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."
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.
...
The next generation of nuclear reactors will be much safer, the current problems are caused because the designs require heavy nuclei (Uranium, Plutonium) to be split into lighter nuclei, liberating energy. The problems occur because the decay products are often fairly unstable themselves and consequently radioactive.
Hopefully the progress on fission in lighter elements should reduce the need for this. We can for example build a reactor that induces fission in Magnesium 24 to create 2 atoms of Nitrogen 14, which, as everybody knows, is perfectly harmless. Admittedly the process isn't completely clean as ammonia can be formed, but it should cut radioactive waste from small reactors by up to 23.8%.
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
'A major nuclear disaster would be, well, like Chernobyl. Really bad in the surrounding area, Nothing at all a hundred miles away.'
Go read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's what a bad nuclear accident will be like. Chernobyl fucked with most of western europe as we were down wind.
Chernobyl was caused by _engineers_ testing removal of cores, they took all the cores out and couldn't get them back in.
I'm a believer that nuclear tech will eventually power the world. But it will take a huge technical step forward from where we are now.
What will cause more fear is idiots like you under selling the risks.
Please show me the mass cases of sterility, mutation, birth defects, etc. rampaging across that continent right now.
Ok, here you go
Oh my god! Do you know how long its been since I've seen a User Friendly reference on Slashdot? Is that horrible excuse for a comic still around?
I have a website. It's about Macs.