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.'"

Comments

Re:Lots of little Carrington events?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of little diesel generators are going to come online?

right idea - Wrong fuel

[denis-The-menace]

Should be using Thorium instead.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[denis-The-menace]

/. ate my link
http://thoriumremix.com/2011/

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[PerlJedi]

I'm not disagreeing with you, but if you could give a reason, and (hopefully) some supporting data/references?

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[anti11es]

There's an interesting google talk on Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgKfS74hVvQ

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? And yes, the link is useless.

1. There are molten nuclear reactor designs using uranium. Nice in theory, ugly in practice. Solid fuel is less "icky" (less crap to cleanup afterward). Decommissioning costs are important in practice.

2. Uranium has an established fuel chain! Read this and re-read this. The costs of using thorium are the same as having a car run on 100% alcohol vs. gasoline - gasoline is established!

3. There is little advantage to thorium, except if you are in a nation that has lots of thorium and little uranium, then maybe.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[vlm]

Theres a whopping big wiki article that tries a little too hard to be "balanced" when in all fairness Th is a PITA fuel, that kinda sucks.

Its only good for non-proliferation from a distance. Up close its worse. You need to boot up with a slug of Pu because there are no fissile Th isotopes. So no one ever builds "a Th reactor" they build a "bomb grade Pu reactor" surrounded with a Th shell that eventually can breed itself into reacting, hopefully your breeding plan curve matches your electrical demand curve.

Its only good for non-proliferation if you define proliferation as current designs. Historically plenty of U233 bombs were blown and research done. No you cannot make a current model US B61 out of stuff from a Th reactor. Yes, you can make something almost as good as a B61 that is U233 based using what comes out of a Th reactor. It in no way prevents proliferation merely makes it a slightly more involved research project (slightly!)

In a way, not being useful for proliferation dooms Th. The US and Russia and China and god only knows who else (Iran?) are still going to need U based reactors so now you've gotta run both technologies... Why not just run one? And that one's gotta be U, at this time. So trying to push Th means your sales will be pitiful because you can only sell to 3rd world and not much else.

Plus it gives the non-proliferating Th owners experience in plant operation which they can transition to new/secret U plants of their own anyway, its like bootstrapping proliferation not preventing it.

Anyone who says Th = nonproliferation is either misinformed or being paid or trolling.

Its an unholy PITA to recycle due to hard gammas, or you can have agony when disposing. Its waste stream is just "worse" than a traditional reactor.

Its harder to run, more neutron poisons like Pa build up.

To be economical, you just have to burnup into the ground, which is kind of like saying a F-350 has a lower lifetime environmental cost IF you can get it to survive 600K miles. Its... ambitious. You don't achieve high burnup by just wishing, its difficult, dangerous if you have cladding failures, and expensive. Otherwise the prius wins again for overall lifetime costs.

Its interesting to learn about, good to learn about, but it shows good engineering judgment to avoid a Th design.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[Nimey]

Cite?

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[vlm]

Whoops also forgot another reason why Th sucks, its harder to make fuel rods. Hotter manufacturing temps. So they end up being more expensive and/or less reliable than U, which is supposedly the opposite of what the system is supposed to produce. So the theoretical 3rd world operator finds it easier and safer and cheaper to use U rods.

Th is a second class fuel. The best thing to burn in your steam locomotive is anthracite, if you can still get it. Next worse is bituminous. If you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel and gotta do what ya gotta do, you harvest irish peat and burn that in your steamie. But trying to convince people peat is just as good as anthracite, or peat is cheaper, or peat should really be your first choice, or I read an article about peat and figure it might be fun to try, thats just not gonna work. Stick to the U and Pu designs until the world runs out of U in 20000 years or so. After that, you gotta do what you gotta do, and whip out the Th designs.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[leucadiadude]

What a gigantic pile of steaming FUD. You win the FUD award of the decade.

I tried hard, but I could not find a single factual statement in anything you wrote. Every single statement is a lie. Wow.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[vlm]

Cite?

Come on man, its called "google for fuel cycle of thorium reactors" and the first thing is the wikipedia article. Its not a perfect article, tries too hard to be "equal" rather than be "correct"... but I saw no obvious factual errors when I read it.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[denis-The-menace]

Watch the video first. (at least first 10 seconds of it)

1. With LFTR you have next to no waste.
From what I remember, there are 2 radioactive leftovers and both are valuable.
-molybdenum-99 (Medical usage)
-Plutonium-238 (Space probes)(VERY valuable)

2. Uranium has an [Expensive] established fuel chain. You can only get fuel pellets from ONE supplier: the one who built the reactor. And no, they don't have sales.

3. Advantage of thorium vs uranium:
-No enrichment
-No 10000 year radio-active waste
-No high-pressure water cooling schemes that need power to work and backups up the wazoo.
-Others mentioned in the video

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[Waffle Iron]

Wrong idea.

If lots of little complex mechanical gadgets all worked more reliably than a few big complex mechanical gadgets, then the Soviets would have won the race to the moon with their N-1 rockets that sported 43 engines each. As it happened, their four N-1 launches achieved four explosions.

Lots of little things work OK when you need at least some of them to work (that's redundancy). But large numbers of things is not the solution when you can't afford to have *any* of them fail.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[gstrickler]

False. They don't need Pu to start up, they need a small amount of fissile material (e.g. 235U) to get them through the first 45 days. Once in operation, they breed their own fissile fuel.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[Scottingham]

such as?

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[jeppen]

I get a bit angry when I read that, so I probably shouldn't respond at all. But just about everything you write is wrong. First, you don't need to boot up with Pu, you could use highly enriched uranium. Second, if you use Pu, it won't be bomb-grade, but reactor grade. There is no reason to use weapons-grade unless you want to destroy weapons, in which case it would be a bit silly to call it a proliferation risk. You claim "not being useful for proliferation dooms Th", which seems a bit schizofrenic since you also claim it is a proliferation risk. First, the military use has no economic significance while the civilian use will easily be a billion-dollar market (if you decide to get rid of fossils). Second, the won't be much of problem installing a U238 blanket close to a thorium (U233) core and get some plutonium that way. Also, regarding waste streams, nuclear poisons, burnup, cladding and so on, you should read up on the LFTR. It solves these things beautifully.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[washort]

Making bombs with U233 from a LFTR reactor isn't as feasible as you'd think since it's contaminated with U232, a hard gamma emitter that fries electronics (and humans) and is easily detectable from a distance. Plus, LFTR reactors can be run with a just-barely-critical fuel supply --- stealing bomb materials couldn't be done without turning out the lights.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[Anthony Mouse]

My initial thought was to agree with you, but I'm not so sure. The problem with the analogy is that the Soviets used 43 engines, not 43 rockets. They had one single rocket which was 43 times as complicated: It proves the point the other way. If they built smaller rockets with fewer engines, there would be a lower probability that each of them would explode.

Of course, then they would need more of them, but you'll get more payloads to the moon if you build rockets with one engine and one payload that have a 95% success rate than you will with larger rockets with 40 engines and a .95^40=12.85% success rate: To get 40 payloads to the moon with the former, you need ~42 launches using 42 engines and you'll lose ~2 rockets with ~2 payloads. To get 40 payloads to the moon with the latter, you'll need (rounding down) ~7 launches using 280 engines and you'll lose ~6 rockets with ~240 payloads.

Of course, that's assuming the larger rockets are more complicated and therefore less reliable than the smaller ones. But if you assume they're both the same reliability then you end up having no advantage or disadvantage either way: If you can build big rockets with the same reliability as the little ones then 20 rockets carrying 40 payloads will get (on average) the same number of payloads to the moon as 20*40=800 rockets with one payload each. Or in the nuclear context, the total harm from all failures will be the same because each failure would cause proportionally less damage (since there is proportionally less material to escape from the reactor in the event of a failure), but it will be exactly offset by the increase in the absolute number of failures.

The real question, then, is whether the probability of a failure is lower for a smaller reactor or a larger one. If it's the same then it makes no difference.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[Waffle Iron]

Or in the nuclear context, the total harm from all failures will be the same because each failure would cause proportionally less damage (since there is proportionally less material to escape from the reactor in the event of a failure), but it will be exactly offset by the increase in the absolute number of failures.

But that's not how public perception works. *Any* nuclear accident, no matter what the size, will cause a major nationwide reaction that will disrupt the economy, overshadow other important activities, etc. (See 9/11 for an example of huge fallout from a relatively small and localized event.) Whether technically justified or not, that's how the human mind works, and anyone pushing nuclear technology needs to account for it.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Mo-99 has a very very short halfife. You cannot extract it from reactor waste. Pu-238 cannot be in waste because it gets transmuted to Pu-239 and then Pu-240, and both are burned That's why there is very little Pu-238 of it in reactors waste.

2. Uranium fuel chain has multiple supplier of fuel. Cameco (Canada), the Russians (Atomsomethingsoemthing), AREVA (French). The new enrichment plant in US that just got approved. You can buy lots of uranium if you want. You cannot buy thorium readily.

3.You need *highly* enriched U-235 to start thorium reaction. Thorium is not a chain reaction. It needs to be bred to Uranium-233 and then it is Uranium that produces power!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle

It has the same problems with Actinides as Uranium reactors. Actinides is what constitutes the real waste.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor

Thorium reactor are by definition fast neutron reactors. Fast neutron uranium reactors are very very similar. Saying that thorium is better than uranium is akin of saying that sweet potatoes are better than regular potatoes. Well, you eat what you have is the bottom line.

-No high-pressure water cooling schemes that need power to work and backups up the wazoo.

It is the exactly the same! Cooling requirements have nothing to do with Uranium or Thorium. Cooling has everything to do with reactor design and ability to cope with daughter radionuclides.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor

Has same properties you listed, except it runs on Uranium.

Anyway, the future of Uranium fuel cycle is fast neutrons anyway. Fast neutron reactors can burn the current "waste" sitting conveniently waiting to get put back to produce a lot of power. No need to dig up new stuff or switching entire fuel chains.

Again, thorium is only useful if you have lot of thorium in your nation and no uranium. If you have uranium, it is quite stupid to have thorium reactors (lots of R&D costs!).

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[Jorophose]

Can't the "waste" from conventional nuclear reactors be, uh, "recycled", for lack of a better word? I thought I read about pilot projects here, where the spent nuclear fuel would be put into a different kind of reactor and continued to emit heat until they finally decayed to something stable (or something with such a small amount of damage that it wouldn't matter).

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[AmiMoJo]

Thorium does little to help with clean-up after the reactor is decommissioned. In the US the standard method is to entomb parts of the site instead of full decontamination, meaning it can't be used for anything else. Having lots of smaller sites get contaminated doesn't seem like a good idea.

Full decontamination so that the site can be reused takes about 80 to 90 years in the UK.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[AmiMoJo]

Actually their design had a better chance of working because engines rarely explode, the usually just stop working and the fuel supply is cut off. US moon rocket's engines occasionally failed but the other engines were able to burn a bit longer to make up for it, which the Russian design could do too. The Russian engines were cheaper and simpler, but also more efficient.

Really they were just unlucky that all the launches failed. The basic design was sound, they just had issues that needed to be resolved but not enough cash to keep at it long enough.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[BlueParrot]

1. With LFTR you have next to no waste.

Other than all the fission products, including radioactive iodine, strontium and caesium (and others). Heck, just avoiding excessive tritium production involves isotope separation of lithium to enrich it in Li-7.

Essentially somebody has not told you teh full truth, or outright lied.

2. Uranium has an [Expensive] established fuel chain. You can only get fuel pellets from ONE supplier: the one who built the reactor. And no, they don't have sales.

Fuel costs are less than 10% of the cost of nuclear power. Construction and operation is the majority of it. Most estimates conclude that reprocessing ( even in the LFTR ) would be more expensive than uranium enrichment. You may save some money by not needing fuel manufacture , but in return you have a larger inventory of fissile material since it is not all in the core.

3. Advantage of thorium vs uranium:
-No enrichment
-No 10000 year radio-active waste

Nonsense. Thorium is not fissile, so it needs to be started on a large seed of fissile material. This could be either reprocessed plutonium or enriched uranium, just as with other reactors. Also, since plutonium cannot be effectively destroyed in a thermal spectrum, there will be a buildup of plutonium and curium, both of which have half-lives in the range of thousands of years, while still be very toxic.

-No high-pressure water cooling schemes that need power to work and backups up the wazoo.

Most modern designs, whether they use water or some other coolant, are built to not need power for emergency cooling.
The ESBWR doesn't even use pumps during normal operation. This is not a feature of thorium, but a general property of
decent engineering. Hot liquid flows up, cold comes down. This has been demonstrated successfully in virtually all types
of coolant, including water, lead, sodium, salt and carbon dioxide and even nitrogen.

You may have a point about pressure, but there are other issues with salt systems. The need to keep the salt above it's several
hundred centigrade melting point is one of them.

-Others mentioned in the video

There's loads of videos. Most of them are half-truths at best, and I'm not just talking about reactors. Seriously, you seem to never have come across a marketing campaign before.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[Anthony Mouse]

It seems like the better solution would be to educate people and train them not to be so susceptible to hysteria. The consequence of worst-case nuclear plant failures are of the same type and on the same scale as worst-case chemical plant failures, but there is no public movement to shut down Dow Chemical or Proctor & Gamble.

Example: Here is Greenpeace doing their thing with respect to a chemical plant in New Jersey:

Imagine a low-lying cloud of lethal chlorine gas spreading through New York City or your home town, stretching 15 miles past your childhood playground, your place of worship, or your friends’ homes. Imagine that you witness the same horror seen by American troops when Hitler used chlorine gas as a weapon: people gasping for air and grasping their throats as fumes melted their lungs and slowly suffocate them. Imagine that your Senator could have done something to prevent this.

That's right, the vile bleach manufacturers are genocidal Nazis come to separate you from God and murder your children. So that's their usual fare then. But nobody pays them any mind because they're a bunch of hysterical crackpots. It doesn't get any real media coverage, but if the problem is actually legitimate then responsible people in government and industry quietly work together to reduce the risks. (Which they did.)

And when actual disaster strikes, it's the same thing: Have you ever seen the list of Superfund sites in the United States? It's literally a thousand pages long. When somebody discovers a bunch of barrels of toxic waste leaking into the drinking water, the local newspaper writes a couple of stories about it, the EPA comes in, the site gets cleaned up, the offenders are bankrupted or significantly punished by the fines and cleanup costs, we learn from our mistakes and do better next time. There is no call for hysteria. Scientific analysis to reduce the risks of future failures requires no fear mongering whatsoever, and in most cases we do a pretty damn good job of sticking to the facts. It is, in fact, still safe to drink the water in New York City and San Francisco, notwithstanding two hundred years of industrial progress.

The problem is that the population has been convinced that nuclear power is extra scary for no rational reason, which creates a vicious cycle: People are afraid of it because they don't understand it, the media (who could, if they wanted to, educate people with actual facts) respond by fear mongering and emphasizing extremely low probability worst case scenarios because it gets ratings, which in turn makes people even more afraid and even less well informed.

The solution has to be to break the cycle. Down with irrational hysteria. Hysteria kills, people. You don't want thousands to die as a result of irresponsible fear mongering, do you? Then fight hysteria. It's the only way.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[rubycodez]

u-233 bombs aren't common (the U.S. has done some) because higher critical mass (16 kg vs. 10 kg for plutonium), and it can't be handled with "glove box" like plutonium, has to be remotely handled. Thorium oxide has been characteristics than uranium dioxide, higher melting point, higher thermal conductivety and lower thermal expansion coefficient. Not a proliferation risk since can't chemically separate the u-233 in thorium from u-232, wind up with very radioactive material (glove box issue again). And you don't need Pu to activate an thorium reactor, other methods can be used including starting from another thorium reactor. So, as nuclear engineer, would say your post is mostly nonsense.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[CptNerd]

But you're talking about standard uranium/plutonium reactors. From what I recall thorium reactors don't make the containment radioactive, and the decay byproducts aren't necessarily, either. Molten salt thorium reactors are so unradioactive (sp) that they can be "scrammed" by dumping the molten salt into separate containers, which won't have enough reaction to even remain liquid.

I could be mis-remembering and therefore wrong, of course.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[nedlohs]

Do you not know what "every single" means?

Pick any statement from the referenced post - that's your "such as".

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[blindseer]

I believe that the risk of nuclear proliferation is overblown. It is also going to be irrelevant eventually.

There is going to be a time when fossil fuels run out. Might be decades, might be centuries. When it does run out people will not willingly revert to a preindustrial society. They will crave things like artificial lighting and refrigeration. Wind, solar, and hydroelectric are too sparse to power a modern economy. Once the fossil fuels run out people will have to choose between nuclear power or a near caveman like existence. If you think these oil producing countries don't play well with the other children in the schoolyard right now just wait until the oil runs out and they are told they can't have nuclear power.

I guess there is another choice besides caveman lifestyle and nuclear power. That choice would be living off of the generosity of a nuclear powered nation. I don't believe that would go over very well either. Without the energy density that only nuclear and fossil fuels provide there would be no planes, trains, and automobiles. There would be no steel mills, aluminum refining, or concrete production.

There is going to be a time when, after the fossil fuels have been depleted, we will have to come to.terms with the reality that by denying a nation nuclear power we are dooming them to either freeze or starve to death.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[schroedingers_hat]

There will still be fission byproducts even if you don't have much in the way of actinides/lanthinides left over, and your shielding will be absorbing neutrons. Without knowing more about them, I would think decontamination (unless you wanted to wait a few hundred years) before doing anything else with the space would be cheaper, but still rather involved.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Where did you get this idea? Thorium is very similar to Uranium/Plutonium with reprocessing. In fact the whole point of LFTR is to do in situ reprocessing for neutron economy reasons. You can do that with Uranium/Plutonium too will almost all the same benefits. Remember Th is not a fuel it is fertile much like 238U. Its 233U that is burnt in a LFTR, not Th itself and the fission products are very similar as are the delayed neutrons the decay heat and waste activity. The *only* thing Th is better for is you get less actinides, but a fast reactor can burn those as well so all the advantages are just from using a molten salt reactor with in situ reprocessing.

Th nuclear is still nuclear. Its really doesn't change the picture much at all. Well no more than don't do once through cycles, which are stupid.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[TheTurtlesMoves]

I don't disagree with anything in particular. However the whole point of molten salt reactors with in situ reprocessing is to solve most of these problems. It has not been shown to work, but in theory at least it should. Pulling out the 233Pa as soon as its created basically solves or mitigates the hard gamma ray problem and neutron economy problems so that a 1:1 breading ratio can be achieved. It has never been done of course, since no molten salt reactor has ever bread anything. So this is strictly a modeled design. Also the design works just about as well as a fast reactor with a U fuel cycle with much better neutron economy while solving some of the hard problems of fast reactors.

Of course now you have a pretty clean source of quite pure 233U to make bombs from...

However the other advantage of Th is there is about 5x more of it on earth than U.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[TheTurtlesMoves]

If you use reactor grade you need, well a reactors worth of it to go critical and now you don't have any room for Th. Since its a breeder (all Th reactors are breeders) it has a poor neutron economy, you need highly enriched starter or you just don't start.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[TheTurtlesMoves]

They *made* bombs from it. The "you can't" is verifiable false. It is *not* proliferation resistant. Its just a bit harder. And TBH not that much harder if its the only material you can get.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[TheTurtlesMoves]

The orders of magnitude less waste is because its not a once through fuel cycle which you can't do with Th. U has the same orders of magnitude less waste with a reprocessing fuel cycle too. Waste from a Th cycle tends to be a worse gamma emitter than from the U fuel cycles making them harder to deal with. Its the same gammas that are suppose to make it impossible to make a bomb.... Yet you have to deal with them in the waste.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Mostly correct. But Th reactors are *not* fast reactors. Th breads well with a thermal spectrum unlike U reactors.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[dr2chase]

I think grandparent is wrong on some details, but from what I've read, Thorium is still a better choice for the fuel. The principal reasons appear to be that (1) there's a whole lot of it; (2) the byproducts are harder to weaponize (contains U-233, but also contains nasty gamma emitter U-232 -- less of a weight difference than 235-238, and the gamma rays are bad news for everything nearby); (3) fast reactors are apparently hard to design (control/safety issues). Seems like the gamma rays would interfere with home use :-).

On the other hand, the Wikipedia page for LFTR seems to ONLY compare to with light-water reactors.

The chart you reference doesn't seem to tell the whole story, since it doesn't discuss the half lives of any of those products, or their biological risk, or the easy of extracting/confining the longer-lived ones. Tc-99 is apparently a problem, and Thorium (U-233) scores somewhat better there.

The chemical issues involved with LFTR appear amusing. Beryllium, fluorine, and isotopically pure lithium. Yum!

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[CptNerd]

Unless you're frying your nuclear fuel ^_^, I believe the word you mean is "breed", not "bread". You've written that several times, which is why I'm pointing it out. Not intending to be mean, it just makes your intended message more amusing that you probably wanted...

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[AmiMoJo]

You are wrong I'm afraid, Thorium reactors do produce a lot of high level nuclear waste at the end of their lifetimes. We spend a huge amount of money carefully dismantling and taking the parts away to be stored along side other highly radioactive waste, but the levels are so high that it takes 90 years of careful decontamination and encasing things in protective radiation shielding on-site before transport to do it.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[ShooterNeo]

"Wind, solar, and hydroelectric are too sparse to power a modern economy."

The facts disagree with your statement. While Wind/Hydro I have not looked into worldwide availability for, solar is trivial to calculate. You figure out the sun hours for a site, or the average for a whole state, and your efficiency percentage, and do a little arithmetic.

There is more than enough solar in a 100x100 mile area of Arizona to power the entire energy needs of the United States. (check google maps, that leaves most of the state untouched)

The Saraha desert could power all of Europe and Africa the same way.

But...solar plants are expensive! Sorta. In the long run, a photovoltaic cell is just atoms of silicon and some rare earths (or carbon if you use dye) arranged a certain way. Every last cell is the exact same as every other cell, all the way across the desert. So if you can work out a way to produce this identical object cheaply (there are a lot of possibilities for that) your cost savings apply to ALL the cells you produce.

I predict (feel free to quote me on this in 10 years) that in 10 years time, solar cell produced electricity will cost less than coal per watt per day. (note I am neglecting the storage requirements because that's a whole different problem)

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[kestasjk]

What a gigantic pile of steaming FUD. You win the FUD award of the decade.

I tried hard, but I could not find a single factual statement in anything you wrote. Every single statement is a lie. Wow.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Those nasty gamma emitters that make it hard to build a nuke, are in the waste stream. So you have to deal with them anyway. The half life of an isotope has nothing to do with where it came from, so the fission products are basically the same give or take a few % and thus its half life is the same. Sure you could tell if it was 233U or 235U or 239Pu that created the waste, *but* from a disposal perspective they are pretty much the same. Same isotopes like Iodine and Cs etc with the same half lives. The real problem is the actinides that are created from Uranium or Plutonium, but if you are reprocessing you are burning these.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[dr2chase]

I thought that the gamma emitters had a half life that was very annoying for proliferation purposes, but really pretty tractable for storage -- yeah, U232, 70 years. Putting them in a lead cask is one thing; fashioning them into a bomb is something else entirely.

Re:right idea - Wrong fuel

[gordm]

denis-The-menace (or anyone),

Sorry for this crazy-stupid question, but how does one up-vote in slashdot? I'm logged in, but I only see filtering mechanisms, I can't find any voting mechanisms.

I've been on Slashdot for YEARS, and I guess I better finally come clean on this. I have no idea how to upvote, even though every year or so I'll take another stab at it.

Olds

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Olds

[ColdWetDog]

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.

And Toshiba has been trying to get it's small, modular 4S reactors sited in nowhere Alaska for decades and hasn't been able to do it. Not gonna happen.

The only way for this to work is, as mentioned in TFA, have the US government buy a bunch and test them out. Seems actually a fairly reasonable idea - the military has need of off grid power in odd places, has built in technical and security forces that should allow for safe evaluation of the reactors, has the money to do this. So, if this has been true for at least a decade, what's the problem? Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?

Re:Olds

[emilper]

the US government already has a bunch small nuclear power plants, had them for 50+ years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nautilus_(SSN-571) and they're pretty well tested. Russia, France and UK have them too.

Re:Olds

[aaarrrgggh]

I think 100MW is a little small today, but I am biased by living in LA and having over 2.5GW of generation within a 3 mile radius of my house. I also think 600MW is a little too big in terms of a mass-produced design. I think a happy medium is around 230MW; that is roughly the scale of a good sized substation (2,000A at 66kV). It would also scale pretty well for large industrial facilities to be able to export power in their vicinity, and is about the size of a single high voltage circuit.

You have to get them closer to neighborhoods to make it really viable. You would need about 3,500 to fully satisfy the US demand.

Re:Olds

[mlts]

What might be useful is to find a better way of moving energy from place to place other than high voltage wires and the heat loss that comes from that. Room temperature superconductors would solve that problem, of course.

What would work is a way that even if it may be energy intensive, to pull CO2 out of the air somehow and use that and possibly water from a desalination plant to generate a hydrocarbon fuel, which is then piped to a burning assembly near a metropolitan area. This sounds wasteful, but over long distances, would be less wasteful than the voltage drop due to heat.

Re:Olds

[bobbied]

This sounds wasteful, but over long distances, would be less wasteful than the voltage drop due to heat.

What you mean is power loss not voltage drop.

Modern transmission systems do have power losses around 7%. I don't think there is any system that converts electricity into fuel, pipe the fuel someplace, then convert it back that is going to come near 7%. And why one would do away with the stability and fault tolerance you buy when using a "grid" of transmission lines and generating assets is beyond me.

No.. Westinghouse was right, despite what Edison thought.

I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ...

[eldavojohn]

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?

interacts badly with neighbor opinion

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:interacts badly with neighbor opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you have this backwards. The initial plant is going to be a nightmare to get support for, no matter what. Once you have it, though, it should be significantly easier to get support for another one within, say, a couple hundred miles (people have noticed they live relatively near an existing plant with no ill effect). If each plant is gargantuan, this is a waste. If they're small and modular, you can gradually creep across the country this way. Additionally, the initial convincing-cost will be lower with a smaller reactor, since the potential damage is more limited.

So small + modular means the first plant has a lower cost in the court of public opinion, and subsequent nearby plants (where the effect you mention is useful) provide additional utility. Big plants means higher initial public opposition, and no use for the effect you mention.

Re:interacts badly with neighbor opinion

[Andy Dodd]

As another replier has said, once you place one 600MW plant there, it becomes easier to put another one nearby.

Just make sure to have a decent amount of separation - Fukushima would not have been such a problem if it didn't have 4 reactors built as close to each other as possible, with 2 more in extremely close proximity.

Probably rule of thumb should be twice the distance between the furthest Fukushima units from each other - that way if one unit has a problem, it doesn't cause the problems managing nearby units that Fukushima had.

Re:interacts badly with neighbor opinion

[sycodon]

I think the U.S. would be a much better run country of the decisions were not left up to Gallop.

Re:interacts badly with neighbor opinion

[couchslug]

Americans are technophobes. They USE the magic but don't understand it.

We should, instead of nukes, build more coal and natural gas power generating facilities. We have plenty of both fuels, and they are a practical solution to our energy problems for a very long time.

Foreign companies can develop mature nuke tech, then we can buy it. The idea that being innovators is always the best way to go is silly. Let others do the work then we can buy the product.

Re:interacts badly with neighbor opinion

[The Master Control P]

The problem managing the Fukushima reactors wasn't caused by them being near to each other, it was caused by the earthquake knocking out power and damaging the roads so that emergency services couldn't get there for days, and the tsunami flooding the emergency generators & emergency switchboard (which were both in the basements).

How would the spacing between RBs have changed anything?

Re:interacts badly with neighbor opinion

[DaveGod]

Putting a new plant in leads to fears about homes being devalued. The devaluation has already happened (or it's realised a devaluation does not happen) by the time the second plant comes along.

Maybe it's different in other countries, but here in UK where there is high ownership and properties are a relatively high investment, fears about home devaluation play a significant role. Even if a local was fully aware a plan is ultra safe, he'll be worried about ignorance among potential home buyers.

While nuclear may well be significantly better in pretty much every way, there's a lot of talking on /. about nuclear like it's the perfect clean option.

Genuine fears of a meltdown, however minute the probability, aren't to be written off, as Fukushima proves. Playing devil's advocate here: oh but designs are so much safer now? That's what they said back then, and even if they are better now why wasn't Fukushima upgraded or whatever? There's logical explanations but there's no getting past the point that a plant was operating that was thought to be perfectly safe, until it really wasn't. Or maybe they understood the risk but felt it was acceptable - I'm not sure which is worse. How are you going to convince a public that you're right now, when they have a perfect example that you were wrong for all that time before when you were telling them the same thing?

Anyway, given a perfect design, there's real risk - not of meltdown, but adverse consequences - from the day-to-day carelessness and cutting corners that you get at every organisation. Like Dounreay. You can release plans led by teams of brilliant people, design the safest plant possible, come up with safeties and procedures all you like, over the next 20 years you get a few Homer Simpson's working there.

Re:interacts badly with neighbor opinion

[jheath314]

That's a horrible idea. America is already in trouble because we've become a nation of consumers instead of manufacturers... just about the only advantage we have left is a slight lead in innovation.

Becoming a leader in alternative energy technologies could have enormous benefits for America, such as reversing the dynamic of wealth flowing out of the country in exchange for foreign energy. I'd much rather put American scientists and engineers to work on the problem rather than getting foreign experts to build it for us (and racking up debt by paying them with money we don't have).

Re:interacts badly with neighbor opinion

[AmiMoJo]

This. Germany, Italy, Japan and the rest who are abandoning nuclear power are doing it for the economic benefits as much as anything else. You can't sell nuclear to developing nations due to non-proliferation regs, and in the developed world demand is falling. A new market is opening up and those who get in early and commit fully will become the leaders.

Re:interacts badly with neighbor opinion

[couchslug]

We are set to become an exporter of petroleum products if current trends continue.

The US is resource rich. Extract, use, and export them.

We will be competitive when labor costs are FORCED down by the economy.

Re:interacts badly with neighbor opinion

[Andy Dodd]

There were a lot of problems, but one of them was the fact that due to one unit leaking, it made access to nearby units far more difficult, resulting in more severe problems at those units.

Modular is good

[AdrianKemp]

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.

Toshiba 4S

[scorp1us]

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.

Re:Toshiba 4S

[GameboyRMH]

Both of mine that failed went down safely, including one that experienced a meltdown.

Re:Toshiba 4S

[DerekLyons]

You forgot "and it's pretty much vaporware", never having been tested or proven in hardware.

Re:Toshiba 4S

[aaarrrgggh]

Maybe when it hits 50MWe it will be viable, but at 10MWe it is pretty hard to justify over a small turbine.

Re:Toshiba 4S

[ColdWetDog]

You forgot "and it's pretty much vaporware", never having been tested or proven in hardware.

Exactly this:

Currently Toshiba, together with its Westinghouse subsidiary, is in the preliminary design review stage of the Design Certification process before the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC).[6] Application for certification of the design is currently planned for 2012 when the standardized Design Certification application will be filed for the 4S. The most recent meeting with the NRC took place on August 8, 2008, at which time the NRC's staff met with representatives of Toshiba and Westinghouse for a pre-application presentation of a Phenomena Identification and Ranking Table (PIRT) for the Toshiba 4S (Super-Safe, Small and Simple) reactor. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently released an interesting study on the Toshiba 4S design, which provides an overview of the 4S design and suggests that certain goals may be easier to meet if lead is used as the coolant rather than sodium, due to lead's high transparency to neutrons and low transparency to gamma radiation, though lead has a higher melting point than sodium does.[7]

If nobody has yet got the money or balls to actually build one before siting it in the Middle of Fucking Nowhere, maybe we need to rethink things. Yeah, the design is safe and all that but things don't always go exactly as planned. The advantage of a major screwup in Galena, AK is that nobody would ever know about it. The disadvantage is going to be if you have to get some engineering expertise and equipment there in the winter you'd best hope it fits on a dog sled or a twin Otter.

I would think that either the government of Japan or the US or at least Toshiba could pony up the money for a prototype somewhere sane.....

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[X0563511]

One led by people who have a clue? ... if you find such a place, please let me know.

waste?

[photonyx]

Still would not solve the nuclear waste problem.

Re:waste?

[RobertLTux]

its a scale thing when the fuel is spent you basically get a BAC with a hook to stick the whole core on a truck and then ship it to a long term storage facility or you do the really smart thing and cook the core long enough that any long term "gunk" has been spent.

Re:waste?

[sycodon]

It will all go into your backyard.

Re:waste?

[couchslug]

There isn't enough VOLUME of waste to matter.

Contain it above ground for convenient inspection and container repair for the time required, don't bury it then rely on wishful thinking.

Re:waste?

[BlueParrot]

Actually it does.

Sodium cooled reactors consume the actinides as fuel, so you only get fission products in the waste. This alone reduced the necessary storage time for decay to uranium levels by several orders of magnitude, to about 300 years.

If you go further you can separate out strontium and caesium to let them decay separately. Since they are the major initial heat-load of the waste, and since they have modest half-lives, the net result is that storing strontium and caesium separately ends up using considerably less space. If all of these techniques were to be employed, Yucca would easily hold the entire nation's nuclear waste, and the waste would reach safe levels before the repository was full.

Cheap energy saves lives.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[Jappus]

As far as I understand it, the main problem most people have with Nuclear Reactors -- at least over here in Europe -- is not that they can go kablooie when something deemed "unlikely" hits them. This is just a problem as long as they are actually running, and a few years after for cooling down.

The problem is rather: Where do you put all that irradiated waste, ranging from water over metals, concrete, oils, various sealants and so on? After all, most of this stuff happily glows for a few decades at minimum and hundreds of thousands of years at the upper echelon. I mean, if I look at the Egyptian tombs for example, I find it hard to believe that anybody could guarantee that a sign of "Keep out or else you'll die horribly" would actually stop future people from digging up that stuff.

And that already excludes the observation that nothing humankind has ever built or excavated managed to stay permanently, physically sealed for more than a few hundred in most cases and a few thousand years in all cases. That's at least two orders of decimal magnitudes too few time to guarantee anything.

Of course things like coal, gas, etc. are not better -- especially regarding the climate. But at least they don't cause such extremely permanent issues that we can't even imagine a kind of physical or chemical process to get rid of it. They are still bad, but in a less ... distant way.

And if you finally arrive at hydroelectric, geothermal, solar and wind generation, the scope of the problems you cause by running them can be measured in "less than a decade" for cleaning up a broken dam and "what problems?" for solar and wind. That fundamental difference between nuclear, coal/gas and finally regenerative power is what is important to most environmentalists and general critics of the first and to a lesser extend next two kinds of power generation. The fact that they can go kablooie is just icing on the cake compared to that.

I always wonder if people who fully and blindly support nuclear power have ever heard what the term "neglectful precursors" means. After all, economy is mostly a private affair and expires with the generation who had to live in it, but ecology gets inherited fully and permanently.

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[marcosdumay]

we can't even imagine a kind of physical or chemical process to get rid of it

There are physical processes to get rid of it. Recycling spent fuel and breeder reactors solve the fuel problem (you'll still have to protect the residue for 100-200 years). Reusuing the materials and water solve that problem too, but it was never such a big deal to star with (they were initialy at the <200 years bucket).

Those things are just expensive, not impossible.

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[Megane]

Where do you put all that irradiated waste, ranging from water over metals, concrete, oils, various sealants and so on?

The really nasty stuff is nasty specifically because it has such a short half-life. The more radioactive something is, the shorter its half-life. The worst is the stuff with half-life measured in decades, that chemically substitutes for elements your body uses (like the calcium in your bones), thus irradiating you from the inside. But because it's measured in decades, you really don't have to worry about the "Egyptian tomb" problem. And the stuff that's in-between (a few centuries) can be induced to move along the decay process by adding some radiation.

The stuff that doesn't have a short half-life could be reprocessed as fuel, if people weren't so scared of "turrrurrrists" getting hold of it. Hint: it's harder to make an A-bomb out of stuff that has a mix of isotopes; you want really pure stuff. And dirty bomb material could be made via "radioactive boy scout" methods anyhow.

It's like taking raw sewage and trying to hold it in tanks forever, instead of extracting clean water out of it and dealing with the shit sludge separately.

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[Solandri]

The problem is rather: Where do you put all that irradiated waste, ranging from water over metals, concrete, oils, various sealants and so on? After all, most of this stuff happily glows for a few decades at minimum and hundreds of thousands of years at the upper echelon.

The problem is, we ask these questions only of nuclear.

Of course things like coal, gas, etc. are not better -- especially regarding the climate. But at least they don't cause such extremely permanent issues that we can't even imagine a kind of physical or chemical process to get rid of it.

The elemental mercury released by burning coal sticks around not for years, or decades, or hundreds of thousands of years. It sticks around practically forever. At least as long as it'll take for current organisms to absorb it, die, and turn into coal themselves. Yet we're happily pumping it into the atmosphere because we're too afraid of nuclear.

Each year, the U.S. generates about 2000 tons of spent nuclear fuel (high level radioactive waste) in exchange for ~20% of its electricity. By volume that's about two tractor trailers. This is the stuff which can potentially be dangerous for thousands of years. (The 10,000 to 100,000 year stuff lasts so long precisely because it has low radioactivity. By the time it got that old, it would no longer be high-level waste, contrary to what anti-nuclear activists like to imagine.) This "waste" could actually be used as fuel in breeder reactors, reducing the total amount of "high level radioactive waste" to just 1/10th or 1/20th what we currently generate.

But because we're scared to death of what to do with such a small quantity of nuclear waste, we continue to pump into the environment billions of tons of coal ash, including mercury, CO2, radioactive uranium and thorium, and a host of other nasty materials which together kill an estimated 250x as many people as Chernobyl every year. That is what saddens me so much about the energy situation. Yes long-term we should be working towards renewables like wind, geothermal, solar. But while we are working towards scaling those up and making them cost effective, it is absolutely criminal not to be switching out our fossil fuel plants for nuclear. Environmentalists have fabricated a false dichotomy between nuclear and renewables, where we must choose either nuclear or rewnewables. There is no such choice. We can switch to nuclear while we continue to work on renewables.

And if you finally arrive at hydroelectric, geothermal, solar and wind generation, the scope of the problems you cause by running them can be measured in "less than a decade" for cleaning up a broken dam and "what problems?" for solar and wind

Just how do you define "problem"? People see the evacuation zone around Fukushima as a problem. A hydroelectric dam creates a permanent evacuation zone behind it larger than Fukushima's. It's called a reservoir. Why is vacating people for one bad, while the other acceptable? Because one has the N word and the other is just water? Water kills nearly 100x more people each year than nuclear power has in its entire history. So which is truly more dangerous?

Measured in lives lost per unit of energy generated, nuclear is by far the safest power source. So your "less than a decade" and "what problem" assessments are only accurate if you assign zero value to people's lives.

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[ColdWetDog]

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.

No, the point is that a first world country that presumably was on the cutting edge of nuclear power engineering couldn't arse itself to fix critical flaws found over the course of four decades (and there was more than one of them) because of economics, graft, sloth or whatever. That makes nuclear power realistically unsafe. Further, it
s not like TEPCO or the Japanese government have had major changes in how they do things. It's not like the NRC in the US has done more than reshuffle some pages in their manuals and go stare at the plants again.

Nuclear power by first gen technologies isn't safe enough to let the current level of government supervision and private corporation technical ability to manage the risk. Unless there is a concerted and effective effort to change the regulatory and technical infrastructure AND until there is enough real life experience with the newer and presumably safer reactor technologies, nuclear power is dead in the water.

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[ckaminski]

20,000 tons of heavy glassified nuclear waste buried underground and hard to move around vs widespread pollution.

What is Yucca Mtn, Alec?!

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[Jappus]

renewable: only feasible theoretically unless massive commitment from people to reduce their energy requirements 10-fold or more, never actually feasible for base-load generation unless your location wins the geological lottery.

I think realistically the most efficient power generating schema based on current technologies is nuclear plants supplemented by renewable sources.

Actually, the amount of sunlight streaming into Earth from the sun over even very modest amounts of time is orders of magnitude higher than the energy humankind can release by burning all the coal and gas on this world and using all the nuclear fuel that is available without digging exceedingly deep. What else do you think powered the plants and simple and complex lifeforms that created the coal and gas we use? What else do you think powers wind, tornados and hurricanes? Where do you think ocean currents (currents, not tides) get most of its energy from?

You are right that it currently is a bit more expensive and location-dependent so go full renewable than to keep on burning and fissioning. But that won't hold up long. After all, renewable energies get cheaper year by year and the economics of scale apply to it as well as to everything else. And as for getting solar energy out of those countries that have ample sunlight ... where do you think most of your oil comes from?

If we really wanted to, building huge solar arrays in suitable sunny spots and laying down the power grids to move the generated electricity from point A to all the other points is no more difficult than laying down oil pipes across continents and building oil shipping fleets that have enough possible payload to blacken all oceans on this planet if they just released it at once.

Renewables might not be good for the short-term profit, but those who fail to see the mid- and long-term are doomed to lose their profits as fast as they have gained them.

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[Jappus]

The elemental mercury released by burning coal sticks around not for years, or decades, or hundreds of thousands of years. It sticks around practically forever. At least as long as it'll take for current organisms to absorb it, die, and turn into coal themselves. Yet we're happily pumping it into the atmosphere because we're too afraid of nuclear.

Do notice that I explicitly mentioned that coal/gas is also bad. But here's the thing: Virtually all heavy metals, fine-dusts, the more exotic carbon- and nitrogen-oxides and other assorted chemicals can be gotten rid of, as we know how to extract and treat them. As nuclear supporters like to point out: You can't compare old power stations with the newer ones. But has that ever stopped countries and companies from using the old stuff till they quite literally break?

Unfortunately, we don't know how to make something stop being radioactive. Sure, we can re-use stuff, but that only delays when the waste occurs, as you can't reuse something infinitely. And while it is true that this might alter what kinds of radiation is generated by the waste, we can't change the total amount of radiation released. All we can do is distribute it to the point where nobody cares (similar to the observation that coal contains radioactive elements, too) while they still get irradiated, or concentrate it and store it where people can delude themselves into a "bury-and-forget" mentality.

Again, yes, you can process radioactive waste, and yes, by volume it isn't much. But the latter wasn't my point and the former begs the question, as the total amount of radiation released is not changed.

In Europe, strict regulations for gas and coal burning are now the norm (exactly because of those numbers you quoted) and nuclear reactors are shut down in favour of renewables that produce no or negligible amounts of waste. I'm all for continuing to make those laws stricter. As I said, the economy is a fleeting thing; ecology is not. I'd gladly sacrifice the cherry on top of the cake to save those that come after us from having to clean up the inevitable waste product the cake gets turned into.

Just how do you define "problem"? People see the evacuation zone around Fukushima as a problem. A hydroelectric dam creates a permanent evacuation zone behind it larger than Fukushima's. It's called a reservoir. Why is vacating people for one bad, while the other acceptable? Because one has the N word and the other is just water? Water kills nearly 100x more people each year than nuclear power has in its entire history. So which is truly more dangerous?

Remove the dam, wait ~5 years, resettling is easily possible.

Remove Fukushima/Chernobyl ... wait 30 years and you may be able to let tourists in again, for short amounts of time ... if they don't touch or inhale the wrong stuff ... and don't forget to not eat anything from there. Ohh, and we're not liable if you still develop cancer in 10 years.

Of course, the measured response is: Don't build a dam where you have to forcibly relocate people, villages, cities or cultural heritage. I mean, it's not as if you couldn't go solar or use wind power instead if you really don't find such a spot. As with everything, choosing where to build stuff needs a level-headed decision. The problem with nuclear power is that no power of any magnitude can guarantee that it won't cause a multi-generational problem.

Measured in lives lost per unit of energy generated, nuclear is by far the safest power source. So your "less than a decade" and "what problem" assessments are only accurate if you assign zero value to people's lives.

Measured in lives lost per ton transported, bicycles are much safer than cars, trains or airplanes; if used in isolation from each other.
Measured in lives lost per beverage consumed, fruit juice is much safer than alcohol.
Measured in l

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[AmiMoJo]

The elemental mercury released by burning coal sticks around not for years

Why is the excuse always "it's not as bad as coal"? There are other options:

Gas
Geothermal
Hydro
Solar thermal

All of those are reliable, safer than nuclear and cleaner to boot. They work 24/7 and are here TODAY. Not in the future, we can build them on the same scale as nuclear right now, and certainly quicker than we can develop commercial scale systems to reprocess nuclear waste, or even just the storage facilities that will be needed.

And before you trot out that site which claims hydro has killed hundreds of thousands that was due to dams failing, not hydro. It's like blaming your car stereo for the wheels falling off.

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[blindseer]

All of those energy source you gave are safe, require no new technology, and clean. The problem is that they are also very expensive. If nuclear power wasn't so cheap by comparison we would not even consider using it over the alternatives you listed.

I'm quite sure that physical realities are stacked against any existing energy source becoming cheaper than nuclear. We're already getting real close to the physical limitations of efficiency on gas, wind, solar, and hydro. On the other hand we're still learning ways to make nuclear power cheaper, safer, and cleaner.

If gas, wind, hydro, and solar we're as cheap and reliable as nuclear we would not call them alternative energy sources, we'd just call them energy sources. We would not call them "alternatives" because they'd then be the primary means of energy if they even got close to how cheap nuclear and coal are now.

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[AmiMoJo]

All of those energy source you gave are safe, require no new technology, and clean. The problem is that they are also very expensive. If nuclear power wasn't so cheap by comparison we would not even consider using it over the alternatives you listed.

Nuclear is only cheap because it is heavily subsidized. In other words, it isn't cheap.

I'm quite sure that physical realities are stacked against any existing energy source becoming cheaper than nuclear. We're already getting real close to the physical limitations of efficiency on gas, wind, solar, and hydro.

Gas an hydro perhaps, but not solar. And we have vast amounts of unused capacity just waiting to be tapped. For example 0.3% of the Sahara could power the whole of western Europe, and it is land that is otherwise unused. There is a reason we are best buddies with Libya now, and southern EU states are looking to cash in too. Similarly the UK has massive off-shore and on-shore wind resources. Japan has enough geothermal and hydro to completely eliminate nuclear and some of its coal.

If gas, wind, hydro, and solar we're as cheap and reliable as nuclear we would not call them alternative energy sources, we'd just call them energy sources.

I think you will find that nuclear was once an alternative too, because that is what new technologies are called. Okay, hydro isn't an alternative then because it is already widely used, just not widely enough.

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[blindseer]

Nuclear is only cheap because it is heavily subsidized. In other words, it isn't cheap.

All energy sources in the USA gets subsidized by the government in some way. Even if we remove all the subsidies on all energy we'd still see solar costing double that of nuclear power. Even if we had the technology to make wind and solar cost half as much as nuclear there is still the problem that wind and solar are dependent on the weather. Because wind and solar is unreliable there must be a backup power source and/or means to store that energy for later.

Since wind and solar make up such a small percentage of the electric power produced in the USA we have not had to put much thought into backup power since the normal means of handling changes in the source and sink of energy is enough to handle the volatility of wind and solar. The most common means of handling the peaks is with inefficient natural gas turbines. Running these turbines has a cost on par with current wind and solar power costs. So, not only would wind and solar have to cost half that of nuclear to be viable so would the backup power source. Since for every megawatt in wind or solar a utility adds to the grid they need to have a backup natural gas turbine the only reason these utilities buy it is because the government pays them to do it, or simply mandates they invest in "alternative" energy under threat of fines.

When a nuclear power plant is built it's typical to get 85% of rated capacity averaged over a year. With wind and solar it's typical to see only 40% of rated capacity. To get the same realized output from wind and solar a utility would have to build up three times the rated capacity of the nuclear power plant. I'll be generous and assume that the same backup and/or storage would have to exist whether it be nuclear, wind, or solar even though I have my doubts.

The only reason wind and solar is as cheap as it is right now is because we have enough gas, coal, and nuclear capacity to back it up. If we remove the coal and nuclear backup there is just not enough gas and hydroelectric capacity to make up the loss. We'd have to build considerable backup capacity in electric power to avoid blackouts when the wind doesn't blow and the sun does not shine. Right now that means very expensive natural gas turbines.

Okay, hydro isn't an alternative then because it is already widely used, just not widely enough.

We've already dammed up all the rivers that are worth a dam in the USA. We ran out of places to dam long ago.

I see a place for wind and solar in the future of electricity generation. It will provide competition to keep prices down. We're just going to have to see some serious technological advances before wind and solar can be even close to how cheap nuclear power is now. We'll also need to see advancements in energy storage so that we can make use of the wind and solar power when we need it. One thing to remember is that any advancement in energy storage will prove equally beneficial to the price of coal and nuclear since coal and nuclear gets cheaper the closer to rated capacity they are run. Throttling back coal and nuclear is very expensive, with the ability to store the excess capacity for later means lower costs.

The more wind and solar capacity we add, as a percentage, the higher the costs of that power. A change in nuclear power capacity we have, as a percentage, does not meaningfully affect the price. We've seen this numerous times in other nations. I believe it was in the UK they saw that with more wind power the cost of coal power went up because the coal power plants had to idle when the wind blew. Wind and solar are going to have to get real cheap to make up for all the shortfalls it has in technology and physical realities.

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[AmiMoJo]

All energy sources in the USA gets subsidized by the government in some way.

Not so in the UK.

Even if we remove all the subsidies on all energy we'd still see solar costing double that of nuclear power.

Bullshit. How can some mirrors and the same high temperature molten salt plumbing as some nuclear plants use cost more than a reactor that has to be fuelled, run safely and then decommissioned and the site decontaminated over a period of 90 years?

In fact the situation is so bad that when our government tried to sell off its nuclear power plants in the 80s no-one would buy them. On the other hand companies are building solar thermal plants without any subsidy in Spain now.

Since wind and solar make up such a small percentage of the electric power produced in the USA we have not had to put much thought into backup power since the normal means of handling changes in the source and sink of energy is enough to handle the volatility of wind and solar.

So you don't really know much about wind or solar, huh? Solar thermal is reliable and works 24/7. In fact it is one of the best technologies for dealing with peek demand because molten salt is about 95% efficient for energy storage. It needs less maintenance than nuclear too, so less down-time.

Wind depends on location more than solar thermal, but there are places in the UK where it can be relied on 24/7 too. What you have to understand is that the blades can adjust to keep turning at a fairly constant rate even as the wind speed varies, and there are places where it never reaches zero. I don't know about the US but I imagine there are similar places. You have to pick the technology that works best in each area.

We've already dammed up all the rivers that are worth a dam in the USA. We ran out of places to dam long ago.

You don't need huge dams. Anywhere water flows you can generate hydro power.

I guess Europe and Japan will have to show you how it's done. You have already missed the boat and ensured you won't be at the forefront of energy production technology in 10 years time.

Re:Cheap energy saves lives.

[blindseer]

Not so in the UK.

I don't believe you. It's also irrelevant. If solar thermal was so great we'd see more of it. Solar thermal is still experimental while nuclear power has decades of profitable operation to prove its viability.

Bullshit. How can some mirrors and the same high temperature molten salt plumbing as some nuclear plants use cost more than a reactor that has to be fuelled, run safely and then decommissioned and the site decontaminated over a period of 90 years?

Because nuclear power is profitable while solar thermal is not. Solar thermal is still experimental and has not shown nearly as much energy output per dollar put in as compared to nuclear.

In fact the situation is so bad that when our government tried to sell off its nuclear power plants in the 80s no-one would buy them. On the other hand companies are building solar thermal plants without any subsidy in Spain now.

I don't believe you. No subsidy at all? Not even a break on the property taxes? I've seen solar power projects go under in the USA because they could not afford the property taxes.

I find the fact that no one wanted to buy an existing power plant as irrelevant. The old power plants are not nearly as profitable as a new one. That's a lot of money to gamble with, and few corporations have that kind of money.

So you don't really know much about wind or solar, huh? Solar thermal is reliable and works 24/7. In fact it is one of the best technologies for dealing with peek demand because molten salt is about 95% efficient for energy storage. It needs less maintenance than nuclear too, so less down-time.

That's nice but nuclear power is cheaper. Solar power cannot replace nuclear until it reaches parity in cost and reliability. While there are advancements in solar thermal there are also advancements in nuclear power. Even then solar power can only replace nuclear where the sun shines. I doubt solar thermal will prove competitive in places like Alaska. Solar thermal might do well in the land of the midnight sun during the summer but the winter is going to get real cold and dark. Hydro won't work so well either when the rivers freeze.

Wind depends on location more than solar thermal, but there are places in the UK where it can be relied on 24/7 too. What you have to understand is that the blades can adjust to keep turning at a fairly constant rate even as the wind speed varies, and there are places where it never reaches zero. I don't know about the US but I imagine there are similar places. You have to pick the technology that works best in each area.

Sure, I can go with that. There's a lot of places on this planet where the rivers don't always flow, the sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't always blow. Out here in the American plains is a good example. Lots of flat semi-arid land, with wind that likes to gust (gusts and windmills don't play together well), and not a whole lot of sun during the winter. We do have a lot of coal, oil, and uranium though.

You don't need huge dams. Anywhere water flows you can generate hydro power.

Perhaps you missed the part where I said we've dammed up all the rivers worth a dam. There is no growth in hydro power, we've maxed out already. We're going to need more power and I don't believe we're just going to discover a new river any time soon.

I guess Europe and Japan will have to show you how it's done. You have already missed the boat and ensured you won't be at the forefront of energy production technology in 10 years time.

We have no shortage of know-how. The problem lies in the government. The federal government has not allowed for new oil drilling in years, no new nuclear power plants in decades, and they are continuously flushing money down the ethanol toilet.

The USA is sitting on top of some of the largest reserves of oil, coal, uranium, thorium, natural gas, and arable land. In ten years we'll be exporting oil. That's assuming the federal government doesn't bankrupt us all first.

Love the post title

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[Billy the Mountain]

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.

Re:Lots of little Carrington events?

[Captain Splendid]

Whoosh!

Citation?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Citation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look up Hartlepool (it's in Britain). It's quite a poor area that happens to have a nuclear power station and the general feeling there is that folks will bend over backwards for job creation.

The survey results you're after are at DECC.gov.uk. I'm sorry but I haven't the time to link to the specific paper at the moment.

Re:Citation?

[robkill]

Given all the environmental problems with the Savannah River Site, and the fight to prevent it being used as a storage facility for nuclear waste, how can you possibly expect the area to have a favorable response to a new nuclear power plant?

Re:Citation?

[TopSpin]

The first graph of the first first result of my first attempt to find 'a survey which shows that folks who live near a nuclear plant are in favor of new units being built at the site.'

RESIDENTS WITHIN 10 MILES OF VOGTLE ELECTRIC GENERATING PLANT
JULY 2009 for SOUTHERN NUCLEAR
Acceptability of Adding a New Nuclear Reactor at the Site of the Nearest Nuclear Power Plant:
-- Acceptable 92%
-- Not acceptable 8%
General Impression of the Plant
-- Favorable 94%
-- Unfavorable 5%

Take issue with the survey if you must. I don't vouch for its credibility. You claim, as a planning consultant, to have never seen such a thing, yet some schmoe with a keyboard can turn up just such a survey inside a minute. That means one of two things; you're making stuff up or you're phenomenally bad at your job.

Which is it?

Cause and effect all backwards

[vlm]

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.

Re:Cause and effect all backwards

[aaarrrgggh]

The argument for smaller units is based on de-centralizing generation. This limits the proliferation of transmission lines, and brings the effects of generation closer to people's homes. The peak demand in the US is around 75GW. 75GW-scale nuclear reactors isn't going to spark innovation. Limiting them to around half that capacity (or 20%) gives you some opportunities to "mass produce" them.

Re:Cause and effect all backwards

[pavon]

I agree. I think another big issue that is pushing the economics in favor of the smaller reactors is certification. It is more cost effective (and just smarter) to certify a design and then make a ton of exact copies of it, than it is to take a general design and modify it enough at each site to require a recertification, which is what historically happened with our "big" LWRs.

Re:Cause and effect all backwards

[RKThoadan]

From reading the article it seems the biggest benefit was in construction time. The big reactors may create tons of profit once they get going, but they take 7+ years to build, with no guarantee that the economics will remain the same once it's built. Smaller reactors may not be as profitable as the big ones, but the ability to get money coming in far sooner may outweigh overall profit.

Re:Cause and effect all backwards

[WindBourne]

Actually, you are the one having it backwards. A number of old coal plants are going to be shut down. These are typically on the order of 100-200 MWs and are located inside a city. Thankfully, they have a grid hook-up, cooling, etc. AND plenty of land around them. Now, a company like Hyperion, B&W, etc can build a reactor that does 100 MWe and simply plug one-two into these sites. How long will it take to implement it? Well, if done by the on-site approach that you think will dominate, it will take 10 years. OTH, if a company can manufacture everything and have it ready to go, then within 1-2 years, they are up and running. And if they have one, they can probably add a second reactor in under a year. The reason is that everything is all ready to go.

In addition, manufactured allows for a tighter QA control which is a big thing. And a factory can produce something much cheaper then doing on-site construction.

But lets take this one step further. PRISM is an IFR. It can be used to burn up waste. GE is heading towards production of these. Rather than a couple of larger ones, it is actually cheaper to put in say 5-10 of these on-site and burn up all the 'waste' fuel that is there. This is useful at a site like Zion which is already 'shut down', but it will take a decade to remove the current reactors. If Con-Ed can bring these reactors there NOW, they can continue to burn up the 'waste' and use the new reactors to pay for the old clean-up. The new reactors will be very easy to remove compared to the old ones. In the new ones, they can be shipped out in one piece. In the old reactors, they have to be torn down on-site and then shipped.

Re:Cause and effect all backwards

[BlueParrot]

In this particular case you got it wrong.

The idea with modular reactors is that if the components can be made small enough to be easily shipped from a central factory, instead of built on-site, then economy of volume will make up for the loss of economy of scale.

Also, the reason most proposed sodium designs is in the few hundred of MW range is mostly due to safety margins associated with sodium's boiling point and the wish for cooling through natural convection. Gen-4 designs that use supercritical water, lead or molten salt for coolant usually suggest higher outputs, in the order of magnitude of 800-1000MWth

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[Eternauta3k]

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.

Re:Lots of little Carrington events?

[Cyberax]

Cooling pools are not a problem. Just add a way to add more water into them. Like a simple flexible pipe that leads outside of the cooling pool building and can be connected to a fire engine).

Why Small Modular Reactors?

[i_b_don]

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

Re:Why Small Modular Reactors?

[sycodon]

"permitting problems"

Perhaps then the Feds should look at the permitting requirements. I feel 100% confident in suggesting that the majority of the permitting requirements are pure bullshit.

Re:Why Small Modular Reactors?

[aaarrrgggh]

Beyond distributed generation, you have the goal of standardizing across a large number of sites. That makes operation and maintenance easier to pull off effectively. In software, it is the difference between rolling your own and buying from an established vendor.

Re:Why Small Modular Reactors?

[i_b_don]

Well whatever. Permitting problems are often a sign of a community or a group of people that are fighting back by using lawyers. That's not always bullshit but sometimes it is.

d

Re:Why Small Modular Reactors?

[i_b_don]

I don't get why you think building 100 smaller plants is standardizing but building 10 large ones isn't. None of these are going to be done on a mass manufacturing scale where parts are "tooled up for high volume manufacturing". In both cases a large engineering company like Parsons or GE will come in do a design that must be approved. Scale won't change things too much in that whole process. You won't save much money either way from an engineering or building perspective, but if you look at it from a site to site perspective, getting 100 smaller nuclear plants sites picked out an approved it'll be 10 times harder than getting 10 large ones approved. These days, that's where all the stress and headache is so I don't see why anyone would think smaller is better.

d

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[RobertLTux]

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)

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[Alwin Henseler]

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.

Nothing Doing

[hercubus]

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.

Solar is the only real hope

[wealthychef]

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/

Re:Solar is the only real hope

[PerlJedi]

Let me preface this by saying: "I am not a physicist." (If I am completely off base, or even just mis-informed or misunderstand, please explain, I like to learn).

It seems obvious to me that given the laws of thermodynamics as I understand them, that solar power is ultimately the only source of power that we know we will not exhaust. The amount of energy on earth is finite. We are constantly losing energy to space (mostly via heat and light), while simultaneously taking in energy in the form of radiation from stars (the vast majority of it coming from the sun). That all tells me that regardless of how we are getting the energy, it has to come from the sun. In fact even the energy we get from burning of fossil fuels, in a way came from the sun, just a really really long time ago (therefore making the burning of fossil fuels incredibly inefficient in the grand scheme.

Re:Solar is the only real hope

[Solandri]

Solar is diffuse and inconsistent. Collecting it requires vast amounts of surface area. This is why it remains, by far, the most expensive energy source. Realistically, the only way I see enough solar collection happening to power the country is using plants to collect solar energy and converting them into biofuels.

Geothermal is (relatively) concentrated, consistent, and for all practical purposes as inexhaustible as solar (how long until the Earth's core cools down?).

Re:Solar is the only real hope

[blindseer]

Realistically, the only way I see enough solar collection happening to power the country is using plants to collect solar energy and converting them into biofuels.

If we use all of this arable land to produce fuel then what are we going to eat? Biomass fuels have been proven to be an economic and environmental disaster. If we don't abandon biofuels soon we are going to have some serious problems with our food supply. I can only hope people figure this out before we have a mass starvation.

Geothermal is (relatively) concentrated, consistent, and for all practical purposes as inexhaustible as solar (how long until the Earth's core cools down?).

From what I recall geothermal is not inexhaustible. The operational lifespan of a geothermal plant is on the order of decades. What happens is the local rock is cooled by the power plant to the point where it is no longer hot enough to economically run the plant. I assume that given enough time the rock will get warmed up enough to be economically feasible again but I also assume that this would take centuries.

I could also be completely wrong, of course.

Re:Solar is the only real hope

[Confusador]

As far as I can tell, we have 5 significant potential sources of power:
1. Solar is the big one, as you identified. It includes wind, hydro, and [biogenic] hydrocarbons.
2. Geothermal, which is fueled by the heat of planetary formation and essentially gravitational.
3. Tidal, which exploits a multi-body gravitational effect
4. Fission, which we're discussing here and is not limited in the short term
5. Fusion, which of course we can't control, yet. If we could do it effectively, we wouldn't need anything else, since hydrogen is everywhere.

Theoretically, we could drain the methane lakes of Titan as well, but I suspect once we get to that point it will be irrelevant.

Re:Solar is the only real hope

[wealthychef]

Yes, there are a couple of major hurdles to overcome with solar, such as storage, and it's definitely not there yet. I guess I'm hearing from a biased source but LBL does have a national center focused on the effort and it's good science and they have a very reasonable path forward that is on the verge of making some huge breakthroughs. In particular, they intend to solve the storage problem by converting sunlight directly into fuel, like nature does, but much more effectively. They are well on their way to achieving this, it sounds like. Plants are not efficient enough, and then you have to utilize something like switchgrass using bugs, technically messy.
But nuclear, wind, geothermal, etc. none of them have the energy potential to solve the problem. I've always been a nuclear proponent, but you would have to build a nuclear fission plant every day for like 30 years to replace fossil fuels. I'm hopeful about fusion plants -- keep your fingers crossed. Geothermal is inexhaustible but woefully insufficient in terms of available energy, just not really worth doing IMO. The sun bathes the earth with a huge abundance of energy, far in excess of all our needs for the foreseeable future, as in for millennia. Building it out would be a huge project but at least it's feasible.

Re:Solar is the only real hope

[blindseer]

First you state this:

I've always been a nuclear proponent, but you would have to build a nuclear fission plant every day for like 30 years to replace fossil fuels.

Then you contradict yourself with this:

The sun bathes the earth with a huge abundance of energy, far in excess of all our needs for the foreseeable future, as in for millennia. Building it out would be a huge project but at least it's feasible.

I fail to see how we (as a culture/species/nation/whatever) are capable of building large complex solar power collectors, using technology that has not yet been shown to be economically feasible, at a rate sufficient to replacing fossil fuels but are not capable of building nuclear power plants at a rate sufficient to replace fossil fuels, using technology that has been shown to be economically feasible for decades. If we can produce enough steel, concrete, etc. to build solar collectors to keep up with our energy demands then we can certainly do that with a proven and abundant energy source like nuclear.

I have heard something similar to what you stated, if we never build another coal fired power plant we'd have to build a new nuclear power plant every month to keep up with out dated coal plants closing. We'd have to build another nuclear power plant every month or so to keep up with the growth of our world energy needs. We've built gigawatt scale nuclear power plants before. We've not yet built a gigawatt scale solar collector array.

Solar power is clean and abundant but it is very expensive. With all the benefits of solar power it still cannot compete where it really counts, cost. Solar power right now costs around five times that of nuclear power. Given the physical limits of solar power I cannot foresee the costs coming down any time soon.

... They are well on their way to achieving this, it sounds like.

That's nice but nuclear power has already been proven viable. We don't need to store nuclear power since we can produce it on demand. We also already have the technology to turn nuclear power into fuels capable of powering our planes, train, and automobiles. We've had that technology for nearly a century now. The ability to turn solar power into gasoline has not been proven viable and may never prove to be viable.

There may come a time when solar power outshines every other energy source. In the mean time we'll need to invest in nuclear power. I'm not willing to bet the lives of the next generation on the viability of solar power before fossil fuels run out.

Re:Solar is the only real hope

[wealthychef]

Here you go: http://www.lbl.gov/solar/ipfiles/plenary/chu_Solar_to_Chem_Energy_3-28-05.ppt
I see your point. I don't understand why what I wrote is somehow a contradiction. If we build a nuclear plant every day there will be a huge nuclear waste and proliferation problem. This is unsolved.

Re:Solar is the only real hope

[wealthychef]

Sorry for the repeat, but here is a better link, very informative: http://www.lbl.gov/solar/ipfiles/plenary/chu_Solar_to_Chem_Energy_3-28-05.ppt

NIMBY Waste

[retroworks]

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.

Re:NIMBY Waste

[WindBourne]

Actually, some things DO get better with time. Look up IFR and GE PRISM.

Galena, Alaska

[Quila]

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.

Re:Galena, Alaska

[ColdWetDog]

Greenpeace will probably fly in some protesters when construction starts, but the locals won't be too friendly to these strangers threatening their livelihood.

Here in Alaska, all you need is a small game license and you're good to go and collect some Greenpeaces. No seasons, no limit. The big problem is that it's hard to figure out what to do with them. You wouldn't want to cook them - tough and stringy, by and large. They look pretty bad mounted on the wall. The pelts aren't much use either.

So mostly we throw rocks at them and hope they go away. Kinda like crows.

Re:Galena, Alaska

[budgenator]

Smell like goats and taste like a cross between mutton and pig too.

Re:Lots of little Carrington events?

[vlm]

Cooling pools are not a problem. Just add a way to add more water into them. Like a simple flexible pipe that leads outside of the cooling pool building and can be connected to a fire engine).

That's an engineer looking for a complicated solution. The right answer is dig a hole beneath the local water table or below sea/lake/river level, and install a one way valve. Local water table is 500 feet below? Don't build the plant there, build it somewhere within 50 feet of the water table, or lake/sea/river level..

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[aaarrrgggh]

Tax distribution lines at a high rate (scaled by capacity), and pass it on to consumers. Internalize the cost of putting generation in BFE.

It's University of Chicago economics

[Animats]

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.)

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[slinches]

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.

You obviously didn't watch the video...

[andersen]

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....

Re:You obviously didn't watch the video...

[msobkow]

I've always been surprised that this much safer molten-salt thorium technology has never been widely deployed, given how long it's been since it was successfully tested and proven to work.

Why do we continue to deploy uranium based systems when we already know there's a serious shortage of easily mined uranium in the world, with some projections of reactors becoming cost prohibitive in under 20 years due to shortages of uranium fuel?

We won't run out of uranium any time soon, but it's not going to be a profitable or safe fuel choice for much longer at all, and I don't see the sense to investing billions in power plants of any kind if you can't expect at least a 50 year run for the investment.

Re:You obviously didn't watch the video...

[BlueParrot]

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...

The devil is in the details.

While it is indeed possible to build an LFTR, that old bugger called economics tends to come and mess things up.

First of all you need a larger amount of fissile materials since the molten salt transports it out of the core. and around the entire primary loop. Secondly, as with sodium, you need to have a secondary loop to make things safe. Then there's the hydrolysis that can occur at low temperatures, which means you have to keep the salt molten. If the reactor has problems, that may involve drawing power from the grid. The reprocessing technologies kinda work, but are unproven at large scale, and nobody has an idea what the cost will be for a large reactor. They also imply building reprocessing tech for every single plant, which increases capital costs.

Then there is the startup material. Natural uranium is not good enough, so you either need to breed U-233 in a different reactor ( proliferation concern ) , use highly enriched U-235 ( proliferation concern, expensive ) , or startup on plutonium. Now plutonium in a thermal spectrum leads to accumulation of Curium, which is a troublesome waste product that cannot be efficiently destroyed in a thermal reactor.

Add in that while Thorium and Uranium dissolves easily in fluoride salts, plutonium and the other actinides do not. In fact, even at high temperatures with a completely pure salt, the solubility of Pu fluorides is just a few percent. The molten salt reactor experiments got around these issues by using a very exotic salt. Beryllium and Lithium fluorides, with the lithium enriched in Li-7. Now, beryllium is highly toxic, expensive and difficult to work with. It's such a pain that the US and UK considered developing new nuclear warheads that did not use it, even though it is the best lightweight neutron reflector there is. Enriched lithium-7 is a different problem in itself, and even if 99% pure, you will get quite a bit of tritium when it is exposed to neutrons. Perhaps not more than in a CANDU reactor, but all tritium control systems ever designed are made for water coolant.

Then is the issue of in-core materials. The molten salt reactor developed by the US dealt with damage to in-core materials by replacing the graphite core materials frequently. Not only is this expensive, but it's not very fun to handle radioactively contaminated graphite. It is hard to reprocess since it forms organic compounds and is difficult to dissolve in nitric acid. Pyro-processing by electro-refining and similar is also poorly suited for graphite. This is one of the reasons why the pebble bed reactors are usually seen as "once through". Nobody has come up with a practical way to deal with the graphite. Since the material will be in direct contact with the fuel salt, it will likely adsorb quite a bit of contaminants.

Plateout on heat exchangers is another issue. The noble metals have poor solubility in fluoride salts, so unless a very potent ( i.e expensive ) reprocessing system is able to get rid of them quickly, they will plate out on the cold parts of the reactor, which is usually the heat exchangers. A suggested solution is to use graphite-based heat exchangers, which has its own spectrum of development issues and research needs.

I'm not saying molten salt reactors can never become a good idea. I'm just saying that in comparison to the number of issues that need to be resolved to make them practical for a power plant, they are extremely hyped.

Re:You obviously didn't watch the video...

[schroedingers_hat]

Finally, a well thought out and (seemingly) informed post on the negatives of a LFTR. All I've seen in the past is praise and completely uninformed 'nu-huh'.

You seem quite knowledgable. How do you think these issues compare with those (including the already solved ones) required for traditional degigns?

Re:You obviously didn't watch the video...

[TheTurtlesMoves]

It is *not* proven tech. The only demonstration had *zero* Th, and had no in situ reprocessing which is needed and had no breading. To work you need to show a breading ratio of 1 which is hard for a Th cycle. Otherwise the thing just goes out after a while. Th is not a fuel, it is fertile, you bread 233U from it.

Re:Lots of little Carrington events?

[Cyberax]

Beautiful. So in an event of a meltdown the molten fuel can happily disperse to everyone in vicinity, polluting the groundwater for the next couple hundreds years.

The navy doesn't have any answers

[fyngyrz]

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.

Re:The navy doesn't have any answers

[frosty_tsm]

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.

From the link, that ship was built more than 40 years ago, had an overly-small cargo-hold and was done more as a proof of concept (which seems silly). Doing the same today (and doing it economically) would yield different results.

Re:The navy doesn't have any answers

[fyngyrz]

Solar and wind take up a lot of real estate, and might help with peak, but nowhere near are able to deal with the demand of more populated regions

Not true. The desert areas of the US southwest receive sufficient solar energy to power the entire nation. The problem, as I said, is storage. Without adequate storage, we can neither transport nor accrue energy as required to make practical use of the fact that there is enough energy incoming.

I expect we will have sufficient storage within a few decades. The problem is under rather intense scrutiny and development; commercially speaking, its an untapped gold mine. Right now, though, we're stuck with a model where nuclear is prevented by political forces (under which I lump law) and we are limited to the status quo in terms of generation methods and power transport.

There are many interesting methods for power transport that could be implemented -- for instance, contained water can be raised high at the power source, then run downhill to run numerous hydro regeneration installations, in a loop design that returns to base level where the loop returns to the source. With an enclosed body of water, there is no evaporation, no overage, no flooding, etc., and full power is always available as long as the power source can raise the input.

Contained hydro loop techniques also open up interesting high efficiency materials transport methods. Gravity is our friend.

Re:The navy doesn't have any answers

[fyngyrz]

Reactors are great ideas, period. The problem is that they are not in any sense politically feasible. The political and politico-legal aspects raise the costs of reactors far beyond the practical. So forget about them. Concentrate on what can be done, not what you wish for.

Re:Lots of little Carrington events?

[Anonymous Coward]

The diesel generators power the pumps, that provide cooling water to the reactor vessel and spent fuel rod pools, in the event of a failure of main power. This is what was supposed to happen at fukushima, however, the generators were taken out by the tsunami. If the generators had been protected (maybe as simple as putting them on the other side of the building, away from the water), then things might have gone a lot differently.

Doesn't just scale

[drwho]

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.

Re:Doesn't just scale

[WindBourne]

Sigh. first off, the part that travels on the train is the empty reactor. It is not a fully functional reactor. The reactor is still buried and covered at the site prior to loading.

However, look up Ft. St. Vrain thorium reactor. It does not generate excess neutrons so it did not have the shielding. Oddly, it IS capable of working on a train, even powering one.

Coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Coincidence

[WindBourne]

Why? Has Gates announced that? The only that I have seen is that gates is in preliminary talks with China. Nothing more. And I doubt that a study was put together in 1 week and has validity.

Sounds great

[das3cr]

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.

Re:Lots of little Carrington events?

[marcosdumay]

That is the main reason why size matters. Small reactors can be cooled by conduction into its surroundings, and (infrared) radiation.

Wow, more but smaller melt-downs!

[gweihir]

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.

Re:Wow, more but smaller melt-downs!

[spectro]

There is a BBC documentary somewhere in youtube where a submarine nuclear reactor engineer said GE took their reactor design (30 to 50 MW), made it 10+ times bigger and named it the Mark 1.

Power plant reactors are so huge and contain so much fuel it is physically impossible to contain a meltdown with current technology. Engineers solved this by declaring that "meltdowns can't happen" and added safety systems that made building nuclear power plants way more expensive than initially thought. Guess what?... meltdowns still happened.

If a nuclear submarine reactor melts down, they can just replace the reactor and be on their way. Can't do the same with 3-mile island, Chernobyl and Fukushima.

After Fukushima, the only way I would ever support nuclear power is if they come up with a proven way to safely contain meltdowns. Smaller reactors at nuclear submarine scale might be one way.

Re:Wow, more but smaller melt-downs!

[gweihir]

Well, if the reactors are small enough, it could be possible. Full insurance for the running reactors and long-term storage of spent fuel is still my must-have item.

Re:Wow, more but smaller melt-downs!

[WindBourne]

You are in luck, since these are already here.
Thorium reactor comes quickly to mind. Pebble bed is also the same. IFR (now the GE PRISMA) also are impossible.

Take pebble beds. You create BBs that are coated with graphite. Graphite heats up AND EXPANDS. Therefor the pebbles move away from one another moderating the reaction.
My favorite is actually thorium. The Ft. St. Vrain reactor was the largest thorium reactor and it had a simple approach. Thorium is NOT FERTILE. IOW, it does not produce neutrons, so it can neither create, nor sustain a reaction. BUT uranium can. So, what you do is put uranium rods into a case. These are spaced so that a reaction can not be started. Then you put thorium rods between the uranium rods. These will take the excess neutrons and heat up. Basically, the thorium is the one that gets hot, not the uranium. In fact, you can actually drop the uranium and create articial neutrons to generate the reaction, but that is expensive. Interestingly, thorium has a LOW melting point. So what you do is put it in a matix so that it will melt if the temps reach a particular temp (say 100C below a true melt down with the uranium). Then if you do not control the thorium, it melts and the reaction stops. Simple as that. And unlike a regular reactor, the heat stops QUICKLY. After all, the thorium flowed down to a pan.

As to IFR, loaded with passive safety as well

Why new reactors?

[Mojo66]

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?

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[Megane]

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.

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[uigrad_2000]

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.

Re:Lots of little Carrington events?

[Anonymous Coward]

He reads fine. Chernobyl (and reactors with that design) as well as Fukushima (and other GE Mark Is) have design flaws that make it easier than it should be to have a meltdown or similar critical failure. By even the late 1970s, newer designs avoided some of the specific problems the older ractors had, and by even the early or mid 1980s, inherently safe reactor designs were designed. (They were designed so even with a complete failure of the rods, they would not runaway and melt down -- and newer ones don't rely on rods at all.) I don't think I'd like a Mark I in my back yard (there is one about 30 miles away from me though..) but the modern designs? I wouldn't mind at all.

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[Code Yanker]

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.

Re:Lots of little Carrington events?

[peragrin]

the fukshima generators were under the building in the basement. pictures of those generators show them under about 12 feet of standing water.

Re:Lots of little Carrington events?

[ILongForDarkness]

The article says that the small reactors do not need pumps because convection is sufficient to dissipate the heat for the reactor itself. I'd imagine a small scale reactor means a small scale storage pond which they'd just have to keep them small enough that they are the same way: convection is enough provided that the thermal density isn't too high.

Re:Lots of little Carrington events?

[ILongForDarkness]

How about New Orleans?

Not mutually exclusive

[Goonie]

1. There's a great deal of work being done on energy efficiency already
2. We've already deployed a lot of energy efficiency technology.
3. Even so, making large absolute cuts in energy usage is unlikely (it hasn't happened anywhere).
4. America's population is still growing rapidly. So even if per-capita energy usage goes down, absolute usage will go up.
5. Even if developed countries do make substantial absolute cuts in energy usage, it's unrealistic for the developing world to do so.

Re:Not just Nuclear Power....

[Samalie]

Honestly...I was really just going for funny (although my post deserves the -1 Offtopic)

Carry on all :)

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[AmiMoJo]

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?

Re:Lots of little Carrington events?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an engineer looking for a complicated solution. The right answer is dig a hole beneath the local water table or below sea/lake/river level, and install a one way valve. Local water table is 500 feet below? Don't build the plant there, build it somewhere within 50 feet of the water table, or lake/sea/river level..

Nope, digging a hole to the water table to store anything hazardous is about the worst idea I have ever heard. I think I'll stick with solutions designed by engineers, thanks. A reservoir of water on higher ground, with gravity feed, to a pool that is designed with eventual cleanup and - very importantly - de-comissioning considered from the outset.

If you want to know how bad it is to dig a pit below the water table and chuck radioisotopes into it, do some reading on Dounreay in Scotland. Still, not to worry, they should have it sorted it out in another 300 years.

The truth is that pools often are bad news, because stuff gets chucked into them as an alternate to proper safe long term storage. This happened at Fukushima and is basically a problem all over the world. The most hazardous building in Western Europe? B30 at Sellafield in the UK, which contains a huge fuel pool full of all kinds of crap (they aren't sure exactly what is in there -- but it is thought there is a about 1500kgs of plutonium sludge amongst the rods in various states of decay). The second worst building is right next door. These pools are open-air, and you can see both of these pools if you go to google maps and have a mooch around the Sellafield site.

Its religion

[bussdriver]

University of Chicago economics is more of a church indoctrinating new members to their religion.

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[thegarbz]

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.

Only if the smaller reactors were safer.

[stewartm0205]

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.

Re:Only if the smaller reactors were safer.

[WindBourne]

They are. Basically, the new ones use physic and manufacturing economics to make that happen. For example, I would like to see PRISMA be developed for install at all sites that have 'waste' stored there. These would then burn up the fuel and leave nothing but short lived 'waste' (100-200 years; not 20K). Likewise, for new installs, it makes sense to go with thorium similar to what Ft. St. Vrain had. The reactor was good, just the back end was not.

Re:Only if the smaller reactors were safer.

[WindBourne]

Anybody that responds to a sodium accident at a nuke plant would be WELL trained in it. And thorium is exactly what you want. Read up on Ft. Sr. Vrain.

Re:Lots of little Carrington events?

[hrvatska]

And what happens when the water table drops because of drought? The power plant shuts down?

1000 MW Snicker

[Trax3001BBS]

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
cause they were built on a Known major fault line. ...unfinished

Re:1000 MW Snicker

[Trax3001BBS]

My bad missed it on an edit that should be 4000 MW.

Wrong

[WindBourne]

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.

Capital cost

[dbIII]

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.

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[CptNerd]

I thought Germany was "reconsidering" their reliance on nuclear energy.

Re:The Next Extinction Event

[WindBourne]

LOL; radiation is a BIG part of evolution. Why do cowards like you make such IRRATIONAL statements with zero knowledge?

Re:Mass production = tolerances

[WindBourne]

Otherway around. With a factory, you will have TIGHTER specs. When it is in the field, you do not have access to the same tools.

Re:How to order?

[WindBourne]

Certainly. Tell us where you live. We will be happy to send you what you have bought. In fact, we can do it within 2 hours anywhere on earth after we get your information and our verifying it.

When I hear SMR

[ThatsNotPudding]

I think: small enough to steal - or at least far more easily to destroy in situ.

Re:I Thought NIMBY Prevented Even the Big Sites ..

[jpvlsmv]

You've just described the entire zoning philosophy of the state of Texas.

--Joe