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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?
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
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
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.
This was the original idea back in the 1950s for the future of nuclear power. People would buy their own power stations to put in their yards to generate power. But power companies were against this [no money to make] and people were in an uproar about safety issues
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
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
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.)
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
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"
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
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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!
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Yep, one little crack in the reactor core shielding and in three weeks you get to look like Yoda!
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....
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.
Won't a mini-reactor have mini-waste. Is a small amount of waste manageable?
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"It just occured to me that each of is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back..."
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
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.
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
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
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
"...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...
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.
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.
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.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
that you'll need one of these to power Nvidia's next video card. :)
"Just one" is all it takes. It's been proven time and time again that NOTHING is tamper proof. And once hundreds of these things get shipped out... well, I can think of better things our forces can be doing than policing other nation's power plants.
Like, finding Osama perhaps.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Hated it, BTW.
My website url above gives some of my thoughts about the nuke boats.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
'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?
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