Nuclear Reactors As Art

Hemos recommends the coverage over at Wired of a project to digitize nuclear reactor art. "Not all nuclear reactors are built alike. Power plant designs can vary in their fuels, coolants, and configurations, a fact beautifully illustrated by a series of reactor wall charts originally published in issues of Nuclear Engineering International during the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, the charts have been lovingly collected by Ronald Knief, a nuclear engineer at Sandia National Laboratory. Recently, he completed his collection... and began to digitize the drawings. The first eight out of more than 100 have now been permanently archived online... 'This is not a CAD/CAM-type thing,' Knief said. 'This really is art.'"

Comments

Oblig Simpson's ref

[Brett Buck]

I like "Smilin' Joe Fission" - now that's art!

Chicken Little

[Ceiynt]

Oh no, he's helping the terrorists by showing them what a reactor looks like and how it works. The Iranian people can use that to build 100billion teratons of nukes to kill stuff. Hang him.

Re:Chicken Little

[Anonymous Coward]

You know that India has had nuclear weapons for many years already?

Re:Chicken Little

[dakameleon]

The biggest risk is a rogue nation acquiring detailed schematics on how to build a warhead from a country that already possesses the technology... Right now, Russia and former USSR member-states are the only plausible sources for this scenario being realized.

Err... have you forgotten about Pakistan? They've got nukes already, and would be far more like to be unstable and also inclined to share with the "rogue states". And if you do some research, you'll find that they were allegedly helped to that point by China (for more details see the background on A.Q. Khan of Pakistan), which might indicate that the threat is not so much from Russia but from China.

India has the raw resources, it's unlikely for cultural and economic reasons that they will develop a nuclear weapons program in the immediate future.

... errrrrr I think you need to do your research again: India's already got a nuclear weapons program.. India's had a nuclear program since 1974. Indeed, it's in reaction too India's nuclear program that Pakistan did whatever it could to develop its own nuclear arsenal, as detailed in the link above.

In fact just make sure you take a look at which countries have nukes before you comment on this again.

Re:Chicken Little

[jericho4.0]

There are a lot of ways to make your point on the internet, and one of them is to not talk about shit you don't know. It's Ad hominem. And yes,seriously, that's a wiki link. If you would deign to look at it you might learn something, like the fact that dakameleon didn't commit an ad hominem. Saying India won't develop nuclear weapons when they already have makes you look like an idiot, and I thought dakameleon let you off lightly.

Re:Chicken Little

[dbIII]

*blinks* You can't use a nuclear reactor to build a conventional nuclear device

Sorry to point this out, but you can and it has been done several times. Small nuclear reactors are a useful addition to a nuclear weapons program. Egypt and Indonesia are two nations to ask about that with their "civilian" reactors that produce very little power.

Re:Chicken Little

[TiberSeptm]

*blinks* You can't use a nuclear reactor to build a conventional nuclear device -- the best you'll get is a dirty bomb. You can use a breeder reactor to create fissionable material, but breeder reactors are also useful because they can take many different kinds of fuel and produce power from it, whereas conventional reactors can only use fissile uranium and it degrades to useless and highly toxic byproducts relatively quickly.

*blinks* Oh how you would have failed my fuel cycles class. Plutonium is present in spent fuel from even non-breeder reactors. Though it only represents 1% or so of the spent fuel, there are some potential advantages to using plutonium from spent fuel over highly enriched uranium. Plutonium can be extracted chemically from spent fuel while U235 can not be separated from U238 without enrichment facilities. The process of chemically removing the plutonium requires much less infustructure than enrichment of uranium. That being said, the byproducts are much more of a nuisance. Still, if a country wanted to claim to be using nuclear technology for power while steadily stockpiling weapons grade material, a power reactor and PUREX-like (Plutonium - URanium EXtraction ) reprocessing system would be one way to do it. That is why there have always been such large concerns over PUREX reprocessing.

One type of power reactor could be of particular interest to countries wishing to produce weapons grade material without performan ANY enrichment. Those are natural-uranium reactors which burn un-enriched uranium as their fuel. They require moderation by heavy water though, which tends to offset some of the cost benefits of not requiring enriched material. Still, being able to use only mechanical and chemical processing of uranium ore and leaving out the whole enrichment step does have its advantage. That is probably why India produced its plutonium through chemically reprocessed spent-fuel from a natural uranium reactor (CIRUS). That's also probably why Iran built a heavy water plant near Arak and is currently building a 40MW light-water moderated reactor as well. This is not a power reactor of course but is not particularly special. The reason a reactor like this would be used instead of a larger scale power reactor is because it is much cheaper if you leave off all those multi-million dollar power side components like tubrines and don't have to scale the system up to something that can light a city. To argue that "conventional" reactors can not be used to produce weapons grade fuel is incorrect. While most reactors used to do so are not power reactors, they are also not particularly unconventional in any way that makes them more difficult to build. In fact, they can be built much more cheaply than a power reactor and with a much smaller footprint.

requires exceptionally precise and expensive equipment and a lot of technical know-how to develop several key components to creating a conventional nuclear device.

This part is true enough for some of the more efficient bomb designs like those that evolved from "Fat Man." While one can use a technically simple gun-type bomb with highly-enriched uranium, this is not practical for a plutonium bomb. If a country wants to use plutonium from spent fuel then they must decide between a more technically challenging design with higher efficiency or a simple but low efficiency device like a two-point linear implosion bomb. The latter is not particularly appealing for a large scale and long term weapons program due to the relatively low yield, but has been considered a potential "suite-case nuke" design since it can be built to an extremely small diameter That definately doesn't sound like a design someone worried about terrorism would be concerned with, right?

India has the raw resources, but it's unlikely for cultural and economic reasons that they will develop a nuclear weapons program in the immediate future.

I think the main re

Old News

[dukeofurl01]

Wired copied this story from io9, who originally brought attention to this blog 4 days ago.

http://io9.com/5429963/know-your-nuclear-reactors-with-illustrated-wall-charts/

Re:Old News

[antdude]

The article and pictures are also in the current hardcopy Wired magazine. So that means they were done a month or so ago!

Links to all drawings

[condition-label-red]

http://econtent.unm.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=%2Fnuceng/

• http://econtent.unm.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/nuceng&CISOPTR=1&filename=1.pdf/
• http://econtent.unm.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/nuceng&CISOPTR=0&filename=2.pdf/
• http://econtent.unm.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/nuceng&CISOPTR=6&filename=3.pdf/
• http://econtent.unm.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/nuceng&CISOPTR=7&filename=4.pdf/
• http://econtent.unm.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/nuceng&CISOPTR=3&filename=5.pdf/
• http://econtent.unm.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/nuceng&CISOPTR=2&filename=6.pdf/
• http://econtent.unm.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/nuceng&CISOPTR=4&filename=7.pdf/
• http://econtent.unm.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/nuceng&CISOPTR=5&filename=8.pdf/

Everything I see...

[Anonymous Coward]

reminds me of her.

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/17343737

Guangdong plant

[xenophrak]

Is anyone else a bit frightened that the Guangdong plant picture shows what looks to be simple trusses and corrugated aluminum siding over the turbine section, where others use poured concrete and I-beams?

Did they skimp on anything else, I wonder?

Great!

[SEWilco]

I give this a glowing review.

The variability is bad

[plopez]

Starglider29a asked why they is a lack of uniformity. In the US at least there was no standard design. Each was basically as "one off" because the company that won the contract changed from reactor to reactor. A low bid contract method. This meant each reactor was a "one off".

My understanding is that in France the government commissioned a standard design which it then licensed out. This had some benefits:
1) The design allowed better project management. Everyone knew what needed to be done. This made estimation of effort easier.

2) Due to point #1, each company had a better idea of it took to build a reactor and bid accordingly.
This also helped the costs to be budgeted.

3) Lessons learned from one reactor can be incorporated into the newer, yet to be built, reactors. It is also easier to retrofit older reactors with lessons learned. In short, incremental improvement.

4) Related to pint 3, it is easier to QA a standard design. You know what to expect and if the expectations are not met something is wrong.

Making every reactor a "one off" is crazy. I googled +ISO +"nuclear reactor design" and came up without a comprehensive spec. Having a standard might be a good idea.

Re:The variability is bad

[R2.0]

As much as it gauls me, Plopez is correct, although reactor designs weren't quite that diverse. In the US there were basically 4 NSSS (Nuclear Steam Supply System) suppliers: GE, who made BWR's; and Westinghouse, Babcock & Wilcox, and Combustion Engineering, who all made PWR's. Within each of the suppliers the designs were similar; the problem came in when the utilities specified the units. Some wanted big, some wanted small. Some wanted X, others wanted Y. So the suppliers competed against each other within that specification, but no 2 utilities had the same specs. Then they'd submit each individual design to the NRC, who would do a de novo analysis on each individual design and license it.

Should they have simply licensed 1-2 designs and be done with it? In retrospect, yes, but keep in mind that, at the time, the governmental style in the US and France were quite different. Licensing only 1 design created a de facto monopoly on NSSS's in France, and they were OK with that. In the US in the 50's and 60's, that looked an awful lot like communism.

No Chernobyl?

[WidescreenFreak]

I can't believe that there's no Chernobyl reactor as art! I think that in its current state it has a very Dali-melted-watch look to it with a bit of Picasso thrown in.