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Distributed "Nuclear Batteries" the New Infrastructure Answer?
thepacketmaster writes "The Star reports about a new power generation model using smaller distributed power generators located closer to the consumer. This saves money on power generation lines and creates an infrastructure that can be more easily expanded with smaller incremental steps, compared to bigger centralized power generation projects. The generators in line for this are green sources, but Hyperion Power Generation, NuScale, Adams Atomic Engines (and some other companies) are offering small nuclear reactors to plug into this type of infrastructure. The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical. They envision burying reactors near the consumers for 5-10 years, digging them back up and recycling them. Since they are so low maintenance and self-contained, they are calling them nuclear batteries."
Well, it has to go critical (k=1) if there is a constant power output...
Three-headed fish coming to a pond near you!
why bring back the risk of meltdown/contamination. This can be achieved using solar and wind. same distributed concept. Just instead of a power cell you have a house covered with solar panels or a wind generator.
Yes this wont' work everywhere but it is viable in many high demand locations ergo Southern California.
I seem to remember watching a show about little reactors put in out of the way places all over Russia to power navigation aids and stuff. The show I watched, one had been opened and guys were taking turns trying to get the radio active material into a container to get it moved. Some hunters had found it and got radiation poisoning.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
You can't glow home again?
Remember, there are still people out there that think powerlines cause cancer, and that vaccinations cause autism, despite scientific evidence.
Nuclear uis a huge red button. I don't think this option is politically viable except in rare circumstances.
I can see it working for small islands and other population centers that are far away/cut off from other population centers. If you are talking about a largish island that has no power supply on it, then it might work. Or an Alaskan town far from everywhere else.
But I can't see someone putting one of these things say in the middle of NYC, Los Angelos, or even on Long Island
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The liquid metal reactor takes advantage of the physical properties of a fissile metal hydride, such as uranium hydride, which serves as a combination fuel and moderator. The invention is self-stabilizing and requires no moving mechanical components to control nuclear criticality. In contrast with customary designs, the control of the nuclear activity is achieved through the temperature driven mobility of the hydrogen isotope contained in the hydride. If the core temperature increases above a set point, the hydrogen isotope dissociates from the hydride and escapes out of the core, the moderation drops and the power production decreases. If the temperature drops, the hydrogen isotope is again associated by the fissile metal hydride and the process is reversed. The chemical isotope splits chemically when it gets too hot. Just like water boils and turns into steam, you can design the water system to not exceed the boiling point of water. You would have to keep the water under pressure to force higher temperatures.
The safety systems will be similar but the reactor cores are different between the Triga (fuel rods in a pool type reactor) and the Hyperion Power Generation Uranium Hydride (liquid metal) reactor.
If you were going to blow it up, it would take a lot of explosives -like blowing up a 15-20 ton buried bank vault. A lot of explosives to penetrate the concrete cask and then more to blow through however many feet of dirt it is buried under.
It would not add much to the cost to have sensors and digital video camera security to these things. So extreme tunneling, attempts to move it or blow it up should be easily detectable and action taken.
For the amount of effort and explosives it would take then just take those explosives and add radioactive material (available in mines and in less secure facilities and sources) and then put your dirty bomb anywhere. Thus there is no incremental risk.
The nuclear material is tougher to turn into nuclear bombs than using raw uranium, which a terrorist could get from natural sources (mines etc...). Again no incremental risk (we are adding no new risk as there is an easier existing path).
For getting oil from oil shale this system can supply heat instead of natural gas. Hyperion also offers a 70% reduction in operating costs (based on costs for field-generation of steam in oil-shale recovery operations), from $11 per million BTU for natural gas to $3 per million BTU for Hyperion. Over five years, a single Hyperion reactor can save $2 billion in operating costs in a heavy oil field. A lot of the initial one hundred orders are from oil and gas companies.
A single truck can deliver the HPM heat source to a site. The device is supposed to be able to produce 70 MW of thermal energy for 5 years. That means that the truck will be delivering about 10.5 trillion BTU's to the site. Natural gas costs about $7 per million BTU which would would cost $73 million.
It would be better to compare the HPM to diesel fuel, which currently costs about 2 times as much per unit of useful heat as natural gas and still requires some form of delivery for remote locations. In some places, fuel transportation costs are two or three times as much as the cost of the fuel from the central supply points.
In certain very difficult terrains, or in places where there are people who like to shoot at tankers, delivery costs can be 100 times as much as the basic cost of the fuel.
Initially these units will be in remote areas near oil sand projects and they will not be directly under people's houses. Do people live directly over power transformers or oil refineries ? The first few thousand can be placed on the site of existing nuclear and coal plants which have a few square miles of space. Even if there eventually there was one for every twenty thousand or ten thousand homes, they would be situated in some industrial zoned area. For eastern europe and island developments, the units will be sited several hundred meters from where people
No matter how safe it is, I'm betting this will be the largest "Not In My Back Yard" example ever put forth in American History.
and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads
IIRC, weren't nuclear warheads the first large scale application of this technology? In this field it's the older technology that scares me the most.
And if they're too small to make warheads out of...what happens if you steal two or three of them?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The USSR used this form of power generation very widely in the 1950s and 1960s.
Today the lost and fallow reactors poison a great many people.
http://www.bellona.org/english_import_area/international/russia/navy/northern_fleet/incidents/37598
"Hyperion Power Generation Inc. has developed a garden shed-sized nuclear reactor that can produce enough heat to generate 25 megawatts of electricity for up to 10 years.
That's enough energy to power 20,000 homes, but still tiny by current nuclear standards."
These are not going to be burried in peoples back years.
A small town might have one city may have a few scattered around. A factory may have one or a data center.
As too what could go wrong? Well maybe they are as safe as they say. I would be willing to bet that they are pretty dang safe. If so then they could be great. Think of all the small villages in Northern Canada or Alaska that depend on diesel fuel truck or flown in. Or think of small nations like the Bahamas.
Yea this sounds great if it is safe.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
What does the poster mean by "is not capable of creating nuclear warheads". Does he mean, "does not create by-products or waste that, if refined and combined with additional hardware, could possibly be used to create a nuclear warhead". Do we currently have nuclear power plants that are also capable of producing nuclear warheads (warheads that actually react and go boom and not just spread radioactive waste everywhere)?
BBH
I saw this on TV also, but the thing was attached to a silver car that could travel back and forth through time
The only way to solve that problem is to offer something signficant in return, such as free electricity for homes within a certain distance of the "battery". Getting everyone within that radius to agree might be something else entirely.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/images/w87-design.jpg
Ian Ameline
A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, and a nuclear power plant under every neighborhood playground.
to know that "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" would be there
These have been working of submarines and aircraft carriers for decades.
It is high time some of that military tech comes to civilian use.
If you are afraid of nuclear power, you are on the wrong website.
This is supposed to be for technologically informed people.
Yes, start in remote areas. Islands etc where running power lines is a major expensse would be the best places to start. NY and LA prefer to export the pollution to the suburbs.
I RTFA and did not find how the battery actually produces power - is it with a typical steam turbine, or some novel new system? The compact size of the battery also raises some interesting engineering problems. The one I am most interested is shielding - if there is not enough shielding between the reactor and the cooling parts, the radiation will corrode the parts to the point of failure, which is bad especially underground. It does make a lot of sense to use this for remote outposts like mining though.
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
Most reactors are built in such a way that automatically prevents them from going over critical (critical is where you want to be, as someone already pointed out). The very nature of their design, assuming something doesn't mess up, keeps them safe.
The thing is, even though reactors are built with countless safety features, something could still go wrong. That's why you have professionals constantly (or at least daily) monitoring everything. Now, if you go and produce millions of mini-reactors, put them in the backyards of regular citizens, give them nothing but automated monitoring, and leave them going for awhile, something is eventually going to go wrong. It still might work on a one-community-at-a-time basis, though. As long as appropriate precautions are taken, nuclear power is extremely effective and clean (compared to coal).
My preferred name is frazz, but someone keeps taking it. If you see him, tell him I said hi.
and we have a hazmat incident. What could be worse than a gas line breach...how about a core breach!
I think that you'd have to be realy drunk to drive 75mph UNDERGROUND.
-- Sig under construction...
Nuclear power companies in the West have safety records and standards that would put any other power company and for that matter almost any other organization to shame (One significant incident at the outset in Britain, one minor incident in the US in '79, and a few messes of note in Japan) but any statements to the effect that it's safe, even if it's clearly impossible for a meltdown to occur, are prefixed with a clear suggestion of "But you should still be terrified of the Nuclear Bomb In Waiting."
But America gets half its power from coal, which dumps literally tons of thorium and uranium and mercury into the air due to fly ash every year.
...system which could be encased and made safe and deweaponized makes too much sense for a government that is all about top-down centralization to ever allow to happen.
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators are nothing new. And they have the same problem as all small "safe" nuclear power generators.
They are full of highly radioactive material.
Even if the stuff can't go boom on it's own they make a perfectly good dirty bomb, if introduced to some simple explosives.
Not to mention that they can and do leak.
The Russians have many Radioisotope thermoelectric generator along their northern coast. And they get lost, leak and are generally a safety hazard.
"Supposedly" is editorial flair for "I don't understand the science or the hardware, but dammit if I'm not afraid of it, so I'm going to throw doubt on everything".
In reality, they're actually quite safe. In fact, they're probably even safer than coal, especially as of the recent coal slurry disaster in Tennessee and the Mercury in coal smoke.
Attach the word "nuclear" to something and watch the fear level rise.
They are more flexible and more reliable.
1. You can site them anywhere. Solar and wind have to be sited where there is solar and wind.
2. They are available 24/7. Solar and wind are up to mother nature.
3. They have a higher power density. You need less area to power a bunch of homes. This translates into more safety, and ultimately a lower land use footprint, leaving more room for, well, things that live in the environment.
4. Lower environmental risk. We have barely studied the long term effects caused by draining energy out of the wind, or, of robbing the ground from solar energy to convert to electricity. The aggregate effects of billions of windmills and solar panels upon the earth are not understood. With nukes, we know the risks. We might have a meltdown, some radiation, and a leak, but that's about it.
This is my sig.
Summary is incorrect. The "nuclear battery" (incorrect name) would have a 99.5% chance of "going critical". After all, that's what nuclear power plants do. What they mean is that the plant would have an infinitesimally small chance of achieving super-criticality. Super-criticality would be a very bad thing, but even that can be mitigated with enough cement. End result? The reactor will be as safe or safer than installing a Diesel Generator in the same location. But it will be more powerful, economical, and environmentally friendly.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Suicide with a gun is extremely effective and clean (compared to with a knife).
--
make install -not war
TFA says they will be using TRIGA reactors, which are open pool reactors. From WikiP
"Pool reactors are used as a source of neutrons and for training, and in rare instances for process heat but not for electrical generation."
So how exactly are these "nuclear battery" TRIGA supposed to actually create useful power? The flow of hydrogen atoms to the "hydrogen trays?" It doesn't say protons.
Of course, I am treating wikipedia as infallible here. Maybe that is the flaw.
More music, fewer hits
So these reactors power about 20,000 homes. That means that to power LA and the greater NYC area you'd need about 1000 of them. Good luck with that. People get annoyed enough if you want to put cellphone towers in their back yards.
And think of what NYC looks like during a garbage strike, and imagine what it'd be like if the garbage is now radioactive waste :-)
And yeah, sure, putting one in Alberta tar-sands country is fine, because the only people living up there are the oil workers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Also allows communities who want to pursue "Cleaner" (aka Hydro, Wind, Solar, etc) energy credits if they can overproduce.
We don't need a radically different infrastructure to implement technologies like this - we just need to better monitor our current one.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
Go Nuclear!
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
...from going over critical (critical is where you want to be, as someone already pointed out).
I don't understand: do you mean "going (to the condition known as) over critical" or "going over (or beyond) critical"?
I think Ed Asner did an old SNL skit like this. Nuke plant manager leaves for vacation and tells employees: "Remember, you can't put too much water on a nuclear reactor."
Alarms go off, employees: "Did he mean, no matter how much water we put on it, it will be OK? Or did he mean that we have to make sure we don't exceed the proper amount of water?"
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
The concept of "local power" was first advocated by... Thomas Edison. He was advocating small power stations all around a municipality for local distribution via his DC-based systems.
Westinghouse's AC system, however, allowed for transmission of power great distances. Despite using his name, and some patents, most of what we use today owes more to Westinghouse than Edison.
Sounds like the "go local" movement is gaining strength when it comes to power generation, too. Wonder if we'll be able to go back to DC? Probably not.
You might want to read the link. Each reactor can power 20,000 homes so they are not going to put them in everybody's or frankly anybody's back yard.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And nuclear is far reliable than solar and wind.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Come on you stupid backward dipshit ignorant latte-sipping bisexual liberal faggots, get with the program!
Oh! Es inutil...
Anything to get us one step closer to Shipstones.
There is a war going on for your mind.
they are burried 3 meters underground in secured locations. read before posting.
nuclear cowboy
Waste heat from one of these things is going to be comparable to the electrical output, and will require dissipating the waste heat. Either they'll need a cooling tower (the BIG part of any nuclear site!), or be placed next to a large river or lake. Folks sort of get upset putting nukes right next to their water supply and ecosystem, so both those alternatives suck.
you know, even with your little goosestepping nickname, you don't have rights to be a moron around here?
just thought i would let you know.
Well, if I only had 30 million, I'd buy one. Of course, if I had 30 million, I could actually afford to just throw the money at solar for my site.
If I were Bill Gates or a Walton, I'd get one of these to power MS or Walmart HQ or where ever their major data center is. One of theses is likely to power the business and the entire surrounding community for about 5-10 years or so. Now how much could 30 million in solar, wind, hydro or geothermal power?
What's really exciting is $30 million sounds about in the price range for a coop to buy. Sounds great for some folks.
The Hyperion technology is a lot safer than the low-level research and medical reactors that still quietly exist all over the planet - there is no liquid cooling system that can catastrophically fail and burial will secure the installations. Nimby alarmists ignore that nuclear power is the safest source of energy by any measure, once all the real risks are compared. Disposal is safe, but has been made too costly due to post TMI/Chernobyl hysteria.
Sadly, the worlds uranium supply is limited. And, even at current consumption levels, is likely to become very scarce within the next 50 years, or so. Another problem is scalability - how many of these plants will have to roll off the production line to provide even 10% of the world's base load? My quick calculation says about 50,000 will be needed to reach this target. That's a lot of systems and a lot of uranium.
If you want to be safe, stay out of the street, stay off the road, stay out of the sun, avoid food and drink.
Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people!
So... will this thing be able to withstand a truck full of dynamite parked beside it?
The irony is that a Coal Plant is actually MORE radioactive than a Nuclear Plant!!
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Hint: It in the ashes and it affect 1 mile around it. Don't eat stuff from your garden!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
That's a hell of a backhoe that can dig a hole in a sealed steel and concrete box buried ten feet underground.
Even a whole SPOOL of fiber wouldn't summon up a backhoe that big.
Play with Hyperion's Power Generator and the Shrike will come after you.
...something is eventually going to go wrong...
It's true that - given a long enough time frame, and a large enough multitude, and a vague enough definition of disaster - this proposal can be terrifying. But perhaps it might be wiser to analyze the probabilities of different potential failures, in combination with the likely effects of those failures, and weigh these, let's call them "risks", against the probabilities and impacts of all the good things (let's call them "benefits") that would be brought by this proposal. Hey, totally off the top of my head here, but I bet we could even compare this "risk/benefit analysis" against some kind of similar analysis for the current method/system!
I should totally patent that "method for rationally assessing a new idea"--what? Shampoo beat me to it!? Damn.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
I wish I had some mod points this week.
This is exactly the model we should be using for large city apartment buildings, at least in terms of power generation. Everything should be self sustaining for electricity. What we'll find, I'm certain, is that the independent libertarians are going to jump up and down ranting about "gov'ment burying nukes in their yards."
These are the people who should be cheering for this technology. No more government mandated power grid, your power is under your house. The fed wants to raid your house, they'll have to be a bit more creative than 'cut the power and kick the door in'. This can start in the either the low population density areas where running power lines is more expensive than the reactors, or in the dense population centers where some back-up power would be useful. Either way, I want this tech needs to be in my reach in ten years.
There is plenty of room for one in my backyard, so long as I get a small cut.
You mad
Hmm, we're still worrying about copper theft......
"The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical."
This statement is incorrect, a reactor has to be critical to produce power.
Criticality refers to the rate at which the chain reaction of fission is occurring. If the reactor is sub-critical, then more neutrons are absorbed then causing new fissions. In this state, the reactor power exponentially decreases to zero. When the reactor is critical, exactly 1 fission is caused on average for each neutron released, which means the reactor is at a constant power. Super-critical means the reactor is increasing in power. A special case of criticality related to nuclear bombs is called prompt-super-critical. For more info, see the wiki article.
I am not sure of the details of these designs, but I bet they use a fuel type similar to university research reactors. This fuel is a uranium-hydride mixture. The moderation for the neutrons is built into the fuel itself, but it has an extremely strong negative temperature coefficient. This means that any increase in power, and thus temperature, reduces the reactivity, which lowers the power back to the equilibrium level. It is physically impossible for the reactor to overpower.
For a neat demonstration of this effect, see this youtube video. It is the research reactor at Penn State performing a pulse. Basically, a control rod is hydraulically ejected from the core, causing the power to spike to thousands of times the rated power, but only for a microsecond. The power just as quickly goes back down to normal by itself, because of the intrinsic safety of the fuel design.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for innovation, but if people would spend more time finding out how to spare earth's resources instead of new ways to waste them, we would all be happier except the capitalists. And I understand that there is a need to find more contained/portable power sources for places where it is harder to pull the main grid, but maybe we wouldn't need such huge general power requirements if we focused more on ways to better save power and to better recycle waste heat.
Onda Technology Institute
"The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical."
A reactor *must* be critical to sustain a chain reaction and produce energy.
Unless we're talking of *subcritical* reactors which sustain a chain reaction just because of the presence of a neutron source...
You didn't read the article, did you? Also, even making your bizarre assumption that the thing is above ground and made out of thin plastic or something, how are you going to "contaminate the neighborhood" by running a car into a radioactive chunk of metal? Nuclear fuel isn't a green glowing liquid. Hell, even with dirty bombs the risk of irradiation is negligible unless you're standing right next to the blast, in which case you should probably worry more about the conventional explosive that just exploded you. What I'm saying is that you should read the article.
I was on boomers for 4 years. We were completely 'closed loop' for weeks on end. We didn't get sick, contaminated or lose power. I had nuclear powered AC and man was it cold. If you want to build the power infrastructure, first, get rid of the politicians and the eco-wackjobs. Then let the smart people get to work. Without politicians looking for handouts and eco-wackjobs inciting fear over non-issues, things will get done.
Buy stock in Caterpillar because we're going to be digging a bunch of holes around the country.
This is the kind of device Hunter S. Thompson would have stuck under his house.
I know squat about nuclear power production, but how I thought that with a few breeder reactors, getting more fuel wouldn't be a problem....?
Let's hope they aren't made by Toshiba.
My other sig is a knife wound.
One step closer to getting my railway rifle operational!
How are you going to GET to the materials to make the "dirty bomb"?
They are in a 15 ft thick nuclear concrete cask buried 20+ meters below ground.
And you claim they leak? Show me where THIS design has leaked.
Note: These are NOT the Russian cold-war expedients, you are confusing the issue.
Go RTFA and come back and apologize to the public for being absolutely stupid.
The "supposedly" is only in TFS. In the article they mention these things called "reasons" and "science" (although sparingly due to the nature of the periodical) to "explain" how it is self-regulating. TFS (and the TFA's "at least that's what the company claims") is akin to a lay person's first reaction to the internal combustion engine being "And supposedly all these powerful explosions will be contained..."
Bottom line: there's probably a lot more science to support the claim to being self-limiting/regulating than a lay person could easily assess. I'll accept my doubts/misgivings from scientists in the field, thank-you-very-much.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
I hear that homer Simpson will be working at the monitoring center
If you're forced to use nuclear power, lots of little installations installed near population centers is exactly the wrong solution.
Contrary to popular belief, the biggest problem with nuclear power is proliferation risk. If this kind of solution is going to replace much of the worldwide use of fossil fuel, then EVERY country will have hundreds or thousands of these stations. This includes Iran, Syria, Cuba, Somalia, Zimbabwe, etc. What are the chances that none of these tempting seeds for new clandestine nuclear programs won't be tampered with? We already have "rogue regimes" who stop cooperating with international nuclear watchdogs, and we can't figure out what to do about it. This would just compound the problem.
These will be an attractive nuisance for terrorists. The British invented bunker buster bombs using primitive 1940s technology, and the US Air Force brags about how they kludged far better ones during the Gulf War out of old cannon barrels in a couple of weeks. Anybody with access to an airplane, GPS and some control theory could slap some fins onto a pipe and take a shot at blowing one of these open.
If these aren't breeder reactors, then you're still using a fossil fuel that will run out within a few decades while generating a bunch of politically intractable long-term waste.
If we're stuck going nuclear, then it should be the exact opposite approach. Build a few huge breeder reactor complexes with integrated fuel processing on platforms in the middles of oceans, hundreds of miles from the nearest back yard. That way, if anything goes wrong, you don't kill real estate values for an entire small state for 50 years. More importantly, fuel and waste all gets handled in place and is much easier to supervise for attempts to divert materials. Long term waste gets recycled and burned up, and shorter term waste can be buried right below the site, solving that whole issue.
So transmitting the electricity would be challenging and expensive. So what? We already send it 1000 miles or farther just to balance fossil fuel loads. You could deduct the extra cost from the (taxpayer subsidized) liability risk that nuclear plants near population centers currently carry.
The main problem I have with nuclear power is the enormous investment required to make it working, and the minimum scale that it can be done on.
While any reasonably competent hobbyist can cobble together a wind generator and battery array on his or her own quite cheaply and easily, the same cannot be said for nuclear power.
Personally, I think the answer does lie in local micro-generation, and the role adjustment of the grid to become solely a transfer medium rather than distribution channel. Large scale power generation could play a part in such a system, but, in my conceptualization of it, it would be a small part with the majority of power being generated by people from solar and wind sources and then sharing their generated power on the grid. People who generate would also have battery banks, distributing even the storage facilities among the community.
Such an arrangement, were it guided by appropriate legislation and regulations, would place the responsibility for power generation into the hands of the same people who consume, allowing people to choose whether they want to earn money from or spend money on their power needs. It would be power by the people, to the people, if you'll excuse the pun.
The problem with this is that no big business would be able to dominate such an arrangement, thus there will never be a political will behind it.
I hate printers.
These sound like energon cubes. Delicious. Must watch out for flying jets.
Let me start off by stating that I've worked for one of the larger private utilities inthe USA. They are relatively well respected in the industry ... which scares the sh*t out of me.
Distributed generation is a great idea. For safe technology. But distributing the responsibility for operating, maintaining, or even remembering where these nukes were buried is not a job I'd like to see my previous employer take responsibility for. They are in over their heads trimming trees and replacing rotten poles. They've actually lost track of underground transformer vaults from time to time.
Fewer, larger installations keeps the business of inspection and maintenance easier to manage. Safety upgrades are easier to apply to fewer units. Not to mention the configuration control prblems inherent in producing thousands of units instead of a few dozens.
Have gnu, will travel.
Your rational and level-headed responses are not welcome here. Please wait for security to arrive and escort you off the Internet.
I hate printers.
Instead of making many years of electricity available, it implements a short term view of what is essential.
Like cable or DSL; the first time it is installed cheaply; second time? What is your options? after the large local generators are put to rest?
Second, if money can't be made on the electricity itself, money will be made on the (inordinate amount of) maintenance, handling, install and uninstall. See sewer systems in the US - massive capital outlay with substantial yearly maintenance costs. They put these in places where it would be 10x cheaper to simply buy everyone brand new septic systems.
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So is a handgrenade in the mouth, to continue the retort:)
Besides that, please put one in my backyard. The rental revenue is greater than what I'd lose in property value.
... duh!
The ideal extension of this is actual on-site power generation. No miles of copper wires, no attenuation. Had we focused on that as a goal in the first place, I suspect the total cost of on-site generation with solar and wind would have been no more or even less than the cost for creating an entire "grid" infrastructure. We've spent a LOT of money creating and maintaining that grid, and now in these heady days of terrorism it exposes a weakness that can be exploited.
Chalk my vote up for 'go big'.
The States need to get their united asses in gear and go nuclear in a big way. Every green source should be used, too, but the base load currently generated by coal can't be replaced with intermittant sources like wind and solar.
The notion of seeding many supposedly-self-contained, definitely poorly-maintained modules all over the landscape seems like a poor substitute for carefully-monitored, well-secured nuclear power plants.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Summary is incorrect. The "nuclear battery" (incorrect name) would have a 99.5% chance of "going critical". After all, that's what nuclear power plants do. What they mean is that the plant would have an infinitesimally small chance of achieving super-criticality. Super-criticality would be a very bad thing, but even that can be mitigated with enough cement.
Even plain-ol criticality (or sub- for that matter) can be bad if it's producing too much heat for the system to take out. Say for example because whatever fluid is being used to extract said heat for power generation purposes stops flowing. Then you have a meltdown, i.e. the nuclear core melting. TFA says it's meltdown, not criticality, that is virtually impossible, so score another one for bad /. summaries.
The modern way to prevent this is with naturally self-regulating reactors (as opposed to say relying on control rods to cool the reactor down). Pebble bed reactors do it by having the uranium in the center of the pebbles so that at the right temperatures they are at the right density for a critical reaction. When they get hotter, they expand, and the reaction slows down. Natural, physical self-regulation. No machine to fail, no control logic to have a bug, it's the laws of physics saving your ass. I like that.
Here's the paragraph on how this one works: "When uranium hydride gets too hot, above 550 degrees Celsius, it will shed hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen flows out of the core and is stored in special storage trays within the reactor. As the fuel loses hydrogen atoms it begins to naturally cool. As it cools, it will retrieve the hydrogen atoms from the trays."
So again, self-regulating based on temperature, sounds pretty cool. The only thing I don't like is that it still relies on a fluid flow, so if somehow the storage trays were collapsed in a way that didn't let the hydrogen to escape, I would think that the increased pressure would mean the uranium hydride would hold onto its hydrogen at higher temperatures. But I'm anything but a chemist or nuclear physicist.
The enemies of Democracy are
But right now nobody can build a wind farm that will run a city 24/7/365.
Large reactors don't bother me any more than large dams, or networks.
If you want carbon limted power today you have three choices.
1. Hydro if it available.
2. Geo thermal if you have it available.
3. Nuclear.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
give them nothing but automated monitoring, and leave them going for awhile, something is eventually going to go wrong
Read up on pebble-bed reactors. They cannot, under any circumstances, run away.
My friend, even if you spread generation out among everyone, how are you going to deal with people charging their vehicles using electricity? Large megawatt datacenters? Steel plants? While I agree wind and solar have a place, there are always going to be large scale electric consumers in the industrial sector that need a reliable base load. Nuclear fills this gap. It's safe (only one incident on US soil, Three Mile Island), it's almost zero-carbon, and the fuel can be recycled/reprocessed if not for idiotic laws put in place by ex-Presidents (Jimmy Carter, I'm looking squarely at you).
Heck, give me free power for life and you can bury one of these in my FRONT yard.
-Xoltri
The final stupidity is the comparison between a theoretically perfect well run nuclear reactor which should emit effectively nothing and what is effectively background radiation - it is a divide by zero error! It also is not considering mine tailings (got into the water supply in an Australian town two years ago and were radioactive enough to make people sick) and all the other steps in the process to make the fuel.
Since they are so low maintenance and self-contained, they are calling them nuclear batteries.
The first name for the nuclear batteries, "community warheads," didn't poll well in focus groups.
-Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
Gee, a 25 MW nuclear power plant, buried near the water table, with no containment structure. I don't see any environmental issues with this.
And nuclear is far reliable than solar and wind.
There is plenty of empty desert space we could fill with solar concentrators that would be extremely reliable and provide more then enough electricity for this country. Also with all of our coastlines we could fill in the gaps with wave generators, we will always have tides unless something happens to the moon. Then of course we always have ample generation from dams and geothermal sources.
So many more sane options than nuclear.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
They don't. But they are safer, don't produce toxic waste and won't run out of fuel.
These don't produce waste either - at least only in the location they are manufactured, and many of the components can be recycled.
These are every bit as safe as solar panels since like solar panels, they just sit there.
However because you have these nearer to users of the power, you eliminate need for transmission lines that go from the middle of nowhere, and also the horrible transmission losses you have until you finally develop that room-temp superconductor that's cheap enough to produce the thousands of miles of transmission lines you need.
But then of course, that only produces power during the day and not at night - daylight hours are shorter in the winter for deserts too.
Lastly, you say solar panels "will not run out of fuel". Ignoring the fact of the sun's eventual decay as being far too anal retentive, the fact is that solar panels decay just like anything else. They will have to be replaced eventually, with whatever manufacturing and transportation cost to the environment is involved. These may have to be replaced periodically but they'll not really "run out of fuel" in the same sense either since radioactive material to run them is plentiful.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Suicide with a gun is extremely effective and clean (compared to with a knife).
Not really. Want to try it and let us know how it goes?
FarmersReallySucks [farmersreallysucks.com] New content 29SEP07
Uh... kind of counterproductive by this stage. You do realise that you're effectively saying your website hasn't been updated for over 15 months?
Suicide with a gun is extremely effective and clean (compared to with a knife).
And your point was... what, exactly?
Pirate Party UK
I think in general the idea of full reactors spread out over many sites is a bad idea for terrestrial(ie not orbiting or beyond) based operations.
Large scale nuke reactors can be more easily guarded and monitored over a longer term than small-scale battery reactors.
Nuke can be safe but it has to be well monitored and maintained to be so. In other words it involves a long-term commitment, not an unbearable one, but a commitment none-the-less.
Let's set aside the environmental issues, the social issues, the security issues.
From a pure engineering perspective, this is a dumb idea. Electrical transmission losses in the U.S. amount to 7.2% of production (link below).
Absolute best-case scenario, by putting nuke plants at everyone's doorstep, we gain 7.2% efficiency. To do that we have to totally lose the economy of scale. Small plants are more expensive to build, more expensive to maintain, and intrinsically less efficient.
Tesla and Westinghouse beat Edison in the power generation game because they were able to make long-distance transmission costs tiny by using AC power. This allowed them to use larger power plants than Edison's DC power system, and the economy of scale of power generation meant Edison was doomed.
Westinghouse wasn't using nukes, but the same rule applies today: bigger is cheaper and more efficient.
Source: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/femp/pdfs/primer.pdf
Convincing people to let the government/power agency to bury "nuclear" ANYTHING near a town is like a huge red flag to conservationsists and the 'anti-establishement' people.
That's the stereotype. It has little basis in reality. For years, it's been convenient for the nuclear industry and its fanboys with this ad hominem argument: opponents to nuclear power are tree-huggers and hippies who are afraid of stuff they're too technologically illiterate to understand.
There are indeed people who fit this stereotype, but harping on it is not an intelligent way to respond to thoughtful, well-educated people with legitimate concerns about nuclear waste disposal, WMD proliferation, and accidental releases of radiation. If nuclear proponents stopped this ad hominem crap and started honestly addressing people's concerns (assuming that it's possible to do so; I haven't seen a lot of hard facts between the insults) then maybe, maybe you'll stop getting a NIMBY response every time you use the word "nuclear".
You know, this reminds me of an idea that I had a while back. The only reason coal plants get away with releasing the pollution they do (including radioactive waste) is because it is distributed over a seemingly large area and not concentrated in one location.
What would the effects be if we did the same with nuclear waste (i.e. spread it evenly over the pacific ocean)? Would there actually be noticable effects or would the radiation be dilutted below the harmful thresholds? I imagine that things lower on the food chain would be fine, but it would accumulate to dangerious levels in carnivores.
I find it darkly funny that so many on slashdot are so positive about this. Look, I think they are a great idea, in certain environments. But general distribution is crazy. In a suburban locale? Just give me some C4 and I reckon I can do some real damage and maybe make a profit out of holding a city to ransom. And no, even if the radiation is not lethal it will take a fortune to clean up, and property prices will crash.
Also if a company can dig it up then so can I and well ... I'll leave that to your imagination. The point is we don't want to leave cities and people unnecessarily exposed. I just think this is way too risky.
Bitter and proud of it.
Although, it would be difficult to create a nuclear weapon from this generator it would make a very nice dirty bomb. As with other nuclear fuel rods you have the handling problems that help with deterrance (doses can be high/lethal for the terrorist while handling). With many scattered about and no one watching them you can have the same problem Russia has had with their devices in one keeping track of them all and two ensuring their security.
So what? He made an interesting post, unlike yours.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
The only way of parsing that sentence is that there is no amount of water to be considered too much for the reactor to handle.
Suicide with a gun is extremely effective and clean (compared to with a knife).
I'm not convinced. Why don't you demonstrate it for us?
So you know the full environmental impact of covering deserts with solar collectors, do you? You wouldn't half look stupid if your desert became a wetland in a short space of time because you cooled the region too much.
Removing significant amounts of energy from waves and tides could also have interesting environmental side effects.
Basically you're going to get some form of side effect whenever you convert large amounts of energy from one form to another. The questions are: what are the effects, and are we willing to accept them?
Not saying nuclear is better. just pointing out the downside (never mentioned, possibly unknown) of the so-called "renewable" energy sources.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
So stop mining Uranium. There are plenty of other metals which can be used in a reactor with very little work on our part. The most convincing of which is Thorium.
They probably are safer, in and of themselves. But the big "oops" we seem to be forgetting here is we live in a world filled with nutjobs with a cause. People who have NO problem killing themselves getting the material out of one of these because it means they get a VIP spot at their Gods table. I mean hell, if we didn't have nutjobs with a cause we could just run nuclear fuel cell cars and kill that global warming thing dead! And yes I know you can't make a nuke with one of these, that's not the point. to be an effective weapon it doesn't HAVE to be able to make a nuke, just poison the hell out of people and land when wrapped in a dirty bomb. So unless they are only going to bury these things under military bases surrounded by armed guards I'd rather not take the chance, thanks.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I seriously want to put one of these in my back yard. I would have basically unlimited electricity and then sell the excess back to the power company. I could power my whole neighborhood. I would use the money I get from the power company to pay for the reactor. I might quite possibly even make money off the deal.
Um, terminology fail.
It's not a battery unless there are a bunch of them connected together next to each other. As an example, my flashlight contains a single battery that consists of 3 C size cells.
The etymology of the term as it applies to electrical power originates from the term as applied to military artillery, where a battery was a series of guns that operated together.
Forget about safety, stop debating how safe nuclear is/isn't. No mater how safe it is, I'll bet the companies that develop, build, sell, buy, operate these devices will be subject to extreme government regulation because of real or perceived dangers. Not only the federal government will want to know where these things are, who owns them, where the uranium comes from, where the wastes go to, etc., etc., but every local and state agency will also want to have their say. This will make compliance inaccessible to all but the largest corporations, thus maintaining the status quo. Substitute Exxon-nuclear for Exxon-Mobil. Although the price is still too high, the technology exists today that allows me to run my whole house on solar energy and be completely independent from the grid (granted, in central Colorado where we have 300 sunny days a year). When a large enough fraction of the country is using solar the prices will go down and make it even more accessible. Unless you tell me I'll be able to buy a nuclear battery (and dispose of it) without having to fill any government forms, I don't care how safe they are. Besides, even if we consider environmental issues, the chemical risks of solar panel manufacture can be isolated to a few manufacturing plants while the benefits can be spread as granular as we wish.
Ironically President Carter, as a Navy nuclear submarine officer, was probably more knowledgeable about nuclear engineering than anyone in the White House not specifically hired to be an expert on that field.
nuclear is more environmentally friendly than hydroelectric it seems. Flooding a valley seems to have huge ecological consequences.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So you know the full environmental impact of covering deserts with solar collectors, do you? You wouldn't half look stupid if your desert became a wetland in a short space of time because you cooled the region too much.
It would take a tiny fraction of land to build enough concentrator plants compared to the overall amount of desert in the southwest. Besides turning a small portion to wetlands would just increase available farmland, win/win. Also the amount of concrete and asphalt laid down in those desert areas has actually increased the heat so we would actually be resetting the temperatures back to a more natural state.
Removing significant amounts of energy from waves and tides could also have interesting environmental side effects.
The amount of tidal energy we take would be infinitesimal compared to the energy available. The moon has managed to absorb countless massive asteroid/comet strikes and somehow still maintain it's orbit so I think a few tidal generators won't steal too much energy from the moon.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Can I get one in (err under) my backyard?
Ironically President Carter, as a Navy nuclear submarine officer, was probably more knowledgeable about nuclear engineering than anyone in the White House not specifically hired to be an expert on that field.
From a technical perspective, yes. If a reactor was running away, I'd trust him to SCRAM it properly. From a policy perspective, he was unable to understand the ease of nuclear proliferation that would occur in the future, and how his non-proliferation efforts would be for naught.
The term "you can't put too much water" is ambiguous: it can mean "impossible" or it can mean "prohibited.". If meant as impossible, the implication is that they can use as much water as needed, it will never be too much.
The other, contrary meaningis that they must not exceed the maximum amount of water (which would be too much).
When telling jokes, you can't be too clear.
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
if they bury them 40foot in the ground encased in a layer of concrete and steel, preferably in some place with 24hr surveillance like in front of a police station or fire station, how exactly are you going to get to it???
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
You nuke fanbois crack me up. We have ongoing world wide threats of major wars based on who gets to have nuclear technology and who doesn't. If global or large scale regional war isn't considered a "risk"-it certainly didn't make your list now, did it?- what other stuff are you ignoring on purpose to try and make some point?
Look at the whole picture, or forget about comparing or offering an opinion. You can't just pick and choose which data sets to use in your argument, just like the oil guys always leave out what it costs in military tax dollars to keep the mideast oil flowing, and in which direction.
Nuclear power is *not* safe, it needs armed guards for the entire life cycle, the stuff itself is some of the most dangerous and poisonous substances ever created, it can be used in a form of weapon from crude homemade to sophisticated state made and currently stockpiled, enough to render the planet unlivable if even a fraction off the weapons out there were used in a short time frame, the so called "depleted" uranium is an outright lie and has already condemned millions of people in the balkans and the middle east, including "coalition" armed troops who got told the big lie it was "safe", the non proliferation treaty is a joke, you can't build any sort of reactor or battery without going back to the armed guards, and every dry run staged attack has shown it is quite possible for a small crew to take over a station or facility then do who knows what..and so on. Fission makes a lot of heat, big deal, so do deserts.
Nuclear power is a neat idea for *some* uses, but as a widespread power source..eventually it is going to start screwing up, and eventually there are going to be millions of people murdered by one set of dictatorial goons telling another set that "they" can't be trusted with nuclear technology, the ones who already developed the weapons can be, the height of hypocrisy. That stance is going to backfire sometime, and it has already been ignored when it comes to three nations for convenience, india, pakistan and israel, and none of them have suffered anything from developing weapons on their own. after outright lying they were only developing "peaceful electricity". That's three major failures right there to stop the spread of the technology, the nuclear industry failed, the governments failed, and even by our old US laws, we shouldn't be trading with any of them now, which shows they will lie about anything for a buck because we still are. Hypocritical liars, the lot of the nuke industry and the government so called watch dogs.
You can NOT separate the two issues of delivering electricity and the weaponized potential, they are linked in the beginning because they are the same raw material, and even lower refined grades-5% and under- can still be weaponized and are dangerous, either overtly or covertly, either an actual fission bomb or just a dirty bomb.
"3 mile island? Literally not an issue..."
That's going too far. 3 mile island suffered a very serious melt-down which could have resulted in a significant release of radioactive material.
There is a reason corporate H&S officers want you to report near misses along with actual incidents. Any attempt to limit actual incidents must also target events which ended up being only near-misses.
Okay, I've seen a few articles on here with everyone saying how wonderful nuclear power is. Well, here's the thing: fission isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Here is the problem: at a global capacity of 400 GWe (we use 15000 GWe in a year), we'd be out of our low-cost uranium reserves in 25 years. That comes from a publication from the University of Guelph physics dept in 1996. That's right, the number is even lower now.
If we start building more reactors now, we'd be about out of fuel right when they came online. We can overcome this by using breeder reactors, but that's a big international no-no.
So guys, wait until fusion gets working. We'll have enough fuel for that for 4 million years or somesuch. Besides, no self-respecting mech pilot would use pathetic fission.
Control rods do not "cool the reactor down". The control the nuclear chain reaction.
For instance in the standard pressurized water reactor commonly used the reaction is completely "self-regulating". If temperature gets too high then power goes down, if temperature drops too low then power goes up to compensate. What control rods do in this type of reactor is to control the temperature that is maintained by the reactor.
Thanks to the magic of decay heat it is possible for a pressurized water reactor to meltdown due to loss of cooling even if the nuclear reactor were to be terminated immediately (by scramming control rods) once flow was lost. I'm not familar with the reactor type they're proposing but there are nuclear reactor designs which cannot meltdown so I don't doubt that it could be done.
What could possibly go wrong?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
This is you:
"Hurrr, I know nothing about modern nuclear technology! Just because I don't think nuclear solves all of our energy problems, it shouldn't be used to solve any of them even if it can! Every nuclear reactor is a first generation design like the one that blew up in Chernobyl and caused an atomic holocaust that killed millions of baby seals! There is absolutely no possible way known to man, science, or God to get rid of the evil Plutoniums! POWER WORD: PROLIFERATION! POWER WORD: YUCCA MOUNTAIN! IA IA! Nook-you-lur boo-boo-bad!"
Dildos like you are the reason that our atomic energy infrastructure remains in the stone age. Do you know why? The incessant pissing and moaning of the brainless masses - which, might I add, benefits coal magnates that want to protect their trade - makes it politically unwise for our government and our society to permit progress in nuclear research. We have reactor designs that incorporate solutions to the safety problems, the disposal problems, the reprocessing problems, and yes, even problems with the evil element Plutonium - which was gifted upon the corrupted men of Middle Earth by Sauron himself - into their design. Blueprints for passively safe reactors that consume dangerous waste byproducts for energy are sitting on shelves waiting to be built, but they never will be because treefuckers stand in the way of progress. Worse still as that we let this uneducated minority of armchair dwelling so-called 'environmentalists' actually influence our national policy on the matter just because the screaming Luddites at the helm of their movement feel, not know, that nuclear technology is a bad thing.
Also, tell me something. Do you know how many square feet of land you would need to devote to windmills in a given locale with 'average' wind speeds to power one medium sized town? How about solar collectors? Did you know that wind farms slow the wind and raise air temperatures downwind as a result? Did you know that solar farms can produce similar phenomena by heating the air around them? How about areas that don't have strong winds or consistent sunlight? Did you think of any of that, smartass? No, you bought into the 'green' propaganda that these amazing technologies will magically meet all of our energy requirements while having no environmental impact at all, and are therefore the only suitable solutions to the world's growing energy problems worth investigating. (Oh, and a delicious nugget of truth to chew on: It takes coal and oil to build windmills, solar collectors, tidal barrages, and especially solar panels. These things come from factories, they don't grow on trees. Show me a completely solar powered solar panel factory and I'll change my tune.)
I'd like to introduce a couple dirty phrases into your 'green' vocabulary - Transmission losses and base loads. There isn't a magical transmission fairy that's just going to shit megawatts from solar farms in the Mojave Desert into some guy's apartment in Chicago without huge losses, and even with thermal storage tanks, flywheels, and giant Lithium batteries sitting on site, a few cloudy days with slow winds will translate into brownouts in any power grid that relies on just wind and solar. (By the way, you can take your 'silver bullet' rhetoric and shove it. Also, since environmentalists just love silver bullets so much, guess how many square miles of solar thermal collectors you would need to meet the global base load. Here's a hint: The total collection area would exceed the size of many countries.) For those reasons alone, we can't rely on this technology one hundred percent unless the installed capacity and total storage capacity is gargantuan and spread over an equally large area. Also, things like electrified railway stations, recycling centers, and the factories that'll be making your magic beans for Jack's electrical beans
The radioactive waste crap is a fairly irrelevant myth and there is far worse stuff in there anyway. Coal has enough real problems that actually kill people without making stuff up to make nuclear look good.
"So many more sane options than nuclear."
Umm not at all. Western Nuclear power stations have a great safety record. The soviet reactor that people like to throw out would never be built in the west.
Also tides and waves are to different things and tidal power only works in certain locations and could have a large impact on the environment.
We don't have ample power from dams and geothermal. They are limited as well.
Calling nuclear power insane is just mindless FUD.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Having seen both knife and gun suicides, I have to disagree. Most people who kill themselves with a knife are kind enough to do so in a bathtub or at least the bathroom, making cleanup rather simple thanks to tile floors and whatnot.
Gunshots tend to splatter parts of people all over the walls. People that pull off the trick with a rifle or shotgun leave a serious mess for people to cleanup.
tl;dr
Think of the cleanup crew. Use a knife. Unless you are in the U.K., which has no guns or knives by law. If you live there, be creative! But be CLEAN.
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
What if Jack Bauer isnt around?
--exa--
Calling nuclear power insane is just mindless FUD.
Before flinging around the word mindless you might notice I never used the word 'insane', I said more sane. Big difference.
Why not harness energy that's already there instead of creating something although very safe can create devastating consequences if only one thing goes wrong or ends up in the wrong hands?
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Yeah right. And they're going to undo this every 5-10 years at multiple sites. Please return to the real world.
Bitter and proud of it.
Besides turning a small portion to wetlands would just increase available farmland, win/win
Not really - your solar collectors wouldn't work all that well any more :-(
I can't argue with your assertion about the amount of desert - I just don't have any figures. However, all I'm trying to point out is that the so-called "renewable" energy sources have their environmental impacts too.
The amount of tidal energy we take would be infinitesimal compared to the energy available.
That isn't really the point. The point is, what happens locally (around the tidal generator/wind farm/solar collector/whatever) when a significant amount of energy is removed just there. There are already examples of this in Europe: altered pollination patterns for wind-pollinated plants (grasses etc.) downwind of wind farms. No-one knows the long-term effects of this - though I guess we might soon find out.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
Wikipedia has a good article on the technology. The site itself isn't that helpful.
Why are the TFA comments so retarded? People mention Chernobyl which had about as much in common with this technology as an 18-wheeler and stilts (both can be used as means of transportation), and TMI where nobody was harmed. When will this idiocy stop? I'm just tired at this point. I admit that there are some arguments against nuclear power, but Chernobyl and TMI accidents are definitely not them.
The last sentence is also annoying. "If only it wasn't nuclear" - and what should it be? Magic eternal candle? Sex energy? Hamster wheels? It's time to get real.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Ever heard of mercury in fish?
Coal is only cheap because it doesn't include the full cost of waste containment and disposal. Each year 25,000 people in the US die of causes related to of coal pollution.
Radioactive "waste" that gives off powerful radiation still contains useful energy should not be treated as waste. We should reprocess spent fuel until the amount of radiation released is minimal.
We have the best government that money can buy.
But right now nobody can build a wind farm that will run a city 24/7/365.
Straw man.
Wind is useful in a portfolio of energy generation options, up to about 20% of the mix. It's relatively cheap, relatively low impact and easily scalable.
Here in Aoteroa, we have lots of renewable hydro, but in a dry year we can have issues with respect to supply. Wind doesn't have dry years, so is a useful part of the mix.
While I'd prefer energy problems to be solved by renewables, I'd rather have nuclear than coal/gas any day.
It's good luck to be superstitious
The "backgrounder" turns out to be a 4-page brochure with explanatory text.
What is immediately apparent is the following:
- the Nuscale reactor is an ordinary boiling-water reactor with one cooling circuit: the heat exchanger is inside the reactor vessel itself, and steam from the secondary circuit is lead out of the reactor vessel to the generators
- it uses control rods like any other BWR, but which does not contain coolant pumps. Convection takes care of coolant circulation.
- it uses standard low-enriched reactor fuel which needs to be replaced every 2 years
From the brochure:
Thermal capacity: 150 Mwt
Electrical capacit: 45 Mwe
Capacity factor: > 90 percent
Dimensions: 60 feet x 14 feet cylindrical containment vessel module containing reactor and steam generator
Weight: ~ 300 tons as shipped from fabrication for shipping
Transportation: Barge, truck or train Manufacturing: Forge and fabricate at any mid-size facility
Cost: Numerous advantages due to simplicity, modular design, volume manufacturing and shorter construction times
Fuel: Standard LWR fuel in 17 x 17 configuration, each 6 feet in length. 24 month refueling cycle with fuel enriched at 4.95 percent.
In summary: this is a conventional Light Water Reactor which has been simplified and scaled down. I personally wouldn't want to see anything like that near where I live, or even in the same rainwater basin. I can just about live with large nuclear reactors which are situated in large concrete structures on carefully selected sites and monitored ever minute of their life-cycle by people who know something about them, but this little boondoggle is something else.
I don't care if it has a low operational risk. If you install thousands of the things (as you must because of their limited capacity) throughout the country (and close to population centers remember; that's the whole idea) and then run them for 50 years (carting spent fuel and fresh fuel to and from all those sites every 2 years), there is bound to be a catastrophic mishap *somewhere*. A meltdown, bent control rods, an earthquake that tears the reactor vessel open, and aircraft that crashes on top, a terrorist attack, fuel transport trucks that are ruptured in a traffic accident, or even good old criminal blackmail.
I'm not against nuclear energy per se, but this sort of nuclear micro-reactors makes me nervous. Very nervous. If we are going to have micro reactors, then conventional ones are fine. If we are going to have nuclear reactors, big is beautiful.
Control rods do not "cool the reactor down". The control the nuclear chain reaction... What control rods do in this type of reactor is to control the temperature that is maintained by the reactor.
And if you control the temperature in a downward direction, that would be called "cooling". It's the same mechanism as everything else we're talking about, reducing temperature by reducing reaction rate, just mechanically instead of self-regulating. Obviously that's not their main function in a self-regulating reactor, but not all reactors were self-regulating which is what I was contrasting against. In a Chernobyl-type reactor, the control rods were the only thing preventing a run away reaction.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm reasonably sure that these "nuclear batteries" will be safe so long as they're left alone.
What is feel is more important is the question of how much damage someone could do with one if they really tried.
Sure you can bury the thing in my back garden but what if I one day go mad and decide to attack it using a pneumatic drill? (Or whatever, pick your tool of choice)
I wish to remain anomalous
What has amazed me is that things are BAD WRT the mercury issue. But you know that it will get MUCH worse over the course of the next 2-4 years. The reason is that China is bringing on 1-2 new coal plants each WEEK with ZERO pollution controls and are now importing very low grade coal.
About the only good out of that is that it will also put more sulfur in the air, slowing down Global Warming.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I've only read the summary but this reminds me of a certain post-apocalyptic world were people drove cars with "nuclear batteries."
How about this, a skyscraper the size of the Hancock building in Chicago uses as much energy as a city the size of Rockford, Ill. If you could put one of these near such a building you should be able to supply most of the electric and all the heat for the entire building, not having done the actual calculations of course, but it should be close. They may be great as CHP generators.
By any reasonable estimation, the size of a solar panel must be considerably larger in area than the roofline of the building that it powers, particularly in cities. So.. yeah, there is huge land use issue with solar panels. For every building that you see, you will need a solar panel with several times its surface area to power it. Run that through your mind and ask me if there's not going to be an environmental impact. It's obvious.
This is my sig.
Windfarms are only profitable with government subsidy; wind mills cost more energy than they make in there serviceable lifetime (Hence the need for subsidy). Bad for bat populations, which are already in decline. Wow. just wow. .1/kw. Right now, Wind is viable without subsidy in a number of locations (with more coming due to increasing coal and gas costs). If we assigned a real costs to the pollution from the others, then it would be less.
/., not the 5th grade. Many other also have a clue.
The subsidies are far far far less than what is plowed into Coal, oil, OR NUKES. In addition, with our the subsidies, wind produces less than
As to the bats, well, how much life do you think is dying from Mercury, lead, etc. emission in the air by coal and oil. How many died from that recent ash release?
Solar panels are fantastically bad environmentally. They require the production of green house gasses far worse than CO2, lifetimes are limited and exponentially decay. They require toxic batteries to work, and are unreliable due to weather. 14% efficiency. Also, bad for ground-level wildlife.
You are kidding, right? Green House gases far worse than CO2. Like water? Limited Lifetime? You mean 30-50 years? They require energy storage to work 24x7 (i.e. base power), not necessarily toxic batteries. 14% efficieny? The systems vary any where from 7% (thin film) to 35% on newer products (using mags). Bad for ground-level wildlife? You mean something on the roof is bad for the ground? Hmmmm.
Of course, the worse part about your statement is that it assumes SOlar PV. Solar Thermal is actually at the same cost as coal.
The only real alternatives are:
Solar algae (2-4% efficient)
Geo-thermal (limited places)
Wave/tidal (possible local environmental impacts, high maintenance costs)
Nuclear (low risk, high output, radioactive half-lives are down to 200 years)
Again wow. Just wow.
Solar Thermal was missed in all your stuff.
Algae 2-4% efficient?????
Geo-thermal. Have you even read the current study by MIT? Google for it. If you consider only shallow geo-thermal, then USA will only produce about 10GW of power via it. BUT deep geo-thermal can produce more than 1/2 of America's total power need (that assumes everything on electrical) before 2050.
Nukes half-lives down to 200 years? ONLY if you run it through IFR. Of course, that was killed and the program needs to be re-started (if nothing else, just to use our nuclear waste up).
Look, I am a big fan of nukes (more of the IFR), BUT, spreading garbage about AE does not help the cause. This is
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's the divide by zero error I'm talking about. By considering only one portion of the process over a limited time (ie. no discarded fuel rods) and considering the ideal version of it measured far enough away you have zero radiation above background which is exactly what everyone wants and is fine. What isn't fine is taking this number of zero and comparing it to other things - you have a nonsensical divide by zero error and can say your lunch is infinitely more radioactive than the emissions from a perfect plant in the short term.
Now going the other way and comparing 1kg of ash from a coal fired power station against 1kg of spent fuel rod material isn't considered fair either due to the vast amounts of ash generated over the lifetime of the plant. Some of the stuff in the ash is a lot nastier than these traces of radioactive material and that is what we should be worrying about instead and that is why there are pollution controls that incidently catch these isotopes of heavy metals along with the non-radioactive heavy metals (that's where the fly ash ends up to answer the above question, in ash dams, or the larger stuff often gets shipped off to be a filler material in concrete etc).
To sum up, I see the argument that is commonly used as follows:
So long as you don't consider nuclear waste and do consider coal waste then the coal waste is vastly more radioactive than nothing at all.
You should be able to see now why I see the argument as irrelevent bullshit which was unfortunately dreamt up by a PR company as a distraction from the real issues of pollution and nuclear waste. Radioactive coal is incredibly rare considering that it came from organic material and if it has more than 5% of anything else in it nobody really wants to burn it. Radioactive sand is far more likely (and can actually be a bit of a problem after gravity seperation concentrates the radioactive material) and I beleive radioactive granite actually is a problem in the USA.
Once again I'll say that coal has enough real problems that actually kill people without making stuff up. This is just a nuclear PR distraction.
I've read a good amount of the posts and I wanted to clear up some of the misconceptions I've seen, as I deal with this stuff every day at my day job. 1) critical reactor. A critical reactor is a good reactor. not a bad reactor like made for tv movies would have you think. A supercritical reactor is still not bad, a prompt critical reactor or prompt supercritical reactor is. See the first posts on this article for what critical means. 2) reprocessing. It is true that there is a whole lot of uranium-235 and plutonium-239 that goes unused when spent nuclear fuel is 'thrown out.' Reprocessing does allow you to use more of the earth's resources. However, reprecessing does NOT significantly reduce the longevity or amount of nuclear waste. Lets say there are X curies of isotope Y. When you reprocess, that is, seperate out the elements that you need, isotope Y will still be there, and it will still be at X curies, you just seperated it from all the other stuff in the waste. 3) Uranium is barely radioactive. The half-life of Uranium-238 (which makes up 99.28% of the uranium you pull out of the ground), is 4.5E9 years. The definition of stable is loosely defined as 10^10 years.... (for those who dont know, half-life can be thought of as radioactivity). 4) "Burning" Uranium-238 instead of 235 is NOT new. We've been able to do it for years. Look up the history of fast reactors for examples. 5) Thorium can be used to produce U-233. This also has been done in the past. 6) Safety. The design of reactors and the instrumentation and control systems that allow them to be operated has gotten immensely better since we last built a plant in the US. Given that those plants back then were still relatively safe (three mile island was more a result of erroneous human intervention... if left on its own there wouldnt have been a problem), imagine what they are like now. Just like McCain said so many times during his campaign, the navy has steamed on nuclear power for how many millions of miles without incident??
Advances in automated control systems in the last 40 years should make it possible to "fail-safe" in the most conservative of ways. If a mini-plant is having any problem at all it can cry "MOMMY!" and shut off. Big generating facilities produce millions of dollars of revenue per day when they operate, shutting them down not only costs the power company money, in underserved regions (Chernobyl) it causes power outages and major problems for the power customers, thus the reluctance of Homer's comrades to "pull the plug" at the first sign of trouble.
You can try and regulate temperature back down but you must have a heat sink, otherwise no cooling occurs. For instance for a standard pressurized water reactor which is cooled by creating steam, if you were to shut the steam outlet valves (and thereby remove the heat sink) then control rod motion would have no effect on temperature, except insofar as it reduces heat generation. To cool the core from there you would need to remove the heat already present (which control rods do not do). In normal operation the heat sink is always available so it's only of theoretical concern but there is a difference between "cooling" and "temperature regulation".
Well although the RBMK reactor used at Chernobyl is quite different in design than standard western nuclear reactors the control rods on that plant were not strictly to "prevent a run away reaction" but actually did quite a few things, including selecting power output and shaping core neutron distribution. That design was not self-regulating on temperature though, that is true. (Indeed, rising power would tend to cause power to increase further). However reactors that do not lower power after an increase in temperature have typically been the exception rather than the rule. One other thing to note is that the RBMK used in Chernobyl was the only nuclear reactor in the world whose emergency shutdown system would initially cause a rise in reactor power, which lead to a prompt critical situation and disaster in this case...
The Hyperion reactor would be more impressive if they had a prototype working. They're claiming much higher energy densities than any existing nuclear reactor.
It's not even close to being a "battery", by the way. It's a steam plant with a turbine. The turbine is separate from the reactor and connected to it by plumbing. So the reactor is not a "sealed unit".
Still, there are many uses for a small, reasonably safe nuclear power plant. It ought to be comparable to a Triga in safety, and there are about 60 Trigas in the world. That's a neat little General Atomic design from the 1950s, and it's inherently stable; the physics of the thing will shut it down if it overheads. That's' the key idea behind the Hyperion reactor.
But what about solid state passive fission reactors like those which powers japanese electric submarines?
Is it a good idea to deposit a number of potential nuclear catastrophes around in the communities? The risk that one goes wrong is quite small - on the other hand, the damage if it does, could be quite significant. But I think this sidesteps the much more pressing issue: there are far too many people on the planet, and we are insisting on living a lifestyle far beyond our means, in terms of limited resources, break-down of ecosystems and the general viability of basing your future on continued, unlimited growth.
It is not that we lack examples to teach us about these things: no species has ever survived long without finding a balance between growth and die-off. It can't be done, no matter how we twist and turn. It is not just a question about limited mineral resources or energy; life only teems, if one can actually say that, because of its diversity. Whether we know realize it or not, we are not going to be able to survive in such great numbers if we eradicate all the species that are not relevant to us as food. Or look to the current financial crisis - if ever there was a striking example of why we shouldn't live beyond our means, that is it.
The way forward - the ONLY way, in fact - is to first live within our means, and then reduce our numbers. The reduction in number will come, of course; but we still have the time to decide to do it as gently as possible. All this musing about using nuclear-, solar-, wind-, wave- or whatever power must be more than just a quest to extend our wasteful lifestyle a bit longer; otherwise it is simply another way of hiding our heads in the sand.
These viewpoints have never been popular, of course. It's all doom and gloom, people say; well, if it was "doom and gloom" that I was preaching, I would hardly say that we could still make the necessary changes, would I?
Any reasonably competent hobbyist could cobble together a nuclear generator and not even need a battery array (or the huge amounts of nasty chemicals related thereto) if he were allowed to do so. You can buy all the components for a windmill without any hassle, and just bolt them together -- if we allowed the sale of all the components for a nuclear generator I'm sure someone could bolt it together too. Very few "hobbyist" windmill operators do all their own parts fabrication, and there's no reason to assume the nuclear hobbyist would either.
But hobbyist generation from any power source is not the answer. Small-scale generation -- be it wind, nuclear, or otherwise -- is terribly inefficient. There might be some benefit to scaling down below the current "huge regional generators" that we use, but there's no way that "hobbyist" level generation will ever be an efficient option for most users of electricity.
Put photovoltaics on roof tops. A surprisingly high percentage of roof tops have more than adequate solar exposure. Distribution (the grid) is unloaded in the extreme because neighborhoods would be generating most of their power needs. Here's the real clincher: nuclear plants cost $6,000 - $8,000 per kW of generating power and operational costs of 2.5 - 3.5 cents (US) per kWh whereas solar costs $6,000 - $8,000 per kW of generating power for installed residential systems and no operational costs. Solar panels are getting cheaper all the time and electricity produced by coal, gas, oil, or nuclear are all getting more expensive all the time. Keep in mind also that no one has ever been able to calculate Life-Cycle-Cost for a nuclear power plant. BTW Three Mile Island has not produced 1 kWh of electricity for decades but there is still a crew working at the plant 24/7/365 at no small expense to the rate payers in PA.
Are these mini nuclear reactors easily hacked so as that they can be used as terrorist threats?
It would be really bad if these devices spread around, and then be easy targets for terrorists.
Months or years after TMI, the goverment NRC hacks admitted to a gross error. They estimated the rate of hydrogen production based on atmospheric pressure, whereas the pressure in the containment was significantly higher.
Bottom line, there was no bubble, and never any danger of creating a big bubble. Meanwhile, the radiation was contained.
Press reports of this "never mind" were buried in the back pages if printed at all, and hardly noticed by anyone.
The actual damage to public health and anxiety stress to individuals were caused by the publicity and misinformation from the federal government, not the reactor. TMI is a stunning illustration of the modern world in which perception, true of false, becomes the only reality that matters.
Because they are not more sane.
Wave energy is very hard to harness in useful amounts. Tides only work a few limited locations and the tidal areas are about the most sensitive on the planet.
Geothermal again is great where you have it. Most places don't.
Solar only works for a few hours a day and not at all if there is a rain storm.
Wind you can not throttle. Texas ran into that problem when there was less wind than predicted so they had to spend more on power then expected this year.
I am all for supplementing our power production with things like solar, wind, and Geothermal. But none of your suggestions are more "sane" than nuclear at this time and yes you are spreading FUD. Again you use totaly fake terms like "one thing goes wrong". To cause a major problem many, many, many things have to go wrong with a modern nuclear plant even then the most likely consequence would be the plant is ruined and would be very expensive to clean up. The fuel in a modern plant can not be weaponized by an group smaller than a nation. The spent fuel should be recycled so it is no longer a threat but even then it is a much lower risk than industrial and medical radiation sources. It is just too big and bulky to walk out with.
So yes mindless FUD.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Not a straw man at all. Nuclear can provide 24/7/365 power while the only renewable sources that offer that are Hydro and Geothermal and those are very limited.
I agree about wind except yes you can have windless days. The wind farms in Texas under performed this year because of lack of wind.
I agree with with supplementing with renewable sources but as you put it wind is good for up to 20% of your power needs. That leaves 80% that has to come from somewhere else.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
For those who don't know, perhaps this will shed some light upon the issue of "Nuclear Batteries." http://www.eoearth.org/article/Small_nuclear_power_reactors While this is a bit too verbose, if you read the section on Lead Cooled Fast Reactors, you will see that ANL has been working on this for years. The nuclear power industry has had two major accidents, TMI II and Chernobyl. In the case of Chernobyl, the scientists purposely disabled the safety systems on the reactor to run tests, which has been engineered out. With the new models, the passive safety systems prevent reactors from going above ALARA standards. For a quick lesson in reactor criticality, as others have stated when you attempt to power a reactor, you need at the very least, 1 neutron that is within the reactor's designed energy levels (thermal neutrons for thermal reactors, fast neutrons for fast reactors). This will allow you to maintain a power level, however if it is all you have, you cannot increase power. To increase power you need a surplus of neutrons being produced per fission that will reach the designated energy levels, which is mandated to be well below beta (the point where a reactor becomes prompt critical, i.e. likely meltdown). TLDR version: The industry is one of the most tightly legislated, and well trained in the world, and it is extremely improbable that the industry will ever have another significant accident.
You can make it fairly foolproof, but you can't make nuclear power terrorist-proof except by having people around guarding the nuclear plant. That works when you have a few big power plants serving lots of communities, but if you want lots of little plants then you will not be able to guard them all. And then one day you'll wake up to find a terrorist has put a car bomb into one of these little plants and spread radioactive material all over a city. Build new big plants, not lots of little ones.
You can try and regulate temperature back down but you must have a heat sink, otherwise no cooling occurs. For instance for a standard pressurized water reactor which is cooled by creating steam, if you were to shut the steam outlet valves (and thereby remove the heat sink) then control rod motion would have no effect on temperature, except insofar as it reduces heat generation. In normal operation the heat sink is always available so it's only of theoretical concern but there is a difference between "cooling" and "temperature regulation".
You're right, you can only "cool" the reaction itself, whether that's with control rods or self-regulation. I suppose it'd be much easier to quantify the size of heat sink needed and be sure that it is sufficient when it is self-regulating. I'm sure that's part of why they are burying these things too.
the control rods on that plant were not strictly to "prevent a run away reaction" but actually did quite a few things
Of course, they were the only reliable way to regulate the reaction.
One other thing to note is that the RBMK used in Chernobyl was the only nuclear reactor in the world whose emergency shutdown system would initially cause a rise in reactor power, which lead to a prompt critical situation and disaster in this case...
One thing to note? One thing to note about Chernobyl is that there were so fucking many things wrong with both the plant and the test which lead to the disaster itself that it's almost an advertisement for nuclear safety, in the sense of all the crazy things that had to go wrong to get a disaster of that magnitude.
The enemies of Democracy are
Since the largest concentration of electricity demand in the US is in the Northeast, solar in the Southwest is not a workable solution. Energy lost in transmision would be a very large problem. And having just moved to upstate NY, I can assure you that photovoltaics aren't really a practical plan here...there's no sun.
So yes mindless FUD.
Sorry I disagree with you but I don't resort to insults because of that.
My opinion was thought out and not 'mindless' it just doesn't happen to jive with what you believe.
Do you always lash out and insult people with differing opinions than yours? Why that sounds almost... mindless.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Okay I am sorry about saying Mindless but it is still FUD. .5 deaths do to radiation release. Over the past 20 years the natural gas plant in my old home town was had three deaths all from falls.
And what do you not agree with?
That tidal basins are ecological very sensitive? That really isn't debatable.
That wave power isn't dense enough to be practical? Again show me one 20 megawatt wave power plant.
Wind is reliable? Every place has variable winds.
Solar is reliable? Every place has night and rain.
Western Nuclear power plants have a good safety record? The one issue with a US plant was TMI. The results of that where possible
Light water reactors like those used in the US use water as a coolant and a moderator. If you loose all the water the reaction stops. You can still have damage to the fuel elements due to residual heat from decay. The myth of China Syndrome is just that a myth. Containment buildings work as TMI proved.
So yes I will take back mindless but your statements are not based on any facts or data. It is based on fear. Heck even one of the founders of Greenpeace has gone pro-nuclear!
So not mindless but also not based on facts or reality.
Now if somebody wanted to build a graphite moderated reactor without a containment building anywhere in the US? Heck yea I would protest it. The two Light water reactors a few miles from my house? Love the. No smoke stacks, no coal, no oil shipments, cheaper fuel costs than Natural Gas. And no CO2!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
25MW / 20000 = 1250 watts. That's just about a hair dryer. The typical home has at least 100amp service at 240V which is more like 24000 watts. A typical outlet can handle 15 amps at 120V which is 1800 watts. Somebody's got some numbers wrong somewhere.
Yes, Carter failed to foresee Reagan covering up the AQ Khan nuke spy network that stole nuke tech from Dutch/German labs and spread to Pakistan, Libya, Iran and N Korea.
But he did foresee the threat of proliferation that Reagan (to be charitable) ignored, and reduced it. Without that reduction, more than just Pakistan (and possibly N Korea) would already have well known nukes to threaten with.
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make install -not war
Solar in the Southwest frees up other fuels for use elsewhere, much cheaper due to lower demand. Solar can also be harnessed to generate fuels that can be shipped like oil and natural gas are. And in fact the grid is a mostly fungible source of power throughout its span, even before we interconnect it better probably starting this year.
Since you just moved to upstate NY, you evidently haven't spent enough time there to know that there's enough sunlight for solar. I lived upstate for 4 years, among the worst weather in the state, and it had enough for solar to power most houses without the grid.
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make install -not war
You are using a ridiculous argument. You wave your hands and say, "see, there's trees everywhere, blocking the wind, so we can build a bunch of stuff too... in fact, we can build as much as we want." We've been doing that same dumb logic for three thousand years, and obviously, people like you are going to do it for three thousand more. Morons, all of you.
Just because the bear shit in the woods, does not mean that every human can go and shit in the woods. Just because a whale kicks out CO2, does not mean that we can go and build 4 billion cars, kicking out CO2. And just because you see some trees blocking the wind, or making shade on the ground, does not mean you can go and put up 4 billion windmills and 7 billion solar panels.
The lowest, environmentally impacting thing you can possibly due is to build nuclear power plants. It's the least change to the air, the water, and the land, of this planet. Yes, there is the risk that some accident might happen, but if you go and put out 7 billion windmills and 5 billion solar panels, (not to mention the other 50 billion windmills and 100 billion solar panels you will also put in the trash), then, you are definitely going to fuck something up. You don't even know what it is, and even worse, you don't even want to look.
It's just ignorant.
This is my sig.
It's an efficiency issue.
You can produce most of the power in the southwest, and ship it to the northeast. However, you lose a ton of power along the way, requiring a much larger solar plant in the southwest.
Similarly, it's possible to use solar here. However, you need a larger array and much larger battery bank compared to sunnier areas.
However, solar is still a poor choice as a 'base load' source, due to that whole 'night' thing. The energy storage for your solar plant in the southwest would be truly awe-inspiring if it could possibly be built.
Lastly:
The point of changing to solar or other renewable energy sources is to stop using other fuels. Not create a 'second class energy' zone.
Its definitely not a TRIGA reactor - it's a sealed unit that uses the same style of Uranium Hydride fuel as the TRIGA design uses. That's what makes it "safe". Online sources say it doesn't have any moving parts, and uses hydrogen for coolant. Presumably it's convection cooled.
It's not clear how the steam-generation component can be maintenance-free, but it does only have a 5-year lifespan, so maybe that's reasonable.
Well thats all good and they can bury the nuclear waste in YOUR! back yard. After all you said it wasn't an issue. They're papers you'll get less radiation than living near a pile of coal.
How about scraping anything that has a harmful toxic by-product. This includes nuclear, coal, and petro products.
The wind its self doesn't pollute. The Sun doesn't pollute but if we use resources like this then there is no built in fuel costs for the fat energy cats to fuck us with. The wind is free. The Sun is free. Or at least for the time being.
Using solar power to produce chemical fuels for transport across the country isn't at all necessarily very inefficient. The transport hasn't crippled the efficiency of petrofuels, though they routinely cross continents and the globe. Electricity likewise crosses long distances now with acceptable losses. It's less efficient than local consumption, but we're choosing among real alternatives, not rejecting energy sources when they can't be used at their theoretical maximum.
Likewise, solar is entirely possible in upstate NY. At 1KW:m^2, the maximum insolation is a very high rate from which to lose lots of power before it's impractical. Try drawing a solar panel on your own roof using the RoofRay calculator, and see how much your electric bill drops (probably to zero most of the year). That calculation averages latitude, day/night, seasons and weather.
The point of using solar is not to stop using other fuels, it is to use solar instead of other fuels, where appropriate. Submarines aren't going to be solar powered any time soon. But the more solar is used, the less other fuels will be used. Since those other fuels are more costly (either directly or in their consequences), solar will be used more. But that will decrease the costs of most of those other fuels to acceptable levels, so they will continue. If only NYC continued to consume petroleum for power while the rest of the world went to solar, NYC would probably have the cheapest energy costs in the world. I'm looking forward to testing that principle in the real world, as we replace most dirty and costly energy with cheaper stuff like solar.
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make install -not war
Yes, it comes from, say, PA to NY. That's a few hundred miles. Not approx 4000 miles from the southwest to NY. (rough estimate, since the power lines won't be able to take the shortest possible path).
And as I said before, we can compensate for this buy running a lot more wire and using a much, much larger plant in the southwest. Or we can use a nuclear plant in the Northeast. The nuke, despite the large cost of the plant, would probably end up much cheaper.
These statements are contridictory. There is (currently) no 'real' method of using electricity to create a chemical fuel. There's theoretical ones, but nothing on an industrial scale to create a fuel that can replace coal.
Again, I never said it was impossible. I said it wasn't as practical as in a sunnier climate. We've had about 3 sunny days since I moved here 2 months ago. While you can still get power from the bright spot in the overcast, it's not nearly as much as you can get in Phoenix. That means I'd have to put up additional panels when compared to a sunnier climate, significantly raising the cost. In addition, there's significantly more maintenance to solar here due to the different environment (ex. snow removal). And the higher lattitude means more night which means a larger battery bank, also increasing the cost.
But that will decrease the costs of most of those other fuels to acceptable levels
Other fuels for electricity generation, most notably coal, are already really, really, really, really, really cheap (in the US). Hence the large number of coal plants in the US. The power produced at a solar plant costs significantly more than the power coming from coal plants, even in places like Arizona and New Mexico. That's why the utility companies haven't built massive solar plants in the southwest, but have built new natural gas and coal plants in the southwest. (There's a few 'test' sites, but nothing mainstream).
Even if we ignore that particular problem, your theory still won't work in that making solar more expensive relative to petrofuels (by making petro cheaper) would diminish the incentive to convert to solar, not increase it. If the price of coal-produced electricity used to be equal to solar-produced electricty but now it's cheaper, it would be stupid to build a solar plant instead of a coal plant.
Lastly, you gloss over the problems of 'night' and 'clouds' in your massive-solar-in-the-southwest solution.
Nuclear power costs 25-30 cents per KWh, at least double the average electricity costs in the US.
Coal's consequences, including climate change, radioactive pollution, devastating waste pool bursts, damaging conditions inside the mines, ecological catastrophe from mining like mountaintop removal, all make it much more expensive than solar. If it didn't, it would indeed compete well. Instead, it's subsidized by hiding its true costs so it can compete. Especially in the Bush era, when laws reducing its pollution were rolled back simply at the request of the coal industry. Hence the large number of coal plants.
And no, I didn't gloss the "problems" of night and clouds in the Southwest. There's more than enough sunshine when the sun is shining (almost half of all the time) for it to be quite effective. You're just ignoring that, and raising quibbles instead. And ruling out solar power in your neighborhood based on two months during winter. So that's all the time I'm willing to spend in this thread.
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make install -not war
And solar costs even more, depending on how you amoritize the panels.
Plus, that figure would be for one-off large plants. The whole point of the 'nuclear battery' is to mass-produce them, thus driving down the cost.
I'm no fan of the Bush administration, but there has not been a large number of coal plants built during his administration. AFAIK, the utitily companys haven't built any large coal plants in a long time, choosing instead to build smaller natural gas plants since they're far less expensive to build and have much smaller regulatory hurdles.
You certanly haven't addressed them. So in your system, what happens 'round 6pm when the sun goes down?
If we switch to the existing fossil-fueled plants, well then what's the incentive to build solar? If the fossil plants are sufficient for the current load, then why would a power company build a massive, untested, solar plant?
So...how's those reading classes going, since I never did rule out solar here? My point is it's significantly more costly than in sunnier locations. And it's what I've said over and over again. So why, exactly, do you keep trying to throw up that red herring?
Criticality means that the effective neutron multiplication factor, k_eff, equals 1. Subcriticality means that k_eff is less than one and supercriticality means that k_eff is greater than one. A critical reactor will maintain the same neutron flux over time. A subcritical reactor will exponentially decrease its neutron flux, and a supercritical reactor will exponentiall increase its neutron flux over time. If you want to increase power, you have to have a supercritical reactor. There is nothing wrong with this, you just have to level off power and return to plain old criticality once you are done.
The 'scary' term I think you are looking for is prompt criticality. This is where the reactor achieves criticality with prompt neutrons alone which dramatically decreases the effective neutron generation time, lambda_eff, and which will destroy any core. Chernobyl may have been prompt critical when it destroyed itself.
And just to clarify, N = N_0 * k_eff ^ ( t / lambda_eff)
ok ive heard stuff similar to these designs, i thinks toshiba is already making one meant for large office buildings (i.e. empire state building, sears tower, twin tower complex, when it was there) it may not be toshiba but it is a big japanese electronics company. and even better, i believe the company is based out of new mexico, and its making one thats like 10ft in diameter and has enough power for 20,000 homes for 7 years. and guess how much? 25 million, thats less than $250 per home per year. oh and i dont know if this is all of them but the new mexico on has no moving parts and is not capible of going super critical, and is housed in a think layer of concrete. this thing is supposed to come out this year, but the US board of nuclear review or whatever isnt ganna review the thing until next year.
Now while I'll assume the people that put out the paper in the 1970s correctly identified what was in the coal samples they looked at I'm sure there would be a lot of other sources that would written about it if it was anywhere near as common as various idiots have extrapolated it to be. I've looked at a few samples of fly ash and other coal ash under an electron microscope and never seen any of these heavy metals that some idiots insist is in all ash - in fact I didn't even hear about this stuff until some PR campaign in the late 1990s used it and I had moved on by then. I'm not the one making the wild claims that all ash is nuclear waste here, I'm the one pointing out that it is a pretty wild claim and it needs evidence to back it up. It would be trivial for somebody to so an analysis of the ash from any power station or to look at the absorbion spectrum of the flue gas and see these things if they are there. Instead we just get some bullshit fear of the unknown crap when the reality is possibly a less spectacular footnote that the ash dam at some paticular plant has a certain number of milligrams of thorium (some of which will be radioactive) distributed among the several million tonnes of ash.
That is why I am saying that if there is this vast amount of radioactive material why can't anyone find it?
I have to say quite honestly that IMHO this is a very partisan and highly misleading article from someone who may be credible on other topics but can't be taken seriously unless it was co-authored by someone with some experience in the subject matter of coal combustion or at the very least chemistry. I'm sorry but I'd file this under horror fiction - non-fiction would make some attempt to find the stuff instead of leaving it as an unspeakable horror lurking out there to kill us all give terrorists somethign to build nukes from. Thankfully the author has retired. You can find him via linkedin if you wish to find out if it was blatant exaggerated pro-nuclear PR or tinfoil hat territory where the author truly believes and exaggered a few things to better get the message across.
Beleive what you like but I consider that coal kills enough people as it is without finding imaginary hazards that just happen to make nuclear power look better. Personally I think both should stand on their own merits.
From the ORNL report:
For a large number of coal samples, according to Environmental Protection Agency figures released in 1984, average values of uranium and thorium content have been determined to be 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively.
Sounds to me like they actively measured it, in 1984.
Also consider that wording "for a large number of coal samples ... average values of" - it is not actually saying that it is an average for all US coal just that it is an average of a given set of samples that give those large numbers which are like nothing I have ever seen. That is one reason why peer review is important, to stop nasty little tricks like that.
Sorry mate - I think W. Alex Gabbard's article there is tinfoil hat territory. Perhaps you do not realise that this is coming from the equivalent of an internal company magazine. Don't be blinded by science just because the guy has a masters in physics.
Personally I see this "coal is radioactive waste too so why can't we pollute as well" thing as an annoying confidence trick - from what I have written you should be able to see why and hopefully people will look at it more objectively and not fall for the trick. Nuclear has to stand on its on merits and not win extra concessions based on an imaginary comparison with flue gasses or fly ash - they are going to have to use real (and easily achieved) comparisons if they are going to do that instead of fuzzy feelgood lies they don't have to prove. It's a very easy thing for them to prove if it is as dramatic as they say it is - it could be done in a week with cheap equipment and they could get the results for a power plant. The only reason they have not done it is because they will then get the same boring results as all the people that are not making such wild claims.
Now I'm (somewhat reluctantly) in favor of large controlled nuclear power plants, but I think one ought to recognize statements like:
The industry is one of the most tightly legislated, and well trained in the world, and it is extremely improbable that the industry will ever have another significant accident.
for what they are: meaningless guesswork, and irrelevant in the discussion to boot.
First off, "extremely improbable" is so vague as to be meaningless. Secondly, it's not the probability of failure that defines "value at risk", it's probability of failure times cost of failure.
This is precisely the reason that it's very easy to life-insure workers in a nuclear power plant: value at risk at most a few hundred thousand $, probability: very small and fairly well known. As a matter of fact insurance premiums are higher in most other occupations (including staying at home). It is also the reason that no insurance company in the world will insure all the possible damage of a nuclear power plant having a catastrophic accident: the probability is tiny, but *if* it happens the insurance company is immediately wiped out.
I respectfully submit that (a) hundreds of micro nuclear reactors operated all around our major cities are going to be less carefully, competently, and rigorously operated than fifty or so big ones *or* reactors in the care of the US Navy, and that (b) the cost of a micro nuclear reactor accident in the outskirts of a city isn't going to be particularly small; especially not if radioactive contamination makes it into our ground water.
Therefore (and for reasons of security) I see hundreds of micro nuclear reactors as a lot more threatening than a few big ones.
I furthermore feel that the whole issue is too important to take the nuclear industry's word for operational safety and security. Instead I think the whole concept, including safety and security, should be subject to a very public scrutiny. And one in which vigorous handwaving, of the type shown in the parent post, does has no place.