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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?
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 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.
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
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.
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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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....
"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.
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!
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.
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.
You seem utterly clueless.
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.
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...
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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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.