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Transatomic Power Receives Seed Funding From Founders Fund Science
pmaccabe writes "The company aiming to make a Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor(WAMSR) is now getting $2 million from the venture capital firm Founders Fund. From the article: "The Founders Fund is the firm behind some of the more successful Internet startups out there including Facebook, Yammer and Spotify, but also some science-focused companies such as Climate Corporation, Space-X and satellite startup Planet Labs. The fund, which was created by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and his partners, promotes this manifesto: 'we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.'”
Getting the technology is relatively simple. Getting government permission to build it might be a bit harder...
The problem here is that decades of bad press for nuclear power have resulted in almost insurmountable political opposition even when it's clearly a technically superior solution to a whole bunch of problems.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
$2 million? What a joke; that'll buy what, some office space?
WTF are they going to do with $2 million? They're going to need a fuckton more cash than that to develop anything that has a hope of success.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
...from other articles.
The biggest issue with molten salt reactors is corrosion, so they need to find just the right materials to build the thing.
They should re-position the reactor as a nuclear waste destruction system
I'm not sure that this is really true. The reactor appears to be able to burn already "spent" fuel rods from other reactors but this is not going to result in less radioactive waste but rather more. The dangerous waste is the fission products, not the remaining unburnt Uranium which is practically stable (half lives in billions of years). In this design they will be extracted from the molten salt and will then need to be stored somewhere resulting in an increase in the net waste stored since each fission generates 2 or more daughter nuclei and one common one is an isotope of Krypton, a noble gas, which will undoubtedly take up a lot more volume that than the original uranium fuel pellet it was made from.
No, it was Jet Packs. And we got them. The problem was, the real thing wasn't as great as our imaginations of them. In fact, they kinda suck. Pretty much like Giant humanoid robots or mobile suits. The physics of these things just doesn't add up.
The fore-runner of this reactor ran at the Idaho National Labs (very successfully) for 3-4 years in the 1960's. Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Lab tried to get the then US to build an experimental molten-salt reactor. The US government flatly refused: you can't build bombs from these types of reactors.
'we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.'”
instead? there wasn't some group that said, "well..we have the tech for flying cars.. but lets go with 140 characters."
To our current understanding of physics and material science, a flying car* is not possible. where as sending text over the internet is possible.
we wanted clean nuclear fuel, what we got was alarmists twerps that have done far more to hurt the environment then nuclear ever did.
*a la 5th Element
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
my god, they could almost pay to have the first feasibility or environmental impact study planned out.
"I heard him then, for I had just completed my design,
To keep the Menai bridge from rust by boiling it in wine."
We've had flying cars for decades now...
They are called "helicopters".
I really dislike companies that have websites that describe their non-existent (potential future) products in the present tense.
The thing is, the realities of Chernobyl and Fukushima are the realities of ancient, outdated equipment, bad design and unsound engineering.
Operational nuclear reactors have a service life of 30+ years. Any design you can come up with is likely to be obsolete and the equipment in it outdated possibly even between the time it is designed and built, much less for the full service life. State of the art doesn't remain state of the art for long.
As for bad designs and unsound engineering, those don't magically disappear just because time has marched on. Dealing with that takes a focused effort and even if the engineering is done perfectly, if it isn't built, operated and maintained properly it doesn't matter how well it was engineered. Some of the problems of a bad design only become apparent after the unit is built. Some problems are a failure of management. Other problems occur because most reactors built to date are unique designs with minimal commonality so each has its own unique failure modes and any lessons learned cannot be shared or built upon. Even if we decided to build to a common design there are problems there too because any failure modes will now be common to every installed reactor. We also have the problem that our best nuclear technology is apparently kept secret and used in military vessels rather than for civilian applications. Hard to learn when your best engineers can't talk about what they've learned.
The fact is, we can build reactors that don't blow up NOW.
Explosions have never been the problem with reactors that anyone really worries about. The problem is radioactive material leaking out of containment which can occur in a variety of ways. There is NO reactor design we currently possess that can fully eliminate the possibility of a containment failure. Some designs are clearly better than others but all of them carry very serious operational risks in some form or another.
So. Exactly how do we have a "radioactive disaster"?
From the problems you don't predict. From unexpected design flaws. From the black swan events. We have little operational experience with reactors of the sort you describe so there undoubtedly are problems we haven't come across yet. There could be problems with containment materials like embrittlement or corrosion. The design may have flaws we aren't aware of yet. Overlooked/neglected maintenance. Parts of the reactor not being built properly. Improper management of the core mixture. Externalities like natural disasters or wars. Management may take shortcuts in pursuit of economic gain. Etc. There are plenty of failure modes out there and not all of them can be addressed with an improved design.
All the advantages you describe sound great on paper but there are lots of designs that are great on paper but not so great in the real world. Until we've actually tried (and we should) its a little premature to declare that it is perfectly safe.
And a 9.0 earthquake is NOT a "routine event".
Maybe not routine but certainly expected. An earthquake of magnitude 8 or greater occurs on average about once a year somewhere in the world. In a location like Japan it is not merely possible, it is almost certain to occur eventually. Over 80% of the largest earthquakes occur somewhere along the Pacific Rim. Anyone who is surprised that a magnitude 9 earthquake struck near Japan is an imbecile.
The largest nuke mankind has ever set off was 50 megatons. So strap 9 of those bad boys together and that's what you're trying to engineer against. Ask an actual engineer about the logistics of building for something like that.
Well I am an actual engineer. Nobody promised it would be easy. Want to build something dangerous? Better plan for some worst case events. If you can't deal with a natural disaster that was as predictable as a big earthquake/tsunami in Japan then perhaps the activity isn't such a good idea.
Guys who make their money on dotcom fads now complain that there's no hard science or invention being done? Seems like the air's a little thin up on that high horse.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.