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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."
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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.)
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.
Sounds like a great idea. Gives the DOE (or someone else) 30 years to figure out what to do with the things once they become unstable. Considering how dependant the world is on energy, and how fast we are draining our resources, and the relatively small number of accidents to date, I don't see what the huge controversy over nuclear energy is.
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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!
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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.
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.
Too bad this story was reported on earlier.... though the placement of the reactor has changed slightly....
There's already one in existance, built by Toshiba for Galena (Alaska) to demonstrate the technology. It's self contained and should last ~30 years before the fuel runs out. Reference.
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.
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Ain't got time to make no apologies
Actually, depending on the cost, why not deploy these in our own country? Especially if they are safe.
because nuclear power is cheap and the utilities don't want their stock to go down when they annouce that they'll be adding nuclear to their system. check the history, any time anyone announces adding nukes, their stock goes down. i don't have time now to do the googling myself, but it's there.
plus you have all the brain dead americans that think nuke==bad and the "don't want that in my backyard" syndrome. give me a personal nuke plant, i'll put it in my basement, i don't care. they're safe. maybe we should come up with a new name for nuke plants, just like they chagned "nmr" to "mri" becuase "nuclear" (or nucular) was scary.
Do you want this thing out and about?
Please stop with the FUD.
We have satellites, we can also -track- anything. Put a transmitter inside them with a tamper switch. Transmitter goes offline, send in a special forces response team to find out what's happening. Besides, it's in the best interests of every government we give these to that they keep them safe. I'd imagine if they let someone screw with just one we wouldn't give them anymore.
And YES, I do want these things out and about. It's time to quit relying on petroleum for electricity and it's been shown time and time again that other alternatives aren't viable.
The Army was planning on developing portable reactors in the 50's. I believed the idea "lost steam" when the had a few incedents. Not quite portable but mobile, the Army had three small test reactors in the 60's. The air force used smaller reactors to power remote radar stations during the early cold war also.
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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.
I have had bad luck with the spiral flouresents, they go bad for me in about 4 months. It takes a least a year for the normal ones to go bad. I am starting to think that my apartment building may have something wrong with the mains. What brand are you buying and how long have they actually lasted???
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Oh, really? Let me disect your arguments...
The power rating of the PSU is how much power it *can deliver*, not how much it will drain from the grid just because you plug it in.
Right, but if you could get by on 100 watts, or less, then why do you need 350, 400, 500, or larger PSU? Because you will need most of that and the remainder is a safety margin or room to expand. The fact remains your box draws more power than your monitor, by a large margin. It's power you didn't consume before PC's got nice and fast and hot. My Apple ][, C64 and first PC drew, combined, under 200 watts.
And fans draw practically no power at all, maybe one or two watts, so I don't see why you drag them into the discussion...
Practically nothing + practically nothing + practically nothing + nth practically nothing, it adds up. Each fan draws at least a watt, the inefficiences of converting 115 VAC to the various voltages and currents required for all the little DC items in that box, furthered by the switching power supplies on board, plus all those chips, even the ones I'm not using but are wired in and consume power anyway, all add up. Each memory module, each hard drive, each LED, and so on, all contribute to consuming power. I know my powerbill doubled after I built my home PC and it's not even overclocked (declocked a bit actually) and I can put my hand behind the PSU fan and feel that warm air coming out as anecdotal eveidence that AC current is being converted to heat somwhere in the box.
Maybe you don't pay for the power your personal machine uses, that doesn't mean you aren't using any.
If you're interested in using less power, get something with a Transmeta CPU or other CPU which is low power and minimize the features and components of your computer. And by all means, turn the damn thing off when you're not using it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
True. Why don't they invest in renewable energy sources and create a powerplant that could harness the solar energy or the tidal energy for that matter. All this does is create another thing that you need to monitor. Also the geo-political face of the world changes every 25 years, who knows whether the country that has the nuclear reactor would even be there in the next 30 years, and if it is not there then who would be responsible for that nuclear reactor... This is a very stupid idea.
Reading the article linked to from /. story about pebble bed reactors would show you that the turbines are driven by helium in the primary loop. There is no secondary loop. Water can be used as precooling before the helium is recompressed, but water or steam is not required.
Yes, one day I may actually learn to spell...
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.
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make install -not war
Is this a troll in disguise? Really it's hard to tell.
but they've had dealings with the Middle East that puts them in the spotlight
What about all of the United States' shady dealings with the Middle East? We gave them half the weapons they're using to kill our soldiers. We pump billions into their economy by buying their oil.
September 11th doesn't prove that COUNTRIES need to be broken up; that'd be like saying that if a US terrorist went over to France and blew up the Louvre, that the US needs to be broken up. In fact, Saudi Arabia (our ally?) gives a lot more support to terrorists groups than the others you've mentioned.
They satisfy all three of your requirements.
Not quite true, I have most of my apartment converted to the spiral flouresent bulbs, the one exception is the light in my bedroom. The reason I haven't converted my bedroom is that the compact floresent bulbs do have a 1 to 2 second startup delay, and I suffer from night-terrors. My fiance needs to be able to get a light on immediatly when I go into one of those, as its the only thing that snaps me out of them. Considering that I have been know to both do damage to the room, and to attack her during a night-terror, we both want to have no delay in getting that light on.
But, other than that one light, ya, compact floresent bulbs for the rest of the place, they are cheaper to run, and personally, I prefer the light they give out.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
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.
Odd. You don't mention either of the two countries that actually had anything to do with September 11: Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
I think the problem is that people are more averse to lots os small problems than a single large disaster. I'd rather have 200 cuts than have my entire hand severed. Nuclear tends to have fewer minor problems, but more large-scale problems.
However, we are not draining our energy as fast as we once thought. First of all, many dry oil well have been refilling (in fact, it's causing some to reconsider what the process is for oil production in the earth actually is). Second of all, the calculation for "years supply of oil" is actually "years supply of oil at the present price" meaning that it excludes all oil reserves that we know about but aren't worth going after at the present price of oil.
Engineering and the Ultimate
I have worked in the lighting industry for over 12 years. The purchase cost of a fixture is only about 4 percent of the total cost to own and operate the fixture. Maintenance will generally run about 8 percent, and electricity takes the remaining 88 percent. These number apply more to commercial lighting, since that is what I do, but they are good for comparison. If you can use more energy efficient lighting, then you will see a huge return on the investment. I would also recommend checking with your utility company since they occasionally give rebates to people who switch to more efficient lighting.
In terms of this thread, the compact fluorescent lamps replace standard incandescent lamps so will work in the same fixtures. You will get shorter life on them if they are operated base up or in an enclosed fixture. Heat is very hard on the ballast, so there needs to be adequate airflow to keep the lamp cool.
I'd have modded you up, but I already blew all my mod points!
I was on a nuke submarine also and all I can say to this article is DOH!! This technology, the style of reactor construction, long fuel life, neutron bouncing etc etc etc is old tech. The fact that they are just now 'officially' considering it for that purpose slays me.
I find it interesting that the description, size, output, reactor life etc hail back to those days of nukedom.
Shout out to you fellow sumbmariner!
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Or just use a laptop. Mine cost ~$1250, uses between 25 and 50 watts total, depending on load (so sayeth /proc/acpi--actual AC use might be slightly more since AC->DC isn't 100% efficient), and has all the power I could want at the moment.
And this is for a relatively power-hungry (Athlon 64, 15" screen) laptop. I'm sure you can get a Pentium-M model for $1500 that uses half the power of mine.
The power-saving tech is out there, but it's slow to find its way to desktop systems. Don't the desktop Athlon 64's have the same power-saving system (rebranded as "Cool & Quiet") as the mobile models?
Of course, there is one advantage that subs have, but that land-based units would not have. The ultimate failsafe: the Frame 57 Explosive Bolts. I imagine 688s had them too, I just don't know the frame number. You know, the bolts that are set off to separate (and sink) everything aft of the fwd reactor compartment bhd if there is an accident bad enough to warrant it.
"In a hierarchy every employee will rise to his level of incompetence". The Peter Principle
'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?
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.