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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...
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
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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.
"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.
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.
Are you dense? Nuclear = 24/7 power. Solar = sometimes power.
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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.
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.
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.
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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
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So we can drop off that 'not much' waste in your backyard? Nuclear waste is bad stuff, even in small amounts.
Nuclear is only 'green' when you exclude the waste issue.
Anything that produces waste that must be maintained for thousands of years isn't a sustainable process.
It's funny in that it's the reverse of fossil fuels which use thousands/millions of years worth of buildup for a few days/weeks of power. With nuclear you get a few days/weeks of power in exchange for thousands of years of management of the after affects.
Coal/Oil is perfectly green if you don't consider the waste it produces too.
as an aside, in my fantasy world couldn't we fire the nuclear waste into the Sun? It strikes of the anti-environ folks who claim that humans can't possibly affect the global climate. But as a serious question, could we as a planet possibly produce enough nuclear waste to actually affect the Sun significantly enough to matter to us? If we shorten it's life by a million years, isn't that still 2-3 million years before we get there?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Solar + battery = usually power. Solar + battery + grid = 24/7 power. Who's being the dense one?
Developers: We can use your help.
The best would be to recycle the waste and whatever is left over put into a subduction zone.
Why fire it into the sun? Reprocess it, and throw it back in the reactor. Do that enough times, and the stuff you pull out at the end would be "cool" waste: easy to store, not all that radioactive.
The waste problem right now is extreme because the amount of fissile material left in the waste is huge. The reason we don't reprocess is essentially political; reprocessed waste can very easily be "bomb grade" fissile material.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Nuclear is only 'green' when you exclude the waste issue.
And the (radioactive) pollution caused by uranium mining for the indigenous people of northern Niger and other places.
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If we could stop classifying fuel as "waste" then yes sure. You may drop the real waste in my backyard. Do it like the french do and what's left isn't anymore harmful then that microwave oven you have in your kitchen.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
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.
When the fuck have electric grids started spanning all 24 timezones?
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
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.
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.
The only real alternatives are:
Those are listed from worst to best in terms of available output.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
If nuclear waste is reprocessed, like in continental Europe, current reserves will last for probably at least another 1000 years (yep, thats a thousand, google it). So, if the US as one of the big guys not recycling waste, would actually put its ore to use instead of throwing it away after using only a very small percentage, we'd have vastly less actual and dangerous waste, and the energy problems solved.
Pebblebeds, here we come!
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.
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.
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Some modern nuclear reactors can also use thorium, which is much more abundant than uranium, and virtually untapped. The reserves of uranium are large.
I think the "peak uranium" people are forgetting that after the Chernobyl disaster there were practically no new reactors built in several countries, so the uranium miners had to compete against high grade uranium from decommisioned nuclear warheads, and mining and discovery efforts had to be reduced accordingly. This is why we are after "peak uranium", but this is not a supply-driven economy like oil, it is a demand-driven economy because of the limited and restricted use of uranium.
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"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.
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.
Sure, we have infinite sunshine, but we'll run out of silicon to replace that used in old circuitboards eventually.
You do know that silicon is made from sand, you know, the same stuff you find on every beach in the world?