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Nobody Builds Reactors For Fun Anymore
stox tips an article from Nobel Week Dialogue about the biggest problem of the nuclear power industry: it's not fun anymore. The author, Ashutosh Jogalekar, expands upon this quote from Freeman Dyson: "The fundamental problem of the nuclear industry is not reactor safety, not waste disposal, not the dangers of nuclear proliferation, real though all these problems are. The fundamental problem of the industry is that nobody any longer has any fun building reactors. Sometime between 1960 and 1970 the fun went out of the business. The adventurers, the experimenters, the inventors, were driven out, and the accountants and managers took control. The accountants and managers decided that it was not cost effective to let bright people play with weird reactors." Jogalekar adds, "For any technological development to be possible, the technology needs to drive itself with the fuel of Darwinian innovation. It needs to generate all possible ideas – including the weird ones – and then fish out the best while ruthlessly weeding out the worst. ... Nothing like this happened with nuclear power. It was a technology whose development was dictated by a few prominent government and military officials and large organizations and straitjacketed within narrow constraints. ... The result was that the field remained both scientifically narrow and expensive. Even today there are only a handful of companies building and operating most of the world's reactors. To reinvigorate the promise of nuclear power to provide cheap energy to the world and combat climate change, the field needs to be infused with the same entrepreneurial spirit that pervaded the TRIGA design team and the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs."
Nobody *does science* for fun anymore.
"fun" is when a field is so new that the people working in it aren't jaded professionals. Once all is understood, this type of people is not desired in industry or government. You simply distill out the essence of the field, get the textbook companies to start selling the same information in different yearly editions and crank up the university system to create "information regurgitators". Then these people hire other zombies of the same ilk and there you go, in a few years you went from hobbyists, tinkerers and thinkers to "professional engineers" who work in little pre-fabricated silos and take their orders from MBAs and accountants who are in bed with the goverment.
There is supposed to be a big kaboom.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
What is the Half-Life of Human Fear of Nuclear? Figure that number out; that will be when nuclear development becomes "fun" again.
My bet is this time is much longer than the half-life of plutonium (any isotope).
Thanks to overregulation of everything, nobody does anything for fun anymore.
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Prove yourself: CAPTCHA?! Now this post isn't fun anymore.
It is loads of fun. Until the FBI beats down the door because you have radioactive material. Oh wait. They mean professionally.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Once they "perfected" the technology, and how to harness the power, why would there still be as many "developers? That's the whole point of developing, isn't it, to maintain a steady efficient process by which power can be "cheaply" bought?
Of course there should still be fine-tuning of the process, but the man-power needed has been quite reduced.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Start having fun with fusion reactors, is what I'd say.
That's the trouble with any kind of research - fun to start with in a fresh new field, lots of exploring to do, lots of easy low hanging fruit to gather. Later on though it gets harder to get new results and the going gets more difficult. Eventually it becomes a tedious grind with diminishing returns. So it goes.
Taylor Wilson: "At 14, Taylor Wilson became the youngest person ever to build a working nuclear fission reactor-and he did it in his parents' garage. Since then, Wilson has invented a low-cost radiation detector for use in counterterrorism, conducted research on medical isotopes for cancer treatment and become one of the foremost proponents of using nuclear power to safely meet the world's energy needs." Taylor's Nuke Site
It's a mature technology, and once the newness wore off, it's not a very sexy one. Most research reactors (including the ones at both the Universities I attended) are basically just big tubs of water. And further, they can't really "do" anything.
Who needs a hobby that'll bring the cops, battering down your door?
But if you must build one, check out page 31
State level policies allow 50 different ideas and experiments that can be learned from and improved upon. Federal leaves you with one near unchangable policy.
the field needs to be infused with the same entrepreneurial spirit that Scientists are not entrepreneurial. Accountants and managers can be. Per your premiss, " The accountants and managers decided that it was not cost effective to let bright people play with weird reactors.", the field needs to be infused with scientific spirit.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Please go have fun with nuclear reactors. And please do have this kind of pleasure and excitement where you won't be able to do too much harm when the experiments do not turn out to have quite as merry consequences as was intended.
And for those that would like safe and clean power, please have fun engineering geothermal boreholes that go as deep into the mantle as possible, i.e. reaching for the core-mantle boundary.
Even with reduced regulation industry isn't going to put up the money for researchers to have fun and experiment with nuclear energy. The momentum in the prices for PV are just too scary, if that carries on nuclear is just one major breakthrough in energy storage away from obsolescence ... in a field where billions are spare change and commercialization takes decades.
Nuclear is a gamble only governments would take and most governments are strapped for cash.
You've just hit on the major problem with ALL corporations today. They are run by accountants, attorneys, HR, and pussy managers that bow to their control. When is the last time someone was hired without their involvement? 1930? This is why nothing can get done anymore. A bunch of peon wannabes in one of those departments think they run the show. It's high time CEOs, boards of directors, and other higher ups grow a pair, that includes you ladies, and tell these people, "NO, this is what we are going to do, NO we need to hire this person right now, not next month, now!" You can be diplomatic as you want but you need to put your foot. You work for me. If you don't like it, GTFO! These people need to understand they do not run the business. Until that happens you company is doomed to failure.
It was a technology whose development was dictated by a few prominent government and military officials and large organizations...
Funny how patent reform took so long because of that exact description of the individuals involved, and how copyright mutated from being a public service to a industrial weapon to be used on one's business enemies. And all in the name of innovation. And now here we stand again, wondering why America can't innovate, why China is catching up and kicking our ass in more and more areas every year, and yet the thought never occurs: Maybe we need to burn the mansions to the ground, round up and execute the lawyers, and redistribute the wealth so that America returns its promise of the American Dream to its people, now long-held in forced captivity out of fear of terrorists, foreign powers, domestic powers, and in fact every fear to be popularized has been met with the exact same response: Giving the wealthy more money.
We've dug our own graves. Either we lay down in it in dignified prose, or we throw the people who demanded we dig down those holes instead. But don't think for a second this is a problem unique to the nuclear industry.
Show me someone building an airplane. Oh sorry, you need an FAA license for that... and they're talking about even taking away our toy airplanes because they can be turned into drones. How about a rocket? Ha ha, here's a form from the BATF for your background check to own "personal explosive devices". Flying car? Forget it... you can't even build a regular car in your garage now without running afoul of regulations. The only Big Thing to come out of this country in the last forty years that Joe Average had any hope of penetrating this hopelessly dense bureaucracy was the internet... and look how quickly patent and copyright law mutated to repress any attempt at innovation there. Now we're weaving digital restrictions into the very fabric of the network, building in kill switches, and militarizing it.
You want a solution? I got one: Round up all the rich people, shove them in trains, and ship them to concentration camps, and don't let them leave until every penny has been squeezed out of them. Yeah, it's the same thing the Nazis did. Yeah, I'm going there. Because they did manage to do one thing for Germany: It got them out from under the foot of other countries who were sucking their economy dry from WWI and preventing any industrialization. And then Hitler came along and he gave Germany everything he promised: A strong economy, everyone back to work, and independence. Of course, there was a catch...
But I welcome anyone to put a serious alternative on the table for how you can combat wealth inequity on a scale not seen since the industrialization of this country, and at current rates in a few decades will have us sliding backwards into wealth inequity rates not seen since the Dark Ages. I can think of precious few examples in human history where the poor numbered so many and the rich, through peaceful means, gave up their wealth. It is, traditionally, a very bloody affair.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Since then, Wilson has [...] conducted research on medical isotopes for cancer treatment...
As impressive as his site is, that's not real research.
Real research is only done by professionals who have (or are pursuing) an advanced degree, with the backing of a university or government-funded research facility. There are no "gentleman" scientists any more, and there are no contemporary examples of real science done by 'regular folks.
This issue was addressed in an article from a couple of days ago. Haven't you been listening?
I expect the innovators will move on to more friendly climates. My dad taught me to never count the US out - you guys have the best of everything and the worst of everything. Nowhere else produces more nobel prize winners.. or more criminals.
I wonder if that time is coming to an end.
Nuclear energy is too important. Renewables are a joke. It's low quality, low density power from a thermodynamic standpoint. We're either going to burn every bit of carbon and then go nuclear, or go nuclear. Either way, we have to master this technology, and we (humans) will. The only question is what happens between now and then.
Myself, I'm going to encourage my kids to learn Chinese. Sigh.
..don't panic
Anyone with the bean counter gene should be ruthlessly culled from the gene pool.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
write up a business plan based on your design and go find some investors and a place to build the reactor. maybe start by building it in your backyard so that if an accident happens you only kill your family
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC2gDuoiCLc
I was at this talk, and there _IS_ research being done into reactors, just that it isn't that common.
...it must be their nuclear program.
That industry drew in all the adventurers and high rollers and people with math Ph.Ds willing to work 24x7x365 hatching crazy schemes.
Then the banks crashed and took down the world economy with it.
there are some impressive generation III+ and IV reactor designs, and other smarter countries than the USA are pursuing them though the designs done in USA
These do not sound like a safe combination.
If the nuclear boys want to play with dangerous toys, they need to find a nice uninhabited planet to do it on. The innovation has been in wind, solar, geothermal, and even natural gas. Those guys are smart, they are having fun, and they do not destroy massive chunks of real estate.
Read the October 1986 issue of Scientific American to see what happens when guys having fun melt down a reactor.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
It's interesting the bait model employed today by GE and Westinghouse.
They sell reactors at essentially cost price, then overcharge for the nuclear fuel.
They have zero interest in reactors that use liquid fuel, since there's almost no money to be made in the fuel.
Specially reactors that can run on cheap thorium (LFTR-Salt cooled), waste from water nuclear reactors, plutonium (IFR-Sodium cooled).
If they have something interesting, they are waiting for a big govt handout to actually start it (GE-Hitachi S-PRISM).
And govt aren't helping either... S-PRISM promisses to extract 100x more energy from uranium than water cooled/moderated reactors, theoretically they're also a solution to the nuclear waste storage problem. But if it really were that great (with no hidden catch), then why shouldn't GE take one or two billion out of their huge cash reserves and make it happen quickly ?
That's the final point, those huge corporations always have some hidden poop hidden in the thing. Like the true cost of water nuclear plants considering there's no standardized nuclear fuel market (GE fuel can't be used in Westinghouse plants and vice-versa).
We're having fun in Vermont and people in our town are convinced we're building a nuclear reactor up here on Sugar Mountain... I try not to straighten out the rumor mill. Besides, we're almost done.
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/2009/11/01/outer-wall-forms-up/
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/2011/08/25/three-phase-power/comment-page-1/#comment-9690
More innovation - yes. But please not the hacker spirit of Silicon Valley.
You see, if your website is full of holes, that's bad for your company. But if your nuclear reactor is full of holes, that's bad for everyone.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I suspect as any industry becomes entrenched, it destroys competition.
Apparently the Koch Bros are still pissed at what Carnegie did to their father who came up with a more cost-effective way of refining petroleum and then was locked out of the market.
Chemistry sets were effectively banned a long time ago as a side effect of the war on drugs.
This fully funded Kickstarter project is an authentic recreation of an A C Gilbert chemistry set from the 1920s to 1940s.
Chemical List Arranged in the order originally published by the A.C. Gilbert Company along with their item number and the 1936 pricing)
Heirloom Chemistry Set
HackerNews has a discussion thread about this as well
> Show me someone building an airplane
Visit the Experimental Aircraft Association. There's a thriving community doing just that.
Stopping the chain reaction is the easy part. What causes meltdowns is that short-lived fission products keep decaying and generating so much energy that there needs to be continued cooling.
An excellent and inspiring article from a versatile and eloquent organic and computational chemist and it is delightful to see fun mentioned in the annals of the stuffy Nobel-folk. Fun hardly ever survives the peer review process these days.
But. From TA,
An early design invented by Admiral Hyman Rickover -- suitable for submarines but hardly optimal for efficient land-based power stations -- was frozen and applied to hundreds of reactors around the country.
Oh yes oh best beloved, Admiral Rickover was the Father of the light water reactor, the Naval taskmaster who imperiled his military career to apply direct agitation to his superiors -- on the idea that a nuclear reactor might some day power great submarines and ships. He slew the Lernaean Hydra that was the military establishment of the day, not the whole thing, just a few heads that got in his way. He seized the reins and cracked the whip, mustered the almost-Hippies of Los Alamos to yoke them as Oxen of Science. In toil, occasional obscenities and hot water... the Light Water Reactor was born! To become the fiery horse with a speed of light, a cloud of dust, the USS Nautilus! Even Walt Disney was impressed.
But Rickover did not invent the thing. In fact, he was also kind of a jerk.
On US Patent 2,736,696 you will see four names: Eugene P Wigner, Leo A Ohlinger, Gale J Young, Alvin M Weinberg. Weinberg was rightfully proud of his contribution to help solve the Navy's propulsion problem, but as a protégé of Wigner he had also learned that in the thermal spectrum Thorium was a good performer and with the right chemistry it could breed a self-sustaining fissile reaction. So with several chemists they began work in that direction (nuclear airplane yadda yadda) built what non-chemists called, 'the chemists' reactor'.
Fast forward to 1973. Two prototypes of Uranium molten salt reactors had been built to prove that fission and breeding could occur in this 'dry' chemical environment that would have amazing inherent safety advantages, especially for widely deployed commercial reactors.
But Weinberg had become obnoxious. His conviction that Light Water Reactors had unresolved safety issues prompted him to remark on the topic publicly, and it created a bit of a stir amongst those who had thought that Atoms for Peace was a unified voice, and we were harnessing the atom in the best possible way.
But privately all he wished to do was complete his work on the Liquid Salt Thorium Breeder and present it. He was sure that the wisdom of this approach would be obvious to all, especially when it had become reality.
In 1973 Admiral Rickover was given his fourth star and was everyone's Nuclear Darling. He had his Nuclear Navy, he had his Liquid Metal Fast Breeder and the ear of President Nixon.
It would have been a most appropriate time to honor the contribution of his former colleague Weinberg, whose diligent work had helped bring him to the pinnacle of his career. You could buy a billion dollars' worth of stuff with a few hundred million in those days, and the Cold War (and its chilly cousin Atoms for Peace) were integral essential of the federal funding machine. Rickover was no idiot and his public speeches centered on the Navy's perfect record and its attention to safety. He was no idiot and was surely aware of the advantages of using molten salts. A single phone call would have been all it took.
But he was a jerk.
Admiral Rickover it was who took the fun out of building nuclear reactors.
Next question?
For the rest of the story, and it is an amazing one, strap yourself down and clamp your eyes open for two hours to endure Tho
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Show me someone building an airplane. Oh sorry, you need an FAA license for that...
Check out the Experimental Aircraft Association. Visit the Oshkosh Fly-In. FAA regulations on experimental aircraft are quite lenient. You can't carry passengers or fly over heavily populated areas, which is reasonable enough. For flight test, there's the Mojave Air and Space Port. "My job is to give people permission. Every day in the skies over Mojave and on the ground at Mojave Air & Space Port, people take enormous risks, which someday will yield great things for all humanity." -- Stuart Witt, CEO, Mojave Air & Space Port.
How about a rocket?
"You want to test a rocket engine? This is a place where you can do that." -- Board of Directors, Mojave Air and Space Port. SpaceShip One and various X-Prize trials have launched from Mojave. Rotary Rocket flew from there, although not very far. I know people at TechShop building upper stage engines for orbital insertion.
Flying car? Forget it...
There are several ultralight helicopter kits. Quadrotors seem to get bigger each year. Thrust-type VTOLs need a lot of power, which usually means jet engines, which means a flying car will cost about as much as a small bizjet, which limits the market. Paul Moller built a flying car; it doesn't work, but that's Moller's problem, for which he's been making excuses for 40 years. I had some hopes for Urban Aeronautics out of Israel, which was showing a non-flying mockup in 2010, but they never made it fly.
Government is not preventing you from doing any of these things.
Some people get a real kick out of watching Israel squirm.
Most alternative reactor designs have some major flaw. Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Pebble-bed reactors have pebble jams. (An experimental one in Germany is such a mess there's no way to fully decommission it.) Helium gas-cooled reactors leak helium. (Fort St. Vrain was converted from nuclear to natural gas because of that.) One of the painful lessons of long-life nuclear power plants is that what goes on inside the reactor vessel has to be really, really simple. Anything complex in there will break. It's being shot full of holes at the atomic level, after all. (See "hydrogen embrittlement").
Pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors at least have only water to deal with. The fuel rods are solid rods. The thing is basically simple, although the plumbing gets insanely complex. Even then, big accidents have happened.
Some of the fancier reactor designs require an associated chemical plant to reprocess the materials. This is a pain if you're in the power generation business, and a source of leaks and risks.
What's really sad is that the wealthy don't even have to give up their wealth. Lower classes with more money will lift the wealthy up to dizzyingly new heights. The wealthy GOT RICH on the shoulders of the middle and low classes! If the middle/low class have got no money, who's going to buy the products of the rich?
If the rich had an ounce of foresight and half a brain cell, they'd be doing what Henry Ford did--paying his workers MORE than the average wage so they could buy his stuff. A horde of penniless serfs will never buy a single iPod!
--PeterM
YOU! Are a part of the problem! There has been exactly 1 kind of nuclear reactor built in the last 60 years. Yes, they can go kaboom. What about the other kinds that you can't build bombs from? I'm thinking of one that is inherently safe. You might utter "but they are all unsafe" and my reply... but they were all the same (1 kind) design. How do you expect a different result when you do the same thing? The problem isn't the science, its idiots perceptions "Oh, they all blow up and spew radiation." But they are all the same. We need to build another kind that doesn't do those things. That's the point of the article. Instead of building inherently dangerous ones, we need to build inherently safe ones. Use them to power airplanes! WHAT! You cry out, what happens when it crashes?!?!? And I reply, nothing happens. It stops by itself. It doesn't make anything radioactive, it doesn't melt a hole down to the center of the earth. Someone comes along with a forklift, scoops it up, and uses it on another plane. We haven't built any like that. You haven't seen any because there haven't been any for you to see. We need more science, and less idiots freaking out.
Rubbish! Geothermal plants (thats green for ya), typically aren't hot enough to turn water into steam. Darn! We is foiled! Not so fast sparky! You can flash another chemical to boil at a lower temperature, then use that to turn a turbine. Use water to cool the gas back to liquid, and re-use. The water doesn't boil, it just gets warm.
I remember something else Kelvin said in 1900, and it reminds me of some of the nay sayers on /. Kelvin said ...in 1900... that a machine capable of carrying a man in flight is impossible. 60 months later, Kitty Hawk North Carolina. Refutation by demonstration.
From the first talk we viewed on EfT, we were intreagued... Safe Nuclear Energy? (Cf Kindle eBook: "Nuclear 2.0" We paid ~ $2 for it at Amazon.com; YMMV).
Instead of costly solid fuel rods (only ~ 2% of whose energy is used before they're sent to costly storage), liquid fueled reactors need no such rods. Instead, their liquid fuel (about 98% of whose energy) is used.
The LFTR is just one of the several designs being discussed. Some want ASD's in their designs, ie, with an Accelorator in the picture. (I'm sure still other designs will be proposed, possibly incorporating something else that a particular physicist knows well enough to build into it.)
There's plenty of time to innovate, discuss, simulate & build prototypes... Join in the Fun (Did he say Fun?!?) & games of designing safe nuclear power plants, for a change.
Don't let Fukushima's disaster send the baby (nuclear industry) out with the bathwater (a particular design, used at Fukushima)!
We didn't stop sending shuttles, etc. up to the ISS, ie, even after 2 losses! So, let's not let the greenest energy source get away from us... Embrace Next Gen Nuclear Energy, eg, LFTRs = Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors.
What happened to auto making in Detroit was subject to much the same. It was the rise of the MBA and the Bean Counters that killed Detroit.
Time and again - the bean counters fuck everything up.
MSRs look great on the drawing board.
The salts are corrosive and solid at room temperature.
On site chemical processing of the salt stream with fuel and FPs is required.
Huge proliferation risk.
Chemical plants are much more accident prone than nuclear reactors.
Interesting and elegant concept. There is a reason that the technology has been pursued only half-heartedly since the demo facilities the 1960s.
Ford had competition: the Commies. For much of the 20th century, the potential success of communism --- that it could create a better life for the working masses than bare-knuckle capitalist exploitation --- provided a major policy influence on the capitalist elite. Along Ford's logic, the working masses needed to be kept happy with a rising standard of living to maintain support for a "benevolent oligarchy" against radical demands for social justice and equality. However, with the collapse of the USSR into another feudal oligarchy, it's easier to push the "there is no alternative" capitalist propaganda line while quality of life declines under later capitalism (less pressured to compete against alternate social forms). Now, you see the wholesale looting of the middle and working classes, as all the gains made over the past century are clawed back by the super-rich.
Fun belongs to the university laboratories, with government backing. Once the fun is over and seriousness creeps in, the technology development begins using mixed government-private funding. Once the seriousness is all-in and the fun has been sucked all-out, the product development may start using private money.
Problem solved - just resume production of these:
Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/atomictoys/GilbertU238Lab.htm
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?12646-Atomic-Wings
Sounds good to me, would love to see commercial flights, non-stop, no fuel loss or weight. No more fuel taxes. Even cheaper flights.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
...if only your life is on the line, and not, say, the lives of millions of others all the way down to their great great grand children. Innovation at the cost of safety is great in some fields. After all, the only one dieing is the idiot who blew themself up. But when you accidentally start a meltdown because your "fun" design didn't include all the safety gear you thought it did, I don't have any complaints for having more safety than innovation.
Problem solved - just resume production of these:
Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab
This was a stunningly sophisticated science kit that cost $50 new. $430 adjusted for inflation.
There was nothing phony about our Atomic Energy laboratory. It was genuine, and it was also safe. We used radioactive materials in the set, but none that might conceivably prove dangerous. There was a Geiger-Mueller Counter. It was accurate; a carefully designed and manufactured instrument that could actually be used in prospecting for radioactive materials. The Atomic Energy lab also contained a cloud chamber in which the paths of alpha particles traveling at 12,000 miles a second could be seen; a spinthariscope showing the results of radioactive disintegration on a fluorescent screen; an electroscope that measured the radioactivity of different substances.
---- quoted from A. C. Gilbert's autobiography: ''The Man Who Lives In Paradise'' Rinehard & Company
1954.
A. C. Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab
The auction price on eBay in June for an incomplete set in fair condition: $4500. Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, Original 1952
the US Coast Guard wanted to build and deploy at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay?
Cause I for one don't want to see any creative, fun solutions to nuclear waste management, weapons proliferation or reactor safety.
Interestingly the set does contain Polonium 210, used by secrete services for discrete poisoning (Alexander Litvinenko, Yasser Arafat).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium/
my best friend's step-sister makes $70/hour on the computer. She has been out of work for 5 months but last month her paycheck was $21706 just working on the computer for a few hours. try this web-site....
www.fly31.com
He never said either thing. In that sense, it might be quite reminiscent of things that /.ers say -- unresearched bullshit intended to provide the poster with the false thrill of the superficial insight.
I've built a strontium 90, thorium hybrid neutron pulse nuclear reactor in the basement. What fun! By the way, you are all as sterile as me and bender. Have at it!
Why would you need to -build- a rector for fun? They whole point of the discipline of engineering is to design something on paper (well, on a computer these days), and know exactly how it will behave once you've built it thanks to your simulations and calculations. If you're discovering new stuff during the building process, you're doing it wrong. And there's surely nothing stopping universities and such coming up with new reactor concepts.
It was government.
... how the American model of laissez-faire capitalism and money-dominated representative government is the perfect system for promoting social progress and cultural evolution.
The purpose of any commercial power plant is to profitably produce power. If your power system does not do that, there's no point doing it.
The cost of any power plant includes a variety of factors, including R&D. For many nations, the cost of developing commercial reactors is partially hidden in a larger military program. At a minimum, training of the engineers as part of a wider program helps, but you may additionally take advantage of things like fuel separation technologies, development of reactor technologies, and in some cases, like the USSR, the reactor designs themselves are adapted military versions.
There are only a few cases where the cost of designing the civilian technology is completely separate from the military side. Canada is one example. In this case the accounting is fairly easy; the country's taxpayers have paid about $50 billion dollars to pay one province (Ontario) to develop technology used largely only by themselves. If one adds that cost to the price of the reactors, no one would have ever built them.
So back to the story. The reason no one "builds reactors for fun" is that they cost billions of dollars. Taking an alternate technology through to production will cost an enormous amount of money. Unless one can demonstrate that this R&D will be paid off, or they can hide it on someone else's budget (like earlier programs) then any investor is rightfully concerned about the risk/reward basis. And, in spite of what the various "miracle cure" types will tell you, this is precisely what these efforts have failed to do, utterly.
And that's the state of the union, right there.
Nuclear engineers invariably blame someone else for their problems - maybe it's the "greenies" or the money men. Invariably though, it's never themselves. That's in spite of over promising and under delivering for half a century now. Simply put, no one is willing to give them more money to "play".
If you want true Darwinion innovation, try nuclear weapons instead...
Or what did the article author mean with "For any technological development to be possible, the technology needs to drive itself with the fuel of Darwinian innovation". Given the nature of the subject, maybe he should have picked a .. humm... different wording.
To plan and build a new reactor is very, very, very expensive because of the crazy greenpeace and other wackos. Even though Mr. Moore who helped found greenpeace wrote in the Washington Post back in 2006 that the concern wasn't valid, they still oppose any new Nuke plants in court. They hold up the entire industry in court. Otherwise we'd have recycling and new plants that we sorely need. The new plants are safe. Even the old plants are safe. TMI put out a lot less radiation than your standard coal plant puts out every day.
Just don't do stupid things like the Japanese did by:
1) Locating three nuke plants in a place known to get flooded with a tsunami.
2) having their diesel generators located in the basement where they'd be flooded and rendered useless.
3) Not allowing for an external source of power in case their diesel generators failed.
4) Not asking for an outside firm (outside of Japan and free from political pressures as you can get) to approve their plans.
Their decision and Germany's decision to abandon nuclear power is just silly. They'll cause a lot more environmental harm by doing this.
If this article over at Slate is to be believed, then "... accountants and managers deciding it was not cost effective to let bright people play with weird reactors" would be easily explainded.
They made it not fun. You know it. Fix that or get over it.
Calm down gaggle of enviro weenies that are at this moment preparing to attack me for pointing out the obvious... I'm not suggesting you stop. I'm saying until you stop... its no fun. Which is true regardless of whether of your activities are justified.
No fun. Your fault. I'm over it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Thats because only 1% of the fuel is used.
It isnt waste, its stored fuel, classified as waste, that can be reprocessed, endlessly.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I was thinking, why not take the GEET plasma reaction then wrap the reactor tube in a vacuum solar "cooker" to aid the TRANSMUTATION. The combi gives us a machine that takes conventional fuel mixtures and sunlight and gives us mechanical energy on demand + clean air. Am I talking to fast? You dont know the laws of thermodynamics? As a child you almost drowned in a lake of research free skepticism? Sincirely, I think with proper instructions ur mum could build this one.
gdewilde@gmail.com
The real reason? BoyScouts are NO longer encouraged to persue the Merit Badge for Atomic Energy, since Scout David Hahn did his in 1994-1995, and was arrested!! I share with Scout Masters everywhere the sadness of the lack of foresight of the scientific community in supporting Scouting, and the onerous over-sight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commision! Where is the sense of adventure? "Although his homemade reactor never achieved critical mass, it ended up emitting dangerous levels of radioactivity, likely well over 1,000 times normal background radiation. Alarmed, Hahn began to dismantle his experiments, but a chance encounter with police led to the discovery of his activities, which triggered a Federal Radiological Emergency Response involving the FBI and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. On June 26, 1995 the United States Environmental Protection Agency, having designated Hahn's mother's property as a Superfund hazardous materials cleanup site, dismantled the shed and its contents and buried them as low-level radioactive waste in Utah. Hahn refused medical evaluation for radiation exposure.[2]" Wiki.
Actually, they do care. They just do it in uber-secret. (however, with a ban on testing, it's all theoretical. even if they do build it.)
The real issue is, indeed, one of cost. But that's because of the extreme amount of paperwork and permiting required to even buy "lab samples" today. And for good reason; nuclear material is seriously dangerous. You don't have to build something large enough to level a city; in fact, that's a small concern (you'll never get that much material.) The risk of contamination and/or poisoning is very real.
Well, you know what they say... It's all fun and games until someone grows an extra eye.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
Inherently safe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA
"The TRIGA reactor uses uranium zirconium hydride (UZrH) fuel, which has a large, prompt negative fuel temperature coefficient of reactivity, meaning that as the temperature of the core increases, the reactivity rapidly decreases. It is thus highly unlikely, though not impossible for a nuclear meltdown to occur."
Yeah, so many good ideas have been shelved as you point out because they did not fit with the political or social or economic priorities of the time.
CANDU is somewhat safer than usual:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor#Safety_features
More on why reactors capitalism built were expensive:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
How they could be better by being smaller (like TRIGA):
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html
"Natural circulation can also be used to protect the containment from breaking open due to excess pressure. In present-day power plants, active cooling using water pumps is necessary to control the pressure. But with the smaller reactor, there is less energy to dissipate, making natural circulation a viable alternative."
One intriguing possibility is a central factory that makes small nuclear power units meant to run without significant maintenance for 30 years and which then go back to the factory for reprocessing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_nuclear_reactor
I have a lot of respect for the people who maintain what we have though:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/episodes/nuclear-turbine/
"Sean Riley puts on his hazmat suit and heads into the radiation zone for his next tough fix, replacing a steam turbine in a nuclear power plant to boost its energy-producing capacity. Dismantling an enormous turbine and putting it back together again is tough work at the best of times, but when there's risk of radioactive particles inside, tough is an understatement."
That said, I'm not really a fan of big centralized power plants for social reasons, so I lean towards solar, superinsulated homes, and energy efficiency. Also, while in theory nuclear energy could be run well, in practice, given corporate secrecy and other social dysfunctions, like with TEPCO, I have little confidence current profit-oriented corporations could run big nuclear reactors safely. "Silkwood" is another example, although one can see that with corporations that handle anything dangerous, including chemicals used to make ICs -- at least nuclear releases are easier to monitor than most chemical or biochemical releases.
An example is in the USA with dozens of nuclear plants similar to Fukushima requiring active systems to shut down (and power) that are all at the end of their lives and which should have never been built. They should be shut down as unsafe and replaced with something safer (nuclear, fusion, solar, or otherwise), but likely will just be run longer until the next disaster.
With solar reaching grid parity (cheaper than grid electricity from coal,natural gas, and nuclear), it is hard to argue for nuclear without some huge design breakthroughs. It was hard even ten or twenty years ago when one could point to the solar pricing trends (but people scoffed). Hot or cold fusion maybe would be the next step for "nuclear" though, and one could argue fusion plants would have less environmental impact than covering 1% of the landscape with solar panels. Although "solar roads" is a neat idea.
http://www.solarroadways.com/intro.shtml
"When multiple Solar Road Panels are interconnected, the in
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.