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."

Comments

Re:We have them already.

[CrimsonAvenger]

They power nuclear subs, nuclear icebreakers etc. Stick a transformer on it and connect it to the grid, Bingo, floating nuclear power plant.

More to it than that. The overwhelming majority of the power for a nuclear sub/icebreaker/etc is used to make the props go roundy-roundy.

Only a very small part of that power goes to drive the generators (note that nuclear powered ships/subs HAVE been used to provide emergency power to shore installations, by the by).

And since the generators are sized for the amount of power needed by the boat/ship, you can't just push more steam through them to get more power.

Re:We have them already.

[cbhacking]

Still, it's a reasonable proof-of-concept in many ways. Scaling it up and using a tethered platform instead of a mobile isn't a trivial engineering exercise, but we already know how to produce multi-GW nuclear plants. This gives us a good, safe place to put them. It also means they don't have to go sucking up precious river water for their heat exchangers and cooling towers; the ocean is as big a heat sink as we could hope for on Earth.