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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."
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 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
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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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.
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....
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.
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
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...
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.