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Port-A-Nuke
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are designing a self-contained, tamper-resistant nuclear reactor that can be transported and installed anywhere in the world. In 'US plans portable nuclear power plants,' New Scientist writes that the sealed reactors would last 30 years and deliver between 10 and 100 megawatts. The largest version would be about 15 meters high and 3 meters wide, with a weight of about 500 tons, allowing for transportation by ships or very large trucks. The DOE thinks that this kind of nuclear reactor -- named SSTAR for 'small, sealed, transportable, autonomous reactor' -- would help to deliver nuclear energy to developing countries while significantly reducing the risk of nuclear proliferation associated with the use of nuclear power. What do you think of this idea? Is it a good one or a crazy one? Leaving a nuclear reactor in a developing country which can potentially become unstable during the 30 years of service of the reactor doesn't seem to be terribly safe.
Read more before deciding. Anyway, there will be no prototypes before 2015."
Not a bad idea. And as for becoming unstable, I'm sure it's simple enough to bury the reactor such that it becomes it's own disposal site.
I'll take the 10 megawatts model for my house. I'm sure it's no bigger than an asteroid the size of a VW.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Leaving a nuclear reactor in a developing country
I trust this means stable and reasonably secure developing country. Some of us have learned some things in the last few years. Some of us have learned a lot in the last 72 hours. :-(
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Hacking a Port-A-Nuke
Powering Laptop With a Port-A-Nuke
Building Your Own Port-A-Nuke
Now a Porn-A-Nuke?
My Mr. Fusion powering my Delorean is right around the corner...
Apparently the US finally found a use for its nuclear weapons arsenal...
PORN = PORtable Nuke reactor. Lest see if I can make it past the slashcode with that heading. Ok, so I did...
:)
I wonder if they require an armada of security on this thing (thing could mean slashcode or the Reactor
Now it will be easy to have one in your backyard.
sounds great but would be nicer when they can shrink it down in size so it could be worn on your person.
Is it just me, or does this make you think of Nuclear Reactor DRM?
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
What are the chances that I'll be able to retrofit a 2005 Hummer with one of those babies?
Developing countries, national crisis areas, there is practically no limit for something like this. I don't see it being easily abused either. Power is civilization and civilization is generally a good thing. :p
Having these units seized by a terrorist group will be a moot point, since the alien invasion is set to start on 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar.
What could possibly go wrong? /ignoring the fact that it is easier to convince greenpeace to clearcut an old growth forest than it is to get regulatory approval.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
A portable nuclear reactor? Cool! Just sling it over your back and go!
Sarcasm aside, "portable" may be stretching it for something that weight 500 metric tons. "Self-contained" would be a better term. Which would be an impressive feat if they can pull it off. Most of our existing reactors require quite a bit of supervision to ensure that they operate within expected tolerances. The safety systems should kick in if anything goes wrong, but the power going out is enough of a problem in of itself. Of course, most of our reactors are pretty old tech, so a self-contained reactor may be possible now. I think it would be kind of cool if every suburb could have one of these things.
Not sure about the whole third-world idea, though. All I can say is, it's better than letting them build their own reactors. At least with these, we'll 100% KNOW if plutonium is missing.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I knew this sounded familiar. Its even at New Scientist.
Mini nuclear reactor could power apartment blocks
With that said, I don't know how similar these two technologies are. But, smaller reactors seem to be an active area of research.
Yeah, but when you do this and start exporting them, how long before some punk from /. starts selling DIY conversion kits that lets you re-chip it into a bomb?
(JOKE. I could go off into a detailed description of nuclear weapon, so spare me the nitpicky replys why this won't work.)
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Lets hope the terrorist doesn't turn off the coolant and drive it into a building. www.geocities.com/James_Sager_PA
God spoke to me.
Do you want this thing out and about?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There is no way some sub-standard 3rd-world country could keep one of these things running. No way.
I mean, have you even been to these types of places? Even the very best places in these countries are totally underdeveloped and uncontrolled/unsafe.
If it's sealed, it's nice.
But if it gets smashed, there's a hell of a mess to clean up.
Don't you hate it when that happens? You spend all this time researching the best nuclear power plant for your needs, and finally you get one. Then a couple months later they come out with one that's twice as powerful, half the size, and half the price. And it includes this fancy "SSTAR" feature, which of course yours doesn't have.
I can tell you that US Navy subs have had few catastophic disasters, and perhaps none at all for a long time.
So I think that is a good proof of concept for portable nuke power plants.
With the right type of manufacturing technology, one can make the fissionable material very hard to get at.
I fully support much more use of nuclear power everywhere in the world.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
It sure takes away the "We're enriching uranium for clean nuclear power" argument if we can deliver one of these and say, "Here use this till you get your other industries on your feet."
(1) is it going to be safe similar to the claims of ?
(2). If at any point (including) end of life, some unsavory party can break into the reactor and steal the plutonium. Even if there are alarms, the thief would be long gone before the autorities could arrive (if it is not the government themselfs doing this).
Fight Spammers!
I remember reading a one page article in Discover magazine about a dozen years ago, describing a house (or was it a neighborhood) running on a very small nuclear reactor buried in the back yard. It looked very feasible and I am sure we could do that with today's technology.
Happiness is a belt-fed weapon.
It's a good idea if these are mature reactor designs that won't suffer from Chlorine-related chamber corrosion and cannot go sufficiently out of control to achieve melt down.
We need to resume the serious development and deployment of fossil-fuel alternatives. I just wish somebody would create a commercial Energy Amplifier reactor so we could use Thorium as an energy source and move away from enriched uranium, which is energy and environmentally costly to mine, refine, and dispose of.
...at the expense of everybody. Our planet can't sustain 6.4 billion people all consuming energy at the level of the USA.
10 to 30 years is perfect for building a small base.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I wonder how much the extended warranty will set you back....
It doesn't matter what solution you come up with, there is always going to be someone who can beat it, take advantage of it, destroy it, what-have-you. Take the copy-protection world, for instance.
The thing you have to think about is whether the potential damage is worth the potential gain. In this case, I'm casting my vote for "yes", but only if we carefully regulate where these things are going and assure that they're not being... well, stolen.
Of course, this also raises the issue of, how do we deal with nuclear waste in developing countries? We can't even deal with it in our own. That aside, I am a proponent of nuclear energy. It's the best we've got right now. (Don't even talk about environmentally friendly solutions. The only actual environment friendly solution is solar, and good luck with that one.)
Am I the only person who thought of Metal Gear? Portable and nuclear always remind me of Metal Gear.
Seems like the US should stop, ponder a bit, swallow their pride, and then maybe learn from the Chinese?
Portable? C'mon!! How about efficient, safe and non-pollutent?
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
I agree that helping developing countries is always a great idea. I was also be worried that by delivering these types on nuclear plants, we would also have to provide an extensive amount of security. If these are developing countries they themselves would not have the manpower nor the equipment that some of these terrorist groups have to defend the powerplant. If these 500 ton plants are not well guarded we can very well see a nuclear explosion occur.
This is a great idea. The awful truth is that we can build stable, non-bomb-making reactors (pebble bed reactors, for instance) and the loonie left won't even consider it. Give a pebble bed reactor to a city and if the terrorists get it they get... uh... free electricity for a few years. Or a silo full of hot graphite tennis balls that would kill someone... if you hit him with them hard enough.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
Wonder if it has a sticker on the side that says: WARNING DO NOT DISPOSE IN TRASH.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Toshiba has been doing something like that. The lifetime is about the same except the whole thing is installed underground. There was a news item how they installed one in a remote part of Alaska. They call theym micro-nukes I think. But just going out on a limb, they probably should leave these puppies in Iraq (just yet).
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
"15 meters high and 3 meters wide, with a weight of about 500 tons" - my mother in law is on the run again!
Can Washington County, OR PUD be a beta tester?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
So what countries would be on the list to receive something like this? Presumably there could be a deal worked out with Iran and North Korea, but it seems those cats are already out of the bag. What nations are expected to have burgeoning needs for power in the next few decades? It seems to me that most countries with booming populations already have the ability to meet their power requirements with their own reactors, or they completely lack a power infrastructure to begin with (i.e. much of Africa).
This is so idiotic that we are still in the mindset of NEEDING more energy! we need to be focusing on distributed energy creation using renewable especially in the developing countries. They have an opportunity that our country does not have because of our heavy need on foreign oil.. Maybe they can be smarter than us on energy.
Just add C4, Dynamite or Fuel and Fertilizer if you're really hard up.
Hard up for what, seeing paint scorched? The gov't is already pretty good at building reactors and transportation vessels that stand up to such attacks. The real threats are regrettably from the simple and common anti-armor weapons.
Are they using pebble-bed reactors? Seriously. This sounds like it's just begging for trouble. Armor and alarms won't mean much if it's the local what-passes-for-government decides it wants it's hands on (what it assumes to be) fissile material.
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
Why don't we just borrow China's design? (See yesterday's nuke discussion...)
Also, putting it on the back of a truck? I don't know about anybody else, but most of the ports near me are accessed through residential areas. I can only imagine the outcry about -nuclear reactors- passing through these neighborhoods in the dead of night. Imagine if the rig jack-knifed?
Sounds like a perfect way to distribute power generating capabilities, at a size that makes them less likely to have catastrophic failures.
What is being called safe is the cooling systems and other issues involved with a properly functioning system. What none of these are addressing is that a proplerly functioning nuclear fission plant produces wastes that need to be disposed of and those disposal costs are not being calculated in these reportedly cheap price tags.
This is a very serious accounting issue and a firm that tries to play this kind of accounting game deserves to be busted for fraud.
Now a Porn-A-Nuke?
Also known as a very dirty bomb.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
Why not let a developing country develop itself. We're the biggest, the strongest, the best. We won the race to power whoopdeefuggindoo. Why are we trying to help everyone else out with power when we have enough problems with our own powergrid. (East Coast blackout 1 year ago anyone remember that?)
Stop spending kagillions of dollars helping everyone else out and start improving upon ourselves.
Leaving a nuclear reactor in a developing country which can potentially become unstable during the 30 years of service of the reactor doesn't seem to be terribly safe.
Heh... I think you're misunderestimating the usefulness of this device. If we'd given Iraq one of these during the 70s, all this hubbub now about "we can't find the WMDs" wouldn't be a problem! Look, it's right there!
(sorry, couldn't resist the joke)
Oh wait -- did they mean the *reactor* could become unstable, or the *country* could become unstable? Either one makes sense.
This is even better than an RTG in every garage.
I'll bet the 10 megawatt model could be hooked up to an electric motor and transmission. No more gas station. Probably fast as hell too!
Looking at the octopi at work and around home it seems my next house should have powerstrips along the walls, not just outlets.
Power Strip Wainscotting! I love it! I think I'm going to redo my home office with it!
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
What about military submarines, those have been using tiny (well, relatively) reactors for decades.
Also, in the early 70s the military successfully tested portable outdoor nuclear reactors in Sundance, Wyoming, Camp Century, Greenland and McMurdo Sound in Antarctica.
I imagine a generator of this magnitude could prove somewhat useful after a disaster such as the one pending to hit southern Florida. It's like a fun giant battery!
anyone remeber Tsjernobil and what about the waste?
Besides these things won't last very long
I just finished reading about these in Wired.
This is a great solution. Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq would have benefited greatly from this. These would help us get their critical infrastructure back up and running quickly and be a huge humanitarian benefit.
Add to this a good wireless communications hub that would provide voice and data and you can quickly restores some semblence of normal life to a post-war environment.
Now if they can get a water solution such as desalination or filtering then we would in great shape.
According to the article, the only foreseeable way to keep these things sealed and running for 30 years is to make them breeder reactors, converting the wasted material into usable plutonium 239.
Isn't plutonium 239 the stuff that makes nuclear weapons work?
I mean, we're not allowed to have breeder reactors in the United States, but its perfectly ok to send one to a developing nation?
just tell me how to overclock it! :-)
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
Personally, I still think the helium-cooled pebble bed reactors would be better for long-term operation.
I can't believe that anything having to do with steam will survive 30 years without maintenance. Corrosion happens when you have water. High-pressure helium (or other unreactive noble gas) is a safer cooling solution.
Also this whole breeding plutonium thing is real proliferation risk. The article says the reactor is "tamper resistant," but I don't see why someone couldn't bore through the side of the thing and take out the fuel rods. I think a non-breeding solution would be safer.
The biggest issue with the "pebble bed" concept is the physical removal and addition of the pebbles, which is requires too many moving parts to be sealed.
Certainly you could work out some sealed solution to a long-term pebble bed only having a part of the core fissioning at any point, using some sort of neutron absorbing rods or liquid.
It doesn't matter if you choose to send it to any unstable country, the supplier will of course provide the military backup to protect it in this terrorist age.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
... only 15 meters high and 3 meters wide, with a weight of about 500 tons !!
Sounds like those 17" widescreen "portable computers " that I see in stores.
Way to go for the Ghostbusters atomic backpack!!!
G ho stbusters/CentralMinnesota/scrapbookFiles/mailedD1 7.jpgp ackwins ton.jpg
http://community-2.webtv.net/Central_Minnesota_
http://www.cyberturf.com/ghostbusters/back
The Stephen King Dark Tower series... "North Central Positronics Ltd. in association with LaMERK Industries Presents...Portable Nuclear Reactor (Many Other Functions)"
Jesus, DOE/DOD can't make up their mind.
Okay, so nobody wants proliferation of nukes. Okay, that's fine. But if someone really wants a nuke, do you think that they will buy this and crack it open? Hell no! They'll roll their own. And there won't have been any point to this port-a-reactor that generates a pittiance of energy (100MW is about enough to cover a few small cities, but not much else). Oh yeah, and if they do try to crack it open, I guarantee you the US will have an excuse to invade, but that's a side note.
When Atomic energy was discovered the world was dazzled by the thought of cheap(?) and clean(?) energy. After all of these years, we are actually in the process of making it possible. I think this is an excellent idea! That is, unless someone (read: politician) screws it up!
"Logic merely enables one to be wrong with authority." - Dr. Who
How much waste "spent fuel" does one of these reactors generate per watt? The theoretical E=mc^2 of 1 gram is 1E14, but how many grams of radioactive waste matter are actually output after a MW has been pumped over the AC transmission wires?
--
make install -not war
Too bad this story was reported on earlier.... though the placement of the reactor has changed slightly....
How small can they make it? Can they make one small enough to power a laptop? In fact, how much radioactive material would you need to power the average laptop?
Get your own free personal location tracker
If 500 tons is "portable", then we already have these portable nuclear reactors. They're called nuclear submarines.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
These type of reactors were discussed in the latest edition of Wired.
This is not a novel idea. A nuclear-powered air carrier can provide a full electricity support for a middle size town. And it can be ported in most of place in the world.
Bah, I was all prepared to make a "Would you like to know more?" joke too.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
will be to supply power to mobile infantry (or UN peace keepers in a better world), reducing one factor in the "supply-line" equation.
Nuclear-powered ships can do this in port-cities.
Don't most reactors keep their waste on-site because the g00berment is still fucking around with waste site proposals? If there's no method of disposal yet, then it's pretty hard to include it in the price. Not to mention the actual disposal won't happen for 30 years - technology and costs can change quite a bit in that time.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
As long as the reactor is tamper-proof, I am all for the concept. This could ensure that developing countries or remote locations do not need a large coal or natural gas power planet especially when these resources are scarce.
One more thought, ok you can come out with a "safer" or more efficient model then basically pop-out the old reactor from the location and plug in the new one. Of course this wouldn't be as easy as that, but with the ability to move or replace the reactor you give yourself a great deal of flexibility. Done correctly I think this is the kind of idea that could solve a great deal of problems today as they concern energy.
Won't a mini-reactor have mini-waste. Is a small amount of waste manageable?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
If it's so portable, wouldn't you think that in a developing society, security would NOT be the #1 priority that this unit could be stolen?
Any fly by night operation could just pick it up and disappear. Presto, the by products of this unit could produce some pretty nasty results if put in the proper hands.
My friend who has a post-doc in physics says he can put together a nuke easily, but obtaining the materials to do so would be the difficult part. This whole portable nuke facility seems to solve that dilema.
Live forever, or die trying.
I keep wondering if anyone is working on the Accelerator driven Subcritical reactor. I mean it would be darn cool just to be able to have a nuclear fuel that couldn't sustain a reaction on its own (needs particle accelerator to make reaction work), uses a fuel that could not be used to make weaponry (Thorium I think), and doesn't leave long-life nasty waste to dispose of.
I guess for nuclear technology in the US, that profit motives are stronger than any others.
I have an oxyacetelyne blow torch in my garage that can cut through steel armor plating inches thick in a matter of minutes. How can you call any metal container "tamper proof" when such tools are available in the poorest village in Inner Mongolia?
Why don't they just put a bicycle lock on it with a four number combo so you have to click it back and forth to get it open. That will probably be equally secure in the field.
Oh, but wait, they're going to put a satellite linked web cam there so they'll have pictures of the guys who did it. There ya go. That'll work.
Put pics of the Bangladeshi nuke thieves on America's Most Wanted. That'll get em. They'll be so scared they'll just turn themselves in.
I wonder if such a design will simplify the powerplants of U.S. warships. A thirty year powerplant lifespan seems reasonable. Do many U.S. warships spend more than 30 years in US Navy service? Yes powerplants can be replaced, but perhaps we will be able to get some sort of bonus out of not having to do so.
...
Of course there has always been that nagging SDI question of how will we power those airborne (Boeing 747?) lasers for knocking down incoming balistic missiles. Maybe this is the answer.
Now if we can shrink the reactor so that it could fit on a shark
Would you prefer they try to build their own? Or just remain third world shitholes with no power grid? I'm sure they would design it with multiple safeguards (it will be 11 years before they even plan on having a prototype done so don't tell me our current technology doesn't allow that).
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
The self centered thinking of the gov delayed such efforts until things got out of hand. Although it is a step in the right direction, it is too late to limit the proliferation of n*clear stuff. It may still be good for overseeas forces and/or "colonies".
I wonder how many active systems are in this module, such as cooling, moderation, turbine, etc. What happens when a part breaks? Maybe it's built very redundantly so breakage only decreases the capacity.
Does the unit make electricity or just steam? Does it contain any computers? What are the odds of needing a software upgrade sometime in the next 30 years? If there's a path for software updates, could someone write a malicious control software that causes a meltdown or something?
If the US is smart, they'll incorporate some kind of cryptographic leash into this thing. It could require monthly "operating licenses" from the US to continue functioning.
I didn't understand how the unit protects against extraction of plutonium. The article mentions a "thicket of alarms", but what happens when the alarms go off? You have to assume the local government wants to extract the plutonium. Maybe a shaped charge blows the reactor core to smithereens if the housing is penetrated. That would frustrate (or rather kill) would-be bomb makers, but create an environmental disaster around the reactor.
there will be no prototypes before 2015.
What's new about this? I guess the novelty is that it's not a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor. South Africa (yup. Follow the link.), among others will have portable nuclear power plants before that, so it's not exactly that the whole concept is new.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Seriously though, the sliding-mirror reflector design sounds like a very good step for reliability. Much more so than the sliding graphite rod designs.
Yeah, sure. It's not a problem at all. In fact, you'll probably hardly notice it. Let's put it at your house. It's just a little bit after all. Nobody else will notice when you get leukemia in a few weeks. Well, maybe your neighbors after scruffy shits out his radiation poisoned intestines on the patio. But hey, it's not a big deal right. I mean it's just a little bit. Take one for the team.
Well, I for one am a bit sceptical about the 30 year claim. Presumably such a device would need some kind of software. Software typically likes to reside on an operating system. Whilst many versions of *nix are quite stable, I doubt even they could last 30 years. Worse yet, what if they used a Micro$oft product? I think 30 years without a blue screen of death is too much to ask for. Of course, under such a scenario, the blue screen might well spell death for those around ;)
It's not the CRT, look at your freaking PSU, how many watts is that sucker? Why do you need 1 fan for CPU, 1 fan for GPU, 1 fan PSU and possibly a few more to move more air through to move air through the box. Heck, mine might as well say HOOVER on the front.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yeah, nobody but you should have hot water, or a safe drinking supply. Those darn third world people should just get used to not using any energy.
You're an ass.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Is that a "no"?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Would you accept 'luggable'?
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Notice they said "tamper-resistant" not "tamper-proof".This is just like in armor manufacturing, where there is no such thing as a "bulletproof" vest or a "bulletproof" door; there are bullet resistant things, but nothing can be entirely "proofed" from bullets or tampering.
If a seemingly "unupgradable" and unassuming iMac can be overclocked, then the cask can be broken.
If a supposedly "rock-solid" DRM can be defeated by depressing the shift key, then the alarms can be neutralized.
If the entire east coast of North America's power can be shut off by a single local power outage, then the coolant can be blocked.
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
Purvayor of WMDs and now nuclear power stations. Your not allowed to make your own but we'll sell you these instead! Sounds like they are shutting down the competition and then selling them whatever they've just stopped them from making. So Iran and North Korea are looking to be the US's first customers.
The whole thing sounds like a terrorist honey-net project: Get yer nukes, get yer nukes right here. Step right up and get yer nukes.
[Meanwhile, super secret Homeland Security agents prepare to capture and/or take pictures of those stepping right up.]
There ya go. Hey, you ought to apply at Price-Waterhouse. You've got a talent for this kind of thing.
Imagine how much good these could do for developing countries. Nuclear power is one of the cleanest most efficient sources of engergy we have. Its just gotten a black eye so to speak because of disasters in the past due to neglect and improper design. Technology has come a long way, and I think we should weigh the benefits and potential consequences. Constantly blowing whistles by activists who don't know the technology involved on technology which could provide MASSIVE global benefit is clearly not a good thing. The risks with nuclear enegery in the past have almost been completly negated due to technology advancements (2015 is a long ways away!).
In some developing countries this could save many many thousands of lives and improve the quality of living many times over what it is now. Lets stop complaining about things we don't understand and instead promote technology moving in the direction of safe, reliable enegery for everyone.
Yet the plants we do have, 103 of them in 31 states, produce 20% of our electricity requirements.
At Chernobyl, in the worst possible nuclear accident, in the worst possible place, with the worst possible safegauards, staffing, and reaction to the crisis:
31 people died (most of them heroically) on site at the time of the accident
after all this time, only 10 deaths from thyroid cancer can be attributed to this accident.
We should be producing these port-a-nukes and putting them 2500 feet underground with wires sticking out every 500sq miles in this country!
Or we could wait till gas hits 5 dollars per gallon like in Europe.
I bet if we had over 100% electrical capacity covered by non-oil, non-coal fired power plants, all of our lives would be better.
And our Middle East foreign policy would be greatly improved if they didn't have anything we wanted. Things aren't going well at the negotiating table? Screw house of Saud and walk away.
In that context, what Middle Eastern country would want to be a "state sponsor of terroism."
We shouldn't be giving this stuff away to countries until all of our needs are met here. At best, they will only hate us slightly less for patronizing them.
Are we somehow obligated to prop up their governmental "bad ideas" while we fail to deal with our own? Why, cause we have money? Tell Bill Gates that he is required to buy lemonade from my kid because, relative to him, my family is "disadvantged." AND he should do it till he is poor and I am not.
Mod me troll, I am still right.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
That they will not be using a standard rod and hot water setup for this thing. This seems like the ideal position in which to use a pebble bed reactor, perhaps like the modular ones china is developing, as discussed in the latest wired.
I think the pebble bed model wpould be safer, and lend itself less to the recycling of spent fuel rods into weapons grade isotopes, since the actual radioactive material is sealed inside a ball of some rediculosly hard metal i cant think of off the top of my head.
Look out honey cause I'm usin' technology
Ain't got time to make no apologies
Nobody is going to fly a plane into a 100 megawatt nuclear reactor in Etheopia. If you're going to go through the trouble of getting yourself a plane, there are much more attractive targets.
Same goes for the country becoming unstable - we could blow the reactor up with a cruise missle a lot quicker than anyone could move the damned 500 ton thing. Not to mention, new tech reactors dn't have fuel which is very good for reprocessing anyway.
paintball
yeah, and that is why we should be using Thorium based Nuclear reactors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_amplifier
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
"...better than letting them" What arrogance. Why, pray tell, should the United States and the current nuclear club be the only countries to develop nuclear power? Or - yes - even nuclear weapons. Who made the United States the ruler of world affairs?
You want to stop nuclear proliferation? How about starting with the United States, Israel, England, France, India...
Actually, it's an "I'm an idiot, pay no attention to me."
Close, though.
I write in my journal
a portable mega-watt battery! cool! who cares ... you one day find your harddisk full ... so the ... oh well ...and again ... tada, blackouts ... ... back to living in a cave and going ... not sure you're getting my ... oh! i forgot i'm talking to ... oops. forget i said something.
how it works!
suppose it's like pr0n, first you think it's bad and
not ethical, but after like 5 years of constant
bomardment
to the brime with pr0n. and you start wonder how you
got here. i suppose we can understand how the brain
works, but we can't really override it
future depends on nukes
locking back in a few hundred years, how did we
get all this short lived junk anyway?
me points to dessert with a few porta-nukes
lying around. the roads
are falling apart, there's no fresh water, since
the 30 years of battery usage are over. i have
no working toilet and
again
fishing with my bone angle. i hope evelyne found
some wild berries
drift, so i'll make it short. the words prolly:
SUSTAINABLE.
built and integrate for SUSTAINABLITY not short
term profit
americans
As in https://depot.info.apple.com/batteryexchange/index .html :
U.S. Department of Energy is voluntarily recalling certain self-contained, tamper-resistant nuclear batteries that were sold worldwide from January 2015 through August 2025 for use developing countries. These batteries were manufactured by LG Chem, Ltd. of South Korea.
The affected batteries could overheat, posing a fire and nuclear hazard. U.S. Department of Energy received four reports of these batteries overheating. No injuries have been reported. U.S. Department of Energy urges you to stop using your battery and to order a replacement battery immediately. If you continue to use your battery, do not leave it unattended and check for signs of overheating.
A battery overheating has also been reported in Liberia, spreading a slightly irradiated pink cloud. French technologies, already in action during the Tchernobyl cloud, stopped the cloud at the border of Côte d'Ivoire. Analysis made on location revealed that no nuclear contamination took place. Your Governement wishes you a happy and joyful week-end.
Good thing we'll have killed ourselves off by then, or else I'd be really concerned.
The biggest fear of the developed world is that someone will explode a 'dirty bomb' in one of their cities.
These are bombs that disperse radioactive material into the local environment. This material makes the area unfit for habitation because the radioactive material will cause cancer and have other bad long-term health effects. The cost of cleaning up the area (even if that were possible) would be so prohibitively expensive that the location when the bomb is exploded is abandoned and quarantined.
Now someone comes up with the idea that shipping a bunch of ten-meter-high boxes filled with dangerous (to health) nuclear material just to generate electricity would be a good idea.
This is an excellent example of engineers coming up with a solution that would work well in the lab or in 'a perfect world' (or outer space) but would be completely insane to actually implement in the real-world that is filled with fanatics and crazies.
This represents a win-win situation for the US and a lose-lose proposition for the developping world.
The US profits. Most likely US corporations will benefit when the government forces a developping country to buy these things, under a so-called trade agreement. This serves both interests. After all, the US government mainly is a shill for american business interests.
The developping country will always be able to be coerced into these deals. Why? Because they dont have nuclear weapons. THe US can use the carrot-stick approach. By these or else we will lump you with the so called axis-of-evil.
Be pretty hard to generate electricity without steam. Whether the reactor is a pebble-bed helium-moderated design or a "traditional" pressurized water-moderated design, the only purpose of a nuclear reactor is to generate heat, heating water to produce steam, which then turns a turbine to generate electricity. Either design you mention requires steam.
Perhaps your confused about how the primary loop-the water that comes into contact with the fuel elements-works. That water is under pressure, and does not turn into steam. There is a secondary loop, which passes through a heat exchanger with the primary loop, and it is this secondary loop that is converted to steam to turn the turbine. The secondary loop is not radioactive.
Pebble-bed reactors are promising because they have a potential to solve a lot of the problems that a PWR reactor has. But both reactors require steam.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
that you'll need one of these to power Nvidia's next video card. :)
Looks like third-world nations can finally take a hit off our power production technology. I knew this was a nation of dope peddlers, but now energy peddling?
Next we will see a 500-ton portable laptop. Or a portable 50" CRT monitor. Yeah, you can move it, but movability does not imply portability.
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
"The developers claim that no one would be able to remove the fissile material from the reactor because its core would be inside a tamper-proof cask protected by a thicket of alarms" I guess someone finally been able to unveile the core of Longhorn.
Who would trust them after their highly manipulated article about E.T. radio-signals from space ?
This is excatly what I need for when I buy my missile silo!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Will the reactors have remote detonation capability in case these third worlders someday disagree with our foreign policy?
Not a suggestion. Just paranoia.
If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it? ~ Albert Einstein
I remember reading an article discussing how Russia had made all these stand-alone mini-reactors and spread them throughout the wilderness of Russia.
If I recall right, the intention was to provide light (from a shoreline) for ships or to provide heat to stranded sailors in the wilderness, or something similar.
Unfortunately, the article I read this in was an article looking at how terrorists were/are able to readily find radioactive material throughout the world, but particularly in Russia.
These things were spread around during the cold war, and then forgot about after the fall of communism. Russia is now playing a "catch-up" game of having to locate and retrieve all these little powerplants, and at the time of this article, they were unable to locate several of them, and of the ones they'd found, several were missing the "vital pieces".
Similarly, of the ones that they had found, some had been tampered with, some had simply been broken open, probably by nature (with the contents located generally near the remains), and some were a little scarier: Some had been found by unsuspecting people in the area (local residents, hunters, etc), and these people of course became very ill, and in many cases passed away as a result of finding a cracked open, and mysterious case.
One that sticks with me was a guy talking about how he had found this unusual rod laying on the ground, with all the snow around it melted. He took it home to his family as an oddity...
Long story short, I think nuclear power is safe, when handled correctly, and safety is the #1 priority. I have problems believing that portable nuclear devices are held to the same high standards for safety. You simply can't guarantee that a device that's left alone, will always be left alone.
Clearly, one of the purposes of this development effort is to provide a reply to claims from countries like North Korea, which justify nuclear power development on energy needs, but ending up with weapons grade materials to spare (and share). A rig like this, even on the small end, would double the PRK's power output. I can just see the dialog at the UN: "Look, if you're serious about your economic development, we'll give you 10 Port-A-Nukes to ramp up. You don't really need that breeder reactor..."
Nrd world country means Nrd country on complex levels, not only on economic and technology.
Placing nuclear power to societies which have no democratic state, powerful army, police, emergency services, sophisticated and elaborated decision mechanism, general matching technological infrustructure, matching culture in a broad sense - just to name a few - is a stupid fuck idea.
History has proved repeatedly that you can't fast forward just a small segment of a society or region, while leaving everything else untouched, without dire consequences
USA and other developed countries first would have to demonstrate that they can help Nrd nations to take care of their water, food supply, agriculture, more sophisticated and more democratic societies, state and political structures before thinking of exporting nuclear technology into those regions.
Regardless of how "small", "compact", "portable", "safe" it is.
"It's not the CRT, look at your freaking PSU, how many watts is that sucker?"
Let's not. Just because it says 500 watts on the label doesn't mean it uses that much. You can underclock your CPU, or go with a multiprocessor low-power solution as mentioned before on Slashdot.
They are for the massive fleet of BBD's (Big Black Deltas) the Dod is building. Complete with directed energy weapons and and electro-kinetic drives... They have to have them to fight the aliens that are coming, just ask Budda.
PS don't forget about the black helicopters...
Sorry I was all caught up consipircy theory...
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
I wonder if they're picking up on this. Battery-sized nuclear reactors to power your discman!!!
There is a HUGE crane in Jacksonville FL, that, if memory serves me, was erected because someone was planning in building portable floating nuclear reactors. Things fell through as nuclear fell out of favor, but who knows, this plan may also come back full circle.
Eschew Obfuscation
Considering New Scientist's recent track record of poor reporting skills, I'm cautious at best about the actual feasibility and practicality of such a device.
Perhaps I'm showing my unorthidox leftist leanings here but I really don't think of this as a political issue. I think of it as an environmental issue.
The US has not properly disposed of one ounce of high level nuclear reactor waste ever. We are storing it until a safe disposal facility is built. There are a lot of politics surrounding that with Nevada being the loser. Yucca mountain is really far from complete and may never be finished if the opponents win when they have their day in court.
If the US can not properly dispose of the waste, how can we expect a developing nation to do so?
The US has had Three Mile Island and Russia has had Chernobyl. Both of these countries have significant resources to bring to bear against the problem but have suffered the consiquences of accidents. How could Hati, Trinidad, or some other less sophisticated, resource poor nation deal? The answer is pretty obvious. If something goes wrong, they couldn't. And we probably couldn't get there in time.
Chernobyl was designed to be "accident proof" if anything went wrong, the pile would quench itself.
Three Mile Island was designed with multiple redundant safety systems and was manned by skilled engineers around the clock.
Can we really believe that these machines are so well engineered that they can withstand thirty years of use without an accident?
Anyway, there will be no prototypes before 2015 Cool, just like Duke Nukem!
Now if we can perfect the Mobile Construction Vehicle, GDI forces can eliminate Nod once and for all and secure their Tiberium fields.
What none of these are addressing is that a proplerly functioning nuclear fission plant produces wastes that need to be disposed of and those disposal costs are not being calculated in these reportedly cheap price tags.
Traditional power generation ignores the costs of waste management as well. Coal is very cheap, until you think of all the CO2 and other contaminants created when we burn it. Except cleaning up after fossil fuels is much harder than cleaning up nuclear, because the waste is scattered troughout our atmosphere. I opine that the cost of storing nuclear waste is smaller than the cost of global warming. In other words, nuclear is still cheap compared to fossil fuels, even when you factor in waste management.
They only have a concept, with "hopes" for a prototype by 2015.
WTF? They also don't mention price for this 500-ton "portable" device. Will they count the cost of development and disposal, not to mention deployment of such a beast?
By 2015, wind energy will likely be around USD$0.02-0.03/kWh; the odds of nuclear catching up are practically nil.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Looks like the government has been watching Stargate SG-1!!!
(except we don't have naquada yet, so we're forced to use nuclear until we figure out how to use the stargate)
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Why, pray tell, should the United States and the current nuclear club be the only countries to develop nuclear power?
How about because most of the nations outside of the club have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The US through the UN is only trying to hold them to what they have agreed too. If a country wants to withdraw from the treaty, they can. Look at North Korea. But they also become a pariah nation, and are subject to attack by nations whose security is threatened. Iran is headed down the same road. It is not fair or egalitarian for the countries without nukes. But it is stable.
an ill wind that blows no good
0. Place a few of these puppies on a specially designed naval vessel. 1. Steam to developing country. 2. Leave the reactors on board along with nuclear techs and a security detail [say the US Marines :)].
3. Connect reactors to grid.
4. Flip the switch.
5. In the event of a serious emergency the ship can steam away.
Everything stays on board under our control and remains fully contained.
Ideally we would setup shop in a deserted area and setup a 10+nm security perimeter.
In countries that bury their dead, just bury the whole self contained plant under a cemetary. Mark with appropriate long lived multi-lingual stone marker (when the writings eroded the ex-nuke is safe). Bury it over 100 feet down and terrorists won't have an easy time reaching it without lots of lead time to intervene. Not to mention when the lights go out someone will notice anyway.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
hang on there, namecaller.
a full blown, nuclear reactor that powers a large fraction of a state (the one i'm thinking of is in south west iowa) produces only 3-5 55gal drums of waste PER YEAR.
that's VERY little. I CRAP about that much per year.
if you think that a small 10 megawatt reactor will produce enough waste to worry about even over the course of 30 years, i think you're mistaken. Besides, if its that encapsulated, if it was in need of waste removal, it would probably be something as simple as cartridge swap.
so, before you call someone an idiot, perhaps you should talk to someone that has actually worked at a nuclear plant and knows how much waste is produced.
Damn, what is it made of? Oh wait, 15 meters = 49 feet high. Silly me (curse you metric system, you made a fool of me again!)
True, but even if the costs are 30 years down the line, and not completely known, they should be accounted for. I assume they will still be significant.
If you think otherwise, I will sign with your self/business/country a contract which will make you rich... I will give you 1 thousand dollars per year during the next 30 years, and after that... oh... just the nuclear waste of the reactor. Should be no problem, right?
Let's create a VERY LARGE fusion reactor to provide energy, not just for developing countries, but for all countries. For safety it should be outside the Earth's atmosphere, a hundred million miles away perhaps. It would be large enough that it's energy would still reach the planet and it would be self-sustaining for BILLIONS of years. It could be called the SUN although trademark issues with Sun Microsystems would need to be negotiated.
I think these are interesting problems.
We (USA) don't even have a proper, standardized way to recycle our heavy metal batteries, so at least here I think there is uneven development in energy concerns. The DOE should get off its neutral ass and start defining an infrastructure if they want to do that.
Miniaturization (safe!) would be a provocative field of research as well.
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
"How much energy used to manufacture these flourescent bulbs"
Not much more than incadescents. Fluorescents have been produced almost as long as incadescents. I think we've gotten good at it.
"the fixtures to use them and to replace existing fixtures?"
A lot can use the same fixtures as an incadescent. And as for replacement? You can wait till the regular bulb burns out and replace it with an incadescent.
"How much additional waste is generated?"
No more so than what regular bulbs (remember incandescents aren't just what you have in your home) generate.
"How much energy to retool factories to produce more of one and less of the other?"
You don't have to retool anything. Unless you want too. Besides this argument was already tried in the switchover to cars, from the horse and buggy. Were you protesting switchover waste then?
"It is the main short coming of "it's so simple" environmental/conservation arguments that they often ignore the costs which are less obvious."
It's a main shortcoming of those who favour the "status quo" to do little or no research before formulating their arguments, and to bring up a lot of red herrings.
Wired had a much better article a few days back on China's nuclear strategy. Personally, it looks a whole lot better and WAAAAAAY safer then the American fuel rod based designs. Meltdowns are not a problem, no water contamination and it may even help generate hydrogen for fuel purposes.
Got a headache? Try two of these!
Twirlip?
Pot. Kettle. Black.
-1: Not HTML, but coulda been
-1: Needlessly Verbose
What an incredibly bad idea. Take the thing that needs the most security, engineering expertise, technical expertise, and provides the most economic benefit *ever* and send it out of our country. Next thing you know we'll have the "US Department of Shipping high-tech workers to India". Build them here! Employ us! Sell them power.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
In teh 50's, the militray wanted to build a portable nuke plant that could be used as a power supply for remote bases. They built a prototype, SL-1, in the Idaho desert. Unfortunately, an operator pulled a rod to fast and exceeded a limit (they were pulled by hand from the reactor top), causing a rather nasty accident. We rode by the site in our yellow buses on the way to the Navy prototypes. The government has a great flick on teh accidnet, BTW.
Not a bad idea, though...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Putting these nukes into countries without the technical or industrial infrastructure to support them will be a disaster. Look at how software quality has nosedived since anyone can fool a manager or customer into thinking they're a "programmer" by copy/pasting some HTML or scripts. Not only will these installations be unsafe grafted into an incompatible infrastructure, their host countries will become more dependent on foreign corporations that supply them. That's a recipe for keeping these countries in the "developing" (poor) category, never arriving in "developed" stability.
--
make install -not war
I got caught by this one myself - my wife nearly killed me when all the "expensive" light bulbs I bought died after 2 months... I live in downtown Chicago, so I can't imagine it's power fluctuations.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Of course people would not crack open a reactor if it will harm them or fly a plane into a building if they will be killed too.
Fight Spammers!
What China is doing is a far more intelligent way to go about this. Why does the US seems to be getting behind and China to be getting ahead in some areas like this?? Article: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.htm l
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
How about my DeLorean?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Well he was calling me an idiot for not knowing that the parent post was supposed to be funny before going over the top about how bad it would be. Okay, I'm an idiot. No news there.
But your post doesn't even fit this thread. He was making fun of me for not getting it that the other post was being sarcastic. So, we're all apparently on the same side on the nuclear waste is bad theme just some of us are not as quick witted as others. Now that the parent post is modded +3 funny. I guess I get it. It seems a bit subtle, but I guess it's there.
And then you come along talking about your toilet habits and how it's safe to drink nuclear waste and all this.
Are you fucking insane dude? Yeah so what you worked in a nuclear power plant and you think 150 gallons is not a large quantity of waste. That's your opinion and it sounds rather uninformed. The fact that you claim to have been in a nuclear power plant on the payroll doesn't seem to refute that very well. Were you a taste tester for the waste? If you were and you're still healthy then maybe you know something we don't, otherwise it's hard to see the connection.
OK so waste is relative. Is that really a good excuse not to conserve? "Oh yeah! I'm not going to conserve because the smelting plant down the street is so wasteful"
"Not only that, it's stupid really to critize homes for using the 'wrong type' of light bulbs when heat wastage is a far more pressing concern. In the UK the government will subsidise you to get cavity wall insulation, which has ment a huge increase in the number of homes getting it done and making residental gas usage drop by over 15%."
I wasn't aware that conservation ment "do one thing" ala magic bullet. Conservation is a lot of things, big and little which in the end amounts to a big solution.
"Not only that, I really can't stand fluorescent bulbs. All the ones I have take around 5 minutes to put out full power output and even when it does it seems very weak compared to a incandescent light bulb. YMMV."
Get some small halogens.
"I don't know where you got your figures from, because my 19" CRT uses 110W, but a combarable (ie: running @ 1600x1200) LCD would use more than 60W. Not a massive saving and I certainly expected more in terms of lower power consumption."
You do realize that if you let one of your faucets drip for a year it's going to add up big time?
Multiply that across your neighborhood. Or the entire city. How about the entire planet?
I realize that people have trouble recognizing small trends, but they do add up over time.
This isn't a reply to the parent, but to most of the comments so far...
For the love of god! Why is it that the second anything has the possibility of being shipped outside of North America and Europe it will automatically fall into the terrorists hands.
For 9/11 they stole American planes in America! if they are going to do something of that scale again, you can pretty much bet your ass they will steal/use something that is already in America.
In Twirlip's defense, I read his post as a resposne to the "Let's put it at your house" comment. In other words, that poster was an idiot for making a stupid argument.
This bugs me, too, so I've gone so as to block the following regular expression in my ad-blocker: radio\.weblogs\.com\/0105910 . Voila, no more links to Roland's blog -- the "read more" link in today's dupe enticed me to click on it and immediately want to bash my head on the desk, but now it will be out of sight, out of mind and Roland will not get even what scant ad revenue slips by my ad-blocker itself...
(I use PithHelmet in Safari, but any ad-blocker that handles regex strings should be able to block the above.)
10 megawatts is 13,410.2209 horsepower. 1 million pounds. 0.0134 hp per lbs.
.55 hp per lbs.
The 250hp engine in my truck weighs about 450lbs. Thats 186,425 watts, or
I'm not sure why the post was moderated as Interesting, since I assume it was a joke, but a lot of people don't realize a modern car engine puts out a hundred or more kilowatts peak.
lol
This seems to be a reaction to the power problem in Iraq, which we still haven't been able to resolve after a year. Even Baghdad still only has power for part of the day; there is widespread disbelief in Iraq that the most technological power in the world can't fix the power grid, and that we are neglicting it with malicious intent, or at best as an insult of disinterest. One more thing to make Iraqi's mad. Reconstruction is a hot funding buzzword these days.
Also, remember that projects like this serve an "Expert Warehousing" function, which government types take seriously (and for good reason). How much work is there today for nuclear reactor design engineers in the US? Not much. Remember, we haven't built a civilian or large scale nuclear plant for 30 years. Is the current aging brood of experienced nuclear engineers about to retire? You bet.
So we need projects like this if we want to provide a forum to pass on our national expertise in nuclear engineering to a new generation. Sure there are military reactors on subs and carriers, but they are tiny compared to civilian power plants we were building in the 60s.
PS - As for the Iraqi power grid, the fact is that it was not providing enough power BEFORE our invasion...Saddam just blacked out other parts of the country to keep Baghdad powered 24 hours a day.
Braddock Gaskill
Who else read this and thought it was another PostNuke- or PHPNuke-type application? C'mon, admit it!
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Didn't the Army try doing this back in the 50's out in Idaho? I think there's even an old black and white movie about what happened. As I remember it they got in a bit of a mess.
The nuclear "battery" - fully contained, sealed and autonomous. Its designed for remote areas.
The vessel is buried in the ground (thus explosives, car bombs wont touch it), and the nuclear material is sealed under a massive cap that would require very large heavy equipment and alot of time to get at.
-
That whizzing noise was the point flying right past you.
"I'm sure someone will come along and provide more details and insult me in a few moments."
Oh! Oh! Can I insult you? Just this once? Honest, I'll be brutal and everything. Pleease?
See, you set it up like a giant lite-stick.
You put a bunch of pebbles on either side, and just "crack" the reactor to release them into the appropriate place. And hey, if something goes wrong, at least everything around it will start glowing.
That green slime had it coming.
Seriously, when are the editors going to wake up and stop letting this guy use /. as his personal marketing service. He's submitted almost 180 stories since December 2002, every one linking to his "technology blog" where he takes in money from the Ad impressions (I'm not linking to it for obvious reasons). Is he hoping to submit so many stories that he'll get a full time job? Maybe he want's to replace Jon Katz:) I don't mind a poster occationally pluggin their own site but not every couple days and don't try to sneak in your site at the end as some brilliant discussion that is crutial to read (without even specifically mentioning it's your site).
I stole this Sig
Its a slow fission system that uses a neutron reflecting shield that gradually (over 30 years) descends via gravity over the material. The neutrons bounce back into the fissile material thus creating fission. The shield descends at the rate it takes to consume the fuel (a long time)
The benefit of this is if for some reason the shield stops moving, the worse that would happen is fission would cease entirely at some point, rather than run away.
Or so my understanding goes.
-
Ding ding ding. We have a winner.
I write in my journal
Weren't there tiny (~softball sized) nuclear reactors in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series? People used them to power sheilds and guns and stuff. Now THAT'S portable, and seemed acceptable.
Maybe in another 100 years. But it's inevitable, and that will be freakin cool.
J
You want rid of the spent fuel? Grind it up fine, mix it with coal, and it will blend in with the ash from a coal-fired power plant. Per megawatt-hour, coal plants put more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear plants produce.
~Idarubicin
If it's portable, i think you should install:
lojack
I'll pre-emptively reply to this one. Smart people should not worry about nuclear waste. Unlike the waste from burning coal, wood, oil, and natural gass, nuclear waste isn't spread out in the atmosphere, it's stored in nice safe little containers and it has a neet trick: nuclear waste dissapears by itself over time. People look at how long it takes to degrade and worry about keeping it contained for that long. Wake up! How long does it take for lead to degrade? How about mercury? How long do you have to wait before it's not dangerous? Are you sure you can keep it safely contained in your lungs until that happens! Your environment is being poisoned today. People are dying today! Birth defects and neurological disorders are happening today and they are't from nuclear power, the power generation methods we have used instead.
Nuclear power can kill, but if you look at it carefully, it doesn't. Nuclear waste is not nearly as hard to deal with as somehting like mecury spewed out into the air.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
How are they going to cool the reactors?
Leaving a nuclear reactor in a developing country which can potentially become unstable during the 30 years of service of the reactor doesn't seem to be terribly safe.
So is watching these 3rd World mongoloids try to do it own their own.
Moron.
As I understand it, Chernobyl wasn't and entirely random freak meltdown. The plant technicians were running a rather 'spur of the moment' test that hadn't been discussed with many other collegues, in which they wanted to determine whether the plant would shut itself off if they turned off the emergency cooling system and shut down all external power to the reactor.
Chernobyl did have systems that were pretty much accident-proof. Only problem is that somebody thought it'd be cool to deliberately turn them off.
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
I don't about you but I wouldn't want to be that guy standing beside it!
Yeah, that's safe! Let's not only ship a 100 ton breeder reactor to third world nations, let's also cool it with a highly toxic metal!
Experience constant strobe/bad electronic smells.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
"While I agree that most applications don't [b]need[/b] 1 GHz processors, the simple fact is that there is often just one [i]critical[/i] application (which varies from user to user) that does need the extra power. Video editing, 3D graphics rendering, CAD, and something as simple as most games will make any shopper seek the most powerful system they can afford."
So what does that do to our Linux and lightweight (only ever use small number of applications) computers for grandma argument? Either we all will have a need for it, and the argument's dead. Or only a minority will and the argument has some life.
Yeah right, tamper resistant? And I'm sure they'll call the tamper protection technology NRM. I can see it now. Some developing country "cracks" the safety measures and starts sharing the materials to terrorists. Nuclear sharing programs, wouldn't THOSE just be nifty?
It's insane to create more reactors when we haven't conclusively figured out what to do with the waste. Reactor selling is extremely lucrative if the millenia of waste containment isn't factored in. Let our mutated progeny pay for it, I guess.
The sacred and the propane
When I learned about the reactors aboard submarines, how they're built and how they're run my next thought was that we should make civilian power plants the same way. I'm not exactly a cheerleader for the Navy but, from what I've seen, I do think that they are a good example of how to run a nuclear power program.
Small, standardized, modular, portable, self-contained plants that could be added easily to a power grid, refueled at one central location and disposed of in its own container seem to be the most obvious sway to proceed with nuclear energy. Yes, the front end cost may be higher but in the long run, its a better way to go.
"In a hierarchy every employee will rise to his level of incompetence". The Peter Principle
i was under the impression that slashdot was the place to interesting stuff to the attention of the geekish masses or to bring attention to one's work if it matters or might interest ppl. But using some random science story to bring attention to your blog like the poster seem to do regularly is not as amusing imo.
The alarming drop in standards I've seen on Slashdot lately really bothers me. Insults are critical to the Slashdot environment.
...Oh, nevermind. We should be good on insults until 2231 give or take a few years.
At this rate we're going to see a complete lack of insults within...oh..
But still it's no excuse to go slacking man. Now get back on here, call him an asshat and straighten up your postings pronto.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Per megawatt-hour, coal plants put more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear plants produce.
Holy Macaroni. Yeah dude. Radioactive in the broad sense. Very good. You're spouting nuke lobby half truths in public. You should be proud of yourself.
Of course what you're missing is the different kinds of radiation. Yep, no kidding there's different kinds. It's okay. They understand high schools are still a new thing down south there. But yeah I'll fill you in on the little secret. There are different kinds of radiation.
Now if you assert that coal plants produce the same radiation in the same densities and quantities as nuclear fission plants and pose similar clean up costs then I'll just say fuck you, you're full of shit.
With nice pretty pictures. LLNL/a
... For over clocking your computer. No more measly power bottle necks.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
you'll be deathly irradiated within seconds after opening it makes it fairly 'tamper proof'.
Bury it in the ground and it guarantees it'll take anyone awhile and lots of heavy equipment to get into it.
-
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Mod parent up? Precious little to go on, to lazy to google, but it sounds nice.
Tiny Dragon nuclear power plants!
Time capsules are buried and forgotten. 20th Century Studios and the "MASH" cast buried one in a parking lot in 1983. A Marriot Hotel has been built on top of it.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
The original point was that WE don't need more energy. The reply states that maybe WE don't need more energy, but third world areas who do not have a reliable connection to a first world grid do.
brits broke up india into two parts and we are still spilling blood today because of that. yes.. few more years and you would be on the other side sitting on your thumb on a farm in iowa or something, earning money to pay your oldies' social security.
USA is no worse than Russia. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan - Thank you, please dont come again.
As far as 9 11 is concerned, its your own frankenstein monster created for soviets in afghanistan that came back to bite your ass.. oh you poor short sighted souls.
"Dude, wheres my SSTAR?"
No no no.
Wait a minute. This is all screwed up. It's not clear who's saying what.
It's like Who's On First.
I replied to dirvish over the top talking about putting it at his house.
Then dirvish, true to his funny rating --which wasn't there when I commented and sort of skews things when you read it now-- comes back with a saucy --is that a no? Which suggests he wasn't serious to begin with and I was over the top.
Now Twirlip comes in talking shit. No biggie.
Then Naikrovek comes in with his little nuclear cowboy talk as though he was defending me from the "name caller" who had to have been Twirlip.
I come back and say whoa dude, you don't need to defend me because I agreee with him more than you. I think. But at this point it is starting to get hard to tell.
Now we get ACII explaining that Twirlip was saying I (AC I) was over the top. But he doesn't seem to realize I'm the same AC who wrote that parent post that Twirlip was refering to.
Twirlip then declares a winner.
Winner? Who won what? Who's on what side?
Now AC III is calling Twirlip a black kettle. You can't even tell who is pretending to have which opinion.
It's a nice effect.
So Roland Piquepaille asks in the article,
As if one of the largest arsenals of nuclear weapons in the world in the hands of religious fundamentalists in the US was not more worrisome.
Arrogance / Ignorance?
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Could they make it withstand, say, 50lbs of C4? A couple hundred pounds of TNT?
"Dude, where's my reactor?"
"You're breathing it."
Not a good idea, for security reasons.
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
That was my first thought. Put one in my back yard; I get free energy, and I can sell the excess to the neighbors. I bet they'd do a better job of keepin their dogs out of our yard, too!
It is not a new idea. IIRC, the Soviets made (or at least designed) some similar prototypes just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, around 1989
Think this is a good idea? Read this: http://homie.dijas.com/blog/2003/01/03/the-sl1-acc ident.html
If terrorists decide to hack into the reactor by using something like, say, a jackhammer, then the DOJ will go after them using the DMCA.
Brilliant! They can sue those damn terrorists till they have no money left!
and they thought ShareReactor was down :)
Investing in nuclear energy solutions is not just a matter of whether the technology can be made safe-enough or carry a low-enough risk, but that the nature and danger of nuclear power in the wrong hands shackles us to hundreds of years of big-government and big-military to ensure that, while those nuclear substances are still around and still potentially dangerous, so will be beauraucracy and military. Of course most people scoff at the idea that the United States will ever destabilize, but the United States is not the only country aggressively pursuing the development of nuclear energy. Enough caution cannot be excercised when placing this kind of power in the hands of volatile governments, but unfortunately those governments are the only ones with the power to make those decisions. Favoring Nuclear power is the same as favoring the long-term maintenance of the establishing body of power.
The same thing can be acomplished with 100 smoke detectors and a block of C-4. Probably cheaper.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I need one for my camper.
"What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others."
- Confucius
I don't know about your county, but every county around here has declared florecent bulbs to be hazardous waste, so you cannot throw them when they fail. PG&E keeps pushing residents to use them, and the county dump keeps saying "fine, but you better not throw them away!"
Interesting that the FA focuses on supplying nuclear power to other countries. IIRC from a posting to the China article yesterday, the US currently obtains 50% of our electricity generation from burning coal. How about hooking up a few of these bad boys here first?
As for countries like Iran, Hussein's Iraq, Pakistan, etc, they were broken up for a reason. Very simply: we can't trust them as far as we can kick them. September 11 only proves that.
Usama bin Laden and al Qaeda where responsible for 9/11 not Iran, not Pakistan and certainly not Iraq.
Is this something new? Isn't this how the Anartic stations get power? Not to mention submarines, battleships, and spacecraft.
More stupidity from the Federal Government. This is a proliferation nightmare waiting to happen. Watch as the reactors go missing, are busted open despite alarms, and 3rd world countries all over the world building the bomb. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
The Chinese pebble design, reported on a day or two ago, sounds safer. This seems to be the conventional design which can overheat and partially self destruct. The pebble design OTOH cools rapidly enough you can turn cooling off catastrophically and the fuel elements do not melt. (When moderator geometry is disturbed, the reaction stops in either case, but the pebble design has enough surface area that the melting point of the fuel is not reached. Current US designs OTOH melt leaving a mess. Actually I hope the pebble design replaces many of our existing power plants. It produces no carbon dioxide, and one of the side effects is it splits considerable water into hydrogen and oxygen, giving a very nice source of the latter.
Nah. no need to worry since all devices will came with a remote self-destruction system.
the country just got unstable? don't worry, just press a button and wipe that country of the map.
you win twice!
How do you cool these things and what are there fail overs and how do you know these reactors won't reach a critical mass.
Homer: Cobras!!!! Cobras!!!!
Now if you assert that coal plants produce the same radiation in the same densities and quantities as nuclear fission plants and pose similar clean up costs then I'll just say fuck you, you're full of shit.
I think that's why he was suggesting spreading the nuclear waste out into the same low density as the coal plant ash.
He was probably joking-- although this is one of those ideas that is probably valid "on paper," you can bet nobody's gonna buy into the idea of "spread it out real thin" as a solution to nuclear waste *even if* it is equivalent to or less than what we get from coal plants now. Coal contains Thorium and Uranium at average levels of roughly 3.2ppm and 1.3ppm respectively, and it ends up in the ash. If you burn a lot of coal, you release a lot of radioactive material-- it's just spread pretty thin.
But the way people's minds work, this amount of radiactive material released by burning coal is acceptable, as it's a natural waste product of the burning. Pulverizing, mixing with filler, and pumping out the nuclear waste into the air as a similar fine ash, however, is not.
640 watts per hour should be enough for everybody.
Do you know what kinds of radiation are emitted by nuclear waste, and what kinds are pumped into the atmosphere by a coal plant? If not, I think you had better shut up. Your reply is really ignorant.
How it works...
--
The amount of power you get from a reactor is regulated by the control rods. These rods absorb protons and slow down the nuclear chain reaction which generates the heat which is used, in turn to heat the water and turn the turbine which, in turn operates the generator which produces the power. Obviously, this is a very simplified way to describe how a nuclear power plant works, but you get the general idea.
On the technical side...
--
I believe that nuclear power technology is mature enough at this point to justify unattended use of a reactor. It's very unlikely that a reactor will become "unstable" in this era of modern computing technology. Events like Chernobyl are a thing of the past since that plant didn't use many modern systems and was a very primitive reactor.
In the political side...
--
It could be a mistake to leave one of these things in a country where the nuclear material might be "harvested" from the sealed reactor and used to make dirty bombs and (although less likely) some sort of primative nuclear device.
Just my opinion, GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Here, third world country. We've got a nice, self contained nuke design, all manufactured and ready to go. It's a simple deal. What you get is this: reliable safe power plants that are the right size and price for your needs. No expensive engineering that pushes you size the plant larger than you need. No diplomatic or security hassles in getting your fuel and securing the reactor facility against terrorism. None of the pollution and environmental degredatoin that developing countries are supposed to take as the price of progress. Just truck it to where you need the power, hook it up, and get clean, safe, reliable power for thirty years. If there are any problems, well it's a mass produced item, so we can ship you an advanced replacement unit from our assembly line and take yours back for refurbishment. When the plant has completed its useful life, simply return it to our decommissioning plant so its components can be screened, recycled or disposed of in our long term radioactive waste facility.
What we get is not having to worry about the security of the fissile material in your nuclear program accidentally falling into the wrong hands a few years down the pike. If you want to build a bomb behind our backs, well, the price you pay for all these benefits is that you won't be able to use your civilian power needs to hide your program.
If we look at this as a market positioning exercise, I'd pitch it like this:
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Oh come on, what is everyone worried about? I'm sure by the year 2015 we will have won the war on terror and won't have to worry about anyone wanting to misuse one of these reactors.
30? YEARS?
Yeah, i bet it'll be more like 30 MONTHS before the 1st breakdown. There will certainly be service intervals as well. How else could anyone be sure the instruments are not lying?
Space shuttle cant fly without a million man-hours of higly skilled work and it STILL crashes. Reactors that are under CONSTANT monitoring experience dangerous situations. Who is this company that dares to claim their stuff runs for 30 years nonstop?
AND PLUTONIUM? ARE YOU INSANE?
*THE* MOST easiest material to make a nuclear bomb of? ( Remember the Fat Man? That's Plutonium-239 in action.. )
*THE* most toxic substance on the planet?
newsflash: PEOPLE in TODAYS world do blow themselves to bits just to get to get some tiny unimportant political gains for their movement.
How many of them would be willing to risk their lives to get a piece of this plutonium-pie?
NO NO NO.
There is a crooked thought behind this "nobel" facade!
For instance I firmly believe this kind of a reactor "service" to any "developing" country will justify a number of US military bases nearby.
( To ensure that nuclear profileration doesn't happen.. of course.. )
Also, it will put in the hands of US policymakers some BIG economical levers to control the policies of any country who gets such a gift.
After all the reactor could be shut down safely from the other side of the globe!
When one is risking to lose the lights and air conditioning in the house, one makes some carefully worded political statements!
It will get a lot of people hooked on "cheap" and plentiful electricity - just like americans are hooked on cheap gasoline. Something that easily could be used to control the masses by flicking the light on or off. You will DEMOCRATICALLY (or any other way) make the "right" decision (i.e. do as you are told) if someone promises to pull the plug...
And last but not least.. what about decommissioning? Has anyone bothered to look at the number of years this reactor is going to be dangerous after the 30 years of usage have passed? Has anyone calculated the price of the decommissioning?
i think the parent's point was that, in a developing country, where there's no (or little) existing infrastructure, we should be teaching them to develop cleaner, more renewable sources of energy, rather than just dumping a nuclear reactor on them. granted, this is still better than dumping a coal plant, but there must be better alternatives.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
It seems to me that the majority of people who post to slashdot don't recognise that having nuclear power isn't some special right that north america has the only right to. Other cultures and societies face the same energy generation problems we do, and why should they have any less right to developing the same technologies? Which country has citizens that use the expression 'but we have the bomb?' Not north korea (although I'm sure they are pleased these days).
Smaller countries have voluntarily agreed to not develop nuclear technologies. We are also supposed to diminish our nuclear stocks as part of that international agreement, however, we seem to be falling short of that agreement. It isn't some knd of innate right we are born with in the first world.
I would think that unless the foreign nations could guarantee non-interference in their internal politics (eg. Bush doesn't like the new prime minister of wherever, so he turns off the power supply to their hospitals/schools). I would also think that this wouldn't be very worthwhile monetarily for other countries, as the current power solutions (while dirty) are relatively inexpensive.
I see the much better use of these things as power supplies for large ocean going vessels, like transports and nuclear subs. A discrete, portable, self-contained power solution that lasts decades would be very worthwhile for them. Also, major industry can now think of making factories to refine raw materials where they are produced (Aluminum is currently refined in Canada, while the raw material is obtained far to the south, simply because electricity is less expensive in Canada).
A structure this big, if self powered, could no doubt be kept in communication with US regulations agencies to guarantee non-tampering. How long would it take for the US government to reach and secure any such structure? This is not a serious security risk, in my opinion.
Build some tamper sensors, a couple of satellite phones and multiple GPS units (as backup). If the reactor moves or its tamper sensors go off, it calls home and a response team shows up. Same deal if communication is lost.
Communication could be two way if we wanted to be really hegemonic about it. "Hey! Stop massing troops at the border, or we'll kill your power!"
Anyone remember the reactor attached to the gatling gun 'Reason' from Snow Crash? It had a cooling vane the folks immersed in the sea while they boated around. That's the first thing I thought of when I saw the post. A 'portable' source of power like that might lead to some pretty impressive weaponry in as small a package as a semi-truck. A semi-sized rail gun, for instance? Drive it up on a hill and accelerate a few boulders through an enemy encampment. Wear your earplugs.
This is, unfortunately, BS.
The disposal costs are factored in, nuke plants throughout the country pay a tax that was supposed to go towards building a repository. Instead, the feds decided to spend the money, not build a repository, and stiff the nuke utilities. The utilities have now had to pay TWICE for disposal of waste, and if the greens get their way they'll have to pay three or four times just for being on Nader's bad side.
The only fraud is coming from the environmentalists on this one.
-Tyler
An AC posts in response to "I'm an idiot, pay no attention to me." That's very funny, because the author of that gem of an admonishment didn't add anything to the conversation. Hence, he is in turn an idiot to whom no attention should be paid.
Furthermore, AC adds to the recursive death spiral by simultaneously adding nothing other than asinine commentary about Twirlip's double-entendreish gaffe. Which in turn spurns more, and (self-reference) more.
It's a nice effect.
Hell yeah.
HAHAH, HAHAHA, HAAHAHHA. On damn thats funny. HAHA.
Oh man sorry. HAHA.
Wow, that was a good one.
If the reactor is long running, then it generates too much Pu-240, just like every other civilian reactor in the world. Plutonium containing lots of Pu-240 is know as "reactor grade" and nobody has ever managed to make a weapon out of it. If you think you're going to get into one of those reactors 10 years down the road and get anything other than a mess, you're dreaming.
It's ignorant fools like you who are responsible for our dependence on oil and (to a greater extent) coal. Thanks for black lung, learn something before bashing the scientists now.
The sole purpose of this is to have a legitimate reason to blow the sh*t out of any emerging country that tries to develop nuclear power on its own. By doing this they will monopolize the emerging country energy market by saying said country has no reason to devellop on it's own since perfectly viable solution are out there (obviously they will mean their own tech).
This way they can invade the country, get reconstruction contracts (once you understand that in capitalism the industry rules the government, it's easy to understand that even if the army is gone the country is now controlled by the reconstructors, the country which invaded the land) and they get to sell their crap tech high price or get the new government to make their business a legal monopoly, to the same people that can't feed their population.
And about nuclear proliferation, I would like to remind you that the only country which has been moronic enough to use the nuclear weapon is the US of A, twice!
Thing is I personnaly encourage any country to get into nuclear for the same reason the US got into nuclear in the first place, dissuasion. Cause right now the number one enemy in the world, the most evil and reviled nation in the world is the US, and for the last four years they have been menacing lots of countries and calling people evil and identifying them as your enemy isn't the best way to make friend, it's actually pretty legitimate for any country to devellop nuclear weapons, because if the US has the right to "defend itself" those countries also have this right and when your self-declared enemy is the US you better be doing better then knives!
Have they even ever have thought about being friendly and not cocky, pretentious and self-declared god, just, you know, friendly, not posting themselves as the world savior just being nice, that's simple no? nice. Seems to be working real well up here in Canada, I mean no one is jealous of our freedom yet... except the US governement who calls us terrorist and is afraid that if we legalize weed their population might come here to smoke, so we have to take responsibility for the total lack of respect of their own law by their own citizen, great, they now block OUR freedoms...
X-10 and CF bulbs don't mix. Period. Not even if you get "appliance switches" and filters and such. A single CF bulb anywhere in your home will basically destroy X-10 operation.
I speak from experience.
If these were deployed globally and constructed in a manner that would allow satellite monitoring; well, my thought is why not build em to go bang as well? Power goes in areas where it can be used (cities) and the if the country becomes unfriendly we add a little green glass (trinatite) to the tourist attractions.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
This was posted some time ago, only it was Toshiba inviting Alaska villages to try out the spruce-tree sized reactor: "Toshiba Pushes Safe, Small Nuclear Reactor Design Tuesday October 21"
Seriously now, there is something interesting about nuclear reactors - their generated power is not really related with their size. So there is no such thing as "nuclear mini-reactor". You have almost the same quantity of nuclear fuel in each of them.
The reason is simple: the mass of fissionable material should be just a little above the critical mass (which is minimum 13 Kg for Pu-239 and slightly larger for U-235). The critical mass of course depends on the core design but you can't really extend that beyond a certain safety limit, and you also cannot keep that under the criticality limit (otherwise you won't have any self-sustainable reaction; only a tiny percentage of the fuel ends up consumed; the vast majority of the fuel is present there just to ensure criticality).
You need to be just above the critical mass in a small interval mainly for control reasons. The neutrons are produced in two class of reactions:
(1) neutrons that are produced by the main fission reaction (which generates around 80% of the total quantity of neutrons) and
(2) neutrons produced by secondary fission reactions from the extremely radioactive fission by-products from the first reaction. The production of these neutrons can be therefore considered as "delayed". These delayed neutrons are essential for reactor control - here is why:
At the end, fission is a chain reaction where you get almost 3 neutrons per fission (assuming U-235), from which you loose 2 and the remaining neutron is used to initiate the next fission. The average time for this generated neutron to participate in the next fission is in the order of milliseconds. In other words, every millisecond or so a new chain reaction produces a new generation of neutrons of class (1).
Let's forget a second about the second generation: if you are above the critical mass, over a very short period of time you get more and more neutrons which will build up in tens or hundreds of milliseconds way above the safety limit. For example let's say that you are 1.001 above the limit. This means that in the first generation you have a 0.001 excess, in the second generation 3*0.001, etc. After N generations you have 3^N * 0.001 which can be way beyond 1 in less than one second. The conclusion is that it is impossible to control a reactor by inserting the control neutron-absorber rods in the core - since again it takes less than one second to double up the neutrons.
Now, since you have these neutrons from the second generation, it is possible to control the reactor without quick build-up only if you manage that those 80% neutrons produced in the first class to be below criticality (otherwise you will have the quick build-up phenomenon above), but the total quantity of neutrons to be above. This way, you will ensure a delayed reaction time of a couple of minutes in which you can safely control the reactor.
The conclusion is that it doesn't really matter how you build the reactor - you will have the almost the same quantity of nuclear fuel there. There are no "micro/mini" reactors.
Don't try to use the force. Do or do not, there is no try.
As a matter of fact, I already *do* make liberal use of comapct flourescent replacements for regular lightbulbs - but they're not always viable. The biggest problem I have with them is they don't seem to be designed to stand up to the levels of heat they put out. They're not recommended for use in enclosed fixtures. (I tried it once anyway, in a couple ceiling lights in my kitchen. After only a few weeks, one of the flourescent bulbs started turning itself on and off every 30 seconds or so. I took it out and found its white plastic case had turned brownish - and it was obviously failing from the heat. A second one started exhibiting the same symptoms shortly afterwards, so I went back to regular 60 watt bulbs.)
The "100 watt + vs. 30 watt LCD monitor" suggestion isn't that sensible either, really. If you have a good CRT (like my Sony Trinitron 21"), where's the sense in disposing of it to save some watts of power? You're creating a big waste disposal issue from the lead in the glass and paying a big price premium for LCD technology that will take longer to recoup in energy savings than the panel is likely to last.
Honestly, attempts to guilt computer users into putting up with slower CPU speeds or twisting their arms to purchase specific technologies are not going to solve our country's power problems.
Most modern systems have all sorts of power savings/management features built into them already - including "sleep" and "suspend" modes, processors that step down to slower CPU speeds whenever they're idle, and so on.
From the picture it looked like a water cooled reactor. Might they take a que from the chineese and make it a pebble bed design? This would make it cheaper, safer and more efficent. Hopefully they will do it this way as it is the best technology available.
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
"Leaving a nuclear reactor in a developing country which can potentially become unstable during the 30 years of service of the reactor doesn't seem to be terribly safe."
You make it sound like a landmine or something. You know, something we're just gonna leave there for some poor third world peasant to trip over? Call me crazy, but I'm betting that after you calculate the building, shipping and handling expenses that go into putting that sucker in place, something is going to be worked out with that government we're "just leaving it" with. Something like "compensation" or a waiver of responsibility if they don't want to pay to maintain it. Infact, i'm going to go out on a limb here and say they're going to be incredibly picky as to whom they're going to leave one of those with. "Just leaving" one of those to rot is a PR/environmental nightmare that I'm sure no administaration wants to touch.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
The rightwingers keep modding down my politically oriented posts....
And, BTW, EVERYTHING I said was true. It always is.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
However, it might push the price to the upper end of the $249 - $billion range.
Hated it, BTW.
My website url above gives some of my thoughts about the nuke boats.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
There is nothing new under the sun, as we are told. This sounds a bit like:
THE RADIOACTIVE BOY SCOUT: THE TRUE STORY OF A BOY AND HIS BACKYARD NUCLEAR REACTOR
By Ken Silverstein
Random House
209 pp., $22.95
Geek builds breeder reactor in his back yard. The lad is now grown up and in the US Navy, I hear.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Just wait until we have cheap white diodes. They'll last for very long (that's why diodes are being installed in street lights now, to cut down on maintenance bills) and are far more efficient than traditional bulbs.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
All you 9/11 experts seem to be missing the "etc" in that list. Etc is short for Etcetera, just so you know. So yes, he did include the involved contries in that list, just not explicitly. I thought most people knew this already. You are also missing the fact that he is not implying that they (the countries explicitly listed) had anything to do with 9/11. He is implying that the countries of the Middle East cannot be trusted and using 9/11 as an example of that assertion. Guess not.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Fairness has nothing to do with it. It's about standing by your principles, and choosing to not build nuclear weapons.
Giving people electricity sounds like a good idea.
Giving them reasons to hate us does not.
'Way back when I first read the Foundation trilogy, I thought all the talk about portable fission reactors powering individual factories and starships and force-fields and hand weapons was, well, silly. Surely we'd be using fusion or fuel cells or antimatter or something by then. More importantly, surely a nuclear reactor couldn't scale down far enough to be portable.
:D )
:)
Apparently, I was wrong. This is, of course, not exactly a portable reactor, but it's a massive step in that direction, probably the portable-reactor equivalent of those floating iron artillery barges in the Crimean War, or perhaps the CSS Virginia (Merrimack for all you Yankees and furriners out there)...
Well, in related news, with the announcement of "portable" nuclear reactors, we're about two technologies -- FTL space travel and energy weapons -- away from technological parity with the Galactic Empire, and if I remember rightly, the U.S. Army's working on the energy-weapon half. Actually, given that we've got computers and they don't, maybe we're better... although we don't have "atom-blasts capable of destroying a planet" quite yet. (Nor would we really want them. After all, at present you could only use them once.
Current SF writers should learn a lesson from this -- the predictive skill of science fiction is really not what it's cracked up to be. Try to imagine new technologies when writing a story -- don't just extrapolate present trends, lest you end up like dear old Issac!
Of course, given what the article's about, perhaps ending up with Asimov's predictive skill isn't so bad after all?
Dr. Emmett L. "Doc" Brown: I'm sure in 1985, plutonium is available at every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by!
True, but power supplies aren't always very efficient. Quoting this web page:
There's a bit more information at wikipedia, but I don't see any hard numbers.
Here's some more info from the energystar website:
-jim
Build your own damn supercarriers, neutron bombs, and space lasers instead of sitting on your thumbs.
They can suffice themselves with commercial airplanes.
I am not trolling, just pointing that you said that USA prevents other nations from developing nuclear power because it can. By the mere use of force.
And when it comes to military power terrorist attacks and WMD are the only means by which a developing country can threaten a developed one.
A large chunk of our arsenal has been destroyed, and many of their silos abandoned.
The USA are still developing and producing new nukes, and new biological weapons, too.
3 out of the 5 most powerful supercomputers are used to simulate nuclear testing (I suppose at least a part of that is used in developing new weapons or improving old ones).
Besides, I thought UN was the ruler of world affairs, thats why the USA created it...
What if they make a AAA sized version of the Portanuke?
... and the govt would probably have to increase funding on the sperm bank! Too many men fried their preciousessss when they keep their cellphone/PDA/iPod/whatever in their pants pocket!
Wow.. I can see it now, PDAs, tiny laptops, digital cameras, mp3 players.. all running for YEARS..
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
The biggest issue with the current PBMR design is the pebbles contain large quantities of graphite. It is quite safe as long as the inert Helium coolant loop is in tact but if the coolant system is breached and oxygen reaches a red hot graphite there is at least a chance the graphite in the pebbles is going to ignite and burn furiously. The graphite fire at Chernobyl burned for nine days and was the main source of the toxic plume.
From WordIQ:
"Some authorities believe that pyrolytic graphite can burn in air, and cite the famous accidents at Windscale and Chernobyl?both graphite-moderated reactors. Others insist that it cannot. Of course, all pebble-bed reactors are cooled by inert gasses that prevent fire. However, all pebble designs also have at least one layer of silicon carbide that serve as a fire break, as well as a seal."
It possible this is a solvable safety issue but it is a source of concern the PBMR advocates seem to downplay without being able to prove its not an issue.
I'd tend to agree that PBMR sounds a lot safer for this kind of thing than a breeder reactor with a steam loop.
@de_machina
Wow. That sounds just like the SX-64!
There were many stories in the papers extolling the virtues of being able to clean up all the horrible sickness-causing dust caused by the horse manure drying out.
Some of those articles talked at great length about the fresh air that was coming to the cities.
Of course, it seems funny in retrospect.
"cheap price tags"
What cheap price tags?!?
Anyway, the government committed to finding a waste disposal site, not industry. So don't blame them (directly at least). Waste disposal is primarily a POLITICAL problem. Oh, there are significant technical problems but those are solvable. If you don't believe this, look at the history of the site selection process where some of the most promising sites were excluded for non-technical reasons.
While I appreciate the sentiment, name a renewable source that can reliably provide 50-90% of peak capacity on a continuous basis and provides positive net energy. Once a city in a developing country has, say, a 100 MW plant, it's going to become completely and absolutely depend on that power source. Water treatment, sewage plants, hospitals, phone networks, will all become better, but dependent. You can't tell them, "If the wind's not blowing, don't bother coming to work." The positive net energy part -- LARGE positive net energy -- could be critical. If some wonderful biomass system ends up consuming 90% of its own output, why bother? The "lovely" thing about oil and natural gas and coal is that you get much more energy back when you burn them than it takes to extract them and deliver them to a power plant.
Seriously, I don't think such things are in the best intrest of anyone other than those that are thinking of selling them.
I think even hydrogen generation from solar using titanium dioxide is furthur alone the development track than such a thing.3.3 MW / yr
= 9 KW / Day
= 380 W / Hr.
Does not sound like that big of deal when you think of it that way.
Or is it supposed to be 100 MW / hr. for 30 yrs?
Please. A DeLorean generates 1.21 gigawatts and is nowhere near that size.
The key issue here is concentration. The radioactive material in the things you eat is of incredibly low concentation, and so it is with the material you excrete. It is the same thing with coal - and very similar, since coal is made from orgainic material. Radioactive material is everywhere, but it only has an effect if there is enough of it in one place.
As the COCOM list contained (high speed/mainframe) computers in the "steel curtain" era, communist countries could not put their hands on these machines ...
..... now if that could happen in the 70s I am sure they can strap on a to-satellite sender that starts shouting when someone breaches the hull, or even on a regular basis .....
....
...
... I am sure it takes some muscle to crush the hull, but sliding vulcanic minerals have the muscle to crush anything ....
Hungary did somehow and soon they were discovered because as soon as the installation was made it started emmitting tiny "beep-beep I am here" signals
Just hope the NSA doesn't turn them into a transformer device, that would fly away in the case of emergency or even worse: turn into a nuclear bomb
I am not a physics genius, but I guess the smallest model does not contain too much uranium to make a decent size explosion
Being right now in Costa Rica I would better fear the regular earthquakes, or possible vulcanic activity
uhhhh... riiight. if you say so.
*wanders off, shaking head*
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
I"ve got some of those little flourescent bulbs...actually the room i'm in now is powered by two or three of them...and frankly they suck. Maybe these are juts old or not that good to begin with, but they put out a fraction of the light (and its washed yellow) than a set of incandesents would
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
When will one be available that is capable of producing at least 1.21 GW and can fit on the back of, oh, say, a DeLorean?
(Obligatory Back to the Future reference attached to article on nuclear power: Complete)
Well, coal has Thorium and Uranium. Uranium is usually between 1 and 2 ppm. I think the original post, aside from making the point that coal puts off MORE uranium that a power plan, was that if you spread it out it really doesn't matter. Uranium comes from the ground, it is the most common element by mass in the earth crust. What is wrong with pulverizing it and spreading it all over.....like where it came from?
So why don't we just grind nuclear waste into a fine powder and distribute it evenly onto a desert or ocean or something?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
1) Frequent power cycling. CFLs will last much longer if they get lit up and left alone than if they are turned on and off every few hours. The older ones were worse in this regard than the newer ones.
2) Wrong installation orientation. In the tiny type on the packaging, CFL's often say "to be installed base down" or base up. Lifespan will be GREATLY reduced if you put a base-down bulb in a ceiling fixture, or even a sideways fixture.
3) Timer-triggered fixtures. CFL's require a jolt of juice to fire up the ballast and create the spark that then sustains the glow. Many timers provide a current ramp that doesn't quite meet this demand (the power gets there eventually, but not all at the start). Many CFL's say on the packaging, "not to be used with automatic timers" for this reason. Those that are timer-OK cost more, natch.
I do not belive these reactors are intended to help development countries anyway. But certainly they will be necessary for next generation of american field weaponry based on laser and microwave technology.
There you are, staring at me again.
We've got plugmold all around the shop on the walls at bench-height. There *still* isn't enough outlets!
Of course, I remember on the wall at my Grandmother's (very old) farmhouse in the bathroom there was a ceramic strip with two looooong slots spaced for plugs, and you could fit in as many plugs as you could on the slot. Fun, but probably illegal and dangerous.....
Just my 120-volts-just-ain't-enough worth
-RickTheWizKid
The amount of Pu-240 depends on the burnup rate.
I still want to know how it is "tamper proof" to avoid people running it in weapons-grade breeding operation.
That said, I have no problems with the US operating helium gas turbine reactors within the borders of the US...
A smaller version nuke plant (of that on full-size subs) was built for this submarine:
i ps /ship-nr1.html
http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/sh
The American Locomotive Company built three packaged nuclear plants for the US Army between 1958 and 1962. One was installed at Fort Greely, AK, one at Camp Century in Greenland, and one in the US as a test and training unit.
They worked, but weren't useful enough to be worth the trouble.
ah! cobras! aaah!!
Select a copy from one of these 'mirrors'.
I think of it as Dr. Strangelove compressed down into a 90-second animated masterpiece!
This and Broken Saints prove that Flash can be used for serious storytelling as well as annoying online advertisements.
I was thinking of that as a kind of ultimate security device for the 'Port-A-Nuke'
But your idea is a possibility as well, Coupons.
C14 does produce background radiation but it is not Chemically Poisonous... While plutonium is very much so (and part of the waste is excess flouric acid from the valency changes of uranium in the flouride mixture).
.. but we're a bit more radioactive than Coal (more recent products of sunlight). Low half-life materials mean they are more radioactive for a shorter period.
:)
Ok, so Coal's radioactive
Also remember plutonium catches fire spontaneously, not a nice additive to Coal
The real question to "portable" reactors is the refuelling safety and shield maintanence
(think about it , fresh fuel is more radioactive than wastes).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Sorry for that pointless responce. I guess my thought was more on the lines of is it really a good idea to teach these people how to create advanced power production needs, when they are daily just trying to feed themselves.
Give a man a fish he will feed himself for a day. Teach a man how to build a fusion reactor, and he will scratch his head.
...done this??
:)
Toshiba or some such offered a "portable" nuclear reactor, based around a "battery" sealed and full of fissile material plugged into the generating station. Worked as a warmer IIRC.
If I actually find the story, Ill post a link.
Course, I could be wrong
err!
jak.
er, *It would* be very easy to generate electricity without steam. Try a Peltier system (alternating plates of two different metal).
Oh, you mean difficult to do as efficiently as it's done with steam? That's a different story.