Slashdot Mirror
Westinghouse AP1000 Nuclear Reactor Starts Generating Power (world-nuclear-news.org)
Longtime Slashdot reader TopSpin writes: The Sanmen 1 nuclear reactor in Zhejiang, China, has been synchronized to the power grid and is generating power. The reactor has been under construction for nine years and became the first AP1000 in the world to achieve criticality on June 21, 2018. The AP1000 design received final design certification from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2005 and has a net output of 1.117 GWe. Three other AP1000 reactors are under construction in China at the Sanmen and Haiyang sites and two reactors are under construction in the U.S. at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia. On June 29, the Taishan 1 reactor became the first Areva Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR) design to generate power. Four EPR reactors are under construction in Finland, France, and China.
[...] has a net output of 1.117 GWe.
Damn. So close. How will I get back to 1984?
Not the very near future;
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-22/wind-turbines-take-a-break-just-as-hot-weather-hits-europe
Please yes. None of those work in space far away from the sun. We have to figure out this nuke thing better than we have if we're ever going to be an interstellar species. Possibly even if we want to be much of an interplanetary species.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Fuck you. If it weren't for assholes like you we would have had thorium reactors by now.
PLEASE NO. The future is a mixture of sources for supply security.
Love how you missed out hydro.
You do not have a say anymore.
China is doing wind AND solar balls to the wall. That is what greenies just can't wrap their heads around, *it is not enough*
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/27/16935382/climate-change-ugly-tradeoffs
You sound like you know what you are talking about.
Sincerely,
Dunning and Kruger
As deployment of solar and wind increases, so do electricity prices. How much more do you want to pay for electricity?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Damming rivers is an environmental disaster.
Westinghouse AP1000 Nuclear Reactor Starts Generating Power
Well that IS what it's suppose to do. As opposed to what? Whistle, "I'm a little tea pot..."?
China is doing solar to corner the market.
China can run its productive export factories night and day with nuclear AC.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Believe it or not, some governments don't consider hydro a renewable.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
In China the batteries will work. The plugs will fit and power will be restored. More experts can be found to work on the reactor in China.
Place a red banner with a slogan next to the reactor and a national mobilization will bring in the support needed.
Pumps, water, energy, engineers from all over China. They will stay working on site long term.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Solar is only effective 50% of the time that is ignoring the existence of overcast days. Wind Its great if you live in a windy area, don't mind turning likes of farm land into wind farms and don't live near the habitat of any endangered birds or a bird sanctuary. and Geothermal is great if you live in a place like Greenland with many volcanic hot spots. but we live in the real world and have a population of 7.6 billion people to feed. We can either wait for the technologies you mention to mature or we can use the solution that is available.
we would need 20 of those for the region i live in, let alone the whole country
Can we have a mod choice of "fucking idiot"?
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
China can run its productive export factories night and day with nuclear AC.
I have no real problem with that. Some would like to add tariffs to make things "fair", but I think the only valid case for that is basically to account for externalities. The only three that come to mind are 1) Destroying the environment 2) poor working conditions (bad working conditions would be an outright ban) 3) government subsidies
Basically a tarriff is a tax, and for the most part those should be the same all around, unless your basically causing problems long term with your business model, such as pollution leading to health conditions and such. (Of course in some case they just need to stop.)
Generation of power always needs to meet demand. You need baseline power plus on demand power from a reliable source. You need to adapt to changing power demands with a variable source. Variable power from "green" sources (wind, solar) is useless if it can't be stored and released, or balanced by fast acting sources like natural gas or hydro power. Most "green" power sources increase carbon emissions because they need a fast on natural gas power source to balance out their variable power.
wind and solar work well, when supplemented by energy storage for periods of low output and/or high demand. wind, solar, and battery tech is 'mature' NOW.
By 'interstellar species' I suppose you mean the genetic mutants evolving out of the nuclear waste who will populate our Star Wars cantina.
China: "Thanks for the nuclear reactor IP, we'll take it from here."
Nine years! It took five years to build Hoover Dam, and that was in the early 1930's.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Probably good for solar power, though.
Ezekiel 23:20
An AP1000 will be as useless to you in deep space as a solar panel.
Ezekiel 23:20
To add to what you say: it's amazing how many problems can be solved when energy is cheap and plentiful. Water purification from the ocean suddenly becomes economical. At a higher energy level, transmuting lead to gold becomes economical. That's a lot of energy, but if you can transform between elements, a lot of the problems of living on Mars go away.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Damming rivers is an environmental disaster.
A lot of rivers will always have dams because the flooding that comes if you don't can be a literal disaster.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The issue with Tarrifs is when they are biased in one direction. If Tarrifs for good from US to China are high but from China to US are low then a manufacturer wanting to supply both China and the US will move operations to China to reduce their tarrif exposure. So it forces the flow of goods to be biased one way.
Simple answer is get rid of Tarrifs or make them even, unless you want to lose the trade war. Adding Tarrifs is the only way out of losing the trade war, by the way the war started back when they invented shipping.
You can't handle the truth! - Because I don't post left all my comments get modded down, bye bye Karma.
Wow, really? You know how flawed just looking at the raw price of something over time is without factoring in inflation and other currency fluctuations is? So that study is showing German price per kilowatt hour (the first part of it). So from 2006 to 2018 it shows that the costs went up ~50%. The Euro lost 10% of its value to the Dollar during that timeframe. Inflation alone over the timeperiod accounts for almost 1/2 of the price difference from 2006 to 2018 in that study. Global market forces can easily account for a large portion of the remainder.
I like the fact that they compare the cost of natural gas in the US vs in Europe. The US is the largest producer of natural gas in the world. It isn't even a close first place, it is a blowout. The closes next country is Russia, and they are over 160 BILLION cubic meters less than the US, with the third ranking country being Iran, which produces 580 BILLION cubic meters less than the US. Of course Europe will not see as much of a decrease in cost of natural gas as the US saw during that timeframe. The US production of natural gas increased nearly 50% over that timeframe. Yet, there isn't some monster pipeline between the US and Europe that can distribute natural gas abroad. It has to be compressed and liquefied and shipped via container ship overseas, all of which costs money and has lots of risks, where there are only a couple dozen ports that can handle processing of liquified natural gas in Europe. That is like comparing the price of Ice between Antarctica and Cairo. The real price is in the transportation, and it is cheap to transport within the US as there are major pipelines distributing it.
Then the study goes on to look at California, a state that imports over 30% of its energy from other states on long, costly, and inefficient transmission lines, where power loss factors on those transmission lines are directly placed on the consumers in terms of high costs (~1% lost every 100 miles adds up).
Does that mean everything the study is wrong, no, but there are so many things wrong with it that people with high school level education could have done a better job in presenting the evidence. As it currently is written, the only conclusion that can be made of it is that some major biases were involved which wanted to fit the data to a pre-determined outcome.
Since you made a generalization about damming rivers so will I.
Allowing mass amounts of rainwater to spill into the ocean is a waste of freshwater.
Not necessarily. Letting people build homes and major population centers in flood plains is what creates the disaster. Using large number of dams on rivers to then prevent flooding simply moves the flooding (and in many cases, causes the flooding to be much worse than it would have otherwise been had there been no dams in the first place). New Orleans is sinking because of the damming of the rivers all around it (the swampland that makes up much of the city has been drying out over the years, allowing the ground to settle) causing much of the city to be below sea level, requiring more dams and sea walls, and pump stations to keep the area from flooding...
Lovely how they use the ridiculous American prices of solar installations. Sucks to be a solar-loving American, I guess.
Ezekiel 23:20
Unless itâ(TM)s a windy day.
"Damming rivers is an environmental disaster." - Ayup. Fortunately we killed most of the beavers, otherwise all their dams would be a huge environmental problem.
Why do you need a river to cool something in space?
It is, actually. It's a huge problem.
Space may be cold but that makes no difference because you can't use convection or conduction.
OTOH if you're actively cooling your reactor then there's something wrong, you're throwing energy away.
No sig today...
Damming rivers is an environmental disaster.
A lot of rivers will always have dams because the flooding that comes if you don't can be a literal disaster.
Incorrect, building in a floodplain is the cause of the disaster, not the lack of a dam. In fact, if you want to restore large parts of the ecosystem, relocating towns away from floodplains and reinstalling beavers to better regulate the flow rate of rivers than we currently do with concrete dams by slowing the water down so that more water gets absorbed into the groundwater table and allows for more habitat for wildlife that man made dams don't allow for.
Hello
"Framatome said the unit had been connected to the grid at 5:59 pm local time."
And they probably did it on a friday afternoon too!
What type of engineers are those!
Cyrille
There's a big difference between "not adequate" and "useless".
Eg, "sunshine is useless because you can't get a suntan at night" is effectively what you just said.
Nuclear power with its massive cost overruns is so expensive that no private investors will touch it, only governments will build reactors. (correct me if I am wrong)
The price is far less than the externalities of every other power source, TCO of renewables beats everything else hands down.
Damming rivers is an environmental disaster.
A lot of rivers will always have dams because the flooding that comes if you don't can be a literal disaster.
Incorrect, building in a floodplain is the cause of the disaster, not the lack of a dam. In fact, if you want to restore large parts of the ecosystem, relocating towns away from floodplains and reinstalling beavers to better regulate the flow rate of rivers than we currently do with concrete dams by slowing the water down so that more water gets absorbed into the groundwater table and allows for more habitat for wildlife that man made dams don't allow for.
Because of course you want to give up the most valuable and productive farm land AND the greenest source of base load power because of some river fish. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Solar is working just fine 2AU away from the sun, thanks. Opportunity and Spirit lasted way longer than designed and ran off of solar from so far away.
The real trick, boss, is power efficiency.
Learn to make shit efficiently. That includes your goddamned code.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You need baseline power
Imagine this song without a decent baseline.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Yes it is extremely hard, as there is very little direct matter contact in space, so you cannot use convection or conduction as your means of temperature regulation. You are stuck with emitted radiation as your only real means of keeping cool.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yes, you're wrong. Governments haven't built reactors for a very long time in the west, all are built and owned by private companies.
Fast Acting.... you mean like a massive battery connected to a wind farm?
https://www.teslarati.com/tesl...
https://www.news.com.au/techno...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
Have a nice day.
Lol beavers are not going to dam the Sacramento river. Maybe beavers would work in Colorado or something, but
Yes, to the extent that you might need a high temperature reactor. Those are no fun to build.
Ezekiel 23:20
You don't need a river in general, but to cool an AP1000 unit in space, you'd need a radiator roughly 2.5 km in diameter.
Ezekiel 23:20
There are more precise explanations, but I'll try to put it in layman's terms;
Space is mostly empty and thus NOT good at transferring heat.
This is why a vacuum flask works:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Heat can be thought of atoms vibrating with more or less energy depending on how 'hot' things are. If you want to cool something down, a good way to do it is to put these energetic atoms in contact with others 'cool' ones which have less energy. Put ice in hot water and energy levels out.
In space, there is nothing to transfer to, so you have to irradiate (using radiators)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Getting very cold is not trivial, and can be problematic:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
Why then was offshore wind able to bid 57£/kWhr for CFDs in the UK while Nuclear at Hinckley Point had to be guaranteed 92£/kWhr?
"Variable power from "green" sources (wind, solar) is useless if it can't be stored and released, or balanced by fast acting sources like natural gas or hydro power."
Are you saying Hydro (e.g. pumped storage with pumping powered by Solar) isn't "green"?
What is the emission in that scenario that wouldn't also be there for any other solution?
But not really wrong. The taxpayer will generally give a loan for the plant, subsidise the production, etc....insurance is covered under the Price-Anderson-Act in the US although the cynic in me would surmise it would fail today and the taxpayer would have to cover it again.
That's one of the reasons why China is pushing hard to be the world leader in battery manufacturing, the other being automotive demand.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No reactor has ever been built that wasn't massively subsidized by taxpayers. Subsidies for construction, subsidies for security, subsidies for insurance, subsidizes for decommissioning - and that's before the ultimate subsidy, storing the waste for millennia on the taxpayer's dime.
Variable like your nuclear power plant going down for planned (or worse, unplanned) maintenance, blowing a megawatt-sized hole in your power grid? Sometimes for years at a time?
All the FUD aimed at wind and solar can easily be addressed by tech used to back up coal and nuclear power plants - like pumped storage. If a large hydrostatic battery is good enough for nuclear, it's good enough for a wind farm.
Sunny days. Man, if there was just some method to get power from the sun. Better go tell German power engineers, as the idea that there may be windless or sunless days has never occurred to them, or that power generating capacity needs to be spread across a grid - same as it is for coal or nuclear power.
Why go to all the power of inventing huge batteries that don't store enough power when nature has provided an extremely efficient one in the form of radioactive material?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
2AU lol, that's still pretty close kiddo. Try Pluto, or deep space.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
It's "only" a matter of price.
> ...there is very little direct matter contact in space, so you cannot use convection or conduction
> as your means of temperature regulation.
So you're saying, I should return my vacuum fan for a refund? :-/
Run! Run to the hills!
[fiddles with earpiece] Oh, apparently it's meant to do that. Carry on, folks.
After the break, woman prevented from boarding with her emotional support crocodile sues airline.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why can't I run an AP1000 in deep space? It doesn't need the Sun to function. Besides, we're already on a tiny rock hurtling through deep space. Going a bit faster on an even smaller rock is not a fundamentally different situation.
From Wikipedia:
Most spacecraft radiators reject between 100 and 350 W of internally generated electronics waste heat per square meter.
This translates to 10,000 m^2 for 1 MW of power on the low end. Assuming 10% efficiency of the plant, the total heat output of a 1 MW reactor would need 100,000 m^2 of radiators, which is a circle 180 m in radius.
Since that's a similar size to the plant itself, I imagine any spacecraft capable of containing the plant would be able to host the radiators.
Well, we're having a 'heatwave' here in London and the wind is pretty constant, was it supposed to stop?
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Because the AP1000 core is designed for a 18 month fuel cycle and it takes decades just to get from Earth to deep space.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Good Courtier's Reply. You should start a blog.
1GW=1000MW, so the area is off by three orders of magnitude.
-1, Troll, because there is no "i don't understand the argument" option?
Nice strawman. You can keep your sacred guns. I only said that nuclear power isn't cheap or plentiful, which is true, and gave reasons why, which are also true. You can shake your fist at reality all you want and decide to argue a completely different point, but that doesn't change the facts.
That article is from 10 days ago. Nothing happened.
Generation of power always needs to meet demand.
True! (well, to a first order approximation)
You need baseline power plus on demand power from a reliable source.
False! (well, the first half is false) You need enough "on demand power [generation ability]" and/or enough demand response ability to ensure supply meets demand. None of that generation ability need be "baseline," commonly called base load.
Most "green" power sources increase carbon emissions because they need a fast on natural gas power source to balance out their variable power.
False! (with no caveats whatsoever; this is just plain wrong and OP has no source to verify it)
Support a few technologists in Washington.
safety is expensive
Safety is not expensive. Paperwork is expensive. Safety is achieved by implimenting off the shelf components and in the nuclear industry it is done with cookie cutter designs. Then we throw millions of dollars of worthless paperwork at it.
"Safety would be cheap and easy if only they didn't waste our time with bureaucracy." It is this fundamental misunderstanding of the risks in nuclear reactor technology that causes disasters like Chernobyl, Sellafield and Fukushima. Too many people don't understand what it takes to keep complex systems under control and how the incentives of our normal everyday life are stacked against safe nuclear power.
Not all are owned by private companies. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4W_reactor
Baseline power doesn't need to be nuclear. It can be geothermal, it can be hydroelectric.
It's also something of a myth, since battery storage can solve and even out wind and solar. Hydroelectric is basically a large battery of potential energy, and you can use the same strategy to create an artificial reservoir and any other water source (eg desalinized water) for both energy and potable water. You just create two reservoirs, and pump reservoir 2 back into 1 using your other energy sources, and run everything off the generation station for reservoir 1. That's not efficient in general, which is why we run it off rain/glacial water, but that may be end result once global warming destroys those as energy sources, and have to be turned into batteries.
Or a better one in the form of Hydroelectric power.
That's fine if some of them are blue, or three tittied.
Nice maths, shame that an AP1000 produces over 1000MW of power needing 1000 times the radiator area or 100 million square metres, which works out at an 11km diameter radiator. Oh dear...
Learn to make shit efficiently. That includes your goddamned code.
Imagine if every computer science student would by default study every single algorithm from the perspective of minimal energy use. So far it has mostly been about computation-space trade-offs, until the problem of moving the increasing amounts of data became a problem. It so becomes a system design issue as well, and the poor computer science student can no longer ignore the engineering studies.
I did the 3D drafting work on those panelboards and switchboards for those 4 plants in China.
The current "wars for oil" is at about $8T. How does that compare with atomic energy?
At two cents a KWh the sales of electric cars start to go through the roof. But "cheap" oil (externalized costs) and high electric rates strongly favor oil-powered transportation.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How do you charge that extremely efficient battery?
Why go through all the effort of fission when nature has put a massive fission reactor in the sky?
In the ideal case renewable plus storage should meet baseline and peaking demand most of the time. Backup should also be able to meet total demand, but since it's not delivering any demand most of the time it's by definition not baseline. The whole concept of baseline doesn't really make sense any more once you get the amount of storage necessary to make say 95% renewable work. It will be an archaic and useless term.
Of course we have no technology to economically create that much storage currently.
Why can't I run an AP1000 in deep space?
It's design assumes gravity.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
OTOH if you're actively cooling your reactor then there's something wrong, you're throwing energy away.
Under normal circumstances perhaps, but you need a cooling system for times when you can't immediately use that energy. Like say some big load suddenly goes offline and it takes time for the reactor to reduce its heat output, or there is some emergency and you need to SCRAM it.
Even on Mars you are screwed because there is no big liquid heatsink available. On a very very large spaceship you might be able to carry enough water or dump the heat into some part of the hull temporarily, but unfortunately nuclear fission just isn't that great for most use cases.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Because the safety of nuclear power plants is too expensive. And they are centralized energy sources.
Forbes articles are behind some kind of bullshit that won't let me view them but the only way this can be true is if energy companies are deliberately making it so in order to protect their investments in nuclear and fossil fuels.
Wind and solar are already cheaper than nuclear, getting competitive with coal. The problem is that the old energy companies have these big nuclear/fossil plants that react very slowly to changes in demand and require massive amounts of offline reserve power in case they fail suddenly, so renewables are a big threat to their profits. Instead of building utility scale storage they try to pass their costs to the consumer.
In properly regulated markets that doesn't happen.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Ha. Haha. Hahahahaha. Oh how cute, someone else has drunk the Tesla kool aid.
The Finnish EPR construction started in 2005, and it was supposed to be fin{1,2}ished in 2009. The current estimate is that it might be completed in 2019 and become the second most expensive building in world history.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Wiki for the reactor says "The design is intended to passively remove heat for 72 hours, after which its gravity drain water tank must be topped up for as long as cooling is required."
In other words our passive system is actually active but with great marketing.
(A corner case where everything before the 'but' matters greatly.)
From an economic standpoint, I'm ok with China having this IP.
They deserve it.
Hopefully because the rest of the world has done little to improve this technology and perhaps they will figure out a way to make it safe.
Hopefully not because it raises the odds that the next event will be far away.
At current consumption, we have 90 years's worth of uranium ore around. We expect to find more, because there's got to be more.
Imagine ramping up from 20GW to 200GW of electricity production by nuclear in the US, and similarly around the world. 9 years's worth of uranium ore.
I'm not certain the known uranium resource is enough to power our current electricity consumption for one full year.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Sigh...external heat rejection. Really?
Look, a heat pump can't feed itself from its own reservoir, right? Well, let's put you in front of an air conditioner. The air's cool, right? Go behind and it's hot. Notice it's the same atmospheric reservoir? Same is true in Canada: it's cold up there, but really hot in Florida.
The earth's single reservoir--the atmosphere--has non-uniform thermal energy. Essentially, it's being heated by the sun, and emits radiation to space at a faster rate if temperature is higher, given the same atmospheric and surface composition. That makes it a storage reservoir for solar energy.
By coupling a heat pump and a heat engine, you can pump heat into a pressure vessel, then dump the pressurized gas into a heat engine (compressed air engine). You can use this to drive a compressor to pressurize your pressure vessel.
Typically, you lose heat this way: although the heat engine will tend to cool air relative to intake, you're adding hot air and so it's coming out warm. You're going through the effort of heating that air, thus if the exhaust is hotter than the atmosphere, you're losing that differential to the air.
Theoretically, if you built an adiabatic system, you could recover much of this loss. A heat pump with the cold side coupled to (and insulated with) the exhaust output when above atmospheric temperature would do it. At the same time, your primary heat source is the atmospheric intake. You insulate your pressure vessel and couple the cold side of the heat pump into that.
The work done by the engine turns the heat pump as well: the working energy driving the compressor and the heat pump, generally lost as heat, are pressed into your pressure vessel.
In this way, you theoretically pull the heat out of the local atmosphere--reducing the room temperature--and store it in an insulated bottle. If you cogenerate electricity or liquefy atmospheric CO2 and H2O into non-aromatic hydrocarbon fuel oil, you remove some of the heat (which leaks even through insulation) and store it as stable chemical bond energy.
This all requires things like aerogel (which we have) and quantum tunneling junctions (which we have at too low yield to actually function) to become even theoretically-possible.
So, yeah. Adiabatic thermal concentrator. Radiating heat...seriously. Throwing away good energy you could be using.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Power plants need to reject heat into their environment in order to function. PWRs typically do this with a nearby river or cooling canals. Here's a few facts.
1. PWRs are about 35% efficient. This means that to generate 1.117GW, we need about 3.3GW of heat.
2. Thermodynamics says that you would need to radiate away this heat. If you do not radiate enough heat out of the system, you will lose your temperature gradient which is what does the work and turns the turbines.
3. Shedding energy via radiation is the least efficient way to do so.
4. For comparison, the Space Shuttle radiators were about 40m^2 and rejected about 70kW.
A quick back of the envelope calculation suggests that you would need a radiator 1.4km on a side to radiate enough heat.
( 3.3 GW / 70 kW ) * 40m^2 = 1,885,714m^2
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
The issue with Tarrifs is when they are biased in one direction. If Tarrifs for good from US to China are high but from China to US are low then a manufacturer wanting to supply both China and the US will move operations to China to reduce their tarrif exposure. So it forces the flow of goods to be biased one way.
Simple answer is get rid of Tarrifs or make them even, unless you want to lose the trade war. Adding Tarrifs is the only way out of losing the trade war, by the way the war started back when they invented shipping.
A tarrif to avoid losing a trade war is the same kind of thing as a tarrif to address a government subsidy. The reason Canada targets milk is apparently because we subsidize it.
No reactor has ever been built that wasn't massively subsidized by taxpayers. Subsidies for construction, subsidies for security, subsidies for insurance, subsidizes for decommissioning - and that's before the ultimate subsidy, storing the waste for millennia on the taxpayer's dime.
The last one you're definitely wrong- The Yucca Mountain facility was constructed with taxes collected under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, and the fund has an unspent balance of $46,000,000,000- and that's with construction at Yucca complete! Other posters have pointed out that there's really a lot of usable energy left in that 'spent' fuel. As I understand it, the current economics of Uranium mining don't justify the capital expense to restart spent fuel reprocessing in the United States, but it works just fine for Japan and France.
Since you're wrong there, the rest of your statements require re-examination. Beyond that, if we're going to use subsidies to set and direct energy policy, nuclear has several significant advantages over solar and wind- not the least of which is that it makes power on demand!
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
the greenest source of base load power
The most ecologically damaging source is not the greenest source.
Because of course you want to give up the most valuable and productive farm land AND the greenest source of base load power because of some river fish. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Fish can go over most beaver dams, unlike most manmade dams. Beavers building dams does in fact lead to replenishment of aquifers; in fact, they create more farm land by building dams.
Hydro is not green, it requires building large dams which flood large areas of habitat. Beavers build multiple small dams, and they do it for free. And we can influence them to build in specific locations by playing the sound of running water.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Lovely how they use the ridiculous American prices of solar installations. Sucks to be a solar-loving American, I guess.
Chinese solar panels are toxic. American solar panels are required not to leach even if you grind them up and landfill them. Sucks to have to breathe the air, drink the water, or eat the food in China, I guess.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because space isn't cold, it's fucking empty, you delusional fucknutter?
At current consumption, we have 90 years's worth of uranium ore around. We expect to find more, because there's got to be more.
Imagine ramping up from 20GW to 200GW of electricity production by nuclear in the US, and similarly around the world. 9 years's worth of uranium ore.
I'm not certain the known uranium resource is enough to power our current electricity consumption for one full year.
Just reprocess and re-use the nuclear "waste":
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site
We have a limited supply of uranium because we squander >90% of it by having it sit in pools of water.
So what? So you carry 10x the fuel you need for one cycle, big deal. It's not like it's significantly radioactive - if it were it would no longer exist after 4 billion years of laying around in the Earth. You just need to avoid packing it densely enough to go critical.
Besides which, just because it takes decades to get to deep space today, when we have basically zero interplanetary transport infrastructure (every launch is a one-off, using disposable rockets designed primarily for orbital missions), doesn't mean that is some sort of natural limit on the transportation times involved. High-thrust nuclear powered ion drives look like a winning option, but there's just not a whole lot of incentive to develop them until there's demand for high-speed interplanetary transportation.
Plus, once we've gone legitimately interplanetary, we're unlikely to be getting raw materials like fuel from Earth.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Summary of the Forbes story and another report with the same conclusion. Check the graphs in the second link, especially. The data seems quite clear - the more renewables a nation deploys (particularly wind and solar), the more it pays for electricity.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Don't even need to play the sound - just driving a couple strategically placed T-posts into the stream bed can do wonders for creating the sound cheaply and reliably. There's a team in... Oregon(?) that's had great luck preventing beavers from damning culverts and flooding out mountain roads simply by driving posts just downstream from the culvert.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Beaver dams are a completely different beast. For starters they're several orders of magnitude smaller (as they say, quantity has a quality all its own) , and the beavers create networks of safety/transportation streams into the surrounding landscape, irrigating the land and aiding the transfer of water into underground aquifers.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
So why are they using it themselves instead of selling it all to help 'corner the market'?
What bullshit is this? links?
Yup. Even more nuclear fuel available if the US perfected thorium fueled reactors.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
OTOH if you're actively cooling your reactor then there's something wrong, you're throwing energy away.
Well, right now nuclear reactors are only capable of converting nuclear energy into heat energy. So an engine is needed to do useful work with the heat.
Barring a major breakthrough in disproving Carnot's Theorem, or a breakthrough in reactor technology, a significant portion of the heat from any engine has to be dissipated, even in the most ideal circumstances.
See, temperature itself cannot drive an engine. You could put an engine in the hottest part of the universe and not produce any usable work. A change in temperature is required to run an engine, just like a change in voltage is required to do anything useful with electricity.
Therefore, the larger the power plant, the larger the cooling system. There is no way around it barring an incredible technological breakthrough. The loss of convection and conduction in outer space is a HUGE problem for providing power to any interstellar spacecraft.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
(every launch is a one-off, using disposable rockets designed primarily for orbital missions)
You've missed that little company called SpaceX, huh? Are you aware that something like 15% of the rockets launched worldwide so far this year have been completed on reused rockets?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Then we throw millions of dollars of worthless paperwork at it.
We wouldn't have to if people would do their jobs properly and not cut corners whenever there is a lack of oversight. Even with the most basic, trivial things.
implimenting off the shelf components and in the nuclear industry it is done with cookie cutter designs.
Off-the-self components is something you use to reduce and increase predictability of the costs as you don't have to order an engineering review on it, unless it is used in a novel way. But you do need to inspect and test it anyway.
Whole-project cookie cutter designs can be used only in the easy cases, like planning a ready-made house to an easy plot surrounded by a friendly and visually compatible neighborhood to appease the locals and the authorities. A power plant is surely something else already for its strong connections to other systems and the environment?
It would take the entire annual output of Tesla's Gigafactory to provide enough battery for three AP1000s for 10 hours.
The Gigafactory has an annual capacity of 35 GWh worth of battery production. Each AP1000 can generate 1.117 GW output, so the gigafactory's output would be good for (35 GWh / 1.117 GW) 31 hours of storage. Three AP1000s could be "buffered" for 10 hours.
Shanghai averages around 10 GW of power consumption. We would need about 9 of the AP1000s to run just Shanghai; if we used solar and wind instead, and needed to buffer the capacity for 12 hours, we would need about 4 YEARS of 100% of the output of the gigafactory.
Battery tech is nowhere NEAR mature enough for mainline energy storage. It is off by orders of magnitude.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
What bullshit is this?
Your inability to use google is bullshit.
links?
Here you go. Not only are chinese panels dirtier if landfilled, but there's twice as much CO2 in their production.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Are you saying Hydro (e.g. pumped storage with pumping powered by Solar) isn't "green"?
No, it's not really green. Greener than fossil fuels, for sure, but dams have a massive carbon footprint and a massive ecological footprint.
Concrete production is one of the most CO2 intensive activities that humans undertake. Dams take a massive amount of concrete to build.
Damming a river also changes the environment substantially, and can also release a lot of CO2. If you drown all the vegetation for miles, all that stored carbon is released as it decomposes. The new lake can also speed decomposition of anything that ends up in it, whereas it might decompose a lot slower if it was somewhere dry.
Granted, the CO2 release is most intense during the construction and first few years of a dam's life, but during that time dams do directly generate a lot of CO2.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Lot's of truth in what you said. Sadly it's timeframe lacking, or perspective lacking
Beaver dams do create more farmland. Yes, that's truthful, the time frame is decades scale to century scale, sentiments and biological matter have to filter out and stay put.
Beaver Dams replenish Aquifers, Yes this is true for multiple reasons and usually faster than a dam does. Because a beaver dam brings in plant growth and slows down river flow, water has more time to enter the earth that the plant's have broken down via the root system. but again, this is time so sometimes it's observable during our lifetime, sometimes it's not.
Can fish go over beaver dams, during flooding times maybe to yes, but a good beaver dam will have small leaks that the flow of water downstream but a fish can not swim in those leaks.
There is more to be said about beavers, but sadly it's going to be rich people that save it. because they will buy up the land, put the beavers in it, and enjoy there own parks on a tax free basis.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Take the entire annual output of Tesla's gigafactory. Dedicate it 100% to batteries for storage for Shanghai. Charge it completely. And you can run Shanghai for about 3 hours.
It's one thing to provide a few minutes' backup in a tiny-consumption area, it's a completely different thing to be useful in a modern large city.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
For many governments, hydro is not renewable and is not considered green. Sad but true!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
While I would like to agree with you, I believe that if Bitcoin and the like were taken out of the graph, it would look different.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Where can you get electricity for $0.02/kWh? We pay about 12X that here in California, and in Germany and Denmark they pay upwards of 20X that price...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Depends what you define a private company then.
The EDF is only a private company on paper in so far that it is a stock company, its mostly owned by the french state. And the new reactor in China is cough cough owned to 30% by EDF. See: https://www.edf.fr/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Power on demand" - i.e., peaking, comes mainly from hydro and combustion (gas) turbine units. Steam-cycle systems like nuclear don't like rapid changes and are therefore best when brought online and left at full load for extended periods.
That's just with current known reserves. See this article:
http://www.world-nuclear-news....
There's a lot more uranium out there than the one that's already being mined. Then there's integral fast reactors which can burn up the fuel one to two orders of magnitude better.
Concrete production is one of the most CO2 intensive activities that humans undertake. Dams take a massive amount of concrete to build.
I always like these excessive generalizations. Ever heard of an earth-filled dam?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What about artificial gravity?
Yeah, all the known uranium only amounts to that much. We're pretty sure (based on scientific knowledge, not magical guesses or actual measurements) that there's more out there, in the same way we're pretty sure there are new and undiscovered oil fields with a huge amount of new oil (I've heard predictions that 1/3 to 2/3 of the oil in the world hasn't even been discovered yet).
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I guess beavers disagree.
Anyway, in Europe basically every river is upstream dammed to make it ship able, generate power and slow down the river flow. The river flow needs to be slowed down because otherwise so much debris carried around that you have to use diggers to keep the river bed deep enough for ships ...
Bottom line the dams provide nice lake like basins, no disaster.
https://www.google.com/maps/pl...
If you go upstream, that is south, there is another dam a few kilometers away.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Fish can go over most beaver dams, unlike most manmade dams. ... and some even have elevators.
Man made dams have a fish staircase
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
How high is the baseline in relation to peek at your place? In percentage of peak?
Most "green" power sources increase carbon emissions because they need a fast on natural gas power source to balance out their variable power.
Obviously nonsense. Except you pair your fast reacting gas plant with a nuke. But what we are doing is replacing a coal plant with wind and solar. The coal plant needs the same gas plant the solar and wind farm needs, there is no extra CO2, there is only saved CO2 from getting rid of the coal plant.
Actually a no brainer, no idea why you write nonsense like above.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
MSR's will be perfected by China most likely, they are the ones bothering to work on them. Might be one European country dabbling in them as well?
MSR's are handy in that they can eat uranium waste from the other reactor's and also consume waste Thorium from all that rare earth mining going on so you can have your new iPhone every year...
Stop reading bloomberg, that article is completely made up.
First of all: most of Europe has no air conditioning. Why would we _need_ more power when it gets warmer? To make more ice?
Secondly: we have at the moment quite strong winds. And why bloomber uses their own model, when they simply could ask people who are professional about wind ... is beyond me: www.windfinder.com
Wind looks pretty constant to me over the actual week ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Vogtle is being built by a private energy company consortium, with some state loans, but that's because the major issue with such large timescale projects is the loan rate variability and loan size can kill the project. Similar issues with hydroelectric.
you need a cooling system for times when you can't immediately use that energy. Like say some big load suddenly goes offline and it takes time for the reactor to reduce its heat output
Could a reactor faced with a sudden significant reduction in load dump excess electric power into a football field-sized battery comparable to Tesla's Hornsdale Energy Reserve?
Not with fission plants, man.
You couldn't have radiators large enough to keep the people alive.
Aneutronic fusion is the critical nuclear technology for space travel.
Erm, yes?
Space is a perfect insulator. There's no method of heat exchange other than black body radiation, the least efficient method.
Cooling stuff in space is hard.
See, temperature itself cannot drive an engine.
ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.. I mean sure, you could be technically correct here- a single temperature cannot drive an engine. However, a gradient of temperature absolutely can drive an engine. Waste heat is a temperature gradient that is too small to do work.
So your heat engine sitting in the hottest part of the universe merely needs a way to channel that heat to a colder part of the universe, which should be hard if it's sitting in the hottest part.
Other than that, your post is correct.
s/should/shouldn\'t/;
No, it's also cold. Very, very cold. (Also very very hot in some places, but that's another topic)
Space has a background temperature. You will not cool to below it.
Other than that, your general point is correct. Space is better thought of as an insulator for energy levels at this scale, since reasonable black-body radiation flux levels are tiny in comparison to the heat generated.
Now if only we could turn ourselves off when the insolation is too low to power a computer using microwatts of power. Whoops, guess we just die.
Un-dammed rivers can also be a frequently recurring environmental disaster.
Sorry mate but that is utter horseshit. The fundamentals to keeping nuclear reactors under control are ludicrously simple, the safety scenario even simpler. A nuclear reactor is not a complex system. A dangerous one, a large one, but far from complex.
But since you pointed out three specific things:
Chernobyl: there was no fundamental misunderstanding of the risks when designing the Chernobyl reactor. It had a working safety system. Someone purposely disabled it and it got listed as operator error. This is also something that since the 90s operators are no longer capable of doing.
Sellafield: I don't know why you would list this one with the others. It was a reactor poorly designed, with engineering problems ignored, operating in a way never intended with a design that wouldn't be considered for power. So quite irrelevant in discussions of nuclear safety. It belongs more in a list of nuclear accidents for weapons research.
Fukushima: The fundamentals of the safety here were also well understood and considering the disaster which preceded it things went exceptionally well.
Now as bad as that sounds you just listed 3 incidents that predated fundamental movements of process safety. In the rest of the industry you can find thousands more such incidents with some common trends that the nuclear industry shares: The accidents decreased over the years as plants were built and the processes governing our fundamental understanding of safety improved. Key words such as management of change, abnormal operating risk assessment, and inherently safer designs are common place across all process and energy sectors these days, concepts which didn't actually exist when these plants were built.
Now with the benefit of 50 years of development in the process safety area we have reactor designs such as the AP1000 where you're simply not able to recreate incidents of Fukushima and Chernobyl with a focus on inherently safer processes and passive cooling. Designs in the nuclear industry as well as the entire process sector have over the years changed from relying on expert operation, to assuming everyone out there is an idiot and to not rely on any kind of expert knowledge.
The key thing there: The process industry without it's paperwork has developed faster and safety than the nuclear industry did. Bureaucracy doesn't just add cost and complexity, it is literally able to hold back progress in an industry.
Oceans.
Currently there are 4.5 billion tons of uranium in the world's seawater at any given time. This is renewed via erosion. Obviously it's an economics issue for recovering metal from seawater, but folks are already working on it. U.S. Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory already is using acrylic fiber (basically yarn) to harvest. They estimate it'll be similar in costs to land mining, and you can reuse the fibers for other purposes. There's also other less efficient stuff, mostly developed from seawater gold harvesting. So, yes, hilariously, nuclear power is sustainable and renewable. Go figure.
We could outpace seawater uranium mining, but it'd take about a thousand years. This ignores the world's thorium reserves. There's 2 or 3 billion tons of that around too. If we can't figure out fusion within a couple thousand years, we have other issues.
Sucks to have to breathe the air, drink the water, or eat the food in China, I guess.
Kind of goes without saying, lol
I'm amazed someone came so vociferously to the defense of the Chinese in this particular arena
We wouldn't have to if people would do their jobs properly
No you don't understand. This isn't the kind of paperwork that puts checks and balances on people.
But you do need to inspect and test it anyway.
Didn't say you don't. But that doesn't change between the nuclear and the process industry. .. Actually yes it does, the process industry actually do it better.
Whole-project cookie cutter designs can be used only in the easy cases ...snip... A power plant is surely something else already for its strong connections to other systems and the environment?
No it definitely isn't. Nuclear power is incredibly simple from a process design and understanding point of view. Dangerous, large, expensive, yes, but incredibly simple nonetheless. The results are literally cookie cutter designs. That worthless paperwork I alluded to? That was all wasted time after we were given the exact design to work with, validated it, presented it back unchanged, and then sat around as people navalgazed over a standard perscripted design. A power plant has very little external systems influencing it.
An oil refinery, or an olefin cracker, now we're talking interconnected systems! Now we're also talking technologies where a fundamental design is given but there is a lot of leeway in the actual implementation. From an engineering point of view, nuclear power is pretty much off the shelf. You want to build an AP1000? You will build it exactly as that design which was approved in 2005 says, with regulators checking and second guessing the very designs that they gave you in the first place.
AND the greenest source of base load power
And the deadliest to boot!
We would need about 9 of the AP1000s to run just Shanghai; if we used solar and wind instead, and needed to buffer the capacity for 12 hours, we would need about 4 YEARS of 100% of the output of the gigafactory.
So?
What's the price difference between 4 years of gigafactory output + equivalent solar and wind, and 12 AP1000s + fuel/waste disposal? (Ignoring that this is China, and waste disposal probably means the Yangtze)
Why go to all the power of inventing huge batteries that don't store enough power when nature has provided an extremely efficient one in the form of radioactive material?
Off the top of my head? Because the byproducts of releasing the energy from that battery is insanely fucking toxic and radioactive?
Not railing against nukes or anything- I'm a pro-nuke person, myself... But acting like nuclear waste isn't a big fucking problem doesn't advance the cause anymore than a kid sticking his fingers in his ears and screaming "lalalalala" gets him out of doing his homework.
Thank god nature did no such thing.
I'm quite sure the sun's mass in any fissile material would instantly collapse into some kind of barely-if-at-all luminous ultra-dense not-life-friendly ball of spinning death.
You keep posting this, over and over and over again.
Why must it be done at once? Transitions can be slow, ya?
As you bring up more renewables, you bring up battery storage for them.
Concrete production is one of the most CO2 intensive activities that humans undertake. Dams take a massive amount of concrete to build.
I hate this argument.
It's not wrong, so who can argue it, right?
But *everything* takes concrete. Windmills. Nuclear plants. Coal plants.
When comparing a dam, which takes a massive amount of concrete, and also kills a bunch of vegetation as a steep initial CO2 cost- against a coal plant, which also takes a massive amount of concrete, and also kills a bunch (though less) of vegetation as a steep initial CO2 cost... and then continues pumping out the amount of CO2 it took to build the dam every 12 days... is fucking ridiculous.
In any valid comparison, a dam is 00ff00. It's green as fuck.
There, I have now doubled the number of times that "France" has been mentioned in a discussion that includes extravagant statements about the unaffordability of nuclear power, how it only survives by huge subsidies.
None of these people ever explain how France has not gone broke, relying on it for 75% of power generation for over 40 years. The power utility has separate books, so you're presumably including a vast nuclear-wing conspiracy to steal trillions from French taxpayers, decade after decade, right-wing and left-wing governments alike keeping the dread secret... of the money smuggled over to the electrical utility to fake up a profit.
Or we could go with Occam's and figure they really produce power with nukes at about a mid-range price for Europe, far cheaper than Germany and Belgium:
https://1-stromvergleich.com/e...
As for safety and all that, this is France, fercrissake; they take to the streets in crowds of black masks, smashing windows, in support of disgruntled train drivers: ...so I really think they would have called their government on the malfeasance if there had been any with nuclear reactors.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
It totally blows me away how aggressively Americans preserve their lack of interest in other countries. The fact that something worked somewhere else never makes any impression on them. Everybody else has universal health insurance? Still can't actually work. (On the right.) France runs the country on nukes since Disco was cool? It's still technically and financially impossible. (On the left.)
What about artificial gravity?
You will need to somehow dump 2x the "net power" worth of heat into the surrounding environment. I'm sure it could be done but it would require a massive amount of radiators.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
It's about scale. How many gigafactories will be needed to bring it up slowly? If you need one factory for 4 years for just one city for half a day, and you have hundreds of such cities, then how long do we plan to take to build out that battery infrastructure, just to run these cities for a few hours?
Do the math for, say, Germany. Each German uses about 7000 KWh per year. There are 83 million Germans. The Gigafactory can make 35 GWh of batteries per year. Do the math for say, 1 day backup (19 kWh per German). You need about 45 Gigafactory-years of output to support that. And that is just for Germany for one day.
Batteries don't make sense on a large scale at all.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You tell me - but include the cost of harvesting 100% of the Gigafactory's required Lithium, Dysprosium, Cobalt, and other rare earth metals, and cost of recycling those batteries. At least the US, we have a completely-paid-for nuclear waste facility and a $46 billion trust fund (paid for by the nuclear power companies) that is sitting idle because of politics. We could dispose of the waste for very low cost, but alas - politics beat reason.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Interesting. That's actually a better estimate than prognosticating on land reserves, because you can actually go around and just measure seawater all over the place with all the research vessels already trafficking the planet.
Once in a while, when renewable energy comes up, I make some bizarre statements about the implications of heat pumps having a greater-than-unity COP and recouperative and adiabatic processes being a real thing. If anyone ever actually builds a working model of that kind of process, the energy economy will immediately become lulzy.
It's not even mathematically-impossible: it's just sucking energy from ambient environment, and the capture from ambient source needs to be bigger than the loss to ambient source. Remember a heat pump can expend 1kW and move more than 1kW--many residential consumer units have a COP of 2.8, and some are over 3--and that 1kW of work energy has to go somewhere, so you take 3kW from the cold end and spit 4kW into the hot end (this is how your AC actually works, and why a 600W dehumidifier is a 600W space heater). If you force this into a heat storage medium, you've still got loss everywhere--your engine, your heat pump itself (which most likely is driving the extra heat where you want it to go anyway), etc. Insulation, piping, and fancy engineering can get you an adiabatic system; but if you have 40% loss and only 30% (i.e. 75%) recovery plus pull 8% more energy from ambient air, you're net-losing (40% energy lost, 38% energy recovered, 2% net loss).
We think, in practice, that our adiabatic storage tech can break 90% recuperation. In theory, it's 100%.
inb4 trolling engineers.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Concrete production is one of the most CO2 intensive activities that humans undertake. Dams take a massive amount of concrete to build.
What is the emission in that scenario that wouldn't also be there for any other solution?
So, Nuclear power stations are built using only, what, wood, with no concrete at all?
If you're bored, go look up how much concrete is used in a wind turbine footing and compare it to how much is used for a dam or nuclear power plant. Wind turbines are far greener than either of those, by a long shot. And they tend to have much smaller environmental footprints. The downside, of course, is that they can't really function as baseline, at least not without storage or country-scale distribution networks.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
There is a fundamental limit to the efficiency of a heat engine and it depends on the ratio of the absolute temperatures of the cold and hot sides of the engine. Nuclear reactors produce heat which drives a heat engine. It is impossible to convert all the energy to mechanical work. Some of the energy is necessarily wasted as heat. If you know a way around this, the Nobel Prize committee would like to hear it.
No, they use more concrete than dams. This seems like something that anyone who has ever seen a nuclear power plant or a picture of one should know.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
You want to build an AP1000? You will build it exactly as that design which was approved in 2005 says, with regulators checking and second guessing the very designs that they gave you in the first place.
So the design is such a complete package that you can treat the plant as a black box with interfaces and emissions? That should make the environmental impact studies a lot easier, as well as enable ready-made rescue plan and risk assessment templates and models. Unfortunately an approved or proven design is just the start of the approval process for placing the plant or any other structure in a particular place, here at least. The regulators here receive the plans and impact studies for approval, make suggestions and requirements and don't actually provide any plans for projects such as a power plant (I wonder if I understood your post correctly?). Demanding neighborhood mammals, fish and all that.
You could get convection back by putting the reactor in a spinning part of your habitat/ship or whatever. That does of course complicate things as the reactor is likely to be very heavy and it'd have to be counter weighted in some way. Cooling would be down to just radiative, and I think that'd always be the biggest hurdle. You'd need a very large system of cooling panels to off load enough heat.
If you know a way around this, the Nobel Prize committee would like to hear it.
No, they wouldn't.
Don't fret, LynnwoodRooster's education is in lies, frauds, and deceits.
I don't disagree that politics is the primary problem with waste disposal. But regardless, those politics have to be factored into the cost.
I'm not sure what China's waste disposal costs are, but they must also be factored in.
I do suspect that politics aside, that problem can be reasonable mitigated for a reasonable price.
You don't need to radiate away the heat energy that is converted to electricity.
Radiation would also be much more efficient in deep space (3 kelvin), far away from the sun.
Terrestrial nuclear power plants are designed to dump heat near the boiling temperature of water. In deep space a working fluid with a higher boiling point could be used. Radiative heat flux goes to the 4th power of temperature.
Not sure what calculation you did as you didn't include it.
Stefan–Boltzmann constant is 5.67 W / (m^2 * K^4)
3.3 - 1.1 GW = 2.2*10^9 W = 5.67*10^-8 W / (m^2 * K^4) * 373K^4 * X m*2
X m^2 = 2.2*10^9 / (5.67*10^-8) * 373^4)
2*10^6 m^2 = 2 km^2 or 1 square kilometer double sided. But this is a monster of a reactor.
Suppose though that you double your working fluid temperature to 746K (nuclear has very high energy density and increasing the temperature is easy compared to combustion). This decreases your radiator size by 8x, at the cost of some efficiency.
How would you get something so big into space, and more importantly, how would you get whatever uses all the electricity into space?
You're certainly right that building a huge ass dam isn't as green as building turbines, but when someone argues that it's not green, I think they do it a disservice by not amortizing that CO2 cost over the life of the dam. That is to say, generally people arguing that have a sales pitch against dams and are trying to make them look worse than they are.
And when you compare the concrete costs MW to MW vs. turbines, is it truly so bad?
How is this design better than other designs. What are the advantages / disadvantages?
Keep in mind that Fukushima is the gift that keeps giving. I personally feel that the Japanese did a good job of managing that mess. But it is a mess to which no one has a solution. They have a core which is in the ground and radioactive water going into the Pacific. Anyone have a good approach to resolving this mess?
Maybe there is a lot of radio - iso's in the ocean and maybe they will be highly diluted. But the fact remains that there is no end in sight. The Japanese government is funding along with various companies ways to solve various bits of the puzzle. But no sign of a clear solution as of yet.
I am not pro / con - but I would like to know more about this design.
Yep, nuclear power could be quite affordable, and it has a very small footprint and massive amounts of energy available at any time - but our politics keeps it failing. We've paid for Yucca mountain, we have tens of billions of dollars in a trust fund waiting to handle Yucca mountain, and we can't use it because politics.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
There is a fundamental limit to the efficiency of a heat engine and it depends on the ratio of the absolute temperatures of the cold and hot sides of the engine.
Yes, this is also known as a heat gradient.
Nuclear reactors produce heat which drives a heat engine.
That's only half of it. If the radiator fails to shed that heat, the reactor does nothing.
Doesn't matter how this is done- the heat simply has to be transferred elsewhere.
It is impossible to convert all the energy to mechanical work.
While this is *technically* accurate- I suspect not in the way you mean it. In the case of a water turbine heat engine, you can continue to run it for as long as you can concentrate heat enough to cause a phase change in the fluid passing the turbine.
The real limits in the work we can extract from heat here on the planet are practical limits.
For example, if the waste heat had dropped below what was enough to phase-change water, you could always use a fluid with a lower boiling point, as long as you had a cold enough reservoir available for it to condense again (transfer the heat).
Parent cited Carnot's theorem without really understanding it, because if he did, he'd be aware that you can extract work from heat all the way to absolute zero, assuming you have a reservoir of absolute zero fluid.
Parent's claim was that an engine placed in the hottest part of the universe could do no work.
Sure, that's right, but a steam turbine in a nuclear reactor without a way of moving the heat to a cooler area can't do any work either.
If you know a way around this, the Nobel Prize committee would like to hear it.
No, they wouldn't. They'd roll their eyes and say, "Congrats. You discovered Carnot's theorem, and figured out that waste heat is a practical limit, not an absolute one."
So, yes, hilariously, nuclear power is sustainable and renewable.
How is it renewable? Is there more uranium being created inside the earth? I thought it came from supernovae. http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
What about artificial gravity?
Let us just cut to the chase and say this, it's a stupid idea. Any fuel you are using for the reactor you would be using as fuel for the space craft and your cooling problems would go away and you could still draw electrical power from an atomic engine in space.
Actually this is the one use of nuclear power I support, in space. Using the spent fuel from our reactor stock in space as engines for space craft that never return to the surface of the earth is probably the best use of these materials.
None of that is going to involve wasting time taking a AP1000 into space because why would you need the mass of thousands of tons of concrete shielding in space? You could simply have the core shielded from impacts and not worry about the radiation because space is already full of that. Why would you use water as a coolant when you have lead. Why would you use a one through configuration when space *IS* the place you would use a breeder reactor.
This is what you would do. You 'reactor' would be the core power component of your engine, you may have smaller reactors on board as auxiliary power or even auxiliary engines. The 'rEngine' for reactor-engine would be the same base elements used in a breeder because if you have the materials it would be handy to create your next batch of fuel in the engine to zip around the solar system in. Now all the energy you were trying to dissipate in space becomes energy to push you along. I even have a rough design for this engine.
So, all up, an AP1000 in space is a waste of fuel - there are much better ways to do the same thing and solve other problems along the way.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
So, your city-sized space ship that uses 1.1 gigawatts per hour for a couple hundred years, needs a surface area of at least 1.4 km in order not to cook its inhabitants. That's not the impossible design constraint you're making it out to be. Aircraft carriers already have several times that much surface area, and we've got plenty of those. Not a trivial project, sure, but a far cry from impossible even with today's technology.
Nobody's going to pay a guy to find the 91st year of uranium reserves. They -will- pay to find the 10th year of uranium reserves. They're out there.
Pluto? Just shy of one watt per square meter. We've got microwatt computers. Again, make your shit efficient.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
What about waterfalls, like Niagra? One of the earliest hydro power plants.
I'm in the pacific northwest. Lots of hydro, little solar.
It would be cool if you could find a way to turn that heat into a giant, bright light.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Hey, I'm a big fan of SpaceX, but how many *interplanetary* missions have they launched to date? Zero so far as I can tell, unless you count the high-risk Falcon Heavy test / Starman PR stunt. The closest they've gotten is a launch to the Earth-Sun L1 point, which is right at the edge of Earth-dominated gravitational space.(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
You need a much bigger rocket for an interplanetary launch, and Falcon 9 just doesn't make the cut. Heavy might, once it's been well-tested. Meanwhile, we don't have even a single orbital refueling depot, which will almost certainly be the very first piece of interplanetary-specific infrastructure to be built.
And really, the BFR is looking like it will be the first rocket capable of handling any substantial interplanetary payload, greatly aided by the planned tanker-ships that will let it (hopefully relatively easily) refuel in high orbit with only a half-dozen additional launches.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Mr. President, the Chinese are opening a Coal Gap with us! It's a matter of National Security! We must not allow a Coal Gap with the Reds!!
"I'm on it!"
Where are these 'hundreds of cities the size of Shanghai' ?
Damming rivers is an environmental disaster.
Also dams use huge amounts of concrete which means huge amounts of CO2 from concrete production.
Those costs are already included in the battery costs you idiot. Or do you think Musk just gives away batteries for free, like you think he does with Teslas. Recycling those batteries after many many years, much longer than nuke fuel, would just make the next round of batteries even cheaper. No need to mine all that stuff again.
Why do you need 12 hrs of buffer? Wind still works at night. Often better. There is less demand at night anyway. Whatever river you are using to cool all those nukes, just damn it and used pumped hydro as storage for the Solar/Wind instead.
Very smart man told us Shanghai averages 40 degrees in the summer anyway, so nuke is a non starter for 1/2 the year.
It doesn't work that way. Nuclear reactor fuel has a limited shelf life and won't perform after a few decades.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Then you need to redesign your reactor or your fuel storage. There's absolutely no reason nuclear fuel should go "stale" while in storage.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'm going to stop commenting on nuclear stories on Slashdot. None of you guys can read. There is a fundamental limit to the efficiency of a heat engine, and it depends on the ratio of the absolute temperatures of the cold and the hot sides of the engine. To actually make a heat engine that converts all energy to mechanical work is literally impossible, because aside from all the technical challenges, doing so requires a cold side at absolute zero, which doesn't exist. A way around that, i.e. converting 100% to mechanical energy without a reservoir at absolute zero, would negate Carnot's theorem, and you can bet your ass the Nobel committee would like to hear about that (but only if you actually found a way around it, not some half-baked idea with a lot of hand-waving).
We had thorium reactors, actual working ones, and got rid of them because they didn't work right. You nuke nutters are just useful idiots for an industry that would gladly irradiate you and everybody else if it made just a little bit more profit.
Same way hydrogen in the sun is renewable. It's not. The hydrogen fusing into helium isn't being recreated.
But on human time scales, it might as well be, so folks use the terminology. I was most kidding, but it is true. Rain strip mines the entire world. This washes down into the ocean. We can strain out the bits we want at minimal environmental cost. Erosion repeats the process. For the next billion years.
At current consumption, we have 90 years's worth of uranium ore around. We expect to find more, because there's got to be more.
The same has been said of oil many times but we still seem to keep finding more. The supply of any natural resource depends on the cost to mine it. If the price goes up then that makes far more of that resource profitable to mine. Since the cost of the fuel for nuclear power makes up such a small portion of the total cost a 10 times increase in fuel costs means only perhaps a rising of what the ratepayer sees is 10%. I'm not quite sure of how that math works out but it's something close to my estimation. If uranium prices go up by 10 times then that means the supply increases by 10 times, which would mean not 90 years of fuel supply but 900 years. At that point the supply may as well be infinite as no one looks that far into the future for pricing anything.
Imagine ramping up from 20GW to 200GW of electricity production by nuclear in the US, and similarly around the world.
Not only can I imagine that I see this as inevitable. There were a lot of nuclear reactors built in the 1970s and 1980s. Being as the people building them didn't know a lot about how these things worked at the time in the long run they were over engineered with huge safety margins. The planned life for these things were on the scale of 30 or 40 years. Now that we have a better idea on how this stuff works on the long term we've been able to double or triple their expected operational life spans. Even so they will have to be shut down and relatively soon. Replacing them with anything other than another nuclear power plant will be very difficult. Replacing nuclear power with natural gas, wind, solar, or even coal means stressing the know resources available. Just like with diminished availability of uranium raises prices so does increased consumption of coal or whatever. Part of the reason that natural gas is as cheap as it is right now is because we still get 20% of electricity in the USA from nuclear power.
I'm not certain the known uranium resource is enough to power our current electricity consumption for one full year.
We don't have to rely on uranium for nuclear power, thorium works for that too. Thorium is everywhere, and it's cheap to mine if only the governments of the world toss out international treaties that limit access to it. Thorium is expensive only because laws on restricting access to what is considered a weapon grade material make it expensive. We can make thorium real cheap, and therefore make nuclear power real cheap, overnight if we toss out these stupid laws.
Canada and India have been experimenting with using thorium as a fuel in their current reactors for years now. It's not like we need to design new reactors, current reactors will do fine. I will grant that this is not optimal, we'd be better served with reactors designed for thorium as a fuel from the start. We know thorium is a viable fuel, it's just that we need to still figure out the specifics. Assuming only a year of uranium fuel is available that still gives us enough time to move on to thorium as a fuel.
Why hasn't anyone moved on to thorium as a fuel already? Because there has not been the motivation to do so yet. If the US federal government believes that they could see 20% of electrical production capacity lost in a year for lack of uranium fuel then they will be, IMHO, sufficiently motivated to allow experimentation in thorium as a fuel in current reactors and the construction of new reactors designed for the use of thorium fuel. It takes ten years for the construction of a nuclear reactor in the USA right now only because the government makes it that way. We've built nuclear reactors within 18 months before and I suspect we could do it again, if properly motivated.
We used to be able to bring 5 reactors online every year in the USA back when the USA had half the population it ha
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Fuck you. If it weren't for assholes like you we would have had thorium reactors by now.
We don't have thorium reactors now because they don't work well enough to bother with. Nobody is stopping nuclear reactor research, only the building of actual power plants. It's not science that these people hate, it's grossly stupid and/or greedy decisions that can affect mankind for thousands of years.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So go change the wiki article if you think nuclear has no maintenance, planned or otherwise. And they don't shut them down when their cooling reservoir gets too hot, ie every summer in some places.
Or you could just look up availability factor and learn what it actually means, instead of what you think it means.
Since cold is the absence of heat, yes, space is very cold indeed. I did not mean to infer otherwise.
"Space has a background temperature. You will not cool to below it."
I believe otherwise. CMB has a thermal black body spectrum at a temperature over 2.7 K. Back in 2003 MIT was able to lower the temperature of sodium gaz below 1 nanokelvin.
http://news.mit.edu/2003/cooli...
Gravity Probe B (2004-2005) was using gyroscopes housed within superfluid helium, maintaining a required temperature of under 2 kelvins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There has also just been a launch of the Cold Atom Lab on May 21'st this year, which may allow temperatures as low as 1 pK.
https://coldatomlab.jpl.nasa.g...
https://science.nasa.gov/scien...
Westinghouse got the business, GE is selling itself off like a scrap dealer!
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
Why don't we mitigate climate change with both nuclear AND renewables? Enough of the camps that want it all one way or the other. We have to hedge our bets anyway.
There is a fundamental limit to the efficiency of a heat engine,
Yes, and it is defined by the temperature gradient.
To actually make a heat engine that converts all energy to mechanical work is literally impossible
Of course it is. Who said otherwise?
The argument was that *unless* your cold side is absolute zero, there's more work that you can pull out of that heat. The waste heat of any practically limited heat engine can be reused, if that heat can be moved to another heat engine with a colder reservoir. Combined cycle power plants operate based on this. All heat engines in use are limited by practicality, not theory.
I'm not sure what you're going on about, or how you got so very confused.
I believe otherwise. CMB has a thermal black body spectrum at a temperature over 2.7 K. Back in 2003 MIT was able to lower the temperature of sodium gaz below 1 nanokelvin.
This doesn't apply- we were discussing radiating heat in space. What you can accomplish with a heat pump doesn't apply.
A radiator in space will not cool down to below CMB background.
You will need to somehow dump 2x the "net power" worth of heat into the surrounding environment. I'm sure it could be done but it would require a massive amount of radiators.
If you have any significant chunk of rock nearby, such as Earth's Moon, you run your coolant loops underground. Maintenance will be tricky, but there's far less piping to keep track of vs surface radiators. Likewise for Mars. The Moon can likely get away with solar panels for some time, but if there's ever to be any significant industry there, a nuclear reactor will be required (barring self-replicating robots, which are more heard of than seen).
Math is good. Engineering is good too. Radiative cooling is only necessary if you can't do conductive cooling with a large body of rock, which is available anywhere in the solar system that's actually interesting. Rerun the numbers for buried coolant loops.
How would you get something so big into space, and more importantly, how would you get whatever uses all the electricity into space?
Anybody building a reactor that large somewhere in space will be bootstrapping from something smaller and building it on the spot out of local resources, probably in order to drive more of what you need to make the parts for the big reactor (and other such large things).
There's been many papers about the smallest viable seed package required to bootstrap a space industry capable of in situ resource utilization. The seed can be almost arbitrarily small if you're willing to wait inordinately long amounts of time. If you want a functioning industry in, say, 20 years, you're going to need quite a few BFR launches worth of stuff.
If SpaceX's Starlink is as overengineered as it appears to be, it might be able to support subscription numbers high enough so that SpaceX will have enough income to pay for the development of quite a lot of those BFR payloads. If not, Elon Musk will have to hope that if he builds it, they will come, which may or may not happen.
Yes it is extremely hard, as there is very little direct matter contact in space, so you cannot use convection or conduction as your means of temperature regulation.
Sure, but spaceborne reactors are mostly pointless. All of the interesting places in the solar system are balls of rock of various sizes, so conduction can be quite useful. Maybe somebody would like to build a super-high-power deep space probe, but probably only once. It's easier to build a smaller one and just keep building bigger antennas to pick up its signal the farther it gets. A deep space antenna array at, say, Mars-Sun L2 will probably be able to hear Voyager I long after its signal is indetectable on Earth, until Voyager's transmitter fails entirely.
2AU lol, that's still pretty close kiddo. Try Pluto, or deep space.
Why bother? Mars is 21,344 km in circumference. At an average walking pace of 5 km/h, if you walk 12 hours per day, it would require nearly a year to walk all the way around Mars. 355 days, to be exact. With no oceans in the way, this is physically possible. And that's without stopping to look at the rocks on the way. There's plenty to do at 2AU.
There are just five human artifacts beyond Pluto's orbit right now, and that number is unlikely to change appreciably in decades, if it even changes this century. (Lovely visualization, somewhat outdated, from NASA here.) Reactor design for deep space isn't relevant.
Do the math for, say, Germany. Each German uses about 7000 KWh per year. There are 83 million Germans. The Gigafactory can make 35 GWh of batteries per year. Do the math for say, 1 day backup (19 kWh per German).
Foolishness. You don't ever need 24 continuous hours of backup, and the more distributed, a.k.a. the more renewable your power harvesting is, the less you need. If you have 9 kW of solar panels on your roof (nameplate capacity), you need just 2 Tesla Powerwall 2s to have continuous backup power for a week of American power consumption, which is 40% higher than German consumption (33 kWh per day). For $13,500 installed, available now. That's a week with zero grid input, average. It could be months, depending on weather.
In any case, we (a global we) have years. We have decades to install more and more batteries, solar panels, and windmills, and there's every reason to believe it will happen. The current multibillion dollar investments in existing power generation is not going to go away overnight. Only Germany and Japan are foolish enough to shut down perfectly good nuclear reactors with a decade of operational life left, nevermind all the existing installed coal plants. The grid mix is going to change and is changing, but it will not be rapid, globally, no matter how dire IPCC predictions get.
80%-90% is taxes.
If you had a sufficient store of water you can allow it to evaporate into the vacuum, which will actually provide a lot of cooling.
Just saying convection isn't the only way.
That specific example (1/3) does not directly apply indeed, except as historical background information. The the others on the other hand do, and only one is necessary to empirically disprove your initial claim: "You will not cool to below it."
Of course, you can posture that "A radiator in space will not cool down to below CMB background". That statement is true, but the goal is not to cool down the radiators, but other parts of the assembly.
I have the impression that you just didn't think things through or spent any time verifying your statement(s), perhaps because of what seemed reasonable and logical to you at the time. No shame in that, but if you are going to use others to test your assertions, it suggest that it is generally appreciated if you acknowledged your mistakes early.
Sigh. No, it really doesn't apply. Sorry.
With a heat pump, you can use a power source to move heat, in this case very little heat really, and that power source can be passively cooled. You *cannot* use a heat pump to cool a device generating the power you're using to pump the heat. I'm sure you can understand why.
As for example 1, it *really* doesn't apply. I'm also sure if you had read the article, you'd understand why.
I have the impression that you just didn't think things through or spent any time verifying your statement(s)
I have the feeling you're good at pulling bites out of articles without really understanding the article itself. Or perhaps you weren't really following the conversation with your complete faculties?
perhaps because of what seemed reasonable and logical to you at the time.
An odd way of saying you believe to have cracked that pesky Carnot efficiency problem.
No shame in that, but if you are going to use others to test your assertions, it suggest that it is generally appreciated if you acknowledged your mistakes early.
The mistake here was in your ability to follow the conversation, and understand the topics you were posting examples of. Let's recap.
The conversation was about the ability to cool a reactor in space. The fact that you could use that reactor to cool *something else* was never in question. That's just basic thermodynamics.
I assert that your power source cannot be cooled beyond passive temp, because, well, second law of thermodynamics and all that.
You cannot cool the system as a whole to below the reservoir entropy. Period. All stop.
If you think you've actually added something relevant to this conversation by asserting that we can use even more power to cool some part of the reactor to below ambient... Then congratulations, I think?
What's important here, I think, is that you learn to read before speaking, and to double check your thought processes before posting.
Better luck next time, though.
You do realise that nuclear fuel decays even if unused?
After a while the fuel pellets have to be reprocessed to remove bothersome elements and the packaging might become too damaged by radiation as well.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I am quite comfortable that I understood both the conversation and the technology we were talking about.
"You cannot cool the system as a whole to below the reservoir entropy. Period. All stop."
See, you changed it again.
Better luck with yourself.
Yes it does decay, but that decay is SLOW. Nuclear fuel is NOT appreciably radioactive. The most common nuclear fuels are Uranium-235, with a half-life of 704 million years, and Plutonium-239, with a half life of 24 thousand years.
Leave a bunch of P-239 scattered around for 1000 years and the fraction of fuel remaining will be (1/2)^(1000/24000) = 0.972. So you'll lose less than 3% of your fuel to radioactive decay in a thousand years. Or less than 0.03% in a decade.
If you pack your fuel closely then you get nuclear chain reactions which accelerate the process, but the solution is simple - don't pack the fuel so closely. Maybe that means putting enough space between fuel pellets, or maybe it requires making directly useless fuel-storage bricks by mixing the fuel with a lot of inert material that can be easily separated later when you're ready to produce fuel pellets. Either way, it's not a big deal.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It doesn't work that way. Nuclear reactor fuel has a limited shelf life and won't perform after a few decades.
WTF! Seriously, where in the world did you get that idea!
Fuel rods for most every reactor in existence, including the AP1000, are zirconium alloy pipes filled with uranium ceramic pellets. This ceramic is much like what's used to make coffee mugs, do your coffee mugs have a "limited shelf life"? The uranium in the pellets is a mix of U-235 and U-238. U-235 has a half life of over 700 million years, and U-238 has a half life of over 4 billion years. That's something like a "shelf life" in that at some point it's useless as fuel but not "decades", it's got a shelf life of thousands of years at least.
The longest anyone has run a nuclear reactor on one fuel cycle is about 30 or 40 years. That's in military submarines but the reason they are shut down after that time is not because it's low on fuel, it's shutdown because by that time the rest of the submarine has been worn out. The reactors in aircraft carriers are usually refueled after 25 years and then scrapped after 50 years with the ship. The plan is that the next generation carriers will carry a single fuel load for the entire 50 to 60 years that the ship is expected to be in service.
We know how to design reactors to last at least 80 years on a single fuel load but there has yet to be a need to do so. Again, this is fuel that is being "burned" for 80 years, not sitting on a shelf. Until it's in the reactor the fuel rod is quite inert and will stay so for a VERY long time.
From the other side, coal can't shut down or start fast enough for overnight off peak times when less power is needed. So they often have to pay people to take the coal power no one wants because it's too slow to shut down overnight and turn on again the next day.
See, you changed it again.
That's actually called restating the argument. It's done to help confused people understand arguments that are too complicated for people to keep track of.
If you build a starship big enough to hold the river or sea that will cool its AP1000 reactor, then I will build the reactor, you fucking nutter.
Initial assertion by some AC.
Why do you need a river to cool something in space?
Strange question #1 from some AC.
Because space isn't cold, it's fucking empty, you delusional fucknutter?
Semi-correct assertion by some AC.
No, it's also cold. Very, very cold. (Also very very hot in some places, but that's another topic) Space has a background temperature. You will not cool to below it.
Correction from yours, truly.
You cannot cool the system as a whole to below the reservoir entropy. Period. All stop.
Restatement in an attempt to remove nuance from explanation so as to make argument more understandable to one jimtheowl.
I don't need luck with myself. But I do hope that some day you're able to use your limited faculties more effectively, because attempt to hinge upon small fractions of text and use them out of context to make a pointless point really is a waste of the energy I likely subsidize your use of.
To summarize;
(1) "Space has a background temperature. You will not cool to below it."
Was nuanced, and was meant as:
(2) "You cannot cool the system as a whole to below the reservoir entropy. Period. All stop." ?
Given that the specific context was the cooling of the power source for some imaginary vessel, yes. I'd say that's even a reasonable interpretation.
Under normal circumstances perhaps, but you need a cooling system for times when you can't immediately use that energy.
No, you need a storage system.
No sig today...
Well of course, if you and Lynnwood are using your own definitions of availability that don't match everyone elses. It's easy to pretend to be right.
Or you need to reduce the reactor's output.
No sig today...
Could you also explain what you meant by "Also very very hot in some places.."?
There are clouds of gas in space radiating x-rays via black-body radiation. I can't remember how many millions of Kelvin they are, but within such a cloud, the background radiation flux will be significantly high, neverminding the rare interactions with the obscenely hot gas molecules themselves. Passive cooling will be problematic there, assuming you can survive being there at all.
Do you define space as "beyond Earth's atmosphere", or "the three-dimentional extent that includes the earth, stars, galaxies, pulsars etc?
In the later, space is considered mostly void and doesn't have a background temperature. You also cannot transfer heat to it. Radiation can move through it, and that is energy, but not heat, at least until that energy gets absorbed by matter (which could be gaz of course).
There is a CMB (cosmic microwave background, supposedly from the Big-Bang) and because cosmologists (among others) are interested in measuring these things, they use an 'ideal physical body', or 'black body' to express how much heat would result from all the energy being perfectly absorbed.
In this respect the AC was correct, and space is not 'cold' in the same sense that it can be hot. There is no heat because there is no matter, or at least not enough to transfer heat to (less than 0.1 atom/cm^3).
That said, I don't think we have to worry about getting anywhere close to one of these hot spots you mentioned (ie: Sagittarius A).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(Skip past 3:37)