Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
Considering my last power bill, these bigger and faster CPUs really need some juice and if you go multicore and such, you may not be exaggerating. All this bitching about nuclear power being safe, pollution from Coal and Gas plants, how ineffective Solar or Wind are -- doesn't anyone realize we're using more electrical power than ever before? Even when we have vaccum tube TV's?
Looking at the octopi at work and around home it seems my next house should have powerstrips along the walls, not just outlets.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
100+ watt CRT versus 30 watt LCD monitor; 100 watt incandescent light bulbs versus 25 watt compact fluorescent. These technologies are readily available, are in many states are now economical alternatives. So use them!
The tech industry is also obsessed with high performance chips that have power consumption through the roof (most of it waste, of course). Where's the direction toward more energy efficient processing alternatives? Most applications do not need 1 GHz processors.
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.
I don't believe that's the same reactor. Toshiba didn't say that they'd actually built a critical reactor. Instead they called theirs a "nuclear battery" that produced a constant 900C of heat. It's quite possible that Toshiba's model was simply radioisotope powered (i.e. RTG), or maybe it was a simple fission pile. Either one could produce a lot of heat and electricity WITHOUT actually running in a critical state. (as with normal reactors).
I'm sure someone will come along and provide more details and insult me in a few moments.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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!
It is the main short coming of "it's so simple" environmental/conservation arguments that they often ignore the costs which are less obvious.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
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.
I think that has something to do with tenuous world affairs becoming even less stable when more countries have access to nuclear weapons.
Who made the United States the ruler of world affairs?
Europe. Happened in WWII when the rest of the world proved that it couldn't keep from trying to destroy itself. So the Allied powers were given certain rights, and the rest of the world was divided up into little pieces. (Germany, the Middle East, etc.) Our then ally (Russia) then immediately did an about face and became a cold war enemy. They chose to begin taking over the various countries through use of their "Communist ideals".
They then proceeded to sap up all the countries that we hadn't broken into tiny pieces, in an effort to gain more world power. The remaining European allies lacked the necessary GDP to defend against any war that Russia might start, so it was left up to the US to be the "good guys". Don't like it? Too bad. Build your own damn supercarriers, neutron bombs, and space lasers instead of sitting on your thumbs.
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. It doesn't stop us from being friendly and trying to help these countries out, but you can bet your ass that the US and UN are not looking to allow them nuclear weapons!
You want to stop nuclear proliferation? How about starting with the United States, Israel, England, France, India...
Leave the US and England out of this. Our nuclear weapons are pretty much at the "yeah, we have some" point. A large chunk of our arsenal has been destroyed, and many of their silos abandoned. I'd say leave France out of this too, but they've had dealings with the Middle East that puts them in the spotlight.
Everyone else in the Middle East is looking to point atomic weapons at each other. Why? None of their excuses make sense to us, so we just try to keep them from lobbing any of those nukes at us or any of our allies.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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
I think the point is not that the fans themselves draw a lot of power, but the various system components are wasting a lot of power expressed by heat which necessitates all the fans.
The fans are symptoms, not the disease.
Much of the animosity we see towards the US is because we are meddling in other affairs under the premise that it is for their good while it is actually for our (the USA's) own good or profit, and when we no longer see an profitable or nice political reason to be there we leave the area to fester (see Afghanistan, actually looks like we are ramping up to do nothing again and let rise more problems).
The USA has done many great things, but we are not infallible:we are very arrogant and can be quite greedy.
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
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
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
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.
This seems like a "where do we put the definition" question. All the energy going into a CPU ends up as heat. Because the "work" it does turns into heat, too. But it does do some stuff, too.
Take a lightbulb-- the normal way to think about efficiency is "how much of the energy is made into light vs. heat." The original poster would seem to suggest that it all ends up as heat, because as soon as the light hits something, it's just going to warm it up. Just like the CPU-- it does some number crunching... but moving those electrons around in there just ends up making heat after we're done crunching, too. It's just that with the CPU, this step is done before we leave the CPU. The CPU is like a lightbulb in a box. The lightbulb does make light-- but from the view outside the box, all the energy you put in is becoming heat.