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."

Comments

Slight change in title, if I may

[tanujt]

Nobody *does science* for fun anymore.

Re:Slight change in title, if I may

[Anonymous Coward]

How can they? Our STEM programs today like to drain all the creativity from their students. They're all aimed at creating lab drones who dream of being in charge. No one dreams of discovery anymore.

Yes, priorities are truly fucked nowadays. A Nobel to these folks is the ultimate line on a resume. Not a sign that they may have played some roll in the advancement of humankind.

Re:Slight change in title, if I may

[Wonko the Sane]

Learning is slowly being made illegal and replaced with schooling.

Chemistry sets were effectively banned a long time ago as a side effect of the war on drugs.

Re: Slight change in title, if I may

[Anonymous Coward]

Whole physics and chem books have been outlawed due to forbidden knowledge about poisons, explosives and nuclear stuff.

I have old school books that would mark me as a terrorist nowadays.

It's a new dark ages of science. This time not caused by the catholic pedophiles but by the anal retentive governments and a retarded zero risk fetishism society.

Re:Slight change in title, if I may

[ridgecritter]

Completely agree. As a child, I learned a good deal about chemistry and explosives through DIY activities. Those childhood lessons (nobody got hurt) have gotten me some good jobs at major aerospace companies and at a space startup. A kid doing today what I did back when would be instantly jailed and put on the terr'ist list forever. Hell, I fear what would happen if DHS were to find my oxy/acetylene welding set in my home shop. Our increasingly Draconian restrictions are fencing off ever more sources of inspiration and creativity.

Re:Slight change in title, if I may

[jbolden]

It had nothing to do with the war on drugs. The shifts came from consumer protection laws. A pre WWI set is a very dangerous toy by today's standards.

Re: Slight change in title, if I may

[jeffb (2.718)]

Start with nearly anything along the lines of "Chemical Magic".

I remember spending many happy hours looking through the "experiments" for making nitrogen triiodide, various preparations with white phosphorus, carbon tetrachloride-carbon disulfide mixes with the same index of refraction as glass (dump a broken glass into a tank of the stuff, REACH IN WITH YOUR HAND, and pull out a whole one -- magic!), lots of mixes with potassium chlorate and/or red phosphorus, lumps of sodium or potassium -- you get the picture. For a few brief, wonderful years, I was able to order some of these chemicals through my elementary or middle schools, and occasionally find them in some old out-of-the-way pharmacy.

I still resent the crackdown on chemicals, but if you'd offered me-the-kid a choice between the old-school chemical buffet and today's Internet, I would've leapt for the keyboard in a heartbeat.

Re:Slight change in title, if I may

[myowntrueself]

"Don't try this at home" isn't fun. It's merely entertainment.

Mythbusters is to science as pro wrestling is to sport.

Ie pro wrestling is 'sports entertainment'.

Re:Slight change in title, if I may

[Opportunist]

The high school one from the 1950s, no doubt about that. It also has the much more interesting experiments. Problem is just that you can't get 9 out of 10 chemicals you need anymore due to "safety concerns" and trying to get the tenth puts you on a no-fly list and grants you a personal visit from guys that come at 6am.

Re:Slight change in title, if I may

[Creepy]

Sigh... said it before, but most fourth generation designs including the one the US killed by John Kerry's ignorance burn nuclear waste as fuel. Russia continued, and their once through versions like the BN-600 burn 80% of their nuclear fuel and would burn nearly 100% if they used continuous reprocessing, but that is considered a proliferation risk. 80% - vs .5 to 5%.

In any case, one of the primary reasons nuclear experimentation was killed off was that it was corrupt and in the pocket of reactor owners - from the NRC site itself:

AEC to NRC

By 1974, the AEC's regulatory programs had come under such strong attack that Congress decided to abolish the agency. Supporters and critics of nuclear power agreed that the promotional and regulatory duties of the AEC should be assigned to different agencies. The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; it began operations on January 19, 1975.
The NRC (like the AEC before it) focused its attention on several broad issues that were essential to protecting public health and safety.

The NRC rubber stamps everything too, so not much has changed.

Re:Slight change in title, if I may

[garyebickford]

Indeed. Try to find a chemistry set that contains potassium permanganate and glycerin these days, much less the ingredients for gunpowder.
We had science fair experiments in sixth grade that today would get you into the newspapers and black SUVs showing up. And going back before my time, my somewhat older neighbor built a pipe cannon back in the 1940s that fired rocks over a mile.

But there's always the Internet, where you can find the free e-book "Ignition" by John Clark. Very funny history of liquid rocket propellants from the 1940s through to the early 1970s. Any discipline where red fuming nitric acid is considered one of the more stable, tractable ingredients is going to be interesting. (compare with Chlorine Trifluoride)

Re:Slight change in title, if I may

[camperdave]

"Don't try this at home" isn't fun. It's merely entertainment.

I thought it was an entreaty to go behind the neighbour's shed to try it.

Re:Slight change in title, if I may

[runeghost]

Ah, Chlorine Trifluoride. No other description of a hideously dangerous substance makes me giggle as much as Clark's comment's on that stuff:

"It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes."

Obligatory captcha: hoisted

Re:Slight change in title, if I may

[GrumpySteen]

If you enjoyed that, you might like the "Things I Won't Work With" posts on Derek Lowe's blog since he writes with a similar style.

Where's the kaboom?

[ColdWetDog]

There is supposed to be a big kaboom.

Re:Where's the kaboom?

[Mashiki]

That's earth shattering kaboom, you insensitive clod. Now where's my illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator.

What would you expect?

[BringsApples]

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.

Re:What would you expect?

[MtViewGuy]

There's still one nuclear reactor technology they haven't actually scaled up yet: the molten-salt reactor, where the nuclear fuel is dissolved in molten fluoride salts. Alvin Weinberg's experimental reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was only a small 5 MW unit that actually ran successfully but was shelved because it couldn't produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.

I'd like to see someone scale up MSR technology as a technology demonstrator to prove it can work to generate large amounts of electricity, at least in the 85 to 100 MW range. If they can do that, that could mean we can get far safer nuclear power plants, especially since shutting down the reactor is very easy to do (just drain the liquid nuclear fuel from the reactor) and it only generates a very small amount of radioactive waste, waste that has a radioactive half-life of around 300 years.

Re:What would you expect?

[nojayuk]

The molten-salt reactor could have produced weapons-grade plutonium (just add U-238 and continuously extract Pu-239 from the molten salt flow) but by the time it was up and running the US had as much plutonium as it wanted or needed for its thousands of in-service nuclear warheads, created in purpose-built breeder reactors running in Hanford and elsewhere in the 50s and early 60s.

As for "just drain(ing) the liquid nuclear fuel from the reactor" then what? How do you clean it up afterwards? You can't just leave it there. Mop and buckets, or a big sponge?

Going back to the original article there are some fun things folks have been doing recently with experimental reactors but the usual result has been expensive messes that are difficult to clean up afterwards. Commercial breeder reactors, for example, most of which have been shut down as either uneconomic or easily broken (or both). Gas-cooled pebble-bed designs; the Germans are still waiting for the radioactivity in their one to decay sufficiently so they can finally defuel it, including all the bits of fuel pebbles that fractured and jammed the mechanisms. It's been 25 years now and counting. Gas-cooled graphite-moderated son-of-Magnox designs like the British AGRs have high thermal efficiency but fuel is cheap and they were expensive to build and operate so the extra efficiency didn't help them proliferate in the world markets. We'll pass quickly over the RMBK-4 graphite moderator designs... CANDUs are doing quite well in some markets but they're expensive for the amount of generating capacity they provide and heavy water reactors present all sorts of proliferation risks. The Russians are doing some interesting things with compact fast-spectrum reactors which have very high burnup rates, effectively closed-cycle breeders with a possible sideline in isotopic waste destruction but they are very very experimental -- liquid sodium coolant, say no more.

Re:What would you expect?

[LWATCDR]

Yes.
The design uses a "salt" plug that is cooled. Cooling shuts off the plug melts and the fuel drains into a tank that lacks a moderator so the reaction stops. There is no water to boil and fuel is already melted. It will then cool and solidifies.

As long as you have gravity then you are good. Now if all of a sudden gravity stops working then we have much bigger problems.

Re:What would you expect?

[nojayuk]

Then what? The reactor operators can't just leave this mindbogglingly-radioactive boiling-hot slurry in those tanks, they have to clean it up. How do they intend to do so? It will be a requirement of the licencing of such a reactor design that they have plans and procedures ready if it ever does and equipment on standby just in case. "...and then a miracle occurs." is not going to pass scrutiny anywhere in the modern world's nuclear regulatory environment.

BTW the dump tanks don't need to be of sub-critical volume -- in fact they can't be. The molten salt stream carrying the fissionable materials only goes critical when it passes through the carbon moderator in the reactor core. Outside that core no fission can occur unless something goes really badly wrong and moderating material gets mixed into the molten salt stream (say if the graphite moderator core gets badly damaged) at which point you really don't want to be within a thousand miles downwind of this "safe" reactor -- one of the commonly posited cost-saving points of molten salt reactors is that like the Soviet RMBK-4s they don't need an expensive containment structure because they're "safe". Honest.

Re:What would you expect?

[Uecker]

Well those better designs would need an insane amount of (goverrment) money to develop into something useful. This is the reason most of these research projects have been stopped in the past. Cost became totally out of control, while the prototypes still had lots of technical problems which made it very clear that much bigger further investments would be necessary in the future. For example, consider the history of the German AVR. It is considered a gigantic disaster. This is the problem with nuclear: In principle it looks promising, but then some problems occur. Solutions to these problems are proposed, but it gets much more expensive, then even more problems appear, ... In reality, it is huge mess and a money sink. And I think all the nuclear fanboys here on slashdot just underestimate the amount of engineering problems nuclear has by a few orders of magnitude.

Re:What would you expect?

[AmiMoJo]

Unless the moderator is damaged and bits of it fall into the tank, or worse still block the plug hole.

You've just hit on something.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Innovation

[girlintraining]

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.

America centric..

[xtal]

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.

Re:Taylor's Nuke Site

[rubycodez]

no, he did not make a fission reactor. he made a fusor with a variation on design that many other people have done. which is impressive but not relevant to this article of fission reactors

On whose planet?

[duckintheface]

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.

Re:On whose planet?

[Cyberax]

they need to find a nice uninhabited planet to do it on

Don't worry, they're working on the 'uninhabited' part.

Re:On whose planet?

[lxs]

Good thing too. Eagles eat rabbits. Are you seriously going to defend a monster that rips apart cute little bunnies and feasts on their lifeless corpses?

The industry wants expensive Nuclear Power

[macpacheco]

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).

Re:Not real research

[slimjim8094]

I'm assuming you're being sarcastic, but the fact is that because as a species we've been systematically looking into the unknowns for a few hundred years now, there's not very much low-hanging fruit left. You do certainly hear stories about some teenager discovering something really cool, and that's great and should be encouraged and celebrated. But the fact of the matter is that most scientists (let alone the average public) won't do much more than add a tiny bit of knowledge to some very specific field. We're past the days where you could invent powered, controlled flight in a garage, in the same way the Wright brothers were past the days where you could invent calculus, and so on. Science is like a tree, and if you're lucky you might discover the next level in the tree - but the nodes are smaller.

And that's great! The reason it's so hard to discover new things is because we know so much now, and the stuff we know we don't know requires building huge rings under Europe, or launching satellites, or building telescopes that cover entire deserts or something. Basically, we're advancing as a species. But yeah, the size of discoveries nowadays do tend to be proportional to resources.

yes and no

[Tom]

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.

An A C Gilbert Chemistry Kickstarter Project

[westlake]

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

Re:Not real research

[ebno-10db]

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

-- Lord Kelvin, 1900

Decay heat?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

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.

Re:Decay heat?

[LWATCDR]

Yes but the molten salt and the storage container will act as heat sinks. The fuel is in the mass of the salt and not contained in the fuel rods. Not to mention that the fuel is already melted so no worry about a meltdown damaging the fuel rods. No water to boil, the fuel is in the coolant, and no possible steam explosion and it all works at one atmosphere.
 

Re:Wealthy give up their wealth? They don't have t

[femtobyte]

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.

like these nuke planes?

[cheekyboy]

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.

Re:like these nuke planes?

[cheesybagel]

The X-.ray hafnium apparatus has been tested and it seems to be pseudo-science i.e. quackery. It was the rave like a decade ago.

The problem with atomic reactors on airplanes has always been weight. Even when SAC was trying to use it in large bombers. Until someone develops lightweight shielding it won't happen. I do not think this is impossible. But the funding certainly seems to be scarce. The curious thing is that since the DOE took charge of reactor development from the military all development has stagnated. I think this is because the military actually has real applications in mind so they end up producing viable products unlike the DOE.

Re:Not true

[garyebickford]

Actually there's a fairly simple fusion reactor that you can build on your tabletop. It even works, but it doesn't produce more energy than it consumes. The Philo T. Farnsworth mentioned is also regarded as the best candidate as the original inventor of TV. The Wikipedia article also has links to some other methods.