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Toshiba Builds Ultra-Small Nuclear Reactor
DeusExCalamus writes "Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs."
Have a fallout, closer to home. Toshiba Micro Nuclear.
Someone should have told these students that they could get one of these and not have to peddle.
liqbase
How did they manage to shrink a nuclear reactor to only two dimensions?
I'm sure the US government would have no problem with people buying these, no problem at all.
now they don't have to rely on bicycles for the supercomputer energy needs!
...and how how many security guards to keep the terrorists away?
Growing up I always loved to take things apart. Everything... My Toys, my parent's stuff like the Kaypro we had, and the Apple II... After I saw this over at engadget earlier and now here, I must say I am glad I am not a kid anymore. I would have taken this sucker apart if we had one and probably set myself on a course to be my own nightlight. Although I do like the cost associated with these things, I always like lower electric bills. However, I fear the kid that wants to see how it works or the hick who decides to take it apart cause they "can fix anything!"
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
This is perfect if Die Hard 4 happens in RL. If it does, can we please not shove the hot Asian chick down the elevator shaft?
Now THAT should get interesting
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
40 years x 365 days x 24 hours x 200kW x $0.05 = $3.5bn
Ok, so I guess it wouldn't run at full capacity all of the time, but even if you half it, or quarter it, it's still a big number.
Slightly more silly: if you were to use the MIT students from the previous article and you assumed they worked 24 hours a day to produce 200kW, and you paid them $10 an hour you'd need 1600 of them and it would cost $5.8bn over the same time period.
I guess that's why we have nuclear power.
I'll wait for the eventual smaller form factor in a year though. Gives me time to save for a Delorian. Those flux capacitors don't seem so extraneous right now.
Am I the only one that gets nervous at the idea of liquid lithium/sodium?
How are they planning on fuelling these reactors? I somewhat doubt, with current paranoia about terrorist "dirty bombs", that they'll be willing to use uranium, which seems to me to somewhat defeat the point of a nuclear reactor...
"Do not park by the shaft hatch, uranium delivery expected!"
I wonder if their cost/kWh figures includes Greenpeace terror campaign against nuclear anything..
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I heard about this yesterday, and searched the Toshiba's main website for a press release or anything. I found nothing beyond the article. If Toshiba are really doing this, i thought it would at least be a headliner on their website.
Anyone?? I'm wondering if this is even real.
my search here (you may have to filter for medical results)
Wow, now its not-in-my-backyard but not-in-the-basement-of-my-apartment.
They seem to have been able to shrink the reactor because they use lithium. Just the other day there was an article on /. about scientists with a revolutionary new battery technology that would increase the capacity of batteries many fold. It used lithium. Lithium seems to be a bit of a hot item now and in the future.
Lithium isn't particularly rare, it is the 33rd most abundant element on the earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium On the other hand, I can't see it getting cheaper. I wonder if this is a good time to buy shares in companies that produce it?
Is this the same unit?
This is actually a spinoff of Rutherford's 'spinning proton' research. A simple concept that has far-reaching capabilities.
Sounds like this has potentially even more "bang for you buck" than nanowire batteries. Just don't take that bang-part literally...
Lots of advocates for solar/wind/other renewables oppose using nuclear power to help against global warming because "They come in only one size: Extra large". This one pretty much mitigates that argument. Of course, Toshiba has done this before, with the Galena project...looks like they are really pushing miniaturization of nukes.
I'd be wary of any story from this source, what with all its links to "overunity" and "free energy" sources. Where's the corroboration from Toshiba?
I seem to recall reading an article in Wired several years ago about pebble-bed reactors, and building them small enough that each town could have their own. Maybe even small enough that you could run one just for your house, or yourself and a few neighbors. I think someone wanted to pilot such a program in China.
I always wondered whether a nanoscale reactor is possible - it's be great, too small and complex to be unloaded and the fuel spent elsewhere, but possible to generate quite a bit of power, especially if lots are coupled together.
IANANPh, but I'd guess there'd be problems with shielding as I don't think radiation scales very well, but I could be wrong... anyone know?
Im here patiently waiting for the stereo sized one that can secretly power my house so I can tell Ameren CIPs and there vastly monopolized pricing to kiss off.
~DF
aren't these the same guys that make the batteries that keep blowing up?
Would you have one of these in your cellar? I wouldn't. I'd rather tune down my power consumption by a magnitude and switch to solar energy or something. I don't think this will fly.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
lol. I'd love to have one of these babies, personally. But then, I went to school for nuclear engineering...
Would you have one of these in your cellar?
Have one myself? Not likely, but possible. Wanting my dumb-ass neighbors to have one? No way.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
The Department of Energy site has a list of new commercial reactor designs, along with brief descriptions of the various types. The Toshiba is included. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/analysis/nucenviss2.html
If you take it apart, does that void the warranty? As usual, I'll wait until I can read the reviews on amazon.com Someone needs to tell me if it comes with a cheap plastic housing.
The article's image seemed to be borrowed from this page.
<br>Although Toshiba 4S reactor is really small,not small enough to fit the described in Next Energy News.
"The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities."
That's probably putting it mildly. I can just see the US targeting communities around the world. "Give us your resources or we will bomb you into the stone age.", takes on a whole new meaning when the community has such a death multiplier like this sitting around. Perhaps they need some short of radar and laser attachment.
On the other hand any terrorist group with a small crane could load one of these babies on a flatbed (I assume the reason for the dimensions is the transportation restrictions on a prefab unit.) and away we goooooooooooo. (or is that gloooooooooow).
If I were toshebia I would be marketing it to chineese shipping companies. The world uses a whole not of energy shipping blowup snowmen and such to the US.
Something along this design could be used on the moon or mars. It would be nice to have guarenteed power there with 40 years lifespan. But it would be nice to see MW, rather than KWs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You must be american. Letting unscientific fear rule your opinion.
It's actually quite safe. Here safe meaning in the same sense that cars are safe, even though their engines are in a near constant state of explosion.
We have come quite a far way since the days when nuclear reactions where unstable accidents waiting to happen.
It's funny that today, all you have to do to make something unpopular is put Atomic in front of it, and all you have to do to make it popular is to put nano in front of it.
Had they called this a nanoscaleparticleenergyconverter instead people would be flying off their chairs screaming "What a wonder!"
The claimed cost of power is $0.05/kwh.
A gallon of gasoline has something around 35kwh. 35kwh from this thing would cost you $1.75. If you had a fleet of electric vehicles, you could continually charge batteries off this thing and swap them out.
A 200kw reactor would produce the equivalent of almost 140 gallons of gasoline per day. Effectively this is more energy, if your vehicles operate in the city, because you don't expend energy idling the engine. You could operate a fleet of electric cabs, locking in the equivalent of a $1.75/gallon energy cost for the next forty years.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Imagine the mileage!
:O
Around earth in 80 days.
To bad if I crash the car though
>I live in an area where that is not near any water, has only intermittent sun and wind so another power source is necessary. One question: why? Everyone will need to think harder about the cost effectiveness of their living situation in the future. Google is thinking about this now, and setting up data centers near large sources of hydro power. I suppose you could grow trees and burn them, like my parents did in the 1970s when heating oil got expensive. Not environmentally friendly because you still get CO2 out. There are very efficient stoves that burn corn products now.
We sold chemical weapons to Iraq.
Some of our future govs did deals with Iran, and more once they came to office.
Shoots, we even built up and armed Al Qaeda.
About the only who will not be allowed to buy this will be American citizens. All else will be welcomed.
When I first read the title, I thought that they built a new laptop power system.
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
Shrink it further so I can have a micro nuclear reactor in my cellphone. This way if my phone bursts into flames I can have my own little Chernobyl incident.
Good to know we're one step closer to Mr. Fusion. Next step, flux capacitors and getting the DeLorean's back on the street.
Insert Sig Here
Gee, I guess I'll be selling all my extra power to the grid.
I love it when someone from Arizona tells me that solar power is going to solve all my power problems here in northern New Hampshire.
I seem to remember reading this somewhere before, like a month ago. On Slashdot I thought. Something about a self contained nuclear "box" about as big as this one, that would be marketed to 3rd world villages. You would hook up water pipes, bury it, and let it run for 5-10 years. Any water going through turns to steam, and you do what you want with it. It was safe because it didn't need rods going in and out or something.
I got one of these and, honestly, it only puts out about 180 kilowatts out of the box. I managed to overclock it to 250 kilowatts, however. I just finished the case mod. I'm using plexiglass so you can see what's going on inside. It also weighs a lot less without all the lead, which was pretty unattractive. But now Toshiba is saying I voided my warranty and won't give me tech support. I just want to find out why my dog started glowing in the dark...
Obviously the people owning apartment buildings are hoping to develop Weapons of Mass Destruction (TM). The US government better take steps to invade them before they threaten the American Way of Life (TM).
Why, yes! I AM new here.
But does it run Linux?
Oh, wait!
Will it blend?
I wish I was clever!
to power my new Dell Vista laptop. Great.
Solar is not viable in high latitudes as the same winter that makes more difficult to have hydro (because water freezes) or thermo-electric (because you have to haul the fuel from somewhere) generation also makes the daylight last few hours.
Low-service nuclear is the way to go in these cases.
If I had to live off-grid, I would rather have solar or solar-thermal where I live (a mile south from the Tropic of Capricorn), but nuclear also seems a nice option for "power-anywhere problems".
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Yes, it's all fun and games until someone grows an arm...
Great! So do we now have to worry about what our neighbors are going to be doing with their nuclear waste? Is it a turnkey job, so Toshiba will assume responsibility for all cleanup after the plant has spent its fuel? Or is the waste not a problem because they're using Lithium? The article is much too short on details for me to get excited about this.
you work for the white house? According to wiki, it is STILL going in. "greenies" have had nothing to do with it. In fact, according to the wiki, just this year, the town confirmed it.
My suggestion is that you go back to preaching about the WMD that Iran/Iraq/NK has. It is idiots like you that cause more issues than the "greenies". They voice concerns. You and your neo-cons voice lies.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf82.html
So the USSR, US and french have designed and built small spaceworthy reactors before. Some of these things have flown on actual space missions, particularly the russian Topaz-I system, weighing only 320kg.
They even built and tested nuclear powered aircraft both in US and USSR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_aircraft
Wonder why it never went anywhere ?
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
This was announced back in 2001, apparently. I still can't find any mention of fuel, anywhere, but at least in the BBC article they do state that the waste would have to be disposed of somehow. It was "conceived of as a power source for colonies on the Moon" and apparently they were trying to get it set up as a smaller, more distributed power generation system to overcome growing power demand and shrinking space to build power plants. With the waste disposal issues and everything else, even if Toshiba did somehow get the contract to build the suckers I'd suspect that there would be heavy regulation and in the end only governments and the well off are going to be building these things, it'd be a nightmare for some regular neighborhood to run one of these things! Anyhoo I dug up this link I guess in theory Alaska is getting one of these suckers up by 2010 if everything goes well. Some slightly better design info in the PDF too...Note that it calls for sodium as the coolant and features exactly the same picture as the newer one..I dunno something about all this new hype is fishy to me...
Graduate students and most professors are no smarter than undergrads.
They're just older.
And one would assume that the costs of this device would go down as economies of scale are realized on production runs of more than single digit numbers of units. Combine that with the load removed from the central power grid (because you're generating the electrons MUCH closer to the point where they are being consumed) and I see a winner here.
This unnatural fear of anything with the word nuclear in it is eventually going to be replaced by the stark reality that we really have few other viable alternatives that will scale to fit our power requirements.
Cheers,
Temperatures this past summer held in the mid nineties with 80% humidity. Winters can be just as brutal with lows near zero and winds gusting to fifty. You are going to find very tough to lower your power consumption "by an order of magnitude" under those conditions. There are no easy or obvious alternatives for the neighborhood, the nursing home, the single family residence.
I don't think this will fly.
I don't know, a if it goes critical it just might fly.
Blank until
Please accept this lovely fruit basket for the holidays and here's hoping for a productive New Year.
(Call me!)
M. Ahmadinejad
They can already fit one into a submarine!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I can't wait until I'm watching Ron Popeil hawk the Nuke-O-Matic 5000. If I call within the next ten minutes, they'll send me a second nuclear reactor for just $19.99, you know.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
10 years ago, this article would have abounded with threads on how cool this is, and "I wonder if you could make a Beowulf cluster of those."
Now, it's all, nuclear is bad, nuclear is evil because "The terrorists might get it".
Listen to yourselves. You've eaten the terrorist propaganda the government has been feeding you, AND YOU LOVE IT.
"We can't do this because it might help the terrorists."
"Yeah, that's cool, but what about the terrorists?"
"If it weren't for terrorists, this would be awesome."
George Bush loves you guys, he's got you on his side and you don't even realize it.
I don't yet know how to do tags, but perhaps someone should tag it Fat_Man_and_Little_Boy_(The_Simpsons) or SomethingHomerWouldDo.
Submarines have had very small, very safe reactors for decades. Unfortunately, the technology is highly classified and will most likely never be made available for commercial uses
My brother-in-law was on an attack sub and I got to tour it (my father in-law actually got to drive it!). We weren't allowed aft passed a certain point, but give where we were in the sub, you could get an idea of how small the reactor was. Always thought it would be fun to put those reactors to use for domestic power generation, even if just for special purposes like powering server farms.
-Chris
I'm American, and I'd damn LOVE to have one of these. Sadly, I'm sure the price is going to be a little higher than would allow me to buy one :P(
This is interesting. As stated in the previous nuclear reactor article entitled "China goes Nuclear", uranium is kept in small pebbles made of graphite, which is a neutron reflector material.
Both reactor designs have a "negative temperature coefficient of reactivity" simply means that an increase in core temperature will cause a decrease in core power. If the temperature increases too much, the core will shut down. I don't know if the pebble-bed design does, but the 4S still produces heat after being shot down (I'm not sure if the pebble-bed reactor does), so there must be some mechanism provided to remove the generated heat.
More interesting facts: pebble-bed reactors use helium as coolant instead of water, and helium is much more resistant to becoming radioactive - this deals with the possibility of having a radioactive cloud in case of an accident. The 4S, in comparison, uses liquid sodium as coolant, allowing the reactor to operate 200 degrees hotter than if it used water. This means that the reactor is depressurized, as water at this temperature would run at thousands of pounds per square inch.
However, I'm not sure how safe sodium is, and we all know what happens when sodium comes in contact with water - and heated sodium explodes just as easily when it's exposed to air. Helium, instead, is an inert gas.
IANANS (I am not a nuclear scientist), but the pebble-bed design seems very well-thought, requiring less control mechanisms than the 4S, so I think I'd go for the pebble-bed design.
Is there any nuclear scientist around to give more info and comparisons, and correct any mistakes I may have made?
The World Nuclear Association published a report on Small Nuclear Power Reactors in november 2007. The nuclear industry is eager to build much smaller reactors, because it's easier to find the initial capital. Once a small reactor has been built, it can start financing the construction of the second one, and so on. This modular approach (taken from solar panels and windmills) can result in a large energy output combined with a fast return on investment.
If you have a reactor that's 20 feet by 6 (by what? - that's only 2 dimensions) then it would fit nicely onto the back of a truck. You can't just plunk it down, hook it up and go on to install the next one. What's to stop the baddies from coming along, winching it up onto a rig and towing it off to extract the fissionables?
I'd guess that one of these would require a level of security commensurate with the threat. Hmmm, nuclear material - let's see would a couple of retired cops be enough?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.
By threatening to nuke their power company?
Moreover terrorists will be pleased to recycle your plutonium for YOU!
A couple of Alaskan villages are trying to eliminate their diesel gen sets and replace them with alternate power sources. This news is about 5 yro. Toshiba offered their 4S reactors (the one in the article) for free, in turn for data gleaned as the reactor operates in a hostile production environment.
Not to mention the boost from the PR.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Sigh this is why I don't post stuff, it never comes out right. Anyway the 4S is the thing in Alaska - few other commenters asked about that. Fast-L is what they're calling the Lithium cooled rig - go figure. Not much info on it but from the looks of things it was developed by "Scientists funded by Japan's Atomic Energy Research Institute". I assume Toshiba acquired the rights somehow, that or some monkey took the info from the Fast-L and tried to get people to confuse it with the 4S, I dunno. So yeah I hope that puts some order to my chaos....Questions?
Graduate students and most professors are no smarter than undergrads.
They're just older.
After crawling the web a bit I found a few more interesting links about Toshiba's "Micro-Nuke" technology. First an article from 2005 about a similar Toshiba reactor running on liquid Sodium that was slated to be installed in a remote Alaskan village some time before 2010. This doesn't appear to be the same reactor as mentioned here on /.
A blog entry with more information and links about this and other small reactors.
It seems to be fairly safe, though I can't imagine the red tape they'll have to get through in order to begin installing them, especially in North America. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US has about a 60 month process to certify a reactor from the time the application is filed, Toshiba probably has a head start on this application from 2005 with its "4S" mini-reactor, but this new Lithium version will probably need its own application process. They plan to build these things at least 30m underground, encased in steel and concrete walls that probably put most bank vaults to shame, so I don't think tampering will be a major issue.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
I'm not familiar with the technology that Toshiba is using. Is this an honest to goodness fission reactor, or just an upscaled RTG?
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
I suspect you'd find a positive correlation between those who use green energy and the uptime of their PC. I make this claim on the assumption that those who use green energy are also more likely to use Linux (compared to those who don't use green energy), and those who use Linux are more likely to have higher uptimes.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The one from 3 years ago was Toshiba's "4S" reactor ("Super-Safe, Small and Simple") designed to produce 10MW of power (much more than this new "micro reactor"). In other words the 4S is a real nuclear plant (albeit a small one), complete with a small staff to run it. Wikipedia link.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Knowing nothing about the potential danger of this "wonder", does anyone worry just a lil bit that this thing at 20' by 6' could probably fit snuggly on the back of a flatbed truck!?(granted it might be a tad heavy...) Portable BOOM, wonderful.
No words of wisedom here.
But does it run Linux?
From article: "The whole whole process is self sustaining and can last for up to 40 years" ...after which it blows up, and you have to doze it and build a new one.
"The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs."
Gee. Is it my imagination or are most stories on slashdot usually against anything organized? e.g. government, business, religion, etc.
Sometimes the status quo works and there's no need to rally against them. Especially when most of us have better things to do than try to recreate society in our own image.
just ship it to this address in New York, and I'll pick it up. I'll pay cash."
that's why it will never be licensed for sale, lease, or test in the US. not big enough to stay put, not costly enough for the feds to be all over it ten times a week.
until A. C. Gilbert is allowed to sell do-it-yourself cyclotron kits, that garage-sized reactor ain't gonna fly.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Slap one of those on the "Hummer H4" and you'd only have to refuel it once every 20 years!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's important that a commander get at least 2-3 of these down before building his first factory. You should also build up around 10-20 or so of these, before you go for tech II power plants. Otherwise you'll be in a dire energy drain which will only slow down your war effort.
Hey, my anti-bot keyword was "leaden". How appropriate!
Your assuming there is a single unchanging "environmental group". Most "environmentalists" are fine with modern wind power which is about as friendly to wildlife as any other large human structure. There where some issues with early small wind power plants killing large numbers of birds due to placement and size issues but new larger wind power plants are about as dangerous to birds as trees. The other anti wind group tends to be rich people who care far more about their view than the environment. Chances are they would have far more issues with people building coal power plants in the same locations.
The problem with the term Nuclear Power is you end up lumping unsafe designs like Chernobyl with far more reasonable modern designs. Nuclear waste becomes safer over time what will kill you in 10 minutes is far safer in 20 years. That's right the spent waste sitting around is "quickly" becoming safer. What's still around in 1000 years is going to be fairly stable. So where a small fraction of people really hate the idea most people are fine with a well designed system with strong safeguards.
I think you will find a lot of people who consider environmental issues are more than willing to do harm as long as we avoid doing something really stupid like reusing the Chernobyl design. EX: Driving a Prius would be cheaper and more fuel efficient than my new Acura but I am more than happy with 31MPG highway because I live 2 blocks from my office so I don't feel getting more MPG is that big a deal. I have no issues using my 55inch 1080p TV, but I find it wasteful to try and keep old PC's running all the time for the "fun" of it. So yea I care about global worming but I think it's more important to invest in new technology than go live in the forest somewhere.
Anyone who knows anything about nuclear reactors knows that control rods certainly do not initiate reactions. They regulate or halt it by absorbing the neutrons that cause it. Maybe the author at "Next energy news" should become a bit more familiar with his/her subject before writing about it.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
Seriously, I want one buried in my backyard. Do they have an even smaller unit for individual homes? Like maybe the size of a Sun V890 or something?
Corporate nuke reactors, eh? Can the Shiawase Decision be far behind?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Don't you mean the enviro-wackos? They are against everything...wind, hydro,solar, you name it, some lunatic Luddite will have an objection.
So, nuclear has a radioactivity issue. So does sunlight, microwave ovens, televisions, coal burning, X-Rays, and many more items/activities in daily life.
o_O
Nuclear radiation is stuff like alpha (helium nucleus), beta (electrons), and gamma (high-energy photons) particles. In particular, when uranium decays it emits an alpha particle.
To say that sunlight and microwave (photons) are "radioactive" is disingenuous...your microwave oven is not going to damage the chemical bonds in your DNA even if you stick your hand in it while it's operating; you're about six orders of magnitude too low in energy to do that.
:(){
...when those smart scientists come up with a wind farm, solar panel array or hydroelectric dam-and-turbine system that has a footprint of only 120 ft^2, is silent and outputs enough power to amply meet the needs of an entire apartment building or suburban city block.
FYI, hydro and wind power generation have a significantly higher day-to-day impact on the environment than nuclear facilities--when considering equal amounts of power output by each energy source, hydro and wind involve the destruction of many times more natural habitat than a nuclear facility does. You'd also have to cover the rooftops of most buildings in a city to meet power demand using solar panels, and just as the case with the batteries in a Prius, nobody talks about the energy expended or the environmental impact of the manufacture, recycling and disposal of solar panel materials either. Nuclear waste is notoriously hazardous to be sure, however the quantities involved happen to be relatively small considering the energy output of the process.
There is one thing I think a lot of people don't realise (assuming Al Gore isn't overstating the magnitude of what is happening as much as his detractors say he is), and that's the fact that in order to have a meaningful impact in the effort to reverse trends in climate change it absolutely must involve profound changes in the way we live, in one way or another. If people do not want to give up a serious amount of "modern convenience" or accept a contraction of the industrial activity not seen since the 1930s, then they have to accept technologies like nuclear power, biomass and so on that are much closer to carbon-neutral even though they may have other objectionable characteristics.
This was already built in Canada over 30 years ago. It was called the SLOWPOKE reactor (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLOWPOKE_reactor). We had one near where I took exams at the University of Toronto and it freaked me out.
Marty! You may be able to buy plutonium at any corner store in 1985 but here in 1955 it is a little hard to come by!
Indeed it could change everything for those people, and anyone else in the surrounding area.
Not to play the ZOHMYGOD factor, but there are some significant risk factors involved in such a proposition.
Not the least of which is the potential to have, let's say it's a well-adopted technology, 50 sites in a state. Each site is essentially a target for anyone looking to cause trouble. How much security could there possibly be in each and every site of a reactor powering individual buildings or businesses? Penetrating the security of these sites would be very easy. And with a common reactor design, it would not be unforseen that a weakness/trigger could be found that causes the right kind of event, be it a meltdown or other event and that is reasonably easy to teach someone to do. How long would it really be before these would become the favored target of anyone looking to cause terror? Imagine the news headlines the day that 10 or 50 of these are atacked at once.
The reason terrorism works is because it does change the way people think. It's goal is to instil fear and it is obviously very successful at tapping into peoples' underlying anxieties. Just look at all the "security" features popping up everywhere.
In the past the cold war was the main source of fear and anxiety, although we didn't call it terrorism, because it came from a state rather than a political group. It did however change the way people thought and acted in exactly the same way as terrorism does.
Nothing's really changed
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I guess I can't argue with that!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Dams have been responsible for wiping out some species of salmon... Sure, they try to make ways for the fish to get past the dams on their way up and down the river, but there's still a huge impact. Not to mention the actual construction of the dam, and the fact that you're now backing up water which used to flow freely.
And dams may help prevent floods, but if a dam fails, it can cause a flood, too. And that can be a huge disaster.
That said, I'm all for hydro, I grew up in a town that depends quite a bit on hydropower. But it's not such a clean cut decision that it's *better* than nuclear. Let's keep it all in perspective, and use nuclear where it's appropriate, and hydro where it's appropriate.
You forgot to add shipping and handling and express guaranteed delivery before 10:30 AM. That jacks up the price from 3.5m to 3.5b.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There were a number of building size reactor designs proposed in the 1980s.
I once worked for a company that designed an intrinsically safe urban reactor designed to make hot water. We had convinced the city of Helsinki to buy it and were within hours of signing the contract when the Chernobyl Reactor accident occurred. Helsinki would have used it as a district heating plant big enough to heat all the buildings in the city.
Nuclear reactors are much better at making hot water than they are at making electricity. Heating is a major consumer of energy in many locations. Therefore, replacing a fossil fuel heat source with a nuclear heat source is more beneficial to the environment than replacing an electric power generator. There are other applications, aluminum smelting for example, that need copious quantities of heat, not electricity per se.
hmm... 20' x 6'... That would fit inside a grain silo for a bit of added shielding. Also, I would finally have the power to fuel the big ass Tesla Coil I've been planning on building! Sign me up!
The game.
It would be great in the US, but it would end up hurting more people than it would do good.
Just like the "energy saving" light bulbs and energy star appliances in the past touting "billions $ a year in savings". They forgot one thing, the energy companies loose out on that money and hence jack up the prices. People who didnt adopt energy saving devices because they couldn't afford it or didn't think it would catch on then had to pay even more for electric services.
If these mini reactors take off and are in the hands of civilians and small companies, those that cannot afford them will suffer the most. Energy companies will retaliate by raising prices. The low income crowd looses out again.
Excess energy that is sold back to the grid will be a nice touch and all, but if no one is buying, it'll cause a disruption in our energy infrastructure. Sadly great ideas like this work only in the beginning, then it causes prices in other sectors to jack up.
Now the Utopian side would be that the energy companies change their busines model slightly. Instead of supplying the "refined" electricity, they now supply the fuel for the reactors. Win win, They supply energy to consumers in both forms.
Being the USA that wont work well. THe energy companies would quite possibly prefer to spend $400,000,000 and 5 years in legal warfare saying how that is unfair to their business. In the end the companies will realize the change is not that bad afterall and be "hey guys, just kidding, we didnt mean it when we sued". It'd be nice to see new technologies adopted faster, but capitalizm stomps innovation to dust.
May Allah praise your work, and quick delivery schedule.
--Osama BL
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'd certainly consider it. From what I've read you could design a PBR to run on some of the more common radioactive materials and the design is inherently safe. But I don't know if they are cost efficient than a coal fired generator and I don't really want to have religious wackos picketing my front yard.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
I can just imagine the operating manaul:
"Thank you to use Nuclear-Friend. The main characteristic in machine of control rod moves in with slim middle, can nimble neutron dependable work send, of via sea warmness thusly turbine twist out machine-wind.
ALERTNESS, magnet-imprison with ionisation threatening badass. Fleeting bioluminescence in bird appendage observation, conjunction Cherenkov neon likeness, linking chain of no command (barking!) to blinking indications. Personages of vicinity ascending fucking with sparks! Ability detriment remove with "fast-neutron-sheilding-blanket" (slowly neutrons with alacrity) to mammalian sex babylove machine faulty. As packing box inside includes dosimeter for life-spirit guard dog is. Un-normal witness with e=mc2 of cloudy fungus c.10km bigness, warranty glue not connected."
The AECL Slowpoke was a small terrestial reactor intended for almost the same use as Toshiba's design.
When everyone in Arizona gets solar power (and feeds the excess back to the grid) there will be more energy total avaliable that you get get from the grid.
If I were an electrician I'd calculate it, but do you have any idea how inefficient it would be to power New Hampshire with electricity generated in Arizona? You lose a considerable amount of voltage over just 1000 feet. It's nigh over 10 million feet from AZ to NH.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
I hear that Microsoft is making a sales pitch to Toshiba for using a special industrial version of Vista as the operating system for these plants. Brings a whole new meaning to 'blue screen of death'.
Hydroelectric power is not cleaner. It involves damming up rivers, which essentially destroys them as ecosystems. By eliminating flowing water it also lowers oxygen levels which can increase organic pollution, because it's no longer removed by natural processes.
Plus, hydroelectric projects often involve flooding large areas and the forcible relocation of whole communities. I'd rather live near a well-designed, modern nuclear reactor than have my house condemned.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think I've heard of this reactor before, or something like it. The design I read about said you basically had a telephone pole worth of fissile material along with a neutron reflector shealth that starts at the top. Over the lifetime of the unit, which was expected to be 30 years, the reflector would move down the pole, causing a fission reaction and generating heat that could then be tapped via the usual steam turbine setup on typical reactors. Once the sheath has moved to the bottom of the pole, the material is all used up and ready for replacement. The original article, like this one, touted automatic operation without requiring an engineering staff. I wonder how the full lifetime cost of such a system would compare with fossil fuel or alternative fuel generation. It might not make any sense where you can schedule fuel deliveries for conventional power but it might be great for places like Antarctica where transport costs are many times higher than near civilization.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
we're all terrorists now!
To Ghostbusters style nuclear backpacks!
how much does it cost to safely dispose of this after the twenty years are up?
10,000 years??
(the little problem nobody wants to talk about)
Any invention that puts the means of production in the hands of individuals or communities is a clear advance over the technologies that are so expensive that 0.01% of society controls them all and uses their advantage to alienate us from our labor.
If these mini-nukes make it into the basement of apartment buildings, I can just see the stereotypical building super (superintendent), the guy with the big key ring on his belt and the obligatory plumber's exposed ass crack who can barely fix a kitchen sink properly, head down to tinker with this.
Have gnu, will travel.
For fear of sounding like a troll, but seriously. 10 years ago, nuclear power had a much greater stigma than it does today. The general public has become more and more accepting of it as global warming has become a bigger and bigger issue.
A private reacter, sounds like pocket sized for al Queda.
No trees were killed in the sending of this message. However, a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
could change everything
Not in the USA it won't, with our endless phalanxes of lawyers, bugfuck politicians and bottomless sea of ignorant citizens who get 100% of their knowledge about nuclear power from The Simpsons.
Nuclear power is a massive boogeyman here in the US, so we'll sit here burning coal and foreign oil like modern Neanderthals for another 100 years or more.
I'm sure the lower rents will attract all those tenants who have always wanted to live in close proximity to a nuclear reactor.
This may be a hoax. Looking in Google, the story is all over the crap tech sites and blogs, but there's nothing from Toshiba or in the mainstream press.
Small packaged fission power reactors are certainly possible. The U.S. Army had several designs working in the 1950s and 1960s. But they were one-offs, and the infrastructure to support them, including training facilities, cost more then they were worth.
Sure. More people have died from high school football or swimming pools than nuclear power. And lets not even talk about the 40,000 people a year that die in car crashes. Why would you be afraid of a nuclear reactor, and not cars?
Anyways, imagine every new subdivision came with a reactor preinstalled, and everyone was guaranteed 5 cent/KWH electric for the next 40 years. I'd buy a house there.
If you can lower your consumption by a magnitude, why haven't you done so already?
Gee, this solves the problem of worrying about terrorists getting dirty bombs. No one will bother to build a dirty bomb when they can just use conventional weapons to blow up the reactor in your apartment building. Scaled down further, this could also solve the pesky problem of having to change the batteries in proctoscopes so often....
I just want to find out why my dog started glowing in the dark...
He ate the neighbor's Korean genetically-engineered mutant cat.
A made up example -- for a community hospital in a small municipality, next to City Hall, the fire station, etc. Let's assume that 200KW per hour plus the trigeneration heat if it can be developed is enough to run the electricity for and warm the hospital and fire station, and city hall, plus providing the charging for all of the mini-metro hybrid bus fleet, etc. This might make a compelling case that a municipal bond investor might sign up for. Let's say that the bond is put out there for 10 years, meaning that the municipality expects to pay about $400K per year back to the bond from tax and other revenues, and that the cost of any alternate energy scheme per year which does all that, is $500K. As a voter I'd vote for that bond to be issued, and as an investor I'd buy that bond in a heartbeat. Because the benefits for the next 30 years are nearly free to my community afterwards.
My question is, what if after a year the hospital/town/etc. discovers that they need an average of 400KW hr., now what? because as far as I can tell there's no way to upsize this system directly. (An interesting question for a Toshiba Sales rep, methinks).
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
AECL (Atomic Energy of Canada Limited) has had two similar technologies for some 20 years already. The Nuclear Battery:
"The reference design for the Nuclear Battery could produce 600 kWe net electricity via a Rankine cycle engine coupled to the heat pipes, and this production could continue uninterrupted (without refuelling) for 15 years. Alternatively, the unit could produce high-pressure steam at 2400 kW for that length of time. The overall dimensions of the reference unit were 2.5 m in diameter, and 2m high."
Seems to outperform Toshiba's model.
"It is unsinkable". Sounds familiar?
For me, assertions like "It will not overheat" (from nextenergynews.com, as linked in the article) sound too much like those made by generations of overconfident and eager-to-sell engineers before to feel any confidence over them at all.
On the contrary, oversimplified blanket statements like those are engineering's way of telling us to trust them unconditionally because we are too dumb to understand what's really going on anyway. Time and again the complexity of the laws of nature has proven those assertions wrong and has shown us that engineers and companies are not as smart and above error as they'd like to make themselfes believe.
So in reality, such assertions must be triggers for everyone to not trust the engineers, have a closer look and analyze the risks themselfes and get a lot more opinions and analyses from different and independent sources before drawing any conclusions, particularily when it's about machinery where failure can have such grave consequences as with nuclear reactors.
I never get it way people seem to think that they will need one Silver Bullet method of producting power.
If you area is good for a certain method of power then use it... Other wise use something else. If all else fails Nuclear is a good option.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
About a year ago Toshiba reached an agreement with a city in Alaska to put one of these reactors in free of charge. It is a remote site that is only accessible during the summer, so they have to receive all their diesel shipments during the summer and store them for the generators. Toshiba was willing to do the entire project free of charge to make a demonstration. The NRC would not approve the project.
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I think the co2 problem will correct itself. Eventually we will burn all the oil and there will be none left. It is only a matter of time. Even if we all do everything right and cut our consumption all that will do is postpone the day when we run out of oil. Maybe we can push it out 50 years. I doubt it. Wait till every family in both Idea and Chine want two cars and a 3,000 square foot house with heat and A/C. Those people are smart and work hard, they will get it, maybe in 20 t 30 years. Al the oil will be gone within my kid's lifetime, OK maybe not gone, but so scarce and expensive that you may as well burn money.
If this device really can deliver power at 5 cents per KWH. and if Toshiba can offer 30 year financing then it makes sense for even poor people in Africa to buy this. If toshiba is smart they should deliver these things for free and just sel the power at 1/2 market rate, adjusted every 6 months to the new market rate. They will make a fortune and their customers will be hapy to pay 1/2 price for power
If breeder reactors were used, then the wastes only stay radioactive for a couple hundred years at worst. Plus you also get 10x the energy out as well as less than 10% of the waste.
Unless you build a number of reactors over fault lines, try to hide that discovery from the public and get caught when a minor earthquake does major damage to your nuclear plant, starts fires and releases radioactive material into the surrounding community. Luckily it was a minor quake and the reactors were shut down in time. Happened this summer in Japan and I witnessed the quake. The local train that went by my apartment every 5 minutes was much more disturbing. There are plenty of worries that have nothing to do with the oil industry and it has its pimps that doing the same type of dirt. Its not the oil industry brainwashing these people, its the fact that their densely populated community is in an earthquake prone area and the government hasn't always put their safety over that of the industry's. Things like Hanford and Chernobyl aren't common but they don't need to be, when something does happen the area is fuc***. I'm not saying don't use the stuff but being wary of it is perfectly acceptable and not limited to oil industry propaganda.
Reed College in Portland, OR has had a 250kW mini reactor since 1968 (10x the heat of a home furnace). Toshiba is WAY behind the times.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Any nuclear reactor, by definition, must use radioactive material. This material can be used to make a "dirty" bomb, thus, all such material is highly regulated by the US Government. Some apartment building will NOT be allowed to have one of these. The security that would be required would price it right out of the market. Perhaps one could be built under the police department in a good sized city?
One could make a logical argument regarding the true danger posed by a dirty bomb, but the US Government seems to have completely abandoned logic as a basis for any of their actions.
The Islamists of the Middle East, who have the largest share of the world oil reserves, seem to have conveniently made it very difficult to get approval for their main energy competitor. In the end we may come to understand that their objective is financial rather than ideological.
Half the power is used is to HEAT or COOL buildings. Geothermal can be used for that TODAY without a lot of extra setup cost. Ever hear of a heat pump?
Not to mention better buildings would cut it even more. There is no reason a Canadian can't heat most or all their house with solar powered Geothermal.
So its not centralized Geothermal, big deal. It helps address a huge part of the whole problem.
Nobody has yet to make a profitable nuke plant; I dare you to find one. You won't because they externalize costs plus get tons of government handouts. I'm so skeptical of nukes; I never minded it being dangerous. I don't mind gov funded electricity; but I hate the sanctioned monopolies that exploit gov which is what we have today. (even the 'cheap' coal plants are subsidized!)
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This is for the budget unshielded version right? I thought it took 20 feet of concrete, or 10 feet of steel to block radiation and is why the american nuclear-powered car never went into full production. (The Ford Nucleon)
As for U-235, I think one of the most inventive uses I've seen is powering a nuclear saltwater steam rocket engine for interplanetary use. Just watch where you point it, the exhaust is really nasty.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
Someone mod this up, for the love of... well, common sense really.
I would like one (or more) of these in my town. I know that its just a TV Show, but have you seen Jericho? What happens to civilization if the utilities we are dependent on shut down one day?
A better example would be this, you live in middle america where ice storms often cause massive power outages when lines are damaged. Imagine if your neighborhood or aparment building had one of these babies. You would be the only people in town who wouldn't need to throw out the contents of their freezers when power is restored 5 days later.
This is the best bang for the buck as far as power generation goes, and the fact that this would decentralize power generation is an added bonus. We've had safe reactors for years, look at our Navy. The discipline of nuclear physics is less than 100 years old, but the field has matured considerably over the last 30 years. I want to be the first guy on the block to have my own reactor.
when I can legitimately say to my future wife "hey babe, can you pick up some uranium-235 next time you're at the store?"
Any here played Blaster Master on the NES way back when? I think this is the precursor to that...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_Master#Story
please... let me sleep... a little more... yay, no longer annonmyous coward.
Trees release Oxygen into the atmosphere, and breathe in CO2.
and when it's dark, they 'breath out' about half the CO2 they took in while it was light.
"But burning them will release more CO2 into the air than they took in."
That's not possible.
"Reducing the Tree population by burning it, only makes the CO2 situation worse!"
Yes, kind of. depends on specifics. If I burn a forest and them immediately pave over it. yes it's worse. But if the area grows back, the carbon that is released will be reabsorbed. Much of the burned material will actually settle back into the ground.
My solution? grow lots of plants through the mid wast of the US that isn't being used, then every 20 years dig it up and bury the plants.
The oceans are the source of most carbon scrubbing. Interesting that as the oceans warm up, there is more algae that takes more CO2 out of the air. Sadly we are in the process of breaking the current balance. The next one will create a lot of problems for all top of the food chain species; which includes us.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm surprised that Slashdot doesn't discuss microgrids more often. Small energy sources near the consumer means that electricity is delivered more efficiently, rather than losing it a long distance of wires through resistance. I'd love to see neighborhoods with solar panels and windmills up, not to mention solar chimneys. But to guarantee a baseline of available power, this is the way.
One thing for sure, though, we simply have to trim our energy usage. I have had an interesting time putting effort into this: all my bulbs are CFL's or LED's. Everything that can possibly be guzzling electricity on "standby" is on a power strip which gets turned off. I have a desktop, but I use my laptop mostly. My extra drive space is coming from a KuroBox acting as a cheap NAS, which consumes only 17W when in use. During the summer, I only hit my air conditioning a few days when it was particularly hot or I had guests. Winter has proven a bit more trying as I am in an apartment which has poor insulation, as it turns out. Yet, my summer and fall electric bills from PG&E averaged about $15 a month, and in wintertime with me heating one or two rooms, I'm doing about $35.
Those are just examples. The means to have cleaner and more efficient power for our lifestyles is here. We could be making so much positive change if some greedy bastards would just get out of the way.
I have no problem with this. I'd love to see more like this. But we also need to do something about the NIMBY crowd and we certainly need better reprocessing and storage facilities. You're right that nuclear is "scary" technology to most, mostly because the only thing they "understand" are A-bombs. Never mind that a modern reactor and an A-bomb have nothing in common except fissionable material.
Now, I have seen a few people who don't want Iran to get uranium enrichment technology (note that I did NOT say 'nuclear power', they don't need to enrich their own uranium for that). I think that's entirely sensible, because the most probable reason they want it is because it's dual-use, and would help them make nuclear weapons. You might say that they only want those to prevent invasion, but that doesn't make much sense given that Bush will soon be gone. I can't see how being against nuclear proliferation can be spun into a bad thing, but I have seen some insensible people say things like that.
The mars rovers would have been powered by nuclear batteries (thus eliminating all the drama about solar panels getting enough energy to power the equipment and heaters, which would have been a by-product of the batteries)...
But of course, anytime someone is thinking of sending nuclear material up in orbit there is a giant freakout from the people who wished we all lived in caves, or better still were all dead to let Gaia party on by herself. Which makes you wonder why then they object to sending nuclear material into orbit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Cos they didn't factor it in here in the UK. £70 billion subsidy from the taxpayer.
Deleted
that's the best sig i've ever read
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
That would also void warrantees according to the Toshiba website.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
correction:
Duh. Though from what I've read, the water going through the reactor system can be your primary steam line - it never makes direct contact with the reactor core. The reactor has it's own coolant that never leaves the core, and the heat exchange systems are built in and certified for no maintenance for the 40 year lifespan of the system. After that, the reactor is being taken in for disposal/refit/recycling anyways. This wouldn't be something you extend past the original lifespan like current large plants.
That has it's own chemistry controls as well. Most of your installed piping would have to be upgraded to keep your chemistry on the secondary side of the system in check too. Better keep another chemist on hand just for that.
I don't read AC A human right
Nice - fits in a Budget 24' moving van, with room to spare for a nice load of fertilizer and quite a bit of fuel oil.
Yeeeee Haaaa
Yes, that's rather irritating. But what is simply outrageous is that there was one rather notable case (linked above), in which the HOA even had the gall to ask a homeowner to paint over the solar cells to make them match the color of the roof, or pay a fine! Now, I'm not an expert on the photoelectric effect, but I think covering the cells with brown paint may have a slight effect on their efficiency... *headdesks*
I just talked to a guy who spent a year at the South Pole. All their energy (heat, electricity) at the Amundsen-Scott Station comes from diesel fuel that's flown in at tremendous expense. The summer population is typically over 200 souls.
The buildings there are very well insulated, at least.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Browse at 5 if you just want those comments to go away.
The second premise is some fantasyland idea where there can't be any more Enrons. What they don't seem to grasp is that Enrons will always be around, and people will always get shafted, if not in the energy industry than elsewhere.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"Sooooo... if the reactor weighs the same as a duck... then it's made of wood."
"And therefore...."
"a witch!!!!!"
(with apologies to Monty Python)
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
This is basically what hoyle described as the next big step in nuclear energy production. in 1980.
Commonsense in Nuclear Energy: http://books.google.com/books?as_isbn=0435544322
UBU
I think AECL here in Canada has toyed with the idea of using small reactors (like the SLOWPOKE) to heat/power remote communities in Canada's arctic (see for example this article from 2001), although nothing ever became of it.
I can see the advantages, remote towns wouldn't have to fly in diesel fuel year round to power their generators; instead just the occasional delivery of a few, small, uranium fuel bundles would suffice. The downside of course would be finding engineers, technicians, etc. who would be willing to live that far north (especially this time of year when there is no sunlight).
I am amazed that you were not modded up. The design totally makes sense. Of course, I would hate to be near one of these when even a small meteorite hits that. I would think that they would want to bury that pretty deep.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I did...man..it's a treasure trove of "could be" technologies...all the techs there that are "the next thing to change the world" are demonstrated very poorly though...anyway, I suppose I could google "+Toshiba +nuclear" to verify if this exists, but I'm far too lazy...but that's not my point! Stop taking me off track for god's sake. My point is that the linked website is full of college student's home videos of revolutionary energy sources that no one else could have possibly thought about! Why didn't that monstrous two paragraph "article" link to any reputable source? All the videos are sketchy at best. Perpetual motion, free energy, look at all the wonders of the universe like 300mpg cars, all on one website! Go, go! Look for yourself!
Vaporware snakeoil fallacy free energy website
I want my 10 minutes back. Who do I see for a refund?
Something to note, uranium is not a naturally reproducing mineral it's supply is literally finite. And, Uranium was apparently formed in super novae about 6.6 billion years ago. It is not common in the solar system. And, today its slow radioactive decay provides the main source of heat inside the earth, causing convection and continental drift. This heat is also used to warm the earth. With this in mind, Uranium is really the last source of power we should be using to power our civilizations. It is not something that naturally reproduces itself. We find a rather large amount of it here on earth. By taking unranium out of the core of our earth could we be finding ourselves in the same situation we are in now with coal and Oil. Second, the only thing nuclear energy is going to do is essentially force us to rely on something that we cannot find easily for energy. When the fuel runs out, earth starts to cool and the ice age approaches.. What will be the final result??? I'll let you figure that one out. Hint, there will be no returning from the final ICE no matter how many green house gasses you pump into the atmosphere. Nuclear is a bad idea... Fusion however, is a totally different option... Because it takes the wastes of fission in our earths core and combines it until it gets to Iron which isn't radioactive at all.
According to the rather conservative PVWATTS calculator:
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/codes_algs/PVWATTS/version1/US/code/pvwattsv1.cgi
But hey, thank's for the FUD bud.
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the Japanese, who riot over nuclear powered and/or armed ...
...
U.S. subs and battleships entering their harbors,
hate all things 'nuclear'
We are Borg and they have been assimilated. PTL!
RR
Yaa. I know. That's what I get for thinking
...do you do the usual decommissioning, remove most of the hot waste and pour concete around what is is left. Put the hot waste in a pool of heavy water and then argue about who is gonna pay to watch it and guard it for the next 100,000 years?
No human institution has ever lasted that long. And certainly with no profit.
Tell me again about this "economy"?
... and who do you call to pick up and dispose of the used-up unit?
I think it's bogus, but someone who apparently knows a lot more than I do about these things says it's for real. Here's the response I posted in Clicked (MSNBC net blog):
"I can't find details elsewhere (except it's not the 4S reactor Toshiba has been installing at Galena Alaska). However, John Wheeler, a manager in the nuclear , nuclear news blogger and podcaster, and a respondant to the article on Dvorak's site, claims it's for real. Contact him, and you'll probably get real details: http://thisweekinnuclear.com/ But contact him directly (email link on his home page) as there are no relevant results from searching his weekly news report. "
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Is anyone else reminded of the "Mr. Fusion" branded mini fusion reactor powering the DeLorean?
:)
And of course, I have to get in the obligatory, "But will it play Doom?"
>trees which are cut down and shipped to the poles where it is too cold for them to decay,
>but I imagine the carbon foot print of the shipping would make that impractical.
Doesn't wood float? Just chuck 'em in the river, they'll float down to the ocean, Nature will provide.
Nucular. It's pronounced 'nucular'.
Stachel
How do you know?
Maybe that radiation was keeping some pest in check.
Oh, and thinking about the reactor in the basement, yeah, there would be nothing close but the cockroaches.
And rats.
What would it be like to have your own private 200kW source in your own basement, though?
>Perhaps one could be built under the police department in a good sized city?
He, that would be a new form of deterrent against crime.
"No officer, please, don't arrest me, I don't want to get radiation poisoning. Really, I didn't mean to rob that bank."
"Well, I get to wear a lead west. You don't. Tough luck. Har Har"
"NOOOOOOOOooooooooooo.........."
But seriously, at 200 kilowatt output, that reactor would be sufficient to power 100 Houses, maybe 150 if they're real energy savers. Hardly enough for a "good sized city". And it didn't say if that was 200 kW thermal or 200 kW electrical (electrical output is always smaller than thermal output because of conversion losses)
...that's where we were headed. What a stupid idea. It's like giving people PCs. They have more computing power than they actually need. They waste more power because it's inefficient. They cause more problems because they are clueless about maintaining their PCs and get rooted more times than I care to imagine. They are stupid enough to take their PCs in for repair at big box shops that employ neanderthal techs (not all of them, but most of them are stupid goons) and then pay an arm and a leg for a completely reformatted system at best and a poorly patched system at worst. But most of all, these people who seem to think they need all this computing power do VERY little with their systems and probably use about 3% of what the systems are capable of. Now apply that to local power generation paying attention to the fact that a reactor need fuel and careful maintenance:
They have more electrical power than they actually need. They waste more electrical power AND nuclear fuel because a reactor for a small group of homes is inefficient. They will cause more problems (explosions, radioactive contamination) because they are clueless about properly maintaining their nukes and will likely come very close to meltdowns more times than I care to imagine. They will be stupid enough to trust the repair and maintenance of their nukes to companies that will employ neanderthal techs who are poorly paid and have little care for making mistakes. (Hell, if a phone company can blow up a house by hitting a gas line [this happened in Strongsville Ohio in August 2007. Look it up.] and very likely shirk all responsibility, you can just imagine what the private sector will do with nuke maintenance) But most of all, these people who seem to think they need locally generated power for their cul de sac will like use VERY little of the power generated and the rest will be wasted in the name of convenience.
Yes, I believe that energy companies are vultures and most of the CEOs and administration in those companies should be lined up against a wall... But I also think that part of the equation to really being smart about electrical energy consumption comes down to conservation. Instead of Toshiba making nukes as a first line of energy crisis solutions, they should instead be working on ways to make their devices more power efficient. Even if it means INCONVENIENCE for the end user. ALL of the consumer electronic companies should be doing this. Make sure all devices actually turn completely off and drain NO power when a user is not using it. Make sure that all computing devices that need to have a saved state do so with solid state drives and better battery technology. Re-work home computing so that all you need is one central resource module that hosts CPU, RAM and storage and interacts with wireless devices that are the "terminals" or "thin clients" while still providing something that feels like a regular PC experience. Make sure that one central module does NOT run an OS at all, but simply hands out resources to the authorized devices. That way you can buy one decent unit that might last a decade instead of new PCs every two to three years. And GET USED TO INCONVENIENCE. It's better than destroying the planet. I'll happily ride the bus to work instead of drive if it means I'm one less polluter. (I do ride the bus to work for just that reason) If you can't bring yourself to inconvenience yourself, you've failed in your civic duty to others.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
What I wrote was because of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14
... well, hot neutrons. I suppose they are, indeed, hot, but if they're at energies higher than the equivalent of having been excited by an infra-red photon, it seems like it should be said differently.
Where it wrote:
Carbon-14 is produced in the upper layers of the troposphere and the stratosphere by thermal neutrons absorbed by nitrogen atoms.
Probably that's technically correct, and I misinterpreted it, and I certainly couldn't correct it. It would probably be desirable if it were fixed so that it didn't seem to say
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Thanks Toshiba! Just what we need - made in Japan quality. Just hope we can get one of these wrapped up in time for Christmas! ;)
How about this...offset the carbon released by burning "fossil fuels" by burying trees. Well...let me qualify that: let's plant a lot of trees, let them grow for a while, then bury them and plant some more. We should concentrate on planting as many of the fastest-growing varieties of trees (like those they make paper out of), then harvest them every twenty years and bury them deep underground (maybe in old mine shafts). That way, the carbon would stay out of circulation for a long time. Think of it as putting coal back into the ground. Plus we'd have the added benefit of lots more trees everywhere, and jobs for all those unemployed loggers in the Pacific Northwest.
Of course, it's heresy to suggest this, but recycling paper is a really dumb idea for pretty much the same reasons. The best thing that you can do with old newspapers is bury them in a landfill. Buried paper is buried carbon. You might as well use some of those pulp trees to make new paper, then bury it later.
OK, so this is probably a crazy scheme...but it's no crazier than a lot of the stuff I've heard suggested lately.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
>It would get NASA back in the budget also NASA is in the budget, just at .6% of the budget,
compared with 4% during the apollo program.
NO way this will ever get into the USA the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency will overly regulate this with so much red tape, that you would have to be Bill Gates to afford the permits. * * Nuclear News and ASME have not had any articles on this issue so This must be a Hoax. Imagine how they got over the efficiency barrier? Where is the heat transfer? Nuclear into electrical energy? No turbine? No condenser? No Generator? No rotating moving parts? * This may work well in Sci-Fi land but not on real land
Herb