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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."
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
"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]
In addition, if you bury the waste in the desert, in containers that don't corrode, where's the harm?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
- Safe.
- Small.
- Nuclear Reactor.
Pick two.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.
There's actually some sound reasoning behind this. By putting such a nuclear reactor in a small village, they will be able to provide power to the entire surrounding area instead of just a fraction. If this was placed in a large city, you would have to somehow partition the power grid into small pieces. Not impossible, but not as easy as simply replacing the diesel generators at this small village.
They may also be trying to market this specifically as a solution for those small, remote sites. Imagine how much diesel fuel would be burned over the course of thirty years -- then realize that a small amount of nuclear fuel could do the same job. Yes, yes, I know that nuclear waste will last much longer than thirty years. The advantage, however, is that nuclear waste is much more manageable and, if taken care of properly, is not as damaging to the environment.
Cheers,
-a
I think placing spent fuel into subduction zones on the sea floor, so that they get recycled would be a good idea.
I drank what? -- Socrates
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.
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.
" 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... "
Well, the most efficient way to kill people in the short term would be to just shut off the power and then we won't have to worry about the long term for much longer. But I suppose a percentage of the population could probably survive without power or fuel, not sure how to best get rid of them. Maybe your contamination plan might work.
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.
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.
And never forget about incidental pollution not related to burning... like the occasional oil spill.
90% of the problem with nuclear power is the tremendous ignorance of people regarding it.
Dangerous nuclear waste hangs around for a couple of weeks. The 50,000 year stuff is all low-level stuff. People living in Colorado will get more radiation mowing their yards.
We're constantly bombarded with radiation NOW. Everywhere. In the food we eat, in the water we drink, in the air we breathe.
A major nuclear disaster would be, well, like Chernobyl. Really bad in the surrounding area, Nothing at all a hundred miles away.
But Chernobyl does bring out the biggest danger with nuclear power. idiot bureaucrats running the reactors.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
On the other hand, plutonium, also used as a reactor fuel is 100% fissionable. The reactor fuel is the same material used in bombs. Plutonium is also highly toxic. I believe the lethal dose for human consumption is something on the order of a microgram.
In a worst case scenario with a nuclear powerplant, we're talking about, what, 50,000 years until it's safe again?
Nothing like that. Heck, people still live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were subjected to far worse than what a nuclear powerplant would do. (Although it's possible that cancer incidence is still slightly higher there -- lots less than the equivalent risk from, say, smoking tobacco.)
Chernobyl was just about the worst case scenario for a nuclear plant -- and that was a really stupid design with a positive void coefficient and a graphite moderator -- which caught fire when the cooling water boiled away. Chernobyl still isn't the best place to hang out for very long, but there are other places that can be naturally more dangerous (such as downhill from a lake that occasionally bubbles toxic gases, such as the one that wiped out a village in Africa some years ago, or the valleys in geologically active regions that can collect lethal levels of sulfide gases and kill the occasional unwary hiker, and so on.)
Oh, and as for "Nuklear Power plant has a jet that flies into it.", in the US and Canada at least (and probably most other places), the result is a flattened jet and maybe a few scratches and scorch marks on the (many feet thick, reinforced, densified) concrete of the containment building.
-- Alastair
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)
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
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.
Again, RTFA. The steam loop is secondary. The primary loop is liquid sodium and located below ground. You'd have to be one fancy driver to even hit the secondary loop, considering that it's in the middle of a concrete building, and getting to the primary loop would be nigh impossible. Furthermore, security around nuclear power plants tends to be pretty tight. When's the last time you heard of any one, anywhere in the world, getting an unauthorized pickup near a reactor building, or even onto a campus?
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Shouldn't you provide attribution for that?
(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.
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..
I did better than read about Hiroshima. I talked with a lady who lived there. She was born there and lived there her entire twenty-one years. That's right, Hiroshima is a thriving port city with about half a million people living in it.
Most of what messed up Western Europe was the hysteria whipped up by the media. Please show me the mass cases of sterility, mutation, birth defects, etc. rampaging across that continent right now.
The fact is, the radioactivity in the atmosphere of Western Europe matched that of western Montanan for a few weeks after the disaster. That's it. End of story.
What causes fear is ignorant people like you who don't have a clue what you are talking about.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
> 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
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.
Do read about Hiroshima some time. Se how precisely the timing had to be constructed. Check the purity and mass and density specifications. Then try to construct a scenario in which a nuclear plant could even vaguly resemgle that.
Chernobyl is pretty much the worst that could happen, and there are plenty of safety precautions that could have prevented it.
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
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.
This Toshiba design looks a bit like the South African pebble bed modular reactor and the General Atomics GT-MHR, so the idea is not really new.
>>Go read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's
>>what a bad nuclear accident will look like.
As others have pointed out, a nuclear power disaster would be *nothing* like Hiroshima. But even if it were... you know, i went to Hiroshima a couple of years ago. It's a thriving, growing metropolis. So is Nagasaki, for that matter.
Large scale reconstruction of Hiroshima had started by 1950. That's 5 years after the blast - which yeah, is bad, but it's certainly not 50,000 years. And, good grief, that's an actual nuclear bomb. Even the worst case nuclear accident is several *orders* of magnitude less severe. Yeah, radiation is dangerous, but the irrational fear far outstrips the reality.
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
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