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In Nuclear Power, Size Matters
PerlJedi writes "Most nations with nuclear power capabilities have been re-assessing the risk/benefit of nuclear power reactors following the Fukushima plant melt down, a newly released study suggests the U.S. should expand its nuclear power production using 'Small Modular Reactors'. 'The reports assessed the economic feasibility [PDF] of classical, gigawatt-scale reactors and the possible new generation of modular reactors. The latter would have a generating capacity of 600 megawatts or less, would be factory-built as modular components, and then shipped to their desired location for assembly.'"
I know, I'm paranoid...but really...what is going to happen to all the spent fuel rod cooling ponds when all the transformers get blown?
Should be using Thorium instead.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
A friend of mine was interning for a company that did a lot of work with these about 10-11 years ago. He was saying they were the big thing, back then. Lower risk, easy to setup/install, cheap due to mass production. Of course, he was stating they they wouldn't go above 100MW., which is a bit of a difference.
Anyway, I'm surprised it's taken this long for them to see the feasibility in the idea. It really does make a lot of sense.
So you're going to increase the number of sites? I thought Not-In-My-Backyard was the reason we didn't just build more big nuclear reactors. You can make the designs as safe as you want -- hell, look at molten salt thorium reactors and the CANDU design. The problem is that the people living anywhere near it are going to be dead set against it. And Fukushima didn't help that image.
Also I didn't see anything about this increasing the number of attack sites for anyone who wants to hit one of these things or steal it. That would be an increased risk factor, as well, right?
From an engineering and economic perspective these things are probably great ideas. But what state or township is going to approve a nuclear power plant -- even a small modular one -- given unfortunate recent events?
My work here is dung.
One thing favoring the big plants is that neighbors' opinion about nuclear power, at least in the U.S., often follows a pattern where initially putting one in is very unpopular, but once one is put in, as it brings jobs, seems to be safe, and unlike traditional industry doesn't pollute or produce bad odors, local popularity goes up. In fact when you poll people living near a major nuclear plant about the possibility of putting in a new unit, results are usually quite positive. So from a political perspective at least, that favors putting in a bunch of power generation in the same place: it's not worth going through the trouble of convincing the local population in each place only to generate 600 megawatts there.
For these to work, I think we'd need a more widespread change where the default attitude towards being near a nuclear generating facility is positive or at least neutral. Then you could just scatter then around without much worry.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
But this makes it sound like modular is being used a bit like a car is "modular" before it gets to the assembly line.
What we really need is small plants in more places using gen-4 technology to keep them running safe. The fact that we still ship power across the damn country is shameful. I'm frankly less concerned about how the power is generated than where.
The Toshiba 4S seems like it would make an ideal neighborhood reactor. Plus, I love the design. Rather than using control rods to stop the reaction, the reflector enables the reaction. By controlling the radioactivity of the core you ensure it can never get too critical. And the reflecting band even if it gets jammed only enables a small part of the core to overheat.
And it's small enough to be self-contained.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
One led by people who have a clue? ... if you find such a place, please let me know.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Still would not solve the nuclear waste problem.
It took one of the worst Earth Quakes immediately followed by one of the worst Tsunamis in modern history to take down a 40 year old nuclear plant via a flaw found and reported 35 years ago (but never corrected). Like it or not, nuclear energy has come a long way and is pretty damn safe.
Don't like that the flaw wasn't fixed or how the accident unfolded ... but I admire how tough that facility was engineered.
It's not the size of your fuel rod, it's what you do with it.
Now baby, give me a tour of your breeder reactor.
You have the option of increasing the number of sites or not. If not, then put a bunch of small standalone reactors together. It probably makes sense from an efficiency and reliability standpoint to have many sites rather than one big one. Although security for many smaller sites seems more problematic.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
I work as a consultant for electricity planning, and I have *never* seen a single survey which shows that folks who live near a nuclear plant are in favor of new units being built at the site. Not a single survey. Not even for Vogtle units 3 and 4, being built right now next to units 1 and 2, located on the Georgia-South Carolina line... a place where I'd expect a more favorable response than most.
If you've got one, I'd love to see it.
Cause and effect all backwards. Its not that small reactors are inherently more economical than large reactors, they most certainly are not. Its that new designs including some pretty radical fuels and coolants are being proposed, and you don't scale those bad boys in one jump from lab simulations to GW+. So these new designs are going to start small, then you build midrange 100s of MW, then you build the big ole GW+ roasters, thats just how its always been and going to be.
The next issue is there is a magic shopping list of rewards, but they're all interrelated to people that know about nukes. Can use natural convection cooling. Well, OK. Look at cube-square law and tell me how a smaller reactor at a given specific thermal output could not possibly be harder to cool? Or given an infinite budget to make a really low specific volume thermal output giant, you can convection cool them too, assuming you can manufacture something that huge. Also you get safety tradeoffs, the dough you spent on a 5 times larger vessel could have gone to quintuple redundant diesel drive coolant pumps on top of 100 meter tsunami wave proof seawalls... Big pieces of reactor grade steel are staggeringly expensive. So you are getting better burnup and better Pu non-proliferation? OK well tell me how to get better burn up without eating its own bomb isotope Pu? Answer, you can't, has nothing directly to do with size, the longer a rod sits in a core the less bomb grade Pu you can refine out of it.
Don't get me wrong, these are cool, very cool. But don't confuse having to release version 1.0 at a small scale as a permanent long term trend. "In the long run" the only thing better than an itty bitty cute little modernized PBMR or a cute little RS-MHR is a cool freaking huge PBMR or RS-MHR, but the big momma version is most certainly not going to be release 1.0. Maybe 10, 20 years after the new high tech ones are rolled out, then, out comes the plans for big ones.
I think this is the mistake the fine article makes, confusing this small beta release, with a long term roadmap. Its very much like thinking that internet sites that roll out slowly via invitations means they intent to stay small forever... not so, its just the scale up process.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
NIMBY might be less of a problem outside the US. For example, I suspect China doesn't give a shit about who wants what on his backyard.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
You are grammar seems irrelevant in this case.
I looked all through out the article and I couldn't find any arguments for "small modular" vs "massive". With all the permitting problems and the like, small and modular seems much harder to pull off. I'd rather have more eyes on a single large facility making sure nothing goes wrong and that security is foolproof than 100 sites scattered around hoping none of them have a Homer Simpson running them.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
if the plant is small enough for a platoon of Former Military folks (which i think we have a bunch of right now) to guard properly the security should not be a problem as such (hint if everything is within "shooting distance" of like 4-6 guys then its the right size)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
But what state or township is going to approve a nuclear power plant -- even a small modular one -- given unfortunate recent events?
Although it does, the 'recent' shouldn't matter. No matter how well you design something, there's always a statistical probability of catastrophic failure. Simplistic: if there's a 1 in X chance that a plant will have a meltdown this year, and you have X number of similar plants across the globe, you could expect (on average) 1 of those to have a meltdown this year. You wanna host that party?
And even 'minor' events could have devastating consequences for people that live in the area. Not saying other options like a coal plant are any better, but the NIMBY syndrome is perfectly understandable (& perhaps logical as well) for lots & lots of reasons.
But what state or township is going to approve a nuclear power plant -- even a small modular one -- given unfortunate recent events?
You've never been to South Carolina, have you?
If I had the money I would put one of these in my back yard and sell the power back to the power company or the local town. I want one with simple mechanical controls and really good circuit breakers though. Failsafe baby, especially if there are 'unforeseen' events.
As other posters have said, the not-in-my-backyard effect means any proposal along these lines is dead-on-arrival in the United States for the near-term.
However, in the long-term there is likely going to be a "come to Jesus" moment when Texas turns to desert or California burns to the ground, when even hard-core skeptics will realize something has to give. Then maybe a plan like this would be dusted off and put into practice.
Wasn't it W. Churchill who said "You can trust the Americans to do the right thing after they've exhausted all other possibilities." Maybe we'll pull our heads out but it'll be a long time coming.
Things will have to get desperate, such as the situation in Galena Alaska where remoteness means energy costs are crazy high. As long as the dollar costs of coal extraction are low and there's not an undeniable disaster in progress due to climate change then coal-fired will burn on.
-- How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
We have coal for a couple of centuries and are finding increasing amounts of oil. We can cease nuclear development while foreign countries fund it instead, avoiding the need to bother with transitional designs. There are plenty of countries which do well without trying to lead the world in anything.
We can choose to use those resources, and choose to accept the consequences. Anthropogenic global warming, if there be such, is inevitable anyway so we can choose to "make hay while the sun shines".
The US and EU and most of the rest of modern civilization span regions which will be less affected by desertification, while our enemies are often less fortunate. It would be fitting that while consuming Jihadist oil we help warm their region. The more stress on Middle Eastern water resources the better.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Irregardless, he's got a tiny wee-wee.
His wife/gf/(m)other told me last night while I was doing her.
Ohhhh! CAPTCHA = "nonsense". So true, so true.
I recently became convinced by an argument made by Lawrence Berkeley Lab scientists that solar is the only power source that we have that really makes sense for powering human needs in the future. Check it out here http://www.lbl.gov/solar/
Currently hooked on AMP
NIMBYism isn't the problem (unlike what the anti-environmentalists will tell you), it's that big nuclear power plants aren't attractive to investors. Would you invest $10 billion knowing you wouldn't see any return on that for a decade? It's a very risky proposition for something that doesn't have a particularly great return. If you can make them modular, so it doesn't take a decade to build them, that radically alters the risk-reward proposition.
Compare the U.S. with France which gets over 80% of it's electricity from nukes. Is it because the French are docile sheep who won't protest a nuclear power plant? No, they shut down their country with strikes at the drop of a hat. It's that the French power plants were built by the government which has a much broader view of investment than private investors and will tolerate not seeing a profit for a decade.
Increase in power plants = increase in backyards. What killed nuclear power in the USA was kicking the can down the road on the nuclear waste. The USA population, and the world's, keeps increasing, meaning more and more "backyards". If they would have dealt with Yucca Mountain 40 years ago, the community would be dependent on disposal tax base by now and there would have been an answer. Some things don't get better with time. Well, ok... there is half-life.
Gently reply
They've been waiting on their Toshiba 4S reactor for seven years now.
Of course their heating and electricity comes from fuel oil, which gets very expensive up there since it only comes by boat in the short summer, and by airplane any other time.
Harsh realities such as that tend to temper NIMBY. I'm also guessing there aren't too many Greenpeace activists in that town to protest, mainly working people. Greenpeace will probably fly in some protesters when construction starts, but the locals won't be too friendly to these strangers threatening their livelihood.
Tax distribution lines at a high rate (scaled by capacity), and pass it on to consumers. Internalize the cost of putting generation in BFE.
The point of the actual paper has nothing to do with reactor design. It's that the financing of a 1GW plant creates too much economic risk for utilities. They point out that 70% of utilities with large nuclear plants at some point faced a bond rating downgrade.
A production line with steady production improves costs more than "modularity". That's how France did nuclear power - a lot of plants, built in the 1980s, all the same, with common components. There's a scale issue with how big an object you can move to the site - if the thing will fit on a road or rail car, it can be built and tested in a factory. There's a big discontinuity in delivered price when something gets too big to move and essentially gets built on site. The paper doesn't address that issue when talking about "modularity".
(This is even an issue with wind turbines. The upper limit on size comes from how big an object you can truck to the site. Ocean units can be bigger because they're brought in on barges.)
If it fit in my backyard, I might want a small one to power my neighborhood. I'll get some extra income from selling power to the NIMBY folks and they have nothing to complain about since the reactor is in my backyard, not theirs.
Knowledge Brings Fear
They are NOT at suggesting using solid thorium and making fuel rods. That would indeed be truly stupid.
The LFTR uses thorium dissolved in molten floride salt. It is proven tech, since the US government
built one back in the late 60s and ran it for 5 years -- with 1.5 years at full power...
Watch the video http://thoriumremix.com/2011/
then and only then can you properly comment on thorium....
-Erik -- --This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--
Naval reactors -- be they powering submarines, aircraft carriers, etc. -- don't have to show a profit. When they need money to run them, they just take it from you and me. Rinse, wash and repeat.
Compare that to one of the very few nuclear powered cargo ships, the NS Savannah. Truly beautiful ship; fast, clean, etc. Couldn't be run cost-effectively, some of which was due to a bit of overzealous streamlining and so forth, but in terms of propulsion costs, oil fueled cargo ships are simply less expensive.
That's why you're not going to see naval reactor designs in your back yard. Ever. Commercial reactors have to be practical.
The right answer is solar and/or wind and/or hydro plus storage. We just don't have cost-effective / space-effective storage. Yet.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The problem with this idea is that some of the most important parts of the reactor, that which contain neutrons, have a fixed wall thickness. This leads to an inescapable problem, and why we could never have a nuclear powered wristwatch (however, it is possible to have a low-power, long-lived radioisotopic heater (RTG) such as those used in deep-space probes. These can generate small amounts of electricity as well). This is not to say that the idea of a nuclear reactor on a railroad boxcar in infeasible (though it may be infeasible for other reasons).
I see the economic rationale for this, and would like to think that nuclear power plants can be built on a production line. Perhaps less of a production of an automobile and more like the production center of a large aircraft, but still, there would be great benefit. I only hope that whoever does this has the sense to use liquid fuel.
I wonder how much this has to do with Bill Gates announcing his partnering with the Chinese in developing a new nuclear power plant design?
Just for the record: Girls bits come in different sizes too. Some are too big, some are too small, some are just right.
Either:
a) You're so far to the left of the bell curve that most women can't feel yours
b) Your only experience is with owners of big, sloppy, bucket-size vaginas.
or
c) You don't have any experience at all, you're just parroting what your mom says (see 'b').
Lets just hope they aren't made in china and shipped here.
From what I hear ... the things they are having factory made and shipped into the US from china to use in the nuke plants is of dubious quality. There was a time when the US would only use items made in the US at nuke plants. They seriously need to go back to that.
Hurricane Island Outward Bound
OB
Like this one:
http://www.defkalion-energy.com/files/HyperionSpecsSheetNovember2011.pdf
"Defkalion described the documents as “a first preparation of our pre-industrial Hyperion product” and stated that final products would be ready for market in 2012. The company also claimed to have received interest from 850 companies in 60 countries for license agreements."
Here is whole story:
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3358483.ece
The idea is right insofar as the resulting catastrophes will be smaller (and more numerous) so for each individual catastrophe, less people will be affected and protest and hence protests will get less effective.
As long as nuclear power cannot be insured for the full damage caused (i.e. "unlimited"), this technology is not safe. As soon as it can be insured, realistic cost estimates become possible (namely risk-cost = insurance fee) and I predict that it is the most expensive form of energy generation. And BTW, same for the spent fuel: Unlimited and infinite time insurance for all damage caused.
As it is, nuclear power is a great amoral scheme to make lots of money for a few people as they do not have to pay for the damage they cause. That is also contaminates the biosphere irreversibly is just a side effect.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Wouldn't it be more technologically advanced to focus research more on power-saving, or generally speaking, efficiency, instead of building more and more reactors, even if they are smaller?
Yes, my name is Answar Al-Qeda. I would like to purchase one of your modular nuclear reactors to power my home.
1) nuclear reactors require expertise in order to get maximum utilization (and profits). There are now some big electric companies that have lots of nuclear reactors (like Exelon), whom are good at operating nuclear reactors.
2) Related to 1), the big electric companies can afford to buy bigger nuclear power plants (1700 MW) than before.
3) Electric nuclear power plant design had been undergoing steady improvements for several decades. Power plant design is now more stable (the 1700 MW EPR will be around for a long time). This means standardized designs at last.
4) China will be building lots of nuclear power plants, and drive through the learning curve for the rest of the world to follow.
So, China will drive through the learning curve of big, refined designs for nuclear power plants. I don't see the advantage of small nuclear power plants in this case.
Or you could google it yourself and find out that the main problem is apparently that the insurance and other legal requirements were created before such small reactors existed, and the NRC is trying to get the rules changed so that they won't have the same requirements as multi-gigawatt reactors. The locals at Galena are all but begging for one to get installed.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
My home town recently lost a bid to get a Nuclear plant nearby. The general feeling was that the new jobs would be great, and it would be in keeping with the recent trend in building power plants in our region.
But the government change regulations regarding reactor construction, and as a result, the company backed out.
So, I guess my point is, NIMBY is hogwash. Just let us know when you will quit pushing the government to suppress new reactors, and my town (and probably many more like it) will gladly host reactors in our backyards.
The thing about building a bigass nuclear powerplant is you will make it work from the ground up, once. If you have a factory making lots of little nuclear powerplants then you will always end up with some defects.
If I had the money I would put one of these in my back yard and sell the power back to the power company or the local town. I want one with simple mechanical controls and really good circuit breakers though. Failsafe baby, especially if there are 'unforeseen' events.
Actually, "simple mechanical controls" is exactly what went wrong with Chernobyl.
If they would have just let the system go through it's normal shutdown procedure, then nothing would have happened, other than the town being without power for about a week.
Instead, the engineers at the plant were told "Don't question the orders, just do whatever it takes to keep the reaction from shutting down! We can't afford another week to wait for the reaction to start again."
The engineers couldn't have done anything, if it was in the US, because all those controls were automated. But, in Russia, they were still 10-20 years behind in design, so manual overrides allowed them to remove the control rods -- against all safety regulations -- which raised the temperature enough to cause all the water coolant to evaporate. That is what caused the fuel to meltdown.
The safety problem with nearly all fission designs is that there is no "unplug one machine, and everything stops gracefully" option. Since Chernobyl, all reactors are pretty close to being idiot proof. There is no way to override the systems in such a way to prevent a graceful shutdown. But, the shutdown still relies on the physical integrity of the reactor and the containment vessels. Unexpected events like Tsunamis or falling bombs can cause containment vessels to break, so essentially there is no way to make such a design 100% safe. I'm still for nuclear power, because the value far outweighs the risk, but when the opposing side says that they can't be 100% infallible, unfortunately they are correct.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
And there is always a chance that the wind turbine in my yard could get struck by lightning and blown into my neighbors dying spruce tree, igniting the side of his house during a wind storm, in turn setting the connecting fence ablaze causing our entire town and the surrounding national forest to erupt in a giant hell-fire of death, moving across Northern Colorado in to the mountains where the fire-fighting capabilities of sparse municipalities are defensless against its firey rage.
Its just not a very good chance.
The only fair comparison is a measurement of deaths-per-Terawatt. And large scale nuclear has proven pretty good even after the contrived linear-no-threshold-model gymnastics that FUD spreaders like to use.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Honestly...I was really just going for funny (although my post deserves the -1 Offtopic)
Carry on all :)
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I guess you won't mind if your neighbour sets up a sewage processing plant in his back yard then. And maybe the guy on the other side could set up a fireworks factory. It's in their backyards so you have nothing to complain about, right?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Try and get out of the US sometime. Check out Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, places like that...
Nuclear power cannot be made safe, and is incompatible with life. The Earth will be destroyed the first time that a natural disaster or epidemic causes several nuclear reactors to be unmaintainable. People should adapt to life without nuclear power, rather than risking extinction.
University of Chicago economics is more of a church indoctrinating new members to their religion.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Outside the US != China.
Pretty much the entire western world is NIMBY, even the French public are largely against the construction of new nuclear reactors.
Think third world.
The probability of a nuclear accident is proportional to the number of reactors. I think small modular reactors would only make sense if they were twice as safe as the larger reactors.
I used to operate (control) a 40000 MW reactor, this was for the U.S. Government and before Chernobyl.
We used to laugh that the power deviation at a sitting could power a small town.
It was built as a dual purpose; to produce Plutonium and waste steam used for electrical generation.
A pressurized water reactor with guesstimate of 600 tons of enriched Uranium. It's safety features
included allowing the initial steam burst into the atmosphere and upwind of three medium sized Cities. This to
save the structure that would then contain what was left.
An acceptable fact that if anything bad would of happened to the reactor, hundreds of thousands
would of been affected.
When Chernobyl blew many were worried, not I. I fought with the rest that reactor(s) were safe and not a concern.
It was the Fukushima disaster that had me rethink these thoughts; I mean the Fukushima reactors had to be safe ...unfinished
cause they were built on a Known major fault line.
SOME should use Thorium.
Others should be a breeder reactor to burn up the 'waste' that we currently have. In particular, we should be able to put in smaller breeders into places that already have loads of stored fuel and simply transfer that over to it.
So, a good example is Zion outside of Chicago. It was closed, but still contains LOADS of 'waste'. But it also contains cooling, generators, and even grid connection. Point is, that rather than ship waste around, we can burn what is there, add to our grid, and shut down more coal plants.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Almost nobody is building large nuclear plants because the enormous capital cost can't be regained until long after the decade or so of construction and commissioning. Smaller reactors should cost less and take less time to build even if their total cost per MW/h over their lifetime is much higher.
What really matters is a lot of steam, and that could come from a lot of little reactors in one plant instead of a single large reactor. However since all the rest of the infrastructure of a large thermal power station is needed and has to be large ot be worth it, it's hard to say whether incrementally building lots of little reactors would be useful.
Economies of scale don't really kick in when you are doing things in small numbers instead of hundreds per year. Also there's no point in trying to "find a good design and stick to it" when it is a rapidly developing technology - you've got to find the good design first and have time to test it out. There's no single completed civilian reactor anywhere on earth that anyone with a clue seriously wants to build another of because the upcoming designs look so much better. Then when those are built (eg. when the first AP1000 is completed in the next couple of years) the lessons learnt from those will inspire improvements to those designs or suggest completely new ones.
I thought Germany was "reconsidering" their reliance on nuclear energy.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Why does my heart go "Boom"
The right answer is solar and/or wind and/or hydro plus storage. We just don't have cost-effective / space-effective storage. Yet.
Perhaps we should redefine the problem instead and adapt to possibility of having huge number of small non-constant power sources deployed on a massive scale:
vary the energy price in real time according to varying supply and demand, then use embedded intelligence in appliances to decide if it is worth it to spend energy (and how much of it) on that particular application at that specific moment. Of course, our power grid should then carry not just energy but also information on current (no pun intended) energy price and our power meters should integrate not just u(t) * i(t) * dt, but price_per_Watt_second(t) * u(t) * i(t) * dt instead.
Allow subscribers to offer the energy surplus to the grid - that would establish the market and make immediate incentive to develop cost effective and efficient small scale energy storage solutions in order to make profit similarly to a way stock exchange broker does: buy low, sell high.
Thus, the market approach would naturally tend to level out the gaps between demand and supply, directly by forcing all non-essential and low priority demand to postpone, and indirectly by rewarding investments into research, development and deployment of competitive energy storage solutions.
I think: small enough to steal - or at least far more easily to destroy in situ.
You've just described the entire zoning philosophy of the state of Texas.
--Joe