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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."
20 feet high, 6 feet in diameter.
Oh, and this is old. I believe it was around 3 years ago that I first heard of this. They were talking about installing one in a remote village up in Alaska that gets all it's power from diesel because it'd be too expensive to connect it to the grid it's so far away.
Then the greenies* heard about it and killed it. The villagers were pretty much all for it.
*Can't really call them NIMBY, unless they count the entire planet their backyard in this case.
I don't read AC A human right
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)
I think you're off by a factor of 1000. I get $3.5 million. That's far more practical. You're numbers come out to $50/kWh.
"TFA says it'll use lithium-6."
I don't think that's what it said. I think it said the lithium was a replacement for control rods to absorb neutrons and keep the nuclear reaction under control. I don't think the article specified the fuel at all.
Now I am not a nuclear reactor engineer nor a physicist, so if you know more about how this works it would be great to get a better explanation than the one the very short article gave.
BTW, never trust anyone who says "nothing can go wrong with it." Something can always go wrong. If they say "these are the risks, but we've assessed them and their mitigating factors and we ultimately believe the ristks aren't big enough to cause concern," you can start paying attention again.
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!"
TFA says it'll use lithium-6
But Lithium-6 is stable, i.e. not radioactive. It can be used to produce Tritium by neutron activation, which in turn is used in thermonuclear weapons. But for Neutron activation you need another radioactive source. So, what's this source? Or is Toshiba using a totally different process?
I doubt that these are properties of an export hit ...
>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.
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!
6Li is a neutron absorber. Its advantage is that it produces essentially no gamma radiation, as the dominant channel is 6Li(n,T). Tritium is produced, but in a reactor like this it will presumably be all inside the seals. The alternative shielding material, 10B, produces gammas as well, requiring lead shielding.
The lithium is a regulator and shielding component of the reactor, not a fuel. It'll be fuelled by moderately enriched uranium, much like a Slowpoke.
Interesting fact: 40% of electricity generated in Canada is lost to transmission lines and conversions. One of the big gains from tech like this would be the reduction in transmission losses.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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
Even when they do apply, that's at least partially wrong. Hydro power is about as un-green as you can get. It does more environmental damage than coal.
Traditional hydro power blocks rivers, which causes problems for fish migration. Hydro power creates pools of water where plant matter dies, releasing large amounts of methane, which contributes directly to global warning. And so on. Hydro power is really relatively nasty stuff. It's fine if you already have a dam for flood control reasons and are just taking advantage of the water flow, but otherwise, it's generally a bad idea.
Solar power is also nasty, at least if you're talking about photovoltaic cells (the only type of solar power practical for anyone but large power companies). The chemicals used to produce the cells are really horrible for the environment. There are cleaner cell chemistries on the horizon, but AFAIK, nothing in mass production yet. The giant solar tower designs don't have that problem, though they are impractical except for large installations and require substantial energy storage to provide power at night. Depending on the energy storage mechanism used, that can be pretty nasty environmentally as well. If they do use a clean storage mechanism, though, such as storing heated water underground, it is relatively green. Notice, though, that with so many "ifs", a large chunk of solar power isn't green at all.
Wind power, bird risks notwithstanding, is relatively green.
Nuclear power is also relatively green. Its only emission is water vapor, which quickly settles out of the atmosphere. The nuclear material, while a waste product, was radioactive on the way in, too. You aren't really producing nuclear waste. You are simply taking advantage of a natural process that would occur inside the ground and harnessing it for power by bringing it up out of the ground. By any sane standard, it is every bit as green as wind power.
Another one you didn't mention is tidal power. This is pretty different from traditional hydro power, and is generally considered to be fairly environmentally sound, AFAIK. It is also limited to coastal regions, which makes it pretty much useless in large percentages of the world, but it's a start. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The nuclear plant in a sub takes up something like 1/3 of the internal volume. this page quotes the size and weight of the plant in a Los Angeles-class sub as 1600 tons, with a volume of 42 (length) x 33 (diameter) feet. Its heat output is ~160 MW, part of which is used to drive a 35000 shp turbine.
Now, the reactor itself is just a fraction of this volume. The data are classified, but as a comparison the reactor in Dodewaard (an experimental nuclear plant in the Netherlands, decommissioned a few years ago, power output 60 MWe) was about 2x1 m. The rest of the space is taken up by the cooling circuits, turbines etc.
A naval plant also uses highly enriched fuel so the reactor can be smaller than commercial ones.
I wouldn't consider these to be 'very small'.