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Setback For Small Nuclear Reactors: B&W Cuts mPower Funding
mdsolar (1045926) writes with news that funding for the mPower, a Small Modular [Nuclear] Reactor, has been cut due to the inability to find investors interested in building a prototype. From the article: "The pullback represents a major blow to the development of SMRs, which have been hailed as the next step forward for the nuclear power industry. ... All told, B&W, the DOE, and partners have spent around $400 million on the mPower program. Another $600 million was needed just to get the technology ready for application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for licensing. ... B&W plans to continue low-level R&D on the mPower technology with a view to commercial deployment in the mid-2020s, said CEO James Ferland. But without a major shift in the business environment and in investor perceptions of the risks and rewards associated with nuclear power, that seems fanciful."
Still insisting on the same basic concept that gave us reactors that use just 0,5% to 1% of mined uranium and have the concept of a meltdown.
Even the most advanced water cooled reactor today still does that.
B&W mPower reactor is just a smalled version of the same.
When will this people learn ?
We need a breeder / near breeder reactor that is able to use bare minimum 10% of uranium mined, or much more.
liquid fuel instead of solid fuel, with the fuel molten in the coolant means meltdowns are impossible and heavy neutron poisons (noble gas fission products) can be collected from the reactor quickly, resulting in minimal neutron losses, the lower the neutron losses are, the better the fuel burnup can be (increasing that 0,5% to 1% utilization to much higher levels), plus the less neutron poisons are kept in the reactor, the less excess reactivity exists on the reactor, minimizing the risk of prompt neutron criticality scenarios.
That's why I don't support any reactor except for molten salt or molten metal coolant designs.
The AP1000 and similar Gen III+ are plenty safe enough for my taste, but if you honestly discuss even the most remote risks a gen iii+ reactor with non technical people, they will still be against nuclear power. Plus water cooled reactors demand lots of expensive active safety systems like hydrogen+oxygen recombinants, pressurizer, emergency spray, emergency water injection, the list goes on, making the reactor far more expensive than necessary. Perhaps with the mPower being a much lower power reactor, it can do away without some of those systems, but they can't all be eliminated unless the reactor has low pressure operation (only possible with molten salt or molten metal cores).
Nurse, I think he's off his meds again.
So you hate nuclear power and have no interest in properly learning about it, instead taking your knowledge from Hollywood sensationalization of radioactivity and nuclear power. We find those by the bucket nowadays. The difference is most don't dare speak, because the aren't sure. Those that actually think they got it right are the most dangerous.
Here is a source for serious information on nuclear power, without any BS:
https://class.coursera.org/nuc...
That's because investors don't want to develop a product to compete with something that already exists (and is very well funded) but is having regulatory issues:
That rant was all emotion-fuelled fallacies.
1) No-one was suggesting making "suitcase nukes" and sending them around, because nuclear bombs and reactors necessarily work differently. That's why the worst case scenario in a nuclear power plant is a meltdown, not a nuclear explosion.
2) Fukishima was not a nuclear disaster, it was a huge tsunami damaging a nuclear facility, complicating the existing natural disaster due to risks of radiation exposure. The technology being researched was not featured. There were also no terrorists (or unicorns or fairies) involved.
3) Nuclear fusion is promising and exciting but has net negative power production at the moment, as opposed to fission which has had massive net positive power production for a long time.
4) People researching small nuclear reactions want to merge Yahoo and Myspace to make megawatt xrays for bird watching? You'll have to ask your unicorns and fairies about this one because it doesn't sound like anything on this planet.
5) Spouting insults at people doesn't make them wrong nor you right.
There are real risks to using nuclear power, but if you are to ever understand them you need to calm down and accept their actual nature, scale and likelihood instead of conflating everything with the word "nuclear" in it with the explosion of nuclear weapons. As an advanced course you can compare individual approaches fairly to their practical alternatives (which all have their own issues) before making a judgement.
Given the work China and India are doing on molten-salt Thorium cycle reactors, I can't see why anyone would spend another dime on a pressurized water reactor again.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It has something to do with public negative perception about nuclear power, but it isn't the real driving force. The reason the NRC has become itself anti nuclear is far more related to the millions US politicians gets from fossil fuel lobbies instead. Too many presidents have appointed people to the NRC that are committed to making nuclear power as expensive as possible. Plus it's not like the FAA is much better, I heard a saying that summarizes the FAA pretty darn well "We're not happy until you're unhappy", the NRC is far worse.
There is no such thing as a non-radiactive tritium reactor. That is a fact and a law of physics.
There is also no such thing as a non-radioactive sandwich, that's a fact and law of physics. (C-14 for instance.) What has that got to do with anything? That you use scare words like "unbelievably dangerous", "terrorists" and "suicidally stupid" only makes you seem less informed. You are just a greenpeace troll. Nothing to see here.
"There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
A meltdown is bad enough. If serious enough, it means containment breach and release of radioactive contamination into the environment.
But actually we have living proof that meltdown is NOT the worst case scenario. I give you Chernobyl. You can have a steam and/or hydrogen gas explosion, scattering nuclear fuel rubble and other contamination all around. I give you Fukushima, another series of steam and/or hydrogen gas explosions involving scattering contamination. There have been other explosions.
RISK of exposure? How about very real documented exposure as a fact? I'll tell you what Fukushima is. Fukushima is a testament to the sad reality that, whatever you consider to be the worst scenario you deem it worthwhile to protect against, something much worse WILL beset your creation. The only question is when. That goes for natural events, human failings and ignorance, and human evildoing.
Fukushima was a nuclear disaster. Even if you want to write off anything that happens because of Ma Nature, that doesn't matter since good management post-tsunami could have easily prevented the melt-down and massive release.
I'm sympathetic to the nuclear industry, but industry proponents really need to get a grip. Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were operated by morons. That just can't happen. It should never happen. There are plenty of smart folk, do what it takes to make sure one of them is in charge the next time a tsunami hits. Follow the damn regulations root out corruption. Bluster and sticking your head in the sand just isn't going to cut it anymore.
Play Command HQ online
I wish Slashdotters wouldn't use the word "ponzi scheme" to mean "thing I don't like". It's got a very specific, very informative meaning that's being casually eroded out of laziness.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000-7.04 million deaths and 80-240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces."
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/...
Alone the thyroid treated children in germany are already far over 10,000.
Given that the thyroid cancer rate in the US (for example) seems to be about 13 per 100,000 people year and the population of Germany is about 81 million we'd expect about 10,530 thyroid cancer cases in Germany per year.
So 10,000 cases in children since 1986 is pretty damn low.
If they think there will be any need for this by the mid-2020s, they're in for a rude awakening and a nasty financial loss.
Solar panels have dropped in price by 65% in the last two years. They're expecting another 60% price drop by 2020, and efficiency isn't being sacrificed - it's only getting better, with 25% being achieved in the lab now. Research is also much cheaper - researchers ask for grants such as $5 million or $15 million, not the $1 billion mentioned in the article.
Combine wind farms, hydro power, solar thermal, and the recent improvements with storing energy, both as potential energy and in batteries, and I doubt any one will want to invest in "small" nuclear reactors, either now or 10 years from now. Solar panels aren't the fix for everything, but they will make it uneconomical to put in place big, expensive nuclear reactors, which are only small and cheap by comparison to even bigger ones.
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
If you can figure out how to remove corruption and stupidity from governmental and/or corporate organizations you'd probably get Nobel Prizes in several categories.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Do not mistake ignorance and intellectual incompetence for laziness. They're hard at work screwing up.
The point is radioactive != dangerous. Just as projectile != lethal weapon.
I'm sorry that anyone has to experience cancer, especially a child. I've personally been on the receiving end of one of those diagnosis. However, the statistics show that the cancer rates have not increased any statistically significant amount over the background rate. This has been verified by numerous studies by independent groups from different countries. I'm sure a handful of those cases are caused by the additional environmental pollution from Chernobyl; but, it's in the 10's range. The deaths of the clean up workers are mostly well documented. Thousands did not die; again, the number is in the 10's order of magnitude.
What? A Ponzi scheme bilks successive waves of investors to enrich the originator and hide the malfeasance from earlier investors. How is that remotely like Kickstarter?
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
> Fukushima was a nuclear disaster
Slight correction:
Fukushima was a *man made* nuclear disaster. None of what happened had to. All of the reactors were in the process of shutting down properly. Errors introduced after the fact were the cause of everything that followed. The tsunami *started* the problem, but it isn't the *cause* of what happened.
The *cause*, in the case of reactor 1 for instance, was incorrectly setting the IC valve contrary to very specific instructions in the manual. Had they not improperly operated that valve, and left the IC turned on throughout, it is highly unlikely anything would have happened. Had the crew actually examined the IC, they would have opened it again. Alternately, had they done *anything* to make up for the closed IC, like core venting or seawater pumping, nothing would have happened. But they didn't, they turned off the IC and didn't do anything to make up for the cooling it provided *specifically for the problem they were having*.
Had any of those things happened, today people would be talking about how Fukushima proves that nukes are safe. Instead
Rather than Ponzi scheme, the proper term for Kickstarter would probably be "confidence scheme" or "confidence trick".
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
I agree, unfortunately I think that's the core of the best argument *against* nuclear reactors. We can make them safe so long as nobody does something incredibly stupid - but we're nowhere close to being able to prevent even smart people from occasionally doing incredibly stupid things.
Now, some of the self-regulating liquid salt reactors,etc. that have been proposed have potential - design the reactor so that the only possibility of a meltdown is intentional, ongoing sabotage and you have something that *might* avoid real world idiocy-based meltdowns. None of this "flipped the wrong lever then forgot about it malarky. Until then, well you have an obvious unaddressed safety concern that has been responsible for most reactor disasters to date.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say the Large reactors make more sense in some situations?
If all you need is 50 MW, building a 1 GW plant makes no sense. If you have a projected growth of 25MW per year, and you are bumping against capacity, you have the choice of building out a 50 MW mini-nuke every 2 years or a 1 GW plant every 40 years, the time-value of money on a big plant will kill you for production costs in the short term.
Maybe the modular plant will actually be cheaper once your start producing them in volume, given a streamlined licensing path the the SMR.
The question is whether the natural market for SMRs is sufficiently large that they can ever become competitive, or at least large enough to justify the R&D, etc. needed to produce them in the first place to justify them as an independent market. Some people are betting they can make this work. Under a capitalist economy they are generally free to make the attempt with limits.
mPower may have reached the point that their attempt is going to fail. This does not directly affect the others making the attempt unless investors as a class lose interest in SMRs because of examples like mPower.
If I had an extra 10 billion USD, I would invest heavily in SMRs -- mPower, not a dime. I would bet on LFTR and maybe other fission techs. For example, this reactor design looks like a nice candidate for an intermediate complexity solution -- still a big downside in term of fuel burnup, but might be worth the investment too.
Nothing for fusion though, I don't expect to live long enough to see it pay it. I see SMR as a natural outcome of better tech, not a tweak of a pressurized light water reactor.
I would agree that mPower will never really result in cheap nuke option. The complications necessary to make LWR reactor "safe" fight against scaling down to smaller plant designs.
Sure radioactive means dangerous, but dangerous != harmful. There is always risk. Gasoline is dangerous, you handle it carelessly and you can get a big explosion. Refineries are dangerous. Coal mines are dangerous, etc. The question is not "is it dangerous", but how dangerous is it? How can we mitigate risk? Is it worth the risk?
Another instance showing the high costs and low returns of nuclear power. Nuclear power is not affordable. It gets more expensive over time. The "learning curve" is negative. It relies on massive government subsidies and has serious unsolved problems with waste.
OTOH, solar and wind are getting cheaper and are now less expensive than nuclear.
It just doesn't make sense to invest in nuclear when solar and wind are cheaper, have fewer problems and are already scaling rapidly.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I agree, but the nuclear industry is blase about it. Putting uneducated pencil pushers in charge of nuclear reactors is not an unfortunate anomaly, it's business as usual.
Plant operators should be as well qualified as airline pilots. They should be in simulators half the time dealing with as wide a variety of fake disasters as can be imagined. They should be tested and tested and tested, and quietly retired when they can't hack it anymore.
Play Command HQ online
Nuclear power is all about safety and security, which are or should be the costliest items on the budget, the fuel is relatively cheap, and processing would be cheap too if it weren't for the safety and security issues. Doing it large-scale in high security lock down zones enhances safety, as opposed to, as the above poster says, trying to keep track of lots of mini-reactors being shipped to many places, fueling hospitals and such, all over the place, getting stolen/lost/loaded on an airplaine and slammed into a building in NY 9/11 style. When there are too many mobile reactors, keeping track of them becomes difficult, and the safety risks are huge. All civil nuclear power should be non-mobile as a first rule. Any nuclear material leaving a high security facility on a train or an arm-guard-cash-truck or in any way is a safety issue.
But there is a need for mobile small scale nuclear power, the most important example being military submarines, which simply cannot function on diesel, as they have to get oxygen from the air, and their tactical situation may require deep underground stays for weeks at a time. Also nuclear fuel needs recharging only every few years, as opposed to every other week with diesel. That's a very important military consideration, as half of all military issues relate to logistics, and supply of materials to the battlefronts. Only nuclear power makes sense for a submarine, and it has to be mobile and small scale. The logistics issue of bi-weekly diesel fuel deliveries also requires carriers to be nuclear powered, needing only a biannual refueling. Do we really need submarines and carriers? Yes. As long as you have a military, sea power is essential, and the battleship is obsoleted by both the airplane carrier and the submarine. Small scale mobile nuclear reactors are an absolute necessity for submarines, not as much a necessity but a very good idea for carriers, and I would even go as far as saying it might also make sense in the future for military airplanes of the slow, long-haul freight kind, which are big like a submarine, and similar but air cooled units could be used in both. Having freight airplanes with guaranteed uptime/availability regardless of availability of diesel can be a lifesaver in the future is diesel prices hit over $20/gal, and the world gets militarily tense over that high price. I mean the $20 in year 2000 US dollar values, not in an inflation world, where, if minimum wage hits $380/hr, and monthly rent is 38,000, and the Dow Jones is at 1,400,000, then $20/gal wouldn't be a big deal, would it.
Besides the military, there are very few civilian requirements for small scale mobile nuclear units, a major hospital being maybe the only such example. A major hospital of at least a certain size should service every area of the country as a last resort to send patients to if power fails to the whole region of the country including the branch hospitals and the major hospital itself. A major hospital should have reserve batteries to last at least 20 minutes, then reserve diesel to last two weeks (when electricity goes out natural gas may still be available indefinitely, so generators based on that should be run before diesel stores are touched, (the same generator should be able to run both diesel and natural gas), but if both electric and natural gas is lost then you need), with ability to request the military to deliver one of these or a couple of these air-cooled airplane-engine units in a high security, heavy military defended way, operated by military personnel until power connections to regular power plants can be reestablished, or if not, indefinitely guarded. The air cooled part is what would take up 95% of space, the reactor itself being very small, as availability of water cooling cannot be guaranteed, the hospital may be lucky to sustain its water supply from local wells, if the water-pipeline/sewer infrastructure also fails. Groundwater wells should be mandatory for such hospitals, and empty spaces should be reserved within a mile range of hospitals to acco
This is nonsense. Treating 10k children by giving them prophylactic iodine and periodically checking thyroids is not treating them for cancer. Several hundred children in the surrounding area did get thyroid cancer based on the result I just re-read. Almost all of them responded to treatment (they did not die).
Hundreds did not die daily in the cleanup. A million people did not die in the immediate aftermath. The amount of radioactive material released was large; the "liquidators" received an average dose of 16.5 REM. That's high but not at all lethal. It carries an increased cancer risk of a few percent at most. The city was evacuated but people continued to work in the plant for a decade afterwards, with at least two of the reactors remaining online generating power.