Slashdot Mirror
MIT Designs Less Expensive Fusion Reactor That Boosts Power Tenfold
jan_jes writes: Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak (donut-shaped) fusion reactor. The stronger magnetic field makes it possible to produce the required magnetic confinement of the superhot plasma — that is, the working material of a fusion reaction — but in a much smaller device than those previously envisioned (abstract). The reduction in size, in turn, makes the whole system less expensive and faster to build, and also allows for some ingenious new features in the power plant design.
From T(first)FA: the major radius is 3.3 m and the minor radius is 1.1 m.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Does anyone want to venture a guess as to which will come first, the Year of Linux on the Desktop, or the widespread availability of this fusion reactor technology?
Damn it. That'll teach me not to read TFA before failing at first post.
Still, it is good that research in that area is still ongoing. We need to find out pretty soon whether this planet has to go all-renewable in order to survive. Working fusion within the foreseeable future would be very much desirable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is good news, and I applaud any improvements that will shorten the time to commercial nuclear fusion... but...
It's clear to me that what we should do in the interim is develop thorium fuel cycles using LFTR and 4th (or is it 4.5?) generation nuclear fission reactors.
The thorium fuel cycle and liquid flouride thorium reactors are the clear fission winners, and would help clean up the mess that the Uranium fuel cycle has produced in the past, including processing all that 'used nuclear fuel' sitting in cooling ponds into viable starter fuel for the thorium reactors, and eventually into much safer fission products.
Smaller faster and cheaper, plus we already have it working.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Question 1: When my perfect robot wife picks me up in our flying sedan will I be able to get gigabit speeds on my sunglasses? --- or is that still further out
Not unless you used the 100 gigabit tether for your sunglasses.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Afaik, the total amount of matter actually reacting at any given moment is less than a gram, if you cut that supply the reaction will auto-extinguish in micro-seconds.
Um, not exactly.
Look, it's like laptops or commercial fission reactors.
They were first built for military uses (I had a laptop in 1982 in the Army, and a better one in 1985), and fission reactors were built for submarines and other uses we're not supposed to talk about way before they were commercially available.
So, if your question is "Will there be nuclear fusion reactors on military planes and ships and other things by 2025?" then the answer is Yes.
Will you see one in your city before 2040? Probably not.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
People really need to understand that we are nowhere near breaking even on fusion reactors (e.g., producing more energy than you put in) and any fusion reactor designs are purely for research in fusion physics and similar...
FTFY
Lockheed Martin says 5
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
that they called the new design an ARC reactor... I.E. Iron Man....
"I don't code the things you use, I make the code your things use better."®
Or... we could spend the money on solar and wind (and battery storage) which we could implement in just a few years using proven technology.
Why wait 20 or 30 years for something that might (or might not) work when we have a solution now that we know works.
Nuclear has gone from "too cheap to meter" to "too expensive to matter".
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Waste heat? Heat is generally what they want to produce to make steam to run through turbines to make electricity. Heat can also be used to separate water for H fuel, desalination etc etc etc. Or current designs are wasteful because they do only one thing and throw out a lot of energy. It's mostly a PR and regulation issue people would say the desalinated water could be radioactive and the regulators want to oversee anything even tangentially related to the plants.
No sir I dont like it.
No, don't "see fukushima".
With fission, the challenge is stopping the reaction from running away. With fusion, the challenge is keeping it going. If you suddenly lose containment, what happens is that the hot plasma burns into the walls of the reactor, damaging them. Annnd.... that's it. There's a small amount of tritium there, but it's not a great amount, and tritium isn't that hazardous of a material compared to most radioactive elements. There's some induced radioactivity in the reactor, but it's quite limited because you can choose what to make the reactor out of (and iron's not all that bad for induced radioactivity anyway, it's generally the heavy stuff that's problematic). The lithium blanket is harmless (except for, again, breeding tritium - which is constantly removed). There's beryllium in there, but it's not dangerous when not in gas or dust form. Some work had looked into using lead as a neutron multiplier, which could have indirect breed polonium or other problematic compounds, but beryllium works a lot better than lead.
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
that failure mode for fission reactors is from decay heat of fission products in the fuel. That problem doesn't exist with fusion in any form.
Published almost a year ago, so, 4?
> when we have a solution now that we know works.
> solar and wind (and battery storage)
Because wind & solar & batter is NOT a solution that works. You cannot run the national power grid off of batteries.
TFA makes no mention of what happens if you stop supplying the energy required to confine the plasma. This could be a weak spot in the system.
It explodes in a 40MT blast. Didn't you see Aliens?
Please, make an account and stop posting anon, because I'd love to subscribe to your comedy newsletter.
TFA makes no mention of what happens if you stop supplying the energy required to confine the plasma.
Getting the right conditions for more-out-than-in fusion is REALLY HARD. So far it's pretty much only been done momentarily - using atomic fission bombs as working parts to apply enough heat and pressure.
So when there is ANY problem in the confinement, the fusion stops.
You're left with the energy in your plasma - several camera photoflashes' worth - and your superconducting magnet - which probably is unharmed and still running.
If the magnet is not properly quenched, at most it's got the energy of a large electrical fire or small bomb - on the rough order of a few hand grenades or laptop battery fires. This might be enough to throw around the small amount of low-level-radioactive material created by months or years of neutron bombardment of the reaction chamber walls and the like.
This is not in the same ballpark - by many orders of magnitude - as the few tons of molten, activated, coreium you'd get from an old-tech fission plant meltdown (all set to become an UNcontrolled, UNcooled, operating reactor if it manages to be puddled into a compact volume), or the fuel assemblies full of recent fission products still putting out, for months, heat enough to melt, ignite, or partially vaporize themselves if the coolant level drops enough to uncover them.
It's the difference between Fukushima or Chernobyl and, at most, a transformer fire in a warehouse with a substantial number of ionization smoke detectors installed.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
DAFUQ, solar is starting to get below COAL in cost and it's rapidly getting to Natural Gas territory. The cost is dropping faster than anyone expected now India and China are building plants as fast as possible. Oh and storage? It's being implimented, RIGHT NOW at costs comparable to coal. Why do you think thermal coal prices have dropped through the floor and existing coal mines are beginning to shut down?
Your opinion on renewables is from about 5 years ago.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The only efficient, earth-based source of the tritium needed for all working fusion reactor designs is a fission reactor.
No, you can breed tritium with a fusion reactor by using lithium blankets around the reactor. While you need some to start the process, current reactor design studies show reactors producing tritium at a rate 1.1-1.15 times the rate they consume it, with indications that will improve with more work.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One of the sure signs of an idiot is an easily repeatable phrase
The primary reasons that Nuclear is expensive is the constant lawsuits and attempts to derail efforts to implement it
And even after all of those efforts, the only reason that Nuclear is more expensive than Coal (the only competitive power generation, solar is waaaay off the mark) is because Coal does not have to contain the waste that it spews from its smokestacks, which contains mercury, uranium and enough CO2 to cook a planet
It is painful that the idiots who carry around signs like "you can't hug a child with nuclear arms" and want to save the planet from nuclear power are the same idiots who are forcing industry to use Coal power
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Comment removed based on user account deletion
'solar is starting to get below COAL in cost"
cite or GTFO
Wherever You Go, There You Are
good luck with that.
Neutrinos don't interact with matter very much at all. Like to the point that it took abandoned mines full of water to catch enough of the neutrino blast coming from the sun ALL THE TIME to make enough blinks to finally prove they really exist.
If you're really worried, put your home's Mr. Fusion in the back yard rather than under your bed. (The inverse square law is your friend.) Remove any granite countertops from your kitchen or granite gravel from your driveway, to more than compensate by lowering the DETECTABLE background. Or move a few feet downhill to reduce your exposure to secondary cosmic rays.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Oblig XKCD- https://xkcd.com/678/
So, your solution to the energy problem is wiping out 29 out of every thirty people now living?
LOL, maybe you need to learn more about nuclear power
Wherever You Go, There You Are
It's only progress if it works. The field of fusion has a well established track record of reactor designs that do not work when built for one reason or another. I'll get excited when they have demonstrated that it works and not before.
I wonder when you thorium freaks will get off it. LFTR technology is nowhere near the maturity level for large-scale power production. I'd be surprised if a pilot plant could be built in 30 years. MSRE had numerous serious/fatal problems which LFTR advocates conveniently never mention. Even if LFTR does work, it would likely be INSANELY EXPENSIVE, in terms of final cost per delivered kWh. There are very good reasons why LFTR would be horrendously expensive, and I'll explain them if you want to know. But suffice to say, solar and wind are most definitely far cheaper and could provide us with all the energy we could ever need.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
TFA makes no mention of what happens if you stop supplying the energy required to confine the plasma. This could be a weak spot in the system.
It explodes in a 40MT blast. Didn't you see Aliens?
Yes, but I watched it from orbit. It was the only way to be sure.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
You do understand that Chernobyl used a flammable material for the neutron moderator and poring water onto the plant, where necessary, caused a significant amount of radiation to become airborne, even after the steam explosion blew it apart. What eventually brought the situation under control was the partial burying of the core in lead and sand to reduce the radiation so a makeshift containment building could be hastily assembled over the blown apart reactor.
Also, the problem with Chernobyl was more about the lack of safety engineered into the system, than a fault of Nuclear power persay. In Soviet Russia times the imperative was to generate power cheaply, and NOW. They literally built a house of cards, with inadequate safety, cut corners on all kinds of safety systems, and had complex interactions between seemingly unrelated systems. Then they skimped on operator training and safety standards. It's no wonder that this reactor design didn't blow up more often. It truly was an accident waiting to happen.
Modern reactors can be designed to be fail safe. One design I saw claimed that you could literally walk away from it running at full power and it was both thermally and physically safe. It would insert the control rods if it got too hot and there was nothing that could stop it. At that point, even a total loss of coolant pumps would not result in a melt down as a number of plugs would melt, flooding the area around the containment vessel and allow the conduction/convection cooling of the core. Even then, if the core continued to heat, it would release the fuel assemblies which would fall into deep pools of reserved cooling water and end up far apart in the bottom of the containment building. All this didn't require ANY operator input, or power to accomplish, it was totally mechanical and automatic and only required the reactor containment system to remain in tact and right side up.
There are a number of very safe and practical designs for nuclear power today, it's just impossible to get a permit to actually build one because the environmentalists won't let that happen..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Uhhh... Chernobyl dissipated all the heat in its reactors in real time while running... That's the whole point of a nuclear reactor. The issue comes when cooling is shut off to the reactors, and the heat is allowed to build up.
With fission (at least with 50s designs), that's a major problem, because you can't just turn it off.
With fusion, it's not a problem at all, because you simply stop providing fuel to the reaction and it'll shut down immediately. Getting fusion reactions *not* to shut down is the problem being faced at the moment.
He means after epa fines for using coal.
That seems to be the elephant in the room WRT fusion, producing 3x as much energy out as you push in won't help with global warming if you produce 100x as much waste heat as you do usable energy out.
The amount of waste heat produced by all human activities is trivial compared to the energy the Sun puts on Earth. Waste heat has nothing to do with anthropogenic global warming.
If you fail to contain the reaction it very rapidly dissipates. That's in fact the whole problem with this type of reactor design - no one (as of yet) has succeeded in keeping the plasma confined for long enough to generate more power than they put in to start the reaction.
Umm, no.
Tritium has a halflife of 12.3 years. Even U235 has a half life of 700 megayears. In other words, tritium is intensely radioactive compared to uranium (or most natural radioactives).
Note also that uranium is an alpha emitter. You can protect yourself from it by wrapping it in old newspaper. It takes (slightly) more to keep tritium from being a problem (say, three sheets of newspaper)....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Tokamaks are so unworkable that even a tenfold improvement leaves them wanting. My money's on Lockheed's design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
According to the US EIA, in 2012, the overnight capital cost per kilowatt (effectively the construction cost) for coal ranged from $2,934 to $6,599, depending on the type and size of the plant. Solar thermal was at $5,067, and photovoltaic was $3,873 to $4,183 per kilowatt, placing it squarely in competition with coal. That was three years ago; since then, solar power installation costs have dropped even further, while coal has likely stayed about the same, or perhaps even increased slightly.
However, it's still a pretty far cry from natural gas. Excluding fuel cells, the overnight costs ranged from $676 to $2095 per kilowatt. Solar would have to drop nearly half from its lower cost to gas's highest cost. It is dropping, and it probably will get there, but I expect that it's not going to be competitive with gas for a few years yet.
Part of the issue now I think is that labor has become a far more substantial part of solar installations, and that's a relatively inflexible amount. For example, if half of the cost of solar is the labor (not sure if it is or not), then even if the panels were free, it would only be competitive with certain kinds of gas plants.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Pumped storage hydroelectric plants are nothing new and many operate around the world. Energy efficiency is 70%-80%.
I don't know how cheap nuclear plants are going to be. The Ontario government was going to build two new ones but stopped when the proposals came back with a price of $26 billion. In 2013 they said the cost had gone down a bit but not enough to justify building them. (Not that I trust the Liberal government with anything financial. They are the ones that paid $1B to cancel a gas powered electricity generating plant in order to win a riding.) For info about the price of the nuclear plants see here http://business.financialpost....
There are a number of very safe and practical designs for nuclear power today, it's just impossible to get a permit to actually build one because the environmentalists won't let that happen..
The energy corporations don't want to builld new reactor plants, they want to keep old ones in useage, this costs less money. The environmentalists fear that new reactors will be built to insecure standards to spare money.
This problem is a political one. It hardly is a technical one.
The real question is: will fusion achieve real energy production before our civilization collapse because of power source exhaustionN
Neutrinos don't interact with matter very much at all. Like to the point that it took abandoned mines full of water to catch enough of the neutrino blast coming from the sun ALL THE TIME to make enough blinks to finally prove they really exist.
Homestake Mine experiment: The chlorine in 100,000 GALLONS of C2Cl4 liquid caught about ONE electron neutrino every two DAYS. Even if you're a real couch potato you're a lot smaller target than that big tank - like by four orders of magnitude, which will swamp variations in the neutrino-interaction cross-sections of your various elements. You might catch more than one electron neutrino in your lifetime, but not many more.
Measured value for the solar constant (total energy from the sun going through an area of space at the Earth's orbit - roughly that area's share of the energy delivered by the sun's fusion) is 1.361 kW per square meter. Area of a sphere is 4 pi r^2. So let's be pessimistic and assume a fusion power plant turns one part in four pi of the fusion energy into deliverable power. (It will probably be closer to 60%) A 1.361 kW generator (enough to run your house) a meter away would be about as "bright" as the sun, neutrino-wise. A 1.36 GW power plant (enough for a million houses) a kilometer away, ditto.
One nice thing about low, constant, levels of ionizing radiation is that they actually slightly REDUCE the incidence of cancer and the like. (This is part of why Denver residents don't have horrible cancer rates compared to those living nearer sea level.) Apparently the ionizing radiation provokes the production of inducible enzymes that repair DNA and scavenge free radicals - preventing more damage from both radiation and free radicals from the cell's own energy production than the radiation causes. Up to the saturation of the induciblity it's a slight net gain. Unfortunately, the neutrino flux from fusion reactors would be too low to confer this benefit.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The internet model: "we'll lose money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume!"
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Contrats, of all of the many thousands of radioactive isotopes created by man or nature, you picked the one with the 32nd longest known half life. Try compared to nuclides in general.
There's a balance in terms of half life. The shorter the half life, the more intense the radiation - but the shorter you have to deal with the problem. The longer the half life, the less intense the radiation, but the longer you have to deal with the problem. The only way around this is a product that has a very low energy in its radioactive decay. And indeed, that's just what tritium is .
Tritium's decay energy is only 18.591 keV, which is tiny by the standards of radioactive decay - by comparison, U235's decay energy is 4678 keV - 251 times more intense. Furthermore, alpha radiation, while harmless outside the body (like tritium's ultra-weak beta), is (unlike beta) terrible inside it - its biological effectiveness is 20x that of beta. Hence a decay from a atom of U235 inside of you is 5032 times more damaging than a 18.591keV electron (beta). On top of this, you have biological half lives. Uranium's is only slightly longer than tritium's, 15 days instead of 12. But, again, U235 is not normally a problematic radioisotope. 239Pu, 90Sr, 226Ra, 45Ca, etc have biological half lives so long that they're effectively with you until they decay or you die. Oh, and on top of all of this? All of the energy of beta decay doesn't go into the electron; a higher percentage goes into the muon antineutrino, which escapes harmlessly off into space. The average energy of the beta particle from tritium decay is only 5.694 keV. Net result? Before controlling for the difference in half life, U235 is 20540 times worse for the body than tritium.
Now, of course, due to 235U's incredibly long half life, its radioactivity rarely a problem - which is why fresh fuel rods are not considered very dangerous, but spent ones are. People's concerns in nuclear accidents center around the fission products: strontium, iodine, plutonium, etc - things with shorter (but still problematically long) half lives and strong biological effectiveness. Versus them, the ridiculously low energy tritium is almost irrelevant in terms of biological effect, even if present in similar quantities. Combined with the very small amount of tritium that's in the torus at any point in time, it's just simply not even remotely comparable.
Did I even bother to mention that gaseous tritium tends to rapidly escape wherever it is and ascend up and out of the atmosphere? Tritium in the form of heavy water can be problematic in higher quantities, but of course, there's no "higher quantities" of any form of tritium in the torus.
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
Provided you can get rid of your NIMBYs, wind and solar will some day be developed to its fullest potential. So then what baseload source will the other 80% of our industrial needs come from? We're not Germany, so it's not going to be coal.
I would much rather live near a nuclear plant than a fossil fuel plant or a wind farm.
At the ICOPS conference (International Conference on Plasma Science) I asked a couple of professors what they thought of this.
They thought it was pretty telling that Lockheed wasn't investing a lot more money in this concept than they are.
If Lockheed isn't putting significant money into it, maybe you should think twice about putting your money (figuratively speaking) into it.....
That said, I really hope Lockheed does succeed with this, and starts shipping units like crazy and displacing coal power production worldwide.
--PM
The goal of a fusion reactor is to generate energy. If it does not generate energy then it does not work.
Tritium doesn't bioaccumulate significantly (10 day biological half life), unlike Strontium and Iodine isotopes.
Injection is relatively easy; one uses pellet injectors. They basically bore tiny pellets of a mixture of deuterium and tritium ice and shoot them into the middle of the core with a tiny gas gun.
Removing the helium "ash" is harder, and requires something called a divertor. The plasma naturally pushes the helium toward the outside, as it's heavier. The divertor basically juts out into the outer edge of the plasma stream and skims off the plasma, acting as sort of an exhaust system. But it's an incredibly hostile environment, and not just because the temperature (it has to operate continuously at thousands of degrees, and that's after water cooling!) - it's being pelted by high energy alphas all the time! Regardless, it provides not just a way to get rid of helium but takes up many megawatts of heat that are used for power generation.
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
I do not know where you are getting those costs, but here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Coal comes up about 1/4 to 1/2 the cost of gas turbine
This is using LCOE, which takes into account the entire lifecycle of the fuel source
The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is a measure of a power source which attempts to compare different methods of electricity generation on a comparable basis. It is an economic assessment of the average total cost to build and operate a power-generating asset over its lifetime divided by the total power output of the asset over that lifetime. The LCOE can also be regarded as the cost at which electricity must be generated in order to break-even over the lifetime of the project.
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Yes, I live downwind of one of the largest nuclear plants in America
Not a problem for me or three million other people in the same area
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Let me fix that for you
One of the sure signs of a person with the mentality of a three year old is an easily repeatable phrase
pedantic enough for you
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Well funded fossil fuel interests who use loud mouthed environmentalists as a reason for their muddle-headed politicians to respond to the environmentalists by acting in the fossil fuel industry's favor
Wherever You Go, There You Are
It would be interesting to compute what the effect of using this tape, rather than copper windings, would have on the scale of Bussard's/EMC2's polywell fusion machine prototypes. The Polywell is essentially a big gassy vacuum tube that produces fusion-powered electricity from hydrogen and boron.
The proposed 100 MW machine is 3 meters (about 6 1/2 feet) in diameter - because the scaling rules (5th power) include both volume and mag field strength, which both go by power laws (3rd and 4th respectively) of the radius. Their sweet spot is 1.5 meters - about the size and power density of a Boeing 777's engine - with too little power produced if much smaller, needing impossible material strengths if much larger. A machine this size, peripherals and all, would fit in one store segment of a strip mall and power a small city.
But their prototypes so far have used copper magnetic windings and pulse operation. It's not clear to me whether these engineering numbers include superconducting magnets - and if they do, whether they use windings as good as this tape or something more akin to the IETR.
A 5 kW "Mr Fusion" about the size of a home furnace would finish off the power grid. A 20kW version the size of a microwave oven would run automobiles without the need for recharging.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Never mind things that already work such as, wind and solar, as well as things that likely will such tidal pools.
Put all your money in something that m-i-g-h-t someday work.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Still gonna make waste.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
but is that before or after the government subsidies for using solar?
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
That's in fact the whole problem with this type of reactor design - no one (as of yet) has succeeded in keeping the plasma confined for long enough to generate more power than they put in to start the reaction.
Actually I understand that one of 'em recently DID reach theoretical breakeven (more fusion energy produced than input energy consumed) for a moment.
But that's still a "factor of several" from ENGINEERING breakeven (more put into the grid than pulled from it). There's still a long way to go.
Not counting fusion bombs, of course. Batch processes are a LOT easier than flow. B-)
That's one of the reasons they keep trying to do ignition with lasers. If they could trigger a fusion bomb without using a fission bomb for a primer, they could bury it, set it off, use the hot hole to make steam for a while (geothermal style), then drop in another one and repeat...
Unfortunately, somebody could also skip making the hole and just set it off in a city. So the tech would be kept under tight government control. Non-batch processes would not need such tight regulation.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The military has been using it for years.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Then there's other potential-energy solutions like lumps of concrete on inclined rails (if you have hills but no water), kinetic storage flywheels on magnetic bearings, flow batteries with arbitrary-sized tanks of electrolyte, compressed-air storage, reversible hydrogen fuel cells, UltraBatteries.. the list goes on.
Nearly all of these are well-established technologies. All have an efficiency cost, of course, but the cheaper the solar/wind input gets the less this matters. Renewable + storage is absolutely an effective and reliable baseload solution, and already competitive with coal in many cases (even before you factor in coal's huge external costs).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
RBMK (Chernobyl) reactors also were advertised as absolutely fail-safe in their time.
I'm not sure that marketing was really considered credible. Here is a Washington Post artcle from 1978 that has a very skeptical tone regarding Soviet "safety".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
There are actually many uses of this waste heat. For example, it could be pumped around a town to provide hot water or heat in the winter, or it can be used by industrial processes which otherwise would use conventional means to generate heat. Besides, all existing power plants produce a lot of direct heating (with the exceptions being solar and wind).
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Since they typically go on about the 1950s experiment and know nothing about what India is doing with it today, probably never.
Just remember, 1 kw coal generates 5 times the electricity in a year that 1 kw solar does.
do you live downstream of hanford where the waste will end up?
Go on Alibaba. You can build systems capable of taking 4 homes entirely off-grid with redundancy backup power in case of some 2-3 day long solar eclipse. Cost? $8K or so. I've already sold and installed several systems for about 2x that amount for businesses.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Fusion? Seriously? Extraordinary claims and all that.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
It is painful that the idiots who carry around signs like "you can't hug a child with nuclear arms" and want to save the planet from nuclear power are the same idiots who are forcing industry to use Coal power
Indeed. Where would we be now in terms of CO2 emissions if the goddamn 'green' movement hadn't shat all over nuclear energy?
I suspect that we'd have a great deal more electricity to play with today and that the abundance may have been enough to spur interest in electric vehicles much earlier.
Pure speculation of course. One thing I'm sure of though: we'd be considering the CO2 problem from a much better position than we are now.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Do you want to live near nuclear plant? I don't, no matter how new and shiny with latest "bug-free" design it is.
Well done, NIMBY. I hold you arseholes partially responsible for the fucking mess we're in today. Thanks so much for your efforts!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
none of those are as good as artificial lakes that you pump water into.
the best source to pump it with? nuclear. duh.
the real problem is that a certain ceo said at a product release that the whole usa could be powered by batteries and the public bought the idea without blinking...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You might not be quite so pessimistic about the topic if the research had been properly funded, rather than being repeatedly cut back to the point where fusion is always n years away. I do appreciate the sentiment though and I'm frustrated that we collectively achieve so little on important stuff like this.
However, given the progress to date and the many different approaches that are being explored, to say we'll never develop the technology suggests that you either have some deep and unique insight into the problem the rest of the world hasn't woken up to yet, or you just know that you are correct because feelings.
Neither holds any water as far as I'm concerned.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Hanford is a military processing facility, it does not store commercial nuclear waste
Currently commercial nuclear waste is stored on-site, until a national repository can get through all of the legal hoops that it has been forced to jump through
The constant lawsuits against the national repository has limited the amount of safety available for waste storage, but it is still much safer than living downwind of a coal power plant
I notice that you post a lot of opinion about nuclear power, you are either a magnificent troll, or horribly misinformed
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Did you just claim that the validity of an argument is dependent on the manners of the messenger?
That sounds like something an idiot would say...
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
see, fukushima
For what? An example of the damage that can occur when the magnetic containment system in a fusion reactor fails?
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Thanks Rei! Google of course makes it easy to research stuff (if you know what you're looking for) so I find comments like yours very helpful for steering further research in addition to the intrinsic educational value of your posts.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Unfortunately, somebody could also skip making the hole and just set it off in a city.
Honest question, I think I'm missing something - wouldn't that require the construction of a NIF-level facility at the target site or a similarly-powerful orbital platform aiming its lasers at whatever hohlraum-equivalent you've dropped on the city?
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Thermonuclear weapons are the obvious extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claim.
Duh. I mistook the joke for conspiracy theory, that was stupid.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Thank you! my thoughts exactly when I read it as well.
RBMK (Chernobyl) reactors also were advertised as absolutely fail-safe in their time.
Yeah maybe by the soviets. Fact is at the time that type of reactor was completely illegal to build in the rest of the world due to the positive void coefficient (which is in fact an anti-safety feature).
In fact it didn't blow up because of just design error, but because of some operator experiment went wrong.
It was a mixture of poor (intentional) design and operator error. TMI also had design flaws and operator error, yet was much better designed. In particular, TMI was designed so that failures would stop the reaction which they did. So, even when it underwent a complete meltdown, it ended up safe with no expernal contamination.
Nothing like RBMK has ever been built in the west and was never at any point deemed acceptable to build in the west.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'm not sure if they ever prototyped it (I don't think they did, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised), but there was a design that involved dropping a fusion warhead to the bottom of a mine shaft filled with water and then driving a geothermal-style power plant from the resulting steam.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Hazard of a radioactive material isn't merely how "hot" it is, but also how biologically active it is. Radium, while outside the body, isn't a particular problem (IIRC an alpha emitter), if it gets inside you your body uses it like calcium so it stays in your bones, irradiating you from the inside, for a large amount of time. Tritium on the other hand doesn't linger in the body, it remains for a fairly short time period, so ends up being a lot less dangerous than some much-less-hot radioactive elements that would end up getting incorporated in the body.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
There are a number of very safe and practical designs for nuclear power today, it's just impossible to get a permit to actually build one because the environmentalists won't let that happen..
[Citation needed]
I'm no expert on nuclear, but it's usually the price that's the real problem. The plants are just too damn expensive to build. This goes for old and tested designs, and no least for new, safer, untested ones.
Fusion's 17 MeV neutrons are nothing compared to spallation's neutrons, which can approach (or in some designs even exceed) a GeV. 17MeV neutrons are most eminantly stoppable. Yes, they have a longer penetration distance, and yes, there are some differences in behavior (they tend to cause (n,2n), (n,alpha), (n,d) etc reactions a lot more often while lower energy neutrons usually only do (n,gamma) transmutation), But these are not fundamental differences nor fundamental problems.
Fusion reactors do not use "layers of lead" as shielding. You have some misconceptions about how shielding works. Lead is an excellent shielding material for gamma and beta, but it's terrible for neutrons. It does not moderate them down at any relevant rate due to its high atomic mass, it has a low (n, gamma) gross section, and when it does undergo neutron capture it breeds bismuth - which is fine, except when bismuth undergoes (n, gamma) it breeds polonium, which is really, really nasty stuff. There's also a variety of other neutron reactions lead can undergo which lead to other radioactive products. You don't use lead for neutron shielding. Quite to the contrary, lead is used as a coolant in some types of nuclear reactors because of how little it interferes with neutrons.
Neutrons by contrast are generally best blocked by light elements. Hydrogen is the most effective moderator, although you want both to moderate down the neutron energy and have a high neutron cross section. And of course you don't use pure hydrogen because that's an explosion hazard. So if you want liquid shielding, something like borated water is your best bet. For solids, borated plastics are best.
However, the neutrons in a fusion reactor are not seen as an undesirable thing, but as a critical part of the process to keep it going. Because you need tritium to run it, and tritium doesn't grow on trees, you have to breed it. D-T gives one neutron and it takes one neutron to make one tritium, so if you didn't have any neutron multiplication, the *best* you could possibly do (with no losses and 100% capture) would be breakeven. The reality is that you have to do neutron multiplication to get enough to operate. So the reactors use a lithium-beryllium blanket, of a thickness to absorb the overwhelming majority of the neutrons. Outside of this there will always be stray neutrons that escape, you're not going to want to just stand next to the thing, but it's not going to be a Glowing Ball of Death.
Now, obviously, for structural materials, you're not going to be building it out of borated water, borated plastic, or lithium. Beryllium, mind you, is light and an excellent structural material, but it's super-expensive and difficult to work with, so it's only generally used structurally in key areas. Aluminum (better, lithium-aluminum) is great and undergoes almost no induced radioactivity, but its low melting point limits its use in high temperature applications. Graphite would be great, and is great in some cases - but it undergoes Wigner energy problems if not operated at high enough of a temperature. Composites, which aren't as Wigner energy sensitive, usually can't take the heat. So altogether, one generally deals with iron alloys (steels), with the alloying agents chosen based on what gives the desired properties while undergoing the least problematic transmutation reactions. With proper design, the level of transmutation can be kept pretty low.
Why would it be low? Well, the vast majority of iron is 56 iron. There are also a few percent of 54Fe, 57Fe, and a fraction of a percent of 58Fe. Let's trace the neutron capture paths here.
54Fe becomes 55Fe. This is radioactive, but the half life is only 2,7 years - hardly "forever". It decays to 55Mn, which is stable. If during the 2,7 years average it captures another neutron, it becomes the common 56Fe. If the 55Mn captures a neutron, it becomes 56Mn. 56Mn is radioactive but only has a halflife of 2,6 hours. It decays into 56Fe. So either way we get back to 56Fe with no long-lived product
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
Labor costs are dropping too, especially on residential and small local installations. New clever mounting systems make installation on most roofs a snap, and it can often be done as a DIY job. Also there are developments to combine solar panels, insulation and roofing, so when a new building goes up, solar power will be more or less integrated (with labor costs split across solar and roof work). When residential solar gains in popularity, I can see housing project developers deliver "solar ready" housing with the electrical wiring already in place, meaning a further cost reduction (cheaper to install solar ready meters, fuse boxes and run wiring when you're still building the house). Or the house will come with panels already installed.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Ugh... that should read 14 MeV neutrons, not 17.
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
The whole anti-nuke sentiment is part of the reason why we are still stuck with unsafe reactors, 30-40 years old, and kept running way past their projected lifespan. Look into Thorium cycle plants a little bit further. This technology promises to solve a lot of problems such as leaking pressurized reaction vessels, overheating/meltdown when the cooling dies, and waste that has to be kept safe forever. These things are no more unsafe than a large chemical plant, with comparable worst-case scenarios.
That's the promise, at least. There are still tons of practical problems to overcome, but those are engineering issues that seem easy compared to the challenges posed by viable fusion reactors. And perhaps thorium plants will turn out to not be completely safe... they'll still be way safer than any other nuclear plant, and way cleaner than any coal or gas fired plant. Interest in this technology is finally picking up, after the anti-nuke lobby and (in Europe) the French with their heavy investment in uranium plants have stalled large scale research for years. China and India are betting on this, and I recently noticed a bunch of research projects in Europe kicking off as well.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Actually, the holy grail of fusion is aneutronic fusion. There's a group working on it that is literally doing their experiments in a garage in Jersey, and they have already exceeded the technical landmarks of the multi-billion dollar ITER in only a very short time. All other power generation designs require that we still use a heat engine to create electricity. The Aneutronic Fusion gives off massively charged 'jets' of positively and negatively charged streams which can be captured to generate electricity DIRECTLY. No conversion losses. It's also got the 'side effect' of using one of those jets of charged particles as thrust.. as in put it on a spacecraft and reach intra-solar bodies in weeks or months. Oh, it's also got the advantage of not giving off neutron radiation. at all. In fact, they are stating that after shutting it down you could safely walk into the reaction area in 30 min or so.
To me, THIS and a LFTR reactor working together would be the best possible power generation going forward. The benefits you could from a really hot LFTR reactor for making liquid fuels from C02, burning up old 'spent' fuel from conventional fission reactors and for the medical isotopes it generates just makes too much sense NOT to use them.
If I sound stupid, it's not me talking....
Like "fixed that for you" or similar? :-P
1 kw coal generates 5 times the electricity in a year that 1 kw solar does.
Is a pound of feathers lighter than a pound of iron too?
The primary reasons that Nuclear is expensive is the constant lawsuits and attempts to derail efforts to implement it
How is it that NIMBYs and greens are so good at keeping nuclear down, yet fail to stop fracking or coal plants or oil drilling? Why is nuclear so uniquely vulnerable to their lawsuits?
The reason nuclear is dying out is the cost. Simple as that. Governments don't want to spend that much subsidising it and providing unlimited liability insurance any more, power companies don't see it making enough or any money for them. Even France, the biggest proponent of nuclear power in the world, realized that its nuclear program was basically just welfare for power companies at this point, and the power companies are strangely unwilling to build anything once the subsidies are cut back.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Considering what's at stake, that is, the promise of almost limitless clean energy, how is it that the U.S.A. isn't leading the world in an Apollo to the moon, first atomic bomb, Panama Canal etc... like effort to develop a usable fusion reactor. Yes, it would cost a lot but so what. The payoff would be priceless. Are the oil and coal companys paying off politicians to block it? I really don't get it.
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/a...
Coal is only cheaper than natural gas when comparing the cheapest coal technology against the most expensive gas technologies. The cheapest gas technology is well below the costs of the cheapest coal and at the expensive end the two are pretty much competitive in costs.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
All this didn't require ANY operator input, or power to accomplish, it was totally mechanical and automatic and only required the reactor containment system to remain in tact and right side up.
I wonder what kind of disaster would be required in order for the reactor containment system to be intact and not right side up.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Naval nuclear reactors do not need to be right side up in order to go through a proper shut down
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Strangely, materials don't evolve on their own. They require research funding.
A lot of the development in superconductors and cryogenic magnet systems has been funded by large research efforts like fusion and the LHC.
You actually can hug a child with nuclear arms. But only once.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
But a cup of feathers is lighter than a cup of iron.
Whoosh! You missed the joke.
You should learn the difference between kw and kwh and why kwh is used to compare actual electfical production.
You should learn to laugh a little at a joke. Lighten up. A watt is a watt - hence the joke. I'm quite well aware of the difference between a watt and a joule so your response cracks me up.
But since you wanted to be pedantic, saying a "watt of solar" is a meaningless statement unless you clarify it further. Solar is a process that can mean many different things ranging from photovoltaics to photosynthesis. Coal is group of hydrocarbon chemicals with well defined properties but is essentially stored chemical energy viewed abstractly. Ironically coal really is just sunlight turned into hydrocarbons. If you want to talk about electrical power generated from burning coal versus power generated from photovoltaic cells then say so. Clarify what you are comparing or just stand back and laugh at the joke.
If you want to talk about efficiency (the amount of sunlight energy converted into electrical energy vs coal) then you have a discussion but coal does not have a 5X advantage there. If you want to compare energy densities then you probably aren't really comparing sunlight to coal because you are comparing storage mediums. You are probably comparing chemical batteries to coal which is quite different.
I deliberately went for the conspiracy tone, so understandable. Irony in writing is tough and I'm no good at it. In real life I'd sound like the comic book guy.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yikes! The problem with that design (among others, I'm sure) is that a "fusion" bomb is actually a fission bomb that sparks a fusion bomb. That would make things a bit messy.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
even a tenfold improvement leaves them wanting.
FTFA: "Right now, as designed, the reactor should be capable of producing about three times as much electricity as is needed to keep it running, but the design could probably be improved to increase that proportion to about five or six times"
My money's on Lockheed's design
Lockheed's design does indeed look pretty cool, but keep in mind that it counts as 100% vaporware at this point. By comparison, tokomaks count as a mature, fairly well understood technology. Making them net positive counts as merely an engineering problem, not a feat that requires invoking any groundbreaking new physics (and indeed, this new MIT design should prove net positive thanks to advances in largely unrelated materials science).
My point is that you can't predict everything, it is impossible, or if you try to cover each once a 10000 year case, it makes whole project too expensive and it doesn't pay off. Often you can only look at the past and say that this and that was too risky, you should have had reactor cover, do not conduct experiments on production reactor, or do not place all backup electric supply under ground level when it can be flooded, each time something different. You learn from mistakes, and in nuclear power a single mistake can be too expensive for the whole society as it was proven few times.
Often you can only look at the past and say that this and that was too risky, you should have had reactor cover, do not conduct experiments on production reactor,
Often you can, but not in the case of Chernobyl. In the west, reactors were never built with a strongly positive void coefficient (only Canada allowed even slightly positive ones) or a cover because that was known to be unsafe at the time. Not only were they unsafe but they had been made illegal because the faults had been correctly identified.
Again, TMI is an excellent example of paranoid design. Sure they got a whole bunch of stuff wrong, but it was designed assuming that a complete loss of containment and core meltdown would occur. It was designed so that the molten core would get diluted and spread out enough to lose critical mass and land on good heatsink so things could go no further.
With fukishima, it was similar. It was known before that the plant was at risk, and it had been warned about repeatedly. People just didn't bother to fix it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
There are plenty of skeptics for today's nuclear reactors as well. At some time above ground nuclear weapon testing was perfectly acceptable both by US and Soviets, but what is acceptable has changed over decades. It is more than likely that if you build "latest and greatest design" reactor today, it would be considered hopelessly unsafe and dangerous 40 years later, this is license period in the US. And you can't reduce that term much, as you need to recoup huge capital costs to build.
I grew up within sight of the Limerick nuclear power plant in Limerick, PA.
Never had a concern growing up. Still don't.
Is Google broken again? Shesh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Look at the "Passively safe" designs...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
There where a number of reactors built based on the same design as Chernobyl in the old Soviet Block nations. They had a horrible safety record, including a number of less serious accidents which put things like Three Mile Island to shame. Everybody knew they where unsafe so the EU demanded that they be decommissioned, and funded the efforts to replace them.
They where simply CHEAP-O sources of electric power, which where designed without any significant concerns about the public safety because as far as the government was concerned, it was worth the risk. There was nobody being held accountable, no civil recourse for anybody who happened to be harmed, no elections to throw out the leaders who let it happen, nothing. It was only about generating electric power and keeping the lights on. They where desperate and safety suffered.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If they actually have a working prototype in 4-5 years (and I am inclined to give some weight to the claims of Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works) it won't be another 15 years to commercial usage. The need is simply too high.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
IMHO neither nuclear or solar are viable right now with natural gas so cheap... Though, I do allow for the "environmentalists Wack'os" to make their CO2 point if they want. Problem for them is that nuclear is cheaper than Solar by a long shot, and seems to be about even par with Wind (though I don't have any numbers to prove that.)
They need to realize that if they want CO2 emissions to go down, nuclear is the ONLY workable technology they have that could possibly compete on cost with the other options. Not to mention that Solar and Wind simply cannot work as a 100% replacement for fossil fuels. We still need a lot of standing generation capacity which is not dependent on the wind, sun or rain...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You can only fix as much as you have money for, as bandaids cost money too. And who is going to pay for it if it is commercial project and should remain profitable? You have Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act and liability is limited anyway. Regulators and regulated are working in the same nuclear industry and are friends effectively.
The design is more or less inherently unsafe in any case, it is still possible to end with melted core and it is too bad even if containment is left intact. You can read the same criticism about US plants as for Fukushima ones:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com...
How is it that NIMBYs and greens are so good at keeping nuclear down, yet fail to stop fracking or coal plants or oil drilling? Why is nuclear so uniquely vulnerable to their lawsuits?
Seriously? They have different regulatory hurdles, fewer people care about oil drilling nearby (which, incidentally, often isn't done near people on any large scale), and the oil industry has more money to throw at people. Most people also don't care about coal plants, because they don't know that they should.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
See you ran afoul of the hippie energy crowd. Somebody needs to remind these people that a software engineering degree, is not knowledge of power systems
Yet this software engineer holds an Electrical Engineering Degree... And you are correct, they don't teach you ANYTHING about AC power in Computer Science classes and most software engineers wouldn't know their power factor corrector from a large capacitor (Or why anybody cares about them)...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
RBMK reactors are of course not safe of course because they don't have good enough containment, but they didn't have any accidents that were as serious as Three Mile Island accident except for Chernobyl one, which was caused by operator action with safety systems deliberately turned off. They are still running in Russia and not exploding every year.
And you can't just assume containment makes everything safe automagically. As was proven in Fukushima #1, contaiments break because of hydrogen explosion, and vents do not always work in accident. Do you know that some of these vents in US plants should be opened manually, which may be hard to do in case of serious accident?
Of course it can be powered by batteries, at certain cost and time.
Tritium obligingly heads for the upper atmosphere when it gets loose.
Ah yes... the mythical baseload. I know there is a surplus of electric supply overnight since you can buy electricity for next to nothing during the night. I'm not sure there is much demand for baseload. Perhaps street lights? ... but they could each have a solar panel and battery to run just fine. There may be some factory somewhere which operates overnight and runs some machinery.
We don't know how the grid will evolve but there doesn't seem to be much baseload demand and what there is could easily be met with wind, natural gas and battery storage. No need to keep a coal or nuclear plant running 24/7 just to satisfy a mythical baseload. Utilities can't give away enough electricity at night to keep their plants running.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
"The sun was too far away from my solar panels, so I built a closer sun."
I wouldn't have a problem with it. Especially a heavy water plant that doesn't require high grade materials.
People in Kiev or Fukushima also lived and had no problem (or rather nobody asked their opinion) until they had to evacuate fast. Or stay in place to help government to pretend nothing serious has happened and save face at the expense of their health. Northern Scandinavia hundreds of miles away from Chernobyl downwind where rain has fallen is still contaminated, decades later.
Well, there have been three powerplant meltdowns ever. For the first, (TMI), careful design prevented any kind of disaster, and many of the remaining fixes (human factors related ones) have been applied almost universally across industry. Of the second, the risk was legislated out of existence everywhere else very early on in the process. For the third, the problem simply doesn't exist for the majority of powerplants ever constructed.
We actually have much more experience than you think predicting and managing risks for complex installations, including rare events and strange interactions. That field of study is common across not just the nuclear industry, but the petroleum and chemical industry too.
The design is more or less inherently unsafe in any case, it is still possible to end with melted core and it is too bad even if containment is left intact.
TMI has precisely that and basically isn't a problem. It's been mostly cleaned up and the rest is stable. Very little radiation leaked into the environment.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
On contraire sir.
There where a number of accidents that happened with this reactor design that where successfully hidden from public view at the time. There where at least two partial meltdowns at various plants, including one at Chernobyl Unit 1 a few years before it exploded. This design was known to be risky by the Russians and others, but it was cheap, so they built a bunch of them.
There are safety issues in any plant design and if you look hard enough you can find them. The issue though is about inherent safety. How much operator interaction is required to render a plant inert? How complex are the systems, how much power does it require to keep the minimum safety systems working? These are the questions you need to ask...
That a specific reactor design uses a manually operated vent system, doesn't mean the plant is unsafe. It only means that in running though the accident scenarios on paper you need to account for needing someone to climb the stairs and open the vent when necessary. That may not be a huge risk, or it might be unacceptable. Considering that hydrogen production is really an indicator of MAJOR core damage, being manually operated might be OK. You just don't know until you walk though the scenarios and make your contingency plans.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
There is nothing wrong with living near fossil fuel plant. It will not melt and if it will get fire or something, nothing will happen to you. They release their waste high above the ground and living next to the plant means you are not directly affected.
Wind turbines may be annoying if you live 500 feet to them, but 10 miles away you would not know about them and would not need to make evacuation plans, and they are usually not build in urban areas where land is expensive.
Remember industry? You know, the activity Asian countries have because they maintain a 24-hr. baseload? That's why people in those countries have jobs, rather than transfer payments.
Of course, that's just the construction costs. Things shift a bit if you count all costs through the payback period at planned capacity.
It is absolutely not true that Fukushima problems do not exist elsewhere. Hydrogen buildup and containment break up is possible in many other reactors too and is not addressed properly.
Three Miles Island accident has released unknown amount of radioactivity to atmosphere. Containment was breached to some extent and Three Mile Island operators ordered the dumping of radioactive water into the Susquehanna River
Randall Thompson, a health physics technician employed to monitor radioactive emissions at TMI after the accident, said "I think the numbers on the NRC's website are off by a factor of 100 to 1,000"
http://www.southernstudies.org...
You may manage risks, but you can't eliminate them if they exist by design. From business perspective, best risk management is to form LLC, skip on one per 1000 year risks as they are hard to manage anyway, and bankrupt LLC when it really happens. And you can always lobby legislators to limit your liability for "greater good".
There is plenty of baseload supply now. In fact, we have too much baseload supply and utilities basically give it away at night. If you wanted to start a nighttime factory, you could have an unlimited supply of cheap electricity. Corporations move jobs to Asia for cheap labor, not lack of baseload power.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
1. The nuclear plant that I live downwind from is in the US, regulated by the NRC and not used for experiments at the whims of bureaucrats
2. It is nowhere near a seaside (or even an active fault zone) where an earthquake could cause a tsunami to foul its diesel generator fuel supply
Wherever You Go, There You Are
That's what shielding and oceanic rifts are for.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm looking seriously at solar, though the installed cost isn't quite to where I need it (last I checked about a year ago, it was around $3 per watt, and I need it to be below $2.40 per watt). If you have some solid information on DIY, I'd love to look at it, as that would dramatically reduce the costs involved. I'd love for the only labor costs to be the electrician to handle the connectivity.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
"Using these new commercially available superconductors, rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, to produce high-magnetic field coils “just ripples through the whole design,” says Dennis Whyte, a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. “It changes the whole thing.”
Anyone tried strapping this tape to the bottom of a skateboard yet?
Germany, in promoting its Energiewende, initially thought it could rely on the sun always being out at moments when the wind stops blowing. Now it's opening new brown coal plants to replace its lost nuclear baseload, lest the rest of its industry decamp for Korea and China.
The US, meanwhile, is moving away from coal, rather than toward it. And we don't have an all-nuclear country of equal size right next door.
If we could use the better wire to increase the field (fourth power), trade that away entirely for size scale-down, and leave the plasma density the same so we take the full hit there (third power):
- A 10:1 scale-down gives you a reaction chamber just under a foot across that gives you 100 kW. Home power, car power (75 HP continuous - you need about 20 plus "peaking" for a practical car), maybe trucks with slightly larger scaling.
- A 100:1 scale-down gives you a reaction chamber just under an inch across that gives you 100W. That would give you a power brick to charge-run your laptop or whatever.
All assuming the shielding and peripheral equipment doesn't bloat it or make it too heavy. Looks OK for home power, unlikely for laptop bricks (though maybe portable gasoline generators could go nuclear), somewhere in the middle for cars and trucks.
Nuclear dragsters! Neat! If the magnets don't stick them together or push them apart and off the track, of course. And if you can keep the stray neutrons in. (They'd use hydrogen-1/boron-11, where the main reaction is aneutronic, but that DOES have a little neutron emission from occasional side-reactions involving the "exhaust" nucleii, unstable carbon-12 intermediate step, and/or impurities.)
Now I REALLY want to know what magnet technology EMC2 is assuming.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Coal consumption in Germany declined in 2014.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I think I heard something about that too - not sure if it's the same project but I know a small fission bomb was detonated inside a salt canyon to investigate the feasibility of the idea. Made some pretty colours on the walls of the cavern. :)
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Assuming they'd be permitted to allocate the proper funding by their 'green' and NIMBY constituents.
Similar scenarios will continue to rule us until we mature as a species. Right now we're all a bunch of overgrown children and it shows.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Thanks. :)
Comic book guy was always my favourite character!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
A lot depends on the roof. On flat roofs, you simply get racks adjusted to the right angle, just put them down and weigh them down. Over here in NL, many roofs are tiled, in which case you simply lift a tile, slip a hook under it to hook on to the slats under the tiles, then bolt horizontal mounting rails to the hooks. I saw the neighbour across do this last week, took him perhaps a few hours to get 8 panels up. And I'm allowed to do my own wiring too, up to and including wiring things up in the breaker box; as long as I install everything to code, I'll be legal and insured. These guys sell DIY kits, you can pick and choose what part of the work you do yourself and which part they take care of. I have no idea what good options exist for US or Canadian homes, though. Or what is legal there to do yourself.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Neither of those is an option for me simply because I don't have either roof type that you describe. Looking around, I see some DIY options in the US, but most of the sites that talk about it suggest not doing it unless you already do it professionally.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Nuclear waste doesn't take up much space, but I fail to see the relevance to the argument. It's easy and (fairly) cheap to decommission wind farms. It's extremely expensive to handle nuclear waste and decommission nuclear power plants.
> Wind proponents seem to forget spinning things require maintenance and eventually simply wear out - who pays to take them down? No-one apparently.
Disingenuous. There is already a huge market for decommissioning wind farms and many places around the world set aside money for this when the farms are being built. On the other hand, the nuclear industry is notorious for not taking decommissioning costs into account (because doing so would make nuclear prohibitively expensive in all but a small fraction of use cases) and leaving taxpayers holding the bag decades later.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
t's easy and (fairly) cheap to decommission wind farms
It sure is since apparently you just walk away from them and leave huge fields of rusting dangerous eyesores.
At least nuclear waste is out of sight.
You may think that money is being set aside to de-comission them, but what proof do we have that will happen? History has shown us it often does not.
Also nuclear waste is not killing wildlife by the tens of thousands.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Now practical fusion power is only 20 to 25 years away.
Again.
Still.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
> It sure is since apparently you just walk away from them and leave huge fields of rusting dangerous eyesores.
No you don't. Wind farms are being decommissioned all the time. Don't be so disingenuous.
> At least nuclear waste is out of sight.
And extremely dangerous. I'm talking about the cost of nuclear waste disposal and reactor decommissioning.
> Also nuclear waste is not killing wildlife by the tens of thousands.
Shill argument.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Sigh...
Of course nowhere near, doesn't mean never, but it's quite possible that "tokamak" might be some quaint historical footnote when we get to something that is actually practical.
If you look at ITER, it's got so many technologies it's trying to research simultaneously, that it's hard to see it actually being a practical step towards DEMO or PROTO (its theoretical follow-ons) where they will actually try and extract the electricity (ITER doesn't include a mechanism to convert energy to electricity)
I have no particular insight into ITER or this new MIT design, but I have studied the Fort St. Vrain attempt at HTGR fission and the Oak ridge Thorium reactors and have tried to survey what they are doing in the NIF (although it's much harder to get good information about what they are doing) and putting things into commercial development is hard to do on a timeline because there is theory and then there is practice (which is why they build all these research reactors).
One big material science problem they are trying to solve with ITER is a way to build a so-called breeder blanket so they can bleed some of the fusion neutrons to create more tritium (which is rare enough to be uneconomical to refine from the ocean to use as fuel). I don't know how the MIT design would even help with this as they appear to concentrating on increasing the magnetic field for tighter confinement, not making a practical reactor.
Of course there are also the material science problems (confinement and super-conducting magnetic materials that can handle the high neutron flux over the operating life of the reactor).
Using the older fission programs as benchmarks, it's a pretty clear feeling to me we are nowhere near getting to where we need to be before fusion becomes a real practical technology and not a theoretical technology and we probably aren't even $100billion in funding away (the cost of the Apollo moon program in today's dollars).
It's not impossible though (apple is a merely a $700billion dollar company), but it's gonna take a while even if "properly funded"
Thanks for an interesting reply.
Of course nowhere near, doesn't mean never
Your original post that I replied to appears to contradict you here, which was the basis for my reply.
That said I agree with most of what you say. We can't do good materials research without consistent funding, for example. I also agree with your comments regarding Tokamak designs; ideally we'd be pursuing and fully-funding many different approaches at a government level. At least we have several independent commercial projects on the go.
You'd think the potential to eliminate CO2 from power production and simultaneously pave the way for ditching fossil fuels in transport would make a good platform for a political party.
Your Moon Shot example is a good point because I think there are many who feel that commercial fusion power is up there with (or even more important than) the Apollo program. I understand the technological off-shoots of the program were considerable, but in terms of actually useful results, planting the US flag on the moon did nothing constructive.
Don't get me wrong, Apollo was important, but the results of a successful fusion design will affect our day-to-day lives much more profoundly. In addition, fusion will bring a slew of its own tech spin-offs just as Apollo did.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
That would be Project PACER.
We have been working on grid energy storage for well over 30 years. And we still don't have a solution. What evidence do you have that it will be solved in just a few years? And well i don't think you understand the scale of energy needs. Right now there is no way in hell you could replace base energy with solar or wind or both even if all you do is build solar and wind in decades let alone a few years. Since you need a fuckton of it *everywhere*. Really run the numbers.. http://www.withouthotair.com/
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
oh lord... You could have looked it up. Even the big arse ITER contains less than a gram of material. Loss of confinement creates a mark and a little sputtering damage on the first wall or divertor plate. In fact it happens all the time.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
right now tokamaks are a factor of 2 away from working. A 10 fold increase in confinement would make them trivial to build. You could probably not even other with neutral beam injection.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Russian reactors didn't just have "plenty of skeptics"... if you read that article, they found it impossible to export their designs - even to some "Eastern Bloc" countries - because of the almost universal perception that they lacked safety. The article was written because they were finally building a PWR with containment.... their very first!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The grid will evolve over time to take advantage of wind, solar and storage. I don't think anyone is predicting the immediate demise of coal and nuclear although many would like to see it shrink to a much smaller part of our supply. You have to understand that coal and nuclear plants have problems in that you can't easily adjust their power output during the day. They are designed to operate at 100% on or off and it takes days to turn them on or off. This makes them unsuitable to meet the needs of the grid where demand will increase two to three times base load during each day. They are really only good for base load and there has always been a surplus of base load to the point where utilities essentially give away power at night.
Battery storage is uniquely suited to meeting the hour to hour changes in demand from the grid. Coal and nuclear are useless for this.
(Thanks for the reference to www.withouthotair.com Looks like a lot of good information there.)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Given options:
1) Live next to Nuclear
2) Live next to Coal
I think I would choose Nuclear.
If you're a real NIMBY jerk you choose Natural Gas, where you're OK spending more money for energy while at the same time screwing somebody else over where it is extracted. Bonus point for picking oil for really expensive energy, while becoming even more dependent on whatever country that is extracted from, or as recently seen with BP, screwing coastal regions.
Of course most would say "renewable" sources without understanding what that really means. Basically not feasible without a real method of storage, which as yet doesn't really exist... Although that would be something more game changing, a technology that enables mass energy storage. Low tech solutions like Hydro work, there just isn't enough of it.
HEY! reasonably intelligent and well-informed discussions are a clear violation of slashdot.
wake up and hold your nose
Since oil,gas and coal are subsidized as well (differently, but still) to the tune of a few hundred billion dollar each year, I think we can safely ignore that particular issue - because if you don't, fossil fuel looks even worse.
From wikipedia: "Fossil fuel subsidies reached $90 billion in the OECD and over $500 billion globally in 2011.[1] Renewable energy subsidies reached $88 billion in 2011.[2] ". They have a nice list of sources too.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
0_0
News for nerds.....your post is one of the rare times I've been f'ing lost reading a COMMENT.
I'm amused.
Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's been opened.