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MIT Designs Tsunami Proof Floating Nuclear Reactor
First time accepted submitter Amtrak (2430376) writes "MIT has created designs for a nuclear plant that would avoid the downfall of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The new design calls for the nuclear plant to be placed on a floating platform modeled after the platforms used for offshore oil drilling. A floating platform several miles offshore, moored in about 100 meters of water, would be unaffected by the motions of a tsunami; earthquakes would have no direct effect at all. Meanwhile, the biggest issue that faces most nuclear plants under emergency conditions — overheating and potential meltdown, as happened at Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island — would be virtually impossible at sea."
Convince the career politicians.
Step 3. Convince the tax payers.
There is no step 4.
They power nuclear subs, nuclear icebreakers etc. Stick a transformer on it and connect it to the grid, Bingo, floating nuclear power plant.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
It's perfect! Unsinkable? Unthinkable!
No Homer will ever be allowed, and all the regulators will be objective and unbowed!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
But that fixes the earthquake problem!
Now they need to worry about torpedoes
Compare the relative frequency of major hurricanes/typhoons to that of major earthquakes. Add to that the various potential problems that any floating structure has (springing a leak and sinking comes to mind here).
Then, consider that in Japan, the nuclear plant closest to the quake epicentre actually survived unscathed. Because the people designing it did not stick with the minimum legal specs for the seawall height like the geniuses at Fukushima had, but did some research on their own. And simply made the seawall much higher.
Conventional plants are not that bad, if they are designed by competent people. If you put them on barges, though, as these dudes are proposing, you are just adding to the potential failure modes, while not avoiding any that are impossible to handle. Not a good thing.
Meanwhile, the biggest issue that faces most nuclear plants under emergency conditions — overheating and potential meltdown, as happened at Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island — would be virtually impossible at sea.
Yeah, it will just melt down through the containment vessel and dump the fuel slag into the ocean instead. No problem!
After years of use, super-intelegent radioactive Dolphins take over the world!
then a huge rogue wave hits it. aw shiiiiiiiiiiit
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
While it might be moored out at sea, it would have to be built in a much different way to avoid the possible dangers from a hurricane tipping it over or making it unstable.
Of course, it might save a couple hundred square miles of land from being contaminated - but contaminating thousands of square miles of ocean doesn't seem preferable to me.
Doesn't matter where you stick them, I have yet to see a good and permanent waste solution. I expect that at some point (maybe hundreds of years from now) we will have our Lucille Ball moment where we just can't figure out where to stick new waste once enough accidents at existing "permanent" dumps render them unsafe for further dumping, and steadily more wary residents go all NIMBY over future plans.
Maybe I missed the moment where we figured out how to really neutralize the spent crap and not just bury it for the next guy to figure out?
Given other renewable options, I would rather see fossil fuel taxed more to capture their negative externalities, and nuclear's true subsidies removed so there could be a fairer fight for other solutions (more molten salt storage, more solar, more wind, more proper grid design, more innovative load leveling, etc).
Just spitballing here. Feel free to flame away and tell me all the reasons why this can't ever be made to work. IANANE.
Just take Ocean ranger and add reactor...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Not in my back ocean!
Russia is already constructing floating nuclear power stations.
didn't we just spend half a year trying to deal with with a broken oil platform?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
Really, Mr Bond?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
It was said that it's impossible for land based Nuclear reactors to melt down, so "virtually impossible" can't be impossible enough.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
with modern design.
What about the issue of getting the electricity to shore.
Remember, when these reactors were design. plate tectonics was new.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...then you face a whole new risk profile. Storms, collisions with ships, corrosion due to the salt water. Fire is a greater danger in a platform environment. Crewing the platform is a greater challenge. If the platform is a floating moored structure then yes, it's essentially earthquake-proof. If however it uses a rigid seabed platform then this is not true. And it's my understanding that most shallow water oil rigs use the rigid stand design.
Of course you can design for this and the risks made acceptable. I'm just saying that it's not as simple as "floating reactor, all the problems go away!"
Simply being at sea doesn't prevent the cooling problem. Remember, Fukushima was right on the ocean. The problem is that the cooling system has to have at least two loops. An internal loop of coolant (usually water, though salt has also been used) actually travels inside the reactor. Consequently it picks up some residual radioactivity from being exposed to all those neutrons flying around. You cannot just use this single loop for cooling, or else you're releasing this radioactive coolant into the environment.
A second external loop of coolant cools the internal loop via a heat exchanger. This external loop picks up nowhere near as much radioactivity, and the coolant (water) is safe to dump back into the environment.
If it were just one loop, you could come up with a clever design using thermal expansion to make the water flow through it to provide passive cooling in the event of a pump failure. But with two loops (and the inner loop being closed), you're pretty much reliant on active pumping to remove heat from the reactor core. The problem at Fukushima was that power to these pumps failed, and backup generators designed specifically to supply power in that scenario were flooded and their fuel source contaminated.
I don't see how putting the plant on a floating platform helps in this scenario, unless you're willing to open up the primary cooling loop to the environment and just dump water straight into the reactor (with the resulting steam carrying both heat and radioactivity out). Which was pretty much what they ended up doing at Fukushima. If they'd done it before the cladding on the fuel rods melted, we'd only be dealing with a small amount of radioactive water (deuterium, tritium, etc) being released into the environment as steam, instead of fission byproducts being directly released. So I don't see how being by vs on the ocean makes any difference for this scenario.
Maybe you could design the steel containment sphere to act as a heat sink, allowing sufficient cooling when submerged? But the containment's primary job is to contain what happens inside. That's why it's a sphere - it encloses the largest volume for the least amount of material and surface area, and its mechanical behavior under stress are very easy to predict. This is precisely the opposite of what you want from a heat sink. You want the most surface area for a given enclosed volume. Which makes me suspect that the steel containment could only operate as a heat sink if you're willing to compromise its protective strength somewhat.
The other problem I see is that putting it out at sea hinders accessibility. Meaning more mundane events like a fire, which are trivial to handle on land, become much more problematic at sea.
Everything I need to know about energy logistics I learned from Sim City 2000.
You put the plants / reactors away from the city, out in the water, so that pollution doesn't bother folks and if there's an explosion, nothing else catches on fire. The cost of maintaining the power lines is far less than additional rebuilding costs after a disaster strikes and the plant blows. I guess next they'll discover it's fucking egregiously foolish to zone schools and residential next to industrial plants. In this case, they didn't even need a sim, they could just read a history book.
In the news Somali Pirates have hijacked a nuclear reactor...
Man has yet to build a vessel that can survive the worst nature has to offer. This is crazy.
Considering how badly infested stationary ocean objects can become with various types of sea life, and how much maintenance it takes to keep a small sailboat from corroding and suffering general mechanical failures due to both of the above, I wonder at the amount of maintenance required to keep one of these in operation.
What could possibly go wrong?
http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/24/...
Rat-infested nuclear Cherynobyl.
So what about Tsunamis? What if a giant rock or snowball from outerspace hits it at upwards of 17000 miles per hour?
Better not worry too much, just chill out to some smooth, rolling basslines from the 1970s, man.
I think it's going ro be a long, long time...
Stick Men
Objects floating in the ocean are EXPOSED, they are easily damaged by weather, can be attacked easily, are hard to secure, and VERY expensive to operate.
On top of all this the article is silly. Nobody at MIT has 'designed' a reactor, they just made a proposal that is barely more than just saying "build it on an oil rig!" with a few pictures. They talk about reactors anywhere from 50MW up to 1000MW which means basically "Gosh, you could float almost any nuclear reactor!". However it is not AT ALL clear that a 1,000 MW reactor would be made safe by passive seawater cooling in the event of say the whole thing sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Consider the effects of Fukushima COMBINED with the McCondo well blow-out... Its not a pretty picture to imagine a meltdown in 100 meters of water not too far offshore. Yes, the ocean would probably make this less totally disasterous than on land, but it might also be IMPOSSIBLE to quell or clean up. Statements on the lines of "it must be safe in the ocean" are exactly what goeth before a fall in engineering.
Anyway, it will seriously have to be studied, though I suspect others have done so already. As they said, the Russians have been working on this concept for years. That's one of the interesting things about it though, working on it for years, but where's the beef? Its probably not quite so easy as it sounds.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Assume a large spherical radioactive cow...
Table-ized A.I.
And how does this platform intend to deal with a cat 5 hurricane? Because, you know, that's what's going to hit something stationary at sea. A sunken nuclear reactor is surely not going to cause any damage. Nope, none.
The bigger problem is that ALL REACTORS ARE RUN BY HUMANS and the track record for their response to major disasters is not great. Sometimes people do the right thing, in fact most of the time, but many opportunities exist for disaster, and a statistically significant amount of the time responses fail. Furthermore there will always be greedy and unmotivated operators cutting costs like TEPCO. I have no reason to believe that Entergy for instance (a major US operator of nuclear power plants) is any better than TEPCO, or regulated any better either. Is it thus not just a matter of time before we have Fukushima in the US? Probably. Its not clear that building a whole bunch of AP1000's or MSRs or whatever will materially improve that situation. It will just create greater complacency resulting in even worse preparedness. Its inherent in the system.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Like, say, placing the emergency generators on the hills right next to it, nothing bad would have happened. Of if they had spend the extra $100.000 that would have cost for hydrogen valves, the buildings would not have exploded.
The problem is not that nuclear cannot be made safe. The problem is that the people doing nuclear cannot make it safe. And as these are also the people doing waste storage, this will remain a serious issue for the next, say, 1 million years or so. The combination of greed and stupidity found in nuclear planners is absolutely staggering.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is Psychotic. There are other land-based designs that could not run away because the mass of material is to small and encapsulated in materials that provide a distance between the elements that is sufficient to extinguish a chain reaction when all cadmium rods are removed. How can you quantify the risks surrounding a floating platform. BOGUS.
lma in durham nc
The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) design (state of the art 1986) shuts down safely in the event of a sudden, complete power failure. It uses nuclear waste as fuel, reprocessing until there is orders of magnitude less long life nuclear waste than with a light water reactor, the design they propose to float. IFR is an inherently safer design that largely solves our nuclear waste problem. Why are we dreaming of ways to build more light water reactors?
I actually like the concept a lot. But I agree that there is some potential for fallout here:
Having a replacement for Fukushima is one thing, but a world of these going wrong could be a real problem. A majority of the world's oxygen comes from phytoplankton in the ocean: killing them in mass via radioactive leaks might actually create a credible climate disaster.
Not likely that all of the world's reactors would start spilling simultaneously, but the only thing about this that gives me pause. Otherwise, this is a really great idea.
Have gnu, will travel.
Reprocessing and breeding are dirty and VERY VERY EXPENSIVE technologies. They will never compete with mining natural uranium out of the ground until most of that uranium is gone, at which point only if we have a LOT of reactors will it even then be worth it. Sadly by that point we will have HAD to get rid of most of the waste we could reprocess since it will simply be insane to keep that much of it around on the off chance we decide to do it. What this means is that ironically it will never be cost-effective to reprocess fuel at any time, now or in the future. The only way would be a massive up front expenditure of money and the result would only be nuclear power that is 2x more expensive than it already is, not much of a bargain.
Thorium may well work, but the problem is we're a good long ways from building the type of reactor that we can put it in and burn all the fuel down (just using it in existing LWRs doesn't provide much benefit). Even with massive funding these reactors won't really come on line for 30 years, maybe more like 40 realistically. That puts them out to 2048-2058 time frame. Even LWRs like AP1000 won't be online for 10 years. Its not even clear they will be competitive with SOLAR by then, and they lose to wind NOW.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
"would be virtually impossible at sea."
Ah, use of those famous last words I see......
The basic problem with existing reactors is that you need to use moderators and control rods to sow them down and keep dumping water on them to keep them from melting. So putting it out to sea doesn't really fix the issue; at worst case, it could sink to the ocean floor, rupture under pressure, and the core could sink through to China.
Besides, we already have safer designs that we can put on land. The Canadian "CANDU" reactor design requires a heavy water moderator to keep the nuclear reaction going; the fuel is low-enriched or unenriched, so if you drain out the heavy water, the reaction stops (or slows to a point where you have time to fix it or set up backup cooling and containment), thus avoiding almost all issues in natural disasters. They're even working on a next-gen version, but AECL apparently lacks the cool factor of MIT.
http://nuclearfaq.ca/
But what happens if things go wrong? If something goes wrong and the reactor ruptures or melts down it would certainly make it easy for the radiation to disperse globally surrounded by the sea.
All nuclear plants are backstopped by the government in case of accident.
Just prohibit the government from backstopping nuclear plants, and force them to contract private insurance. Since any actuary worth anything will tell you that nuclear plants are uninsurable (the risk is simply too great, the cost of handling an accident too high), no plant, unless using a demonstrable safe design will be built anymore...
Another option to not run out of water is to just have the thing downhill from a large permanent lake.
Putting something out at sea and sacrificing containment for the sake of reliable cooling water seems to be ignoring that there is more than one possible mode of failure. It also means that the thing can never be mothballed but instead needs to be actively dismantled at the end of it's life - not a trivial task when there would be a great deal of radiation involved in many parts being demolished.
However what this thing DOES have going for it is a small reactor size which brings it in from being an utterly stupid suggestion to something that may just work if as much care is taken as is with the small military reactors - which probably removes it from commercial consideration without a few "shortcuts". IMHO the same small reactors on land with reliable cooling water are a far more sane idea.
One of the biggest expenses I hear about when someone is building a new nuclear reactor is the zillion lawsuits that spring up. I imagine a fair amount of these could be avoided if the physical structure was built in a different country from the one adding the fissile material. Or, even in the same country, people would be less likely to try to stop construction because if it's a good reactor and people stopped you from using it, you could probably sell it to someone else who is willing to use it. I imagine whoever works the kinks out of the reliable floating reactor construction process could have a nice ongoing construction business.
There was enough money involved to attract management with plenty of political skill to get the good jobs but no background on what they are attempting to manage. That has led to a cycle of needing a unmistakable disaster with each generation of management or they forget their responsibilities. TMI was the perfect one since it was an obvious fuckup with little consequence, but it was too long ago for anyone other than engineers, technicians and other non-horse judges to take seriously. Chenobyl gets written off as "those crazy commies". The most recent chain of stupidity is unfortunately being written off as entirely due to the tsunami and the similarities to US reactors and US industry practices are being ignored.
As for waste storage - any mention of it was seen as being some sort of traitorous move against the nuclear industry, which is why the Synroc I saw in 1987 didn't get the funding and approval to be properly tested until a couple of years ago. Waste storage has been so badly managed that there have been incidents such as one where some idiots put enough drums of high level waste together to get something similar to the Chicago atomic pile.
Who told you that lie? Several reactors have suffered a melt down / loss of primary containment event where fuel slumped to the bottom of the pressure vessel and burned through. TMI is an example of such an event. This was always a possibility in Generation II PWR and BWR designs. It's one of the reasons we need to be building Generation III+ replacements.
Don't forget the white cat.
With 2 tails, just to mess with the environmentalists.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Subs are designed to sink.
Its part of their mission.
There was a british nuclear sub involved in the search for MH370
I don't know if its still on the case, given that no more pings have been heard, and they expect the batteries of the black boxes to have run out by now. A nuclear attack sub has good passive sonar, great for detecting other sound, but not useful at looking at the ocean bottom for wreakage.
Rouge waves, typhoons, collisions with tankers, vulnerability to warships, aircraft, submarines.
But hey. It's cool that a tsunami won't screw it up.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In case of accident, people on the shore don't have to be relocated because radiation leaks are underwater. Yeah, ever heard of a concept called food chain? You radiate the seas and next thing you know the whole food chain is radiated. We don't have examples at all of this happening with other industrial misbehaviours (cough, high concentrations of mercury in fish, cough).
I actually prefer the nuclear plant in ground where at least it can be buried and not affect the whole environment.
Chernobyl would not have been prevented by putting the reactor in water. It was the only accident which had a "nuclear power excursion" as the reason. TMI and Fukushima were a failure of the classical cooling.
In Chernobyl the operators ignored the normal precautions. They operated the fuel in a state where xenon (see http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g...) was present. Due to this the system was far away from the assumed stable oprtion point assumed in the controls.
The power which you would have needed to dissipate at the event to cool the reactor would have been ong the order of 200GW. Normal heat transfer coefficients are on the order of 10s of KW/m^2/K if i assume that you allow 200K difference on the surface, you end up at an active cooling surface of 100000m^2, which just is not there, not even if you drop the reactor into water.
Back in the 1970s, General Electric created a company called Offshore Power Systems that was intended to build floating nuclear plants. I knew some of the people who worked there.
No such plants were ever built, though, and OPS is long gone.
Worse things don't happen at sea.
Well, hindsight is 20/20. Can you can guarantee that the design of the next reactor using smart and cautious engineers won't blow up or cause damage? No! There's also the problem of dumping nuclear waste. I think the harm caused by coal is less than that caused by a nuclear reactor incident and the risk of maintaining a reactor is totally not worth it.
Two-faced ones are easier to get. Hell, I can get you a two-faced cat by 3 o'clock this afternoon - with nail polish.
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I'm sure it's been said elsewhere, but a loss of containment would be catastrophic...
Using seawater in the secondary cooling loop makes maintaining the cooling system a nightmare because seawater's rather corrosive.
Did we forget about Deepwater Horizon already? Sure, it's not a drill. It's much safer, because it's a nuclear reactor.
I'd much rather a reactor melts down on land than in the middle of the ocean, where water current would disperse the damage even further. This is just plain dumb.
"Man marks the earth with ruin; his control Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain The wrecks are all thy deed," We are still kidding ourselves if we think we can control the sea
It's all about blimps nowadays. Both Google and SpaceX are racing to complete their prototypes
"My atomic zeppelins high above in the mesosphere, beyond the reach of storms and artillery, will beam both free energy and internet connectivity directly into the homes of a grateful populace below. And once the masses has abandoned their carbon fuels and cable service, greedily suckling at our teat for both knowledge and energy, they will be completely under our domination, and then nothing - nothing - will stand in our way!" - Sergey Brin interview, The Economist, 18 Jan 2014, p. 42
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Is this an innovative new design or a solution to a problem that has already happened?
"Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the f-ing Peace Corps." - John 'Bluto' Blutarsky
Really? You think the public will accept the idea of putting nuclear power plants directly on/in the ocean?
Uh, no way in heck. Could be the best engineering and design in the world, not going to happen untile our collective human backs are against the wall facing a calamity that only this idea can solve.
Besides, there is no problem with well designed land-based nuclear power plants ... only with poorly designed ones. So the solution to that is obvious.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Can't put nuke plants in the ocean ... threatens to many colorful pretty things like coral, 'free willy' whales, and 'Flipper'.
No the solution is BLIMP MOUNTED NUKE PLANTS. 100% immune to the effects of earthquakes and tsunamis. And we can reclaim the land for useful things like corn fields and stuff. And the air is cold up there, so cooling is easy, right? And if there's a problem, cut the cord and they drift off safely in to space.
Remember you heard it here first, so that's like a patent or something.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
It's not like they'd shop around for used reactors and platforms, spare parts, and skimp on shielding, extra hulls, cabling, maintenance, upkeep, training, human resources in general, waste management, oversight, and more.
While shamelessly buying lobbyists and "campaigning" all sorts of officials, authorities, politicians and press with loads of souvenires, perks, invitations, contributions, and outreight payoffs, is it?
in an ocean, what could go wrong? Except maybe typhoons, rogue waves and terrorists....
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
So when the reactor goes critical and the core melts through the containment pool right into the ocean, with radiation spreading everywhere and every living species being affected by it, undergoing some subtle, grotesque mutation, our grand kids will only wonder wtf we were thinking when we made this into a reality.
. . . can the "floating reactor" take a wave of torpedoes from a submariner turned pirate/terrorist?
Will it have enough "excess buoyancy" even after 30 years of operation with maintenance going to the lowest bidder?
It is not about not having disasters. It is about having them with acceptable low probability and acceptable amortized cost. The nuclear industry has failed spectacularly at that.
The stance "nothing bad must ever happen" is only advocated by people that failed "risk management 101", i.e. people that are really clueless.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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Emergency cooling was available at Fukushima. The lack of pumps early on was widely publicised but actually they had emergency vehicles with pumps on-site that were working just fine. They would have been enough to avert the meltdowns and explosions, but due to damage to the plant and a critical valve being in the wrong position most of the water the pumped in was diverted to storage tanks.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Coal kills at least thousands, most probably hundreds of thousands, every year. If we had a Deepwater Horizon, an Exxon Valdez, a Chernobyl, and a Fukushima every year, the harm from all other types of power generation would still not be as great as the harm that coal does.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?