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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."
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..."
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.
Convince the career politicians. Step 3. Convince the tax payers. There is no step 4.
Convincing the taxpayers gets rather easy when it is career politicians ensuring alternative (or traditional) fuel costs continue to rise by placating lobbyists. They sure as hell aren't getting cheaper over time as resources continue to be depleted and we refuse (for whatever illogical or corrupt reason) to accept nuclear power in its place.
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!
This is why we need to switch to LFTRs
No pressure vessel to worry about.
Not in my back ocean!
You missed it. Reprocessing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
subsurface water carries the contamination away, contaminating water supplies forever and at an ever increasing distance. yucca mountain was one of the rare places where that was not true.
We could stop wasting the fuel you call waste, and using it completely instead. What we do now is like bringing in oil, burning off the diesel and ignoring the gasoline, kerosene, and all the other fuels it contains.
http://www.nei.org/Issues-Poli...
On the other hand, thorium reactors are even more efficient, and the leftover is nearly inert.
We already have very advanced containment systems. There's nothing about them that would be unsuitable for oceanic use, aside from requiring a whole lot of floatation. The containment system at Fukushima wasn't even close to modern, yet it did a pretty good job anyhow. Hell, the system at Three Mile Island contained nearly all the radioactive material, and that was 35 years ago.
With even the Mark 1 containment building found at Fukushima (which was 40 years old; the same age as TMI), an incident like Chernobyl (which had *no* containment building) wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Compared to modern containment buildings though, Mark 1 isn't even *last* generation; it's outright obsolete.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
didn't we just spend half a year trying to deal with with a broken oil platform?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
DH was a failure of a blowout prevention device. This essentially BLASTED the rig off the well, which continued to spew oil.
You're not going to have that sort of problem with a reactor.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It's called "reprocessing".
"Spent" nuclear fuel can be reused many, many MANY times if it is reprocessed properly.
At that point, spent fuel "waste" becomes a non-issue.
Except that it's not been done. When Dixie Lee Ray was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission he proclaimed that the disposal of nuclear fuel would be “the greatest non-problem in history” and would be accomplished by 1985, yet here we are almost thirty years past that date and still there is no High level waste disposal site anywhere. The closest anyone has come is the Swiss and even there project is a multi-decade test project and extremely expensive.
As for burner reactor technology, such as IFR, there are no materials technologies to support a plutonium economy.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
I'm just picturing what happens when you mix the best parts of Deepwater Horizon with the best parts of Fukushima... It doesn't conjure a great image. This would definitely face an uphill PR battle, at the very least.
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
People are so terrified of previous generation nuclear technology that they're not willing to even look at what an actual modern reactor would offer. It's like dragging up the combat specs of a Sopwith Camel and claiming that there's no place for aircraft in modern warfare.
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.
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?
While that sentiment is accurate, no one wants to pay for decommissioning old reactors. Say we build a bunch of modern reactors, in 50 years will anyone want to pay for decommissioning them?
And it is still a non-issue. When it is 30 years later and you can still store it on-site then it is not a lot of waste. Compare that to any other energy source, the amount of toxic waste, even solar panel manufacturing and you have your answer.
Make them finance the decommissioning at build time. I believe they did this in the 70s with Vermont Yankee, though clearly they screwed up. Presumably we can do better with the actuarial stuff now that some of these older plants are shutting down.
The main problem is that no one can justify building one right now. Hell, it is hard to justify the _operation_ of one. Natural gas is cheap, and even coal plants are shutting down because they cannot compete.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Reprocessing has not been done because Peanuthead declared it to be illegal. Meanwhile there is no rush to reprocess because new fuels is so cheap from bot mined supply and recycled from Cold War weapons through the Megatons to Megawatts program. While we wait for reprocessing to get cheaper and fuel to get more expensive, there's storage at Yucca Mountain, which is finished and waiting to be opened.
Right, it hasn't been done because a bunch of environmentalist morons have forestalled any reasonable measures of fuel reprocessing by invoking the "proliferation" boogeyman.
Yeah. Disposal is a non-starter. And should never have been pursued the way it was. Why? Because NOBODY wants that stuff in their back yard. They don't care HOW safe it is.
But, again, the dueling environmental agendas have basically left the fuel with no place to go. So it basically sits in containment casks out in back parking lots and the like.
As for "a plutonium economy". Why would it have to be solely plutonium? IFRs will burn plutonium, Uranium, Thorium and other fuels equally well. So you're burning stuff down until it's only going to be "hot" for a couple hundred years, rather than tens of thousands. And more, fully "spent" wastes burned in earlier generations of reactor can actually be used as fuel in later generations.
So we get rid of weapons-grade materials, and burn it down into something far far safer. And we get a buttload of power out of it at the same time.
How the hell isn't that a Win-Win-Win scenario?
Oh yeah, because no matter what, some idiot bridgae is going to equate nuclear power with "it's a bomb".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Exactly how dirty and expensive is it? The French have been doing it for how long now?
That's why their waste containment facility FOR THEIR WHOLE COUNTRY is a small room with a vaulted floor.
As for "competing with solar and wind".
You're right, they're not going to be competitive.
You know why?
BECAUSE THERE'S NO COMPETITION!
Again, you CANNOT (and I will repeat for emphasis) CANNOT use solar OR wind power as your baseline power source. They aren't dependable sources. Anyone telling you they are is selling natural gas or some sort of petroleum product.
Nuclear IS a dependable, steady source that infrastructure engineers can PLAN for.
And the only reason nuclear has any sort of price comparison to solar or wind to begin with is the fact that, under the guidance of enviro-nuts, they've basically tarriffed the entire process, from proposition through decomission into the stratosphere. Require the kinds of multi-billion dollar investments (see bribes) for wind or solar plants that are now required for nuclear and watch the price of those options skyrocket too.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
How do the Strontium and Cesium go away with reprocessing?
10 seconds of your time would have taken you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... where you would have discovered that methods have been devised to separate them out and thus in large part detoxify the remaining waste (given that we should already be recovering the other useful elements).
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Rouge waves, typhoons, collisions with tankers, vulnerability to warships, aircraft, submarines.
But hey. It's cool that a tsunami won't screw it up.
Wouldn't it be better on the sea bed? Also tsunami-proof...but also rogue-wave, aircraft and tanker proof.
Even better. Don't build any more reactors than can go into meltdown.
No sig today...
Rouge waves
I don't think Aunt Flo is a significant danger for nuclear power plants.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
"on the seabed" means it becomes vulnerable to earthquakes. A handy adage to keep in mind is, "If it is sitting on the floor, it can't fall and break --but it will get kicked." MIT definitely needs to address the "storm" issue --the "Ocean Ranger" was claimed to be "unsinkable" (much like the "Titanic"), and look where it is now. Perhaps the place to put it is NEAR the sea-bottom, so waves and storms can pass harmlessly above it, and quakes can pass harmlessly below it. Then the only thing to worry about are sinking ships hitting it, and big meteors hitting it, and so on. Relatively rare!