximum around 8 MeV and nuclear mass between 50 - 75. Unstable, heavier nuclei may undergo fission into smaller nuclei with higher binding energy. The difference is released as heat, which we use to generate power.
The electric repulsion increases as the square of the number of protons in a nucleus, so more neutrons per proton are needed for heavier elements to maintain stability; however, there is a limit, and elements beyond Bismuth (83) are naturally unstable. These nuclei undergo radioactive decay, which occurs in two types: alpha and beta.
Unstable, heavy nuclei emit alpha particles, which are identical to Helium nuclei -- two protons, two neutrons. This radiation reduces the atomic mass by roughly four, eventually bringing the element to a stable nucleon count. Unstable nuclei also can undergo beta decay, converting a neutron into a proton and a high-energy electron, which is emitted. The amount of time needed for half of a sample of material to radioactively decay is called the half-life.
For fission, there are only three isotopes with a long-enough radioactive half-life to be stored and transported, and which are fissionable by neutrons of all energies: Uranium-233, Uranium-235, and Plutonium-239. U-233 isn't natural, and is created by inducing Thorium-232 to undergo beta decay by adding a neutron. U-235 occurs in small but extractable quantities in natural Uranium ore. Pu-239 is created by U-238 neutron capture and beta decay.
Alpha- and beta decay cause ionization in matter with which they come in contact by knocking off outer-shell electrons. Alpha radiation for Pu-239, the most energetic alpha decayer in a reactor at 5.1 MeV, has a range of only 3.6 cm in air, after which it is low-enough energy to absorb two electrons from the air and become a Helium atom which can't ionize. Uranium reactors, like the Toshiba model, have even smaller alpha ranges. Nuclear reactors are not at risk for leaking alpha radiation.
Beta radiation consists of electrons, which are much more likely to scatter when they ionize, so there isn't a specific ionization range for beta radiation. On the other hand, the highest energy beta radiation from fission reactions is on the order of 3 MeV, and can be stopped by half a centimeter of concrete. There is no possibility of beta radiation escaping nuclear reactors.
Gamma radiation, produced by neutron capture reactions, drops off exponentially as it is absorbed, so it can be reduced to background levels by a manageable thickness of iron or lead shielding. Normally, this occurs immediately surrounding the reactor vessel itself. If the vessel develops a leak or the shielding fails, nuclear plants have additional concrete shielding and containment procedures. In the unlikely event that everything fails, exposure to reactor gamma radiation is comparable to going to a doctor for X-rays -- not something you'd want for prolonged periods, but not going to injure you before you evacuate. In the case of the Toshiba reactor, which is 60 feet underground, there is no possibility of gamma leakage because the ground acts as shielding.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
I read the article. It strikes me that not even once the problem with radioactive waste after 30 years of service is mentioned. By not mentioning one of the main problems with nuclear , it won't go away. The article states that the plant is a clean solution : certainly not! I don't consider a volume of nearly 0,8 cube meters of uranium clean ...
less is more
700,000 gallons of diesel, says so in the article. ;o)
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
The entirety of Bob's statement is "Have no fear for Atomic Energy, cause none of them can stop the time."
Unfortunately, technology like this won't be used. There will always be a portion of people who will refuse to use new technology. It really makes me sad because we could be using all sorts of energy devices to start freeing us of from the coming fuel crisis.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
How big does it look on this map?
Not sure why someone would sign their name with an anon login though.
If we start making corporations (and individuals) pay the real costs of their business, they will make decisions that benefit society as a whole. Democrats and Republicans are all cronies paid from the same fat cat till. Where is the outrage? Compare and contrast the reaction to Enron vs. Teapot Dome for example.
We need to bring back public tar and feathering.
Unfortunately for the Greens, nobody will vote for them in an exec branch election again - not after the gorebot lost - Gore would have at least pretended not to be a planet-rapist. Bush doesn't even try to look like he gives a fuck about the future of our shared environment.
If they won't let us cut trees or drill for oil, I really doubt if we'll be allowed to keep anything like a reactor.
"The word 'nuclear' makes me nervous," said Randy Virgin of the Alaska Center for the Environment. "But we've long seen the problems with diesel, and I'm pretty excited about the prospect of a clean source of energy," he said. "It sounds very promising, but I'd approach it with extreme skepticism."
I'm not sure I really need to say more....
You might have thought of it if you worked for the Florida company that pioneered it. Can't remember the company, I just remembered they developed barge sized reactors and sold out to Japanese interests in the late 80's or early 90s.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
With solar like this, I'm not sure why nuclear would need to be brought into the picture.
A quick web search led me to the information that Galena, AK is at about 64.73N. While that is below the Arctic Circle by a couple of degrees, it is not the greatest place on the planet to be planning to heat with solar power.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
> Ram the pipes coming out of the ground with a pickup. Let blow some steam out. Drop grenade.
Listen to grenade go *BOOM*. Realize that one needs to read up on nuclear reactors.
You really don't know the first thing about how these things work, do you? What would you possibly hope to accomplish by dropping a grenade into the secondary coolant loop, other than stopping power output, which would be accomplished by the truck hitting the pipes?
Virg
I haven't read the article and I don't know what I am talking about... but..
I was under the impression that nuclear waste was good source material for "all sorts of bad things" -- ranging from making weapons grade materials to just using to pollute water supplies... etc.
I've read enough horror stories about the security around nuclear power plants -- will mini-reactors make this any better?
Evolution: love it or leave it
Some things were not intended to be cheap. It may be worth spending the money or having some governing body decide some safety limits on these things.
If they become easy to get then couldnt somebody just cause a meltdown in one of these things.
The idea is interesting, but in practice I dont think it would work. Too many potential problems could arise from its use.
"You're on my side and the dark side, like Lando Calrissian?" --Gimpy, Undergrads
Of course the article isn't very clear, but I don't really see either not-A or not-B claimed as such.
It seems to me that the reflector is a ring moving down the rod, and at any time you have completely clean fuel at the head end of the ring and progressively more poisoned fuel toward the tail.
If the reflector moves too fast, the fuel within will be proportionally less poisoned, and though the output may be greater, it still won't be more than when the reflector started out on 100% clean fuel.
The reflector gets to the end sooner ("the reactor's lifetime is simply shortened") and the fuel ends up less poisoned than it would ideally have been.
It's over one pound lighter and thinner to boot!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For the sort of money they're talking, you could build a lot of renewable generation, and it'd be working now, not in 2010.
I think the fear of nuclear energy has reached a hysterical level. All nuclear accidents together have produced less deaths and damage than the traffic accidents of a single year. But even though a lot of fear is not rational, it is a force to be reconned with.
If someone feels threatened (even if it is not substantiated), he will act on it. To overcome those reactions may be prove the hardest part of all.
But John Brunner said: There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better"
This kind of reactor would pose a new problem: Lot's of uranium will be distributed at a lot of lonely places. I would be easier to aquire it.
Today it is very difficult to raid a nuclear facility. This may change if they're small and many.
Regards, Martin
Such a plant would also have enough excess power to create hydrogen gas, proponents say. They envision Galena as a demonstration center for the highly vaunted hydrogen economy...
This is the coolest part imho. If we can put a whole bunch of these in remote areas, we won't have a NIMBY problem anymore. Then we can use them to produce and distribute hydrogen and fuel-cells. And they won't need much supervision.
The only problem left is waste-disposal, which is still quite a big problem.
"I couldn't have put it better myself, Mike. Why, the shocking lack of sodium taught in schools today is... shocking!"
"That's right, Crow. So we asked ourselves, how, HOW! do we reach kids today about sodium?"
"How, how, HOW?"
"Through the rock 'n' roll music that the kids seem to love."
"Hit it!"
"Sodium, so-ho-di-u-huh-hummmm..."
On a non-MST3K note, this is good news. Say 'nuclear reactor' to most people today, and they think of a big concrete sphere that can go 'Poot!' at any moment and crack open, spurting deadly radiation into the air, killing everyone on the planet in five minutes. Small, safe reactors that *work* might start to help ease down the paranoia.
It's the kind of ridiculous fear that kept holding up space probes using radioisotope generators from being launched over the last couple of decades. "Oh, that space probe is *nuclear*? Stop it, stop it at once! If anything goes wrong it'll crash into the ocean and KILL US ALL!" Never mind that the generators were designed so that they *couldn't* go critical until they were already well out of Earth's orbit...
You must think in Russian.
If this "new" technology is safe, why isn't Toshiba showcasing it in Japan? Are they afraid that the showcasing might not be thick enough to protect their countrymen if an "incident" occurs?
I think this Japenese company should do its proof-of-concept with Japenese test subjects. I don't think Americans should risk their lives to provide more glory for the Rising Sun, especially in a place like Alaska: slashdot readers might be a little young to consider this, but some of the Alaskan Inupiaq and Yupik, and probably the Inuit, were the subjects of nuclear testing during the work on United States nuclear weapons.
We (the privileded whitebread suburbians sitting in front of computers in air conditioned rooms thousands of miles away from any risk) owe the Native Alaskans more than can be repaid, and most of all we owe them, and all of Alaska, the decency to tell Toshiba to find one of the emperor's own backwaters to buy and victimize.
By the way: fear is a lot easier to create than is electricity, so "Environmentalists" are entitled to comment only if they live within the danger zone of one of these nice little Japenese wonders. Since most "experts" that think this is a neat idea compared to Diesel power live about sixty degrees South of Alaska, I invite them to either shut up or move to the hamlets that are being measured for this dubious "benefit".
Bellhead
To join (metals) by applying heat, sometimes with pressure and sometimes with an intermediate or filler metal having a high melting point.
This is supposed to get you into a large metal container how?
Then why are they putting on the other side
of the planet from Toshiba headquarters
as far away from civilization as you can get ???
As if doublespeak isn't popular enough (See TIA, MS "features", etc) now geeks are getting in on it too. People don't like something? We'll just change it's name. From now on, I'll refer to Linux's command line interface as "Happy Fun Software with Patented 'EZ4U' technology!" when talking to non-techies. Or, if I want to argue something is positive and good, maybe I'll
EXPLAIN MY POSITION WITH REASON AND FACTS
No wait, changing names is much easier. Silly me.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
If this works out, maybe AECL will have more of a future.
Chernobyl was caused by _engineers_ testing removal of cores, they took all the cores out and couldn't get them back in.
What will cause more fear is idiots like you under selling the risks.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
First, by cores, you mean control rods. But you're still somewhat off track.
Second, Chernobyl was an unstable, bad design, without a containment building. It's design, RMBK 1000, was such that if things went bad, the nuclear reaction would continue, instead of shutting down.
In addition to the uranium, a nuclear reactor needs two things- a moderator (which actually promotes the fission chain reaction) and a thermal transfer mechanism, to take heat away and make electricity with it. This is beyond the control rods, which are used to shut down the plant.
In every plant in the US, water acts as both the moderator, and the heat transfer mechanism. Lose the water, and the chain reaction is unsustainable. You can't take away heat anymore, but the fission chain reaction slows down dramatically. This is what happened at Three Mile Island (TMI)- they lost the water. They melted parts of their core, but that was the extent of the meltdown. The reactor vessel did it's job and physically contained the uranium. The containment building did it's job, along with all the auxillary systems, and no appreciable radiation was released to the public. TMI proved that we can handle a disaster without endangering the public.
Back to chernobyl. The RMBK 1000 reactor used water as a heat transfer mechanism, and graphite as a moderator. So when they lost water cooling, the reaction actually increased in power, and this raised power output lead to a rapid spike in temperature and pressure, blowing the lid off the reactor core and destroying the building.
Moreover, if they attempt to sustain low power levels (20% of capacity), the system is unstable. Because the core was huge, it was possible to have pockets of reactivity that couldn't be well controlled. When the power level is low, the cooling water/heat transport flow is reduced, to keep proper operating temperatures. But because they had pockets of reactivity that could be greater than average, there could be local areas where the flow was inadequate, boiling off the water prematurely, and getting us back the increasing reactivity with water loss that I mentioned earlier. Hence, they where supposed to operate below 20% power.
As for the people, despite earlier problems at different plants, they were not aware of the aforementioned technical problems. The Soviet bueacracy prevented any useful exchanges on such subjects. This is not to excuse them from not knowing more about their plant, just to paint a picture.
The cause of this was ironically a safety experiment. When a nuke plant is shut down, it still produces a significant amount of heat that must be removed. Normally the power required to run the pumps to remove this heat comes off the grid from other power plants, but if the plant is disconnected from the grid, a diesel generator is used instead. It took them three minutes to start the diesels (as opposed to a ten second standard in the US), so the engineers thought that they could bridge this three minute gap by extracting power from the turbine while it was in the process of coasting to a stop.
In order to test this theory, they deactivated every single safety system the plant had, and brought the power levels down to 6%. I've already talked about why this was bad.
At the end of their 'safety test', they inserted the control rods successfully, and in a hurry, because they could tell they were losing control of the plant. Because of the horrible design, though, these control rods where insufficient to kill the chain reaction, and instead only displaced water, which brought the power levels up to 100 times normal. Kaboom. The 'successful' insertion of the control rods was the final event in an idiotic string of actions.
They had no understanding of the safety i
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Who's up for a trip to Alaska to pummel this guy's parents?
Bitch of a name.
liquid metal heat exchangers? Whats it running, molten lead? Well, we can build satellites with computer controlled reactors, so I guess the japanese can build on that doesn't need a team of engineers to run. What will H. Simpson do for a living now?
TallGreen CMS hosting
General thoughts, in no specific order...
/. would have to be implemented using little peices of paper, fine point pens, and hundreds of thousands of really, really tired carrier pigeons.
A) the "dirty bomb" (a current favorite among hte fear mongering media) made out of radioactive materials is generally NOTHING like the multiple-megaton weapons that make the big fancy mushroom clouda. These are bombs that expode conventionally, and through said explosion, scatter radioactive materials around an area, creating a hot zone that will possibly kill, probably sicken, some people right near the area, but mainly just go to scare the millions of people into knee-jerk reactions though non-understanding.
B) Making a cheap and nasty little dirty bomb can be easily done by stealing the Cesium 137 out of a few hospitals (canisters of it are used in x-ray machines - i think its an xray machine). The added benefit of this is that the material is a very fine powder that can get spread widely by the wind.
One of these canisters got loose in Brazil once. Resulted in killing four and made a few people sick. THe cleanup was a tad nasty. People heard about it, and thousands of them showed up at hospitals to get checked out for possible contamination. This was after local officials told them "Look, you were in the immediate area, youre going to be fine." People still stood on line at hospitals, choking hospital resources and generally fucking up their ability to take care of those that were really hurt.
[If you get a chance, find that Dirty Bomb special NOVA did a while back. This is the ref for that cesium info above]
Stealing a fat hunk of reactor core would involve about a million times work, and unless they wannt rub the thing against a cheese grater for a while, they're left with one solid hunk of radioactive material, which is fairly easy to handle, contain, and bury somewhere.
[again, go read that NOVA site.]
C) Your average goober (read: 98% of the population) is completely unaware of that fact that we're constantly being bombarded with "background radiation" every second of every day. They're also unaware that our skin does a pretty good job of fending that low-level shit off.
D) Imagine if mass media existed at today's level in Edison's time. Getting people to accept the fact that electricity was not going to jump out of an unused outlet (or a wire) and kill you [in everyday non-dubmass use] would be next to impossible, and
E) People Die. Its something we all do, and ya can't avoid it, so stop fucking scaring yourselves into non-action. You can only hope its not going to be horrible. Generally, not being a stupidass - and keeping yourself aware of (AWARE, not SCARED) the other stupidasses around you - will go a long way in accomplishing this.
s'wut i sed.
What we really need is a working fusion power plant.
Please do avoid Texas. The fewer snotty assholes that visit, the better off it is for us Texans.
And the less f*cking traffic on I-35.
MORTAR COMBAT!
There is a minor problem, though...I can detoxify chemical waste in a variety of ways which make it far less hazardous (insoluble arsenic salts, for example). Organics can be incinerated at very high temperatures; you can probably recapture the organic byproducts and hit them again. With radioactive isotopes such as cobalt-60, iodine-131, strontium-90, etc., the half-lives range from hours to years; depending on the types of radiation emitted, the only way to keep them safe is to store them under shielding until they decay. There is no way to detoxify them until they decay on their own; while there are lots of safe ways to store toxic waste and/or to destroy it and render it nontoxic, there are few ways to store (and no ways to destroy, unless you can get fusion going or the material is fissionable) radioactive waste. Low level waste will be easy to shield, but high-level waste (used cores) will take lots of protection and a long time before they can be stored anywhere safely.
... thousand?....years.
Oh, and lots of the radioactive waste is also toxic, independent of its radioactivity (plutonium, for example, in a soluble form, is the most toxic element known to man - in insoluble form, it is still bad via emission of gamma rays). So, even if the waste is low level, you are still likely to have toxicity issues; the radioactivity and its requirements for storage just compound them.
In summary, if your put the coal waste in my backyard, I can have it dumped elsewhere, incinerated, or processed to render it much less toxic. With medium- to high-level nuclear waste, there is no way to do so - you're stuck with it for the next
I am not dismissing nuclear power as an energy source - it has problems which need to be solved but it could be useful if and when they are solved (where do we put the waste? how do we secure plants against potential and probable dangers?). The relative convenience and toxicity of wastes, however, is not an argument for it.
Offering to put a reactor in the middle of Alaska is not exactly an indication of faith in the technology. They need, first, to put one or two in full load operation a couple of miles upwind from downtown Tokyo. And perhaps a couple more running full load in the lobby of their headquarters. Until then they're using Alaska as a nice, safe, test range with only little likelihood of fallout landing on Japan.
Its half life is tens of thousands of years, and it's extremely chemically toxic as well as radiologically hazardous if it makes its way into the body. Plutonium could be separated from reactor wastes, but that would encourage nuclear weapons proliferation and therefore be eevill too.
YOU FAIL IT!
It requires a tremendous amount of energy to slow down an object enough to get it to hit the sun. Anything thrown from a space elevator would just end up in a different orbit about the sun.
"Hey, I wonder how much I can overclock this th"
Because of its design and small size, the Toshiba reactor can't overheat or melt down, he said, unlike what happened in the 1986 accident at Chernobyl that killed 30 people and spewed radiation across northern Europe.
While the new type of reactor might be perfectly safe, why do they spread "disinformation" then? Of course, the "blow up" of Chernobyl only costed about 30 lives. The cleaning up recruits of the USSR army had about 1000 falacities later. Seems they don't count.
Anyway, besides the credibility of the press release the question of how to take care about burned out units remains.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
One of the big concerns everyone seems to have with these things is "How are we going to guard them?"
This is so simple it hurts when it hits you in the fase.
Assuming these reactors really dont have a footprint much bigger than a warehouse, put them in places that are ALREADY heavily guarded.
Military bases, Prisons, and maybe some of the bigger Airports.
The actual core is buried in the ground (bury it DEEP, who fucking cares) and surrounded by dirt and concrete, so unless the Mole-Men get a bug up their ass, its doubtful an underground attack would go unnoticed. [all you'd need is a cheap seismograph and voila! You can pick up unusual digging.]
The surface building is in an area thats heavily guarded anyway, so all we really would need to do is make sure the current guards are doign their fucking job, which they're supposed to be doing in the first place.
Also, maybe the the death row inmates and the multiple-lifers can work on the crews in the buildings. Make that a trade off for big screen TVs or less shitty cells or something. These would be the same guys that got their shit together and now work the scared straight programs and do other truly useful functions in the prisons already.
As far as dealing with the waste products, I'd personally rather have to truck a treetrunk sized core to some bigass site in the middle of the desert every 20 years than belch a few more hundred thousand tons of shit into the air over that same time period. For fucks sake, we can protect 635 legislators and their staffs form terrorists, I'd think the logistics of a truck going one way slowly wouldn't be too hard.
This might be tough in Alaska, where folks are spread out all over the place, but should be fairly easy in the lower 48, and who says you cant put in a bank of four of these little cores in more densely populated areas? One AA battery is good, four is better, and only slightly harder to add in.
another thought: To make it even more idiot proof, take as many of the computers out amd make all the controlls big analog levers and handles, computers can do the monitoring. Remove the chance of the system itself being flummoxed by a busted motherboard, adn everyones happier (and busier!)
s'wut i sed.
I would like to point out that we have had some amazing nuclear technology ready for primetime since the mid 80's known as Pebble-bed. I know many of the /.'rs know about this, but to some it is quite new.
The pebble bed reactor design is intrinsically safe both while operating and during dismantling. The fuel (which can be uranium or mixed with plutonium) is encased in small high strength ceramic beads. The encapsulation serves to prevent the release of radioactive material even if the reactor vessel is breached as well as separate the fuel and prevent it from melting into a large mass.
The reactor is then cooled with high temperature helium gas, which also acts as a moderator. Here is the second line of safety; should the reactor get too hot or the helium is released, no moderation occurs. This means that the fast neutrons stay fast and are unable to cause a chain reaction. Hence, a catastrophic failure of both the containment vessel and cooling system would cause the reactor to physically shut itself down.
But the best part about the high-temperature gas-cooled pebble-bed reactors (long name) is that they burn up over 90% of the primary fuel and the waste products are still encapsulated by the pebbles. This is radically different from the water-cooled reactors which usually are only capable of 10% fuel efficiency and generate (instead of eliminate) plutonium.
Because of the efficiency, these reactors can be fueled by the waste of our current light water reactors, which between 1968 and 1998 generated 38400 metric tons of waste containing mostly uranium and plutonium (which if not eliminated could be used by to build bombs).
Although it is a pipe dream to think that the oil industry and the US government might actually support these newer nuclear technologies, let us take one step farther in waste disposal. Today, we are all set to bury those 40ktons of waste in Yucca Mountain for 10,000 years... but this is useless. Who knows if there will even be a United States in 10,000 years? By putting the spent pebbles from the reactors into a particle accelerator, we can use neutron transmutation (fun word huh?) to cut the dangerous half-life of waste to less than 100 years and about break even on power consumption. 100 years is far more manageable than 10,000.
Of course, these ideas aren't my own, just compiled from many other well respected scientists and others. If any one is interested in some this material, including a little more history and comparison of other fossil and renewable energy sources, please take a look at this proposal on energy policy.
Galena wants payback for those F-15s they lost to Liquid Snake. They'll run this reactor on the nukes he tried to steal from that nearby island.
Possible solution to kickstarting this: We all get together and buy a crapload of land somewhere out in the middle of nowwhere (Make it somewhere where marketing types dont want to go so they can't fuck up our little utopia by trying to brand and sell it yeas before it's ready to go Gold), incorporate the new town of Nerdville, and write Toshiba a letter saying "COME ON DOWN!"
.nerd
Maybe we should just get an island out in international waters and declare ourselves the soverign state of Nerdonia. We could have cool high-tech passports and build giligans-island style pedal powered coconut cars and everything! We could even get out own top level domain
(screw ICANN and their 2 character standard)
Wait.... until we got the reactor going it'd be a pain in the ass making enough power for fat bandwidth. Maybe solar charging up flywheel batteries?
Someone post an article about this and we can hash it all out as a separate discussion.
[I got dibs on being minister of foolery!]
s'wut i sed.
For decades so-called "environmentalists" have
pushed "clean" hydropower as an alternative to
fossil fuel or nuclear plants. And as always,
they were pushing a solution without having
any idea what they were advocating. And now,
we have hydroelectric to thank for large-scale
depletion of commercial fish stocks. Salmon
is now competing with lobster and crab instead
of tuna. All because hydroelectric plants are
blocking the fish from their breeding grounds
upriver. We are driving salmon to extinction
for "clean" power.
Fusion isn't viable yet. We need nuclear and we
need it yesterday.
you dig it up and replace it with a new one. after all, you'll likely still need a power plant around there in 30 years' time.
as to what you do with the old one, it depends. there's several possibilities even today; which one will seem the smartest in three decades, i dunno. but just abandoning the thing in place is not among the options, as you seem to think.
> I can just picture the breakdown in the middle of a cold Alaskan night, Papa running around glowing green, shouting for Mama to fetch him the anti-radiation suit.
Yeah, I can picture that, too. The question is what that picture has to do with this device.
Firstly, it's subcritical, and by its design must remain subcritical. It produces heat externally, not ionizing radiation. Second, it would require busting the containment vessel to leak radiation at all, and as I said before, it's not going to go critical, so there's no internal force that will do that. Third, the amount of external damage it would need to sustain to break open would be so severe that anyone capable of inflicting that sort of force on it would do more damage inflicting it on the village directly.
The problem they have when it breaks is that it stops running. I assume they'll have standard fuel-fired generators to back it up, and so rushing to the site isn't really an issue.
You can learn all of this stuff yourself by reading the article. Do so before you comment further, please.
Virg
If we compare Three Mile Island reactor #2 with a Ringling Bros. big top circus, it suddenly becomes much safer by association. And Chernobyl #4 is about the same size as a Carmelite convent. That makes it safe, secure, and peaceful.
I think Joel Gay and the Anchorage Daily need a bit of what used to be called "journalistic integrity"
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Inuit officials have declared that another word for 'snow' will be introduced into their vocabulary, this time referring to 'irradiated, green, and glowing.'
UNIX: Find it, fsck it, forget it.
Well one big difference is that Toshiba is the one who will be selling it eventualy. Since a private company is selling it they would be held responsable if it blows Alaska off the face of the earth. Before it was scientists and the government(who we know isn't responable for anything they do) who were pushing it(i think :D). Only time will tell though.
"The universe is my dwelling place and my house is my only clothes! Why are you entering into my pants?" - Liu Ling
I'd like to know if the design can be scaled down to the point where it would power a single house.
How long until these are strapped onto SUVs for the soccer moms to drive over us with forever and ever and ever?
I'll have to ask my uncle. He helped Bechtel build an oil refinery in northern Alberta...
This is not my sandwich.
That's a lie! What's left over will remain radioactive until the end of time!
You know, just like everything else.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
If my Chemistry teacher was correct (and I remember his description correctly fourteen years later), there was also the problem that the graphic control rods themselves will burn fiercely if you can actually get them hot enough.
Of course, they did get hot enough, and the control rods were like kindling inserted into a blaze.
>Anti-war protesters can't complain about the wars over there if they buy gas for their car.
:-)
Yeah, but I'd rather play word games with the protestors, and highlight that they DO drive.
If they are so against financing oil terrorism, they should WALK even if it means poverty. Me.. as long as the Saudis lobby Republican, I'm all for pretending not to see the true cost of oil. Ignorance really is bliss
I was about to respond with pretty much the same points. What the parent's parent said about Dems being beholden to greens just doesn't add up, since greens have by and large been asking for just what he said he wanted.
The United States has not yet been able to find the permanent resting place for all of these spent nuclear materials. Currently all are on hold in temporary storage ponds etc at the various and sundry reactor sites around the world.
When someone solves the waste problem we'll be on to something. Until then I think we should wait.
-Scott scott@surrealistic.org
How long before we can fit one of these into the back of a Delorean?
The only reactor design I can think of that uses liquid sodium and low enrichment fuel is a Fast Breeder. One of the products of a fast breeder is Plutonium.
Why does Toshiba want plutonium?
Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions
You know it's coming. I knew it a long time already, as an unevitabile consequence of war technology development. And guess what, the first to develop it will be the USA. Love or hate it, USA has the means and the cojones to get into this sort of project.
Sigged!
I can't believe there's not a single reference to Mr. Fusion (Back to the Future) here (that I can find).
We'll just have to correct that...
Mr. Fusion has seen better days.
http://www.entermyworld.com/wdmorg/97fusion1x1.
I'm a chemical engineering senior at the UofWisconsin Madison. Two years ago I took a nuclear reactor lab class here at the UW where we learned about and operated the college's reactor (1 megawatt thermal -- lots of good info at this site). It was one of our lab exercises to rapidly remove the control blades (flat plates in this reactor -- not rods) all the way to create a pulse. A *pulse*. That is, even with the blades removed, the reactor would not melt down. (can see it at this site) Since the rxr was water-moderated, there is no conceivable mode of operation which would allow the core to melt. In fact, it's so safe that it was built right in the middle of campus. And this was designed back in the day...
RTG - RadioThermal Generator. While this is closer to a regular nuclear reactor design that the RTGs used on some space probes, the name is still valid since it uses radioactive decay to produce heat that drives the steam plant.
I remember a few years back there was the "can-do" ("Can" for Canada). Not sure what became of it, but I think the project was canned because of stupid environmental activists that didnt want the next chernobyl to be in Canada.
From what I heard, the reactor design was designed to be powerfull enough to generate electricity for a Canadian University.
I see a whole 'nuther cottage industry springing up!
Yes folks, I'm talking about stealing fissionable materials, yup, why do you think the Japanese want to test this outside of Japan! And that crazy little asshole dictator of north Korea won't have to reprocess old fuel rods anymore, just raid rural Alaska! How about wind power, geothermal, biomass? Oh yeah, that's right, not sexy enough.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
our Nuclear Wielding Yukon River overloards and will join the rest of man slaving in their Uranium mines.
The town is only about 700 odd people. One possibility is that if this gets near fielding, there will be a call by the anti-nuke groups for people to move there and basicly take over the town in order to stop it. There will also, of course, be lawsuit after lawsuit to delay it.
It's a must win for the antinuclear movement.
They'll view with alarm the small size, and especially the very low installation cost which makes it hard for long delays to bankrupt by increasing the cost of working capital.
That no plant has been ordered in the US for decades is a huge political point for them, and they'd see this as the camel getting a nose into the tent. I expect a bitter fight by them.
Hava a look here.
It used a graphite moderator (a design not used in the US)
Actually the same design was in use by the Hanford reactor facility in the state of Washington for many years before it was shut down. The U.S. government overlooked the risks for many years because Hanford was a key element of their plutonium production ever since WWII.
More details (search for graphite)
Did a quick search for Galena, Alaska, and got to this page, which says there are 675 people in that village: http://galenaak.cu.myareaguide.com/stats.html
They are currently using 700,000 gallons of diesel annually, a bit more than 1k gallons/person.
I know it's cold up there but geez, have they looked at all the possibilities for energy efficiency? Given the amount of subsidies for energy, prices are much lower than they would be in a normal market, and there is less incentive to pursue energy efficiency.
A $20 million reactor for 675 people is almost $30 grand for each person. Surely a mix of energy efficiency and renewables is cheaper, even in such harsh conditions.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Don't forget there's a process called "glassification" that basically turns the waste into a glass. Hard to leach anything out of that.
Because the flux capacitor requires 1.21 GW of electricity and if plutonium is not freely available on the open market (a la November 1955) They would have to come up with a zany scheme to capture a bolt of lightning to power the time circuits. Duh
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Washington, D.C., attorney Doug Rosinski, who represents Toshiba, calls the reactor a "nuclear battery," although it has nothing in common with the typical AA cell. The power comes from a core of non-weapons-grade uranium about 30 inches in diameter and 6 feet tall. It would put out a steady stream of 932-degree heat for three decades but can be removed and replaced like a flashlight battery when the power is depleted, he said.
So, no, you don't just leave the dead fuel in the reactor--you remove it and dispose of it in a relatively safe manner. Considering that this device produces waste once every thirty years, I don't think that it will be that big of a problem.— darco
Excellent, I have just the place to plant one of these generators: right in my front yard, where a towering pine tree currently stands.
Software developer.
I so very much agree.
The amount of naturally occuring Radon - anywhere - is going to give you a higher exposure to radiation in a year than in living next to a Nuclear plant for 30 years. (Unless you live on the 60th floor of a skyscraper or something. Radon tends to sink in air.)
Hell, smokers are far and above the average for yearly acceptable radiation exposure due to inhaling, among other things, radioactive Polonium (nasty) in tobacco which has a half life of almost a year and then decays into lead (still nasty, if not radioactive.) A pack-a-day smoker gets the equivalent to 300(!) chest X-Rays a year. How's that for another reason not to smoke?
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Not a huge, Three Mile Island-type power plant
Interestingly, TMI (or at least the unit that did not melt down) recently set a record for longest continual operation of a pressurized water reactor (there are approximately 200 of these world-wide).
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
The $S style is an inherently safe design, its non-weapons grade so stealing it will not aid in making a nuclear bomb and the convection is done by liquid sodium. The design was actually developed by a team at Argonne Labs outside of Chicago and killed by the Clinton administration in 1992 FY (as in as soon as they took office.) Naturally, the Japanese took it over and minituarized it.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Okay, I should have said "a design no longer used in the US".
-- Alastair
Hope their custommer support cell center is not the same one that takes calls from notebooks owners.
1. Simple designs with no moving parts, do not employ lots of people to run them. This is counter to the welfare program currently enjoyed by the Nuclear industry. They needs lots of manually operated, fragile equipment to maintain the publicly funded, fear based, nuclear engineer welfare state.
2. Its designed failsafe and easy to copy. This is completely unacceptable to the hordes of scientists who make a living running studies to evaluate the safety of our non-standard obsolete designs.
3. Its terrorist hostile. This really means it cannot be used for political fundraising. Damn! thats serious, what are they thinking? How can we be expected to set up a fear based, control and surveillance oriented, imperialistic, oil driven world order if people don't get with the program? All new nuclear technologies must be scary as hell. Whats so complicated about that?
4. Its not invented here! (for most values of here). Nuff said. Obviously its bad. Wrap it up in environmental lawsuits and regulatory nonsense for 25 years, or the half life of your oil based political agenda, whichever decays first.
5. It allows energy self sufficiency of small isolated communities. This is horribly close to independence, freedom and the associated evils of free speech, libertarianism, and other non right thinking creeds. Isolated people can decide they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness! Alaska might start chucking coffee into the harbor and complaining about taxation without representation! How can we expect such communities to support wars in far away lands for oil, if they don't even need the stuff?
6. The waste it generates (30 years from now) is all in one easily transported and disposable lump. Just shove it on Joe's and Mo's truck and ship it to Yucca mountain(#2), or the New Mexico Waste isolation Pilot Plant (#3). We already know whats in it so we can't even spend billions of dollars characterizing it!. Thats way too easy! Where's the 100 year trillion dollar agency budget in that?
7. The material is the wrong sort to make Radiologic Dispersal Devices (Dirty Bombs for the media folks) what area they thinking, they could at least use something dodgy like Cesium 137, or Thorium or put it somewhere easy to steal (or just plain get a licence and order via the mail, see http://www.gao.gov reports GAO-03-804, GAO-03-638). Using stuff which is just plain safe is ridiculous. So think again nuclear designer folks!.
Many people will be totally opposed to these revolutionary, safe, simple, freedom oriented, cost efficient, anti-terrorist, green, disposable, long lasting, energy producing technologies.
The real world question is, why?
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
First of all, the design uses 1.3 tonnes of fissile Plutonium. Toshiba's write-up on the IAEA website has an interesting approach to this. "In order to keep strict control over the plutonium used... a large amount of fuel can be confined for a long time in the reactor vessel without refueling." In other words, less frequent transportation of fuel = better safeguards. However their fuel inventory balance shows that the spent fuel has almost as much fissible Pu-239 as the fresh... thus although the fuel stays put for 10 years, when it comes out its still potent (although jazzed up with a lot of fission products, which makes it unlikely to be easily handled by your run-of-the-mill crackpot).
The nuclear safety characteristics are excellent (i.e., negative void reactivity, negative temperature coefficients across the board, complete loss of power + no shutdown predicts sheath temperatures less than 850 degC, etc.). The economics, however, are not so good. According to the doc on the IAEA website, the thermal power is 125 MW. Using a generous conversion efficiency of 35%, that equals 44 MW of electrical power minus a few MW to run the station itself. To compete with the new generation of "big nukes" (i.e., over 700 MW), this station would have to cost between 40 and 80 million dollars (the new plant designs are trying to come in a $1,000,000 per MW).
Galena may only have about 700 residents, but it is a part of the Doyon Alaska Native Corporation (one of many here). You can't just move there, you can't buy land there, you can't hunt or fish on their lands, and if they don't want you there, you have to leave.
The Rules are different here.
-cp-
President Bush to Liberate Alaska
Minor correction. 24,400,000,000,000 lbs of C02 are released into the atmosphere per year due to the use of coal in power plants world wide.
This is sort of important, do you remember whom exactly controls the "certification"?
The idea for mini-reactors has been around since at least the 70's. I seem to remember Omni talking about it, back in the day.
If I remember, the concept was that when fuel ran out, the entire reactor (the size of a house furnace) would be swapped out for a new one.
Sealed unit, no leaks, Cannot Fail, yadda yadda yadda...
Clear, Dark Skies
You can buy diesel from many places - fissile materiel is somewhat harder to come by.
Diesel mechanics aren't that hard to come by - nuclear technicians are somewhat rarer.
Waste from diesel generators can be absorbed by naturally occouring processes in a safe manner (think trees).
Nuclear waste will outlive civilisation - even whatever passes for it in Alaska.
waste are political and emotional rather than technical, I don't see how they will ever be solved.
Clear, Dark Skies
I spend like 45 minutes looking through all of those. Excellent. What else do you have for me?
Synergy is your friend
The design of the reactor itself seems safe, but the proponents are ignoring the fact that after its 30 year lifespan, what is left over is going to remain radioactive for the next 10,000 years
Yes, but how radioactive is it after 30 years? Just because it is radioactive doesn't mean it is dangerous.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl became the first plant to split atoms, burn coal and burn hydrogen ...all at the same time.
In addition to the graphite moderator was the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods. The uranium oxide in fuel rods is a ceramic like material, which is brittle, so it has to be encapsulated in a strong zirconium alloy metal to withstand the heat and pressure of a nuclear reactor. But if zirconium is heated too much, it will react with the water in the reactor, producing zirconium dioxide and liberating hydrogen gas. After the initial steam explosion that blew the reactor open, the hydrogen escaped and KABOOMSKI! There goes the roof of the reactor building. The people in Pripyat, a few miles away, saw the burning chunks of graphite being hurled in the air by more steam and hydrogen explosions, and thought it was just fireworks, but why at 1:30 in the morning??
This zirconium-water reaction also happened at Three Mile Island, contributing to fears of an explosion, but not enough hydrogen was generated to cause any damage, and was contained within the reactor itself. And besides that, all nuclear power plants in the U.S. have systems in place to deal with excess hydrogen, mostly by catalytically reacting it with oxygen in the air (instead of letting it collect to explode).
RBMK- Russian Big Mega-ton Kaboom
Cerenkov effect. The Cerenkov electromagnetic radiation, usually bluish light, is emitted by a beam of high-energy charged particles passing through a transparent medium at a speed greater than the speed of light in that medium.
The effect is similar to that of a sonic boom when an object moves faster than the speed of sound, in this case the radiation is a shock wave set up in the electromagnetic field.
The blue glow is not caused by the chemical impurities, but can be enhanced by impurities. Anyone who has ever used a scintillation counter in a biology lab to do things like radiocarbon dating is putting this effect to good use. A little bit of toluene with an ultraviolet tracer (called "scintillation cocktail") is placed in a small glass bottle along with the specimen being "counted". The charged particles from decaying radionuclides (e.g. carbon-14) emit Cerenkov radiation, which is amplified by the ultraviolet tracer in the toluene, and the resulting flash of blue light is in turn picked up by a photomultiplier tube in the counter.
People who emit Cerenkov radiation make me nervous...
One of the problem with Power Generators is that we only look at Peak Power rather than sustained power. One way to increase the peak is to store the excess energy from night useage as either electriciy or Heat. While batteries would be considered by most, these are way too expensive. Instead, using the boeing approach (a liquid salt stoing heat) then it would be possible to store the nightly heat output and then use it during the day. Interstingly, this not only makes it cheaper to run the plant but makes alternative energy much easier to add to a system.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Muja powerstation (Collie, Western Australia), uses 4 Mt a year of coal which is 3 PPM uranium, so 12t a year of U either up the stack or into the residue. I don't know what the ash residue ratio is like, but if it's 0.1% that represents a 4000t heap in the back yard. So... NIMBY, it won't fit.
Meantime, a lot of radon and other stuff gets released in mining and AFAIK not accounted for.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"Sure they say it's impossible to spill (radioactive material) for it to get out. But nothing in this world is impossible," he said.
Except, of course, for the public to rationally consider anything at all with "nuclear" in its name. That is really impossible.
What is it with people and "nuclear"? This reactor is suggested by the Japanese of all people. They were nuked. Twice. If anyone should automatically shut down his brain and cringe at the sound "nuclear", it should be them. Yet they seem to be thinking rationally about it. In the meanwhile, it is the Americans who nuked them who black out when hearing the word. What is this, some sort of guilt trip?
Wait, I got it. These Japanese are also scared of nuclear power. But they hell-bent on revenge! They'll install these miniature nuclear plants all over the USA, and at a predetermined time will cause them all to explode, killing everyone in the continent! Notice they don't suggest it be used in Japan? Launch a pre-emptive strike now!
Okay, help me out here. The article says that cooling with water leads to corrosion, so they're using liquid sodium instead. Then they use the sodium to boil water.
I can understand why they don't want water corroding away at the area around the uranium, thereby releasing U into the surroundings. What I don't understand is why they're not worried about the water corroding a hole in the heat exchanger and coming into contact with the sodium, causing an explosion.
You'd think they'd rather have uranium-contaminated water slowly leaking out of the reactor, rather than a large explosion scattering uranium dust all over the surrounding countryside. Can somebody clarify why the latter isn't a problem?
"It sure was strange to see something on Usenet about me that didn't involve Klingon gang rape." -- Wil Wheaton
Technology is good if it's in good hand.
The same "Good Technology", if it's in the wrong hand
Do not forget that the Japanese attacked the USA even before the gang led by Osama Bin Laden.
Do not forget that Toshiba is a Japanese company.
If Toshiba can make such a compact "nuke generator", what stops them from using the same technolgy to make the nukes that go "kaboom" and then they sell it to Osama Bin Laden ?
After all, what the Japs need is money, and what Osama Bin Laden (and his gang) have is money.
We should be careful to let Japanese having such "good technologies" because they could use whatever they have against us.
Just be forewarned.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
RTG - RadioThermal Generator.
To give cellphone-environmentalists a reason for a field day?
I'd like to see a comparison of the total energy required to build this reactor (mining and purifying the uranium rod, and all the other activities and components) added together, with nothing left out, versus the total energy it will output in its lifespan.
Obviously most of these are one-off costs, so it would also be interesting to look at the energy put into a single uranium rod and the rest of the replacement costs, after the exhaustion period. (One presumes Galena will want energy after 30 years have elapsed.)
Also cost of produced energy bearing in mind approximate cost of $20 million per unit.
Is it computer controlled? If no operator, who carries out computer maintenance or is it designed to be hands-off and fault tolerant?
you had me at #!
The French DO reprocess Nuclear Wastes at the COGEMA facility at La Hague, near Cherbourg. The facility reprocesses French, Japanese, German, Belgian, Swiss and Dutch Nuclear waste. Much of the reprocessed fuel is put back into reactors as MOX fuel. You can lear more at:
http://www.cogemalahague.com
These were also used for some remote surveillance systems and beacons.
See my journal, I write things there
Oh, please. The damage done by strip mining 50 years ago is far worse. I dare you drive down Bolt Mtn Road in WV to see the "high walls".
Mountain Top Removal mining can be done environmentally sound, if proper engineering is applied. There are safeguards to prevent what you call "moon scape"... whatever that is.
Yup, everyone yelling about nuclear waste should make a trip into ash pile of coal plant with a geiger counter and be prepared to a surprise...
It's just so insane that there are people who actively advocate something that is constantly releasing radioactive material into atmosphere along with all those nasty chemical pollutants, yet madly oppose a form where that waste can be concentrated and contained safely.
not one place is that question answered.
Nuclear(Translation for Republicans:"Nucular"), power is untennable, not manageable, too dangerous, because of the waste. it remain toxic for tens of thousands of years, and the reactors would just be terrorist magnets because of the potential for massive damage if destroyed.
remember, any pinheads thinking this is a good idea, that the only reason that we haven't had a rash of accidents is that we wisely decided that no more plants should be built.
but the ones that are built have had problems, and the waste storage facilities have leaked and cause damage that cannot be reversed in many lifetimes if ever.
repeat after me; just because we can, doesn't mean we should.
The reactor you're thinking of is a '60's design. There haven't been any new plants started in the U.S. since shortly after TMI, all of which were based on existing designs. There's been a lot of research done lately...
My Point is even more strongly proven!
please read that one sentence as:
belch a few more trillion (yes, trillion with a "t") tons of shit into the air over that same time period.
using the above number: in 30 years, coal power plants would create: 732 trillion tons of waste CO2
Maybe that number will scare the guy who's afriad of nuke power.
s'wut i sed.
Build it on bedrock.
Well that's just because you are a moron.
I see you finally lost it - Suzi.
I don't think the intent is to be more cost effective that the giant plants. I think is meant to be cost effective purely for issolated communities, where there is an increase in cost per KW. The article mentions that the cost per W is higher than someplace like anchorage would have, but because of the cost of transporting 700,000 gallons of deisel fuel to isolated parts of Alaska for this village, the price was much cheaper with this reactor. In my opinion, anything that can be placed in a few dozen isolated villages and save millions of gallons of fuel, AND money, is a good thing. The only discrepancy seems to be that Toshiba said they can build an maintain one of these reactors for $20 Million, which may throw off some of your calculations.
If the 2010 experiment is very successful, this could greatly improve areas like Antarctica's livability. Easy to pass the red tape where not many people live... yet.
This thread has a lot of valid comments which have been modded down. Somebody seems to have an agenda with respect to nuclear reactors.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.