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America's Energy Department Works With Bill Gates To Test Mini Nuclear Reactors (washingtonexaminer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Examiner:
The Energy Department is participating in a major push with electric utility Southern and a company founded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates to develop small nuclear power reactors that are less expensive and more efficient than their much larger cousins. "Molten salt reactors are getting a reboot," the Energy Department tweeted late Wednesday, offering a schematic of a battery-like power plant module that "could power America's energy"... The Department of Energy linked to a detailed description of how its Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other federal labs are teaming up with Southern Company, a big coal utility with several nuclear plants, and Gates' TerraPower to test and develop a type of reactor that uses liquefied sodium "as both coolant and fuel."
These liquid-metal reactors are sometimes referred to as nuclear batteries because they are small, self-contained units, which theoretically can be deployed anywhere, although the version being tested at Oak Ridge appears to be one requiring a permanent structure and housing. TerraPower was awarded a $40 million award by the Energy Department in 2016 to pursue the project.
Currently it's in the "early design phase" to assess commercial viability, but testing will begin in 2019, "which will help validate the reactor's safety systems for license certification by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."
These liquid-metal reactors are sometimes referred to as nuclear batteries because they are small, self-contained units, which theoretically can be deployed anywhere, although the version being tested at Oak Ridge appears to be one requiring a permanent structure and housing. TerraPower was awarded a $40 million award by the Energy Department in 2016 to pursue the project.
Currently it's in the "early design phase" to assess commercial viability, but testing will begin in 2019, "which will help validate the reactor's safety systems for license certification by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."
Face it, a very large chunk of the price of a conventional nuclear reactor is built into the legal challenges that pop up whenever building a reactor is proposed.
If the anti-nuke hysterics follow pattern, it won't matter if they can build these reactors for $5.99+shipping, they'll have 30 years of court challenges to deal with before they can actually build the first one, and then repeat for every copy proposed....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The "mini-reactor" idea comes around every 10 years. And every 12 year someone discovers that the fixed costs of operating any type of reactor that produces enough power to be useful (e.g. a US Air Force or Soviet "remote base" or "small town" system) mean that a somewhat larger plant is much more efficient, and a somewhat larger plant more efficient than that, and so on into the economy of scale argument for power/steam plants around... 1000 MWe (3000 MWt). Which is what tend to get built today.
The basics of power engineering, nuclear engineer, security, and waste disposal are well known and aren't going to be magically 'disrupted' by anything other than Mr. Fusion.
Nuclear power is the only alternative that has all the qualities you need to power civilization. It provides on demand power, it doesn't require very limited geographic features the way hydro or geothermal do, and it has the lowest impact of any power technology.
If we are lucky we will see its resurgence soon.
Because small, unitized reactors that can be easily dropped into place, and later removed and refurbished could make all the difference in the nuclear industry.
Then, you can strategically drop a reactor wherever you need steady power and encase it in a concrete/steel/lead sarcophagus and only address it again when the core needs replacing. This can help with the issues involved in building large nuclear facilities in danger-prone areas (like California).
Or, if you need more power, you drop multiples in and gang them together.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
They're stuck in 1998.
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You are right that the anti-nukes are f%ing insane. However, most of these 4th gen are much cheaper and safer. Add to that many anti-nukes are environmentalists and know that we MUST get CO2 down, and nuke as part is the only solution.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And too little too late, China is an order of magnitude more
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/china-spending-us3-3-billion-on-molten-salt-nuclear-reactors-for-faster-aircraft-carriers-and-in-flying-drones.html
"After testing, Southern Company and TerraPower plan to develop and license a test reactor before developing a 1,100-megawatt prototype by 2030."
Perfect. This is will arrive the same time that fusion power becomes commercially available and the $35,000 Tesla begins production.
You can't produce nuclear plants fast enough. Nuclear has been around more than half century, and it has failed to outcompete fossil fuels. The new designs are still just finding better ways to boil water. Even if they improve costs by an order of magnitude, solar and wind are still going to beat them.
Solar and wind are still enjoying exponential cost decreases, and at least solar is likely to continue on that path for a long time.
Nuclear has produced, and continues to produce more energy than wind or solar. In fact, no other scalable non CO2 emitting source has produced anything close to the production that nuclear has. Countries with higher percentage nuclear power have the lowest energy prices. Your statements ring hollow.
Nuclear has produced, and continues to produce more energy than wind or solar. Not in Germany.
Globally, by a long shot. Its not even close. You can always draw a small circle. Unfortunately for Germany, their CO2 emissions haven't improved and their electricity costs have skyrocketed, as reflected in their pricing, in their quest to add solar and wind.
History is very relevant. I see you want to ignore it. We know how that ends up.
The fucking hippies won't give a shit. All they will see is "nuclear" and then they will lose their fucking shit. It happens every time. if it wasn't for the hippies we probably would have had this decades ago and global warming from CO2 emissions would nothing but a theory on paper.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
The reason nuclear power plants are not being built has little to do with anti-nuclear hysterics and a lot to do with the initial cost of building these facilities.
The reason for the high initial cost has a lot to do with anti-nuclear hysterics.
I couldn't tell from the article. Are they talking about molten salt reactors or molten sodium? They mention both.
Also, any idea what the fuel cycle is? Some uranium isotope, thorium, or something else?
Forbes claims to know how deadly each energy source is to people.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
Nuclear power is by far the safest energy source we have available, that's especially true in the USA. There hasn't been a major incident in the USA with nuclear power since Three Mile Island, and no one died from that. Problems in Japan and with old Soviet reactors are not indicative of anything being built today in the USA. Even so the death count from Fukushima is zero, or so close to it that it's just noise on top of the signal from the tsunami that started it all. A once in a century tsunami that hit a reactor older than Chernobyl is not the metric we should use to measure the safety of nuclear power. Certainly not Chernobyl, a reactor with no containment dome and operated by drunken bureaucrats instead of properly trained technicians.
The question isn't if we should use nuclear power, we don't have much choice not to. The question is how quickly we should be building new nuclear power plants. The nuclear power reactors we have now are getting old and we need to replace them with something. It's going to be nuclear power or the lights will start to go out. Or, at least the lights will go dim. We can build devices to collect energy from wind, water, and sun, but that will never be enough for a society that wants to keep airplanes flying, and explore beyond the atmosphere. In space there is no wind, and even on Mars the sun gets pretty dim.
Using wind, water, and sun for energy might mean survival. Using coal and natural gas will mean continued air pollution. If we are going to keep Earth clean, and go even as far as low earth orbit, then we will need nuclear power.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
You can't produce nuclear plants fast enough.
Sure we can.
There was a time when the USA could build them "fast enough", and the USA has only grown in population, industrial capacity, and wealth. We can afford to build new nuclear. We can't afford not to. The USA built 99 reactors between 1967 and 1990. That's nearly 5 per year, but they were going online much faster than that at the peak.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
Just to keep up with the rate of expected closures of old coal and nuclear, and growing electrical demand, the USA will have to build about 2 new nuclear power reactors, of about 1GW capacity, every month. Once we've replaced all the old power plants we will have to keep building them at that rate to replace the ones we build today in 40 or 50 years. This is consistent with EIA projections of 20GW of new natural gas electrical generation capacity this year.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...
I have heard from a nuclear engineer that a nuclear power plant takes no more materials or engineering than nuclear power. The only difference is in the paperwork. If we can get all the legal hurdles out of the way then we could be building new nuclear like we did in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nuclear power is safe, clean, reliable, and we can build it as cheap as anything. Even with all the current bureaucracy on building nuclear power it is competitive with wind and natural gas, and it's certainly cheaper than solar right now. It's not as cheap as natural gas just yet but it only takes a spike in demand, and therefore prices, to flip that around. I expect that to happen after a couple years of 20GW of more natural gas power coming online every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It seems all there is to say against nuclear are easily debunked lies. We will have more nuclear power, that not a question any more. The only questions to answer is how quickly we can ramp up production and what kind of nuclear power we will be building. We can build more light water solid fuel reactors like we have for decades, or we can move beyond that and build molten salt reactors.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
https://www.cleanenergywire.or...
"death count from Fukushima is zero"
Sorry, this is utter bullshit and you know it.
Not only am I convinced that the deaths from the Fukushima Diiachi meltdown is zero, so are the experts at the United Nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Annex A of the UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee for the Effects of Atomic Radiation) 2013 report to the UN General Assembly[49] states that the average effective dose of the 25,000 workers over the first 19 months after the accident was about 12 millisieverts (mSv). About 0.7% of the workforce received doses of more than 100 mSv (Chapter II A(b) paragraph 35). No radiation-related deaths or acute diseases have been observed among the workers and general public exposed to radiation from the accident (Chapter II A(b) paragraph 38). Adults living in the city of Fukushima were estimated to have received, on average, an effective dose of about 4 mSv (Chapter II A(a) paragraph 30). No discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected among exposed members of the public or their descendants (Chapter II A(b) paragraph 39). Average annual exposure in the region from naturally occurring sources is about 2.1 mSv, and average lifetime exposure is 170 mSv (Chapter II A(2) paragraph 29). For comparison, the average dose from an abdominal and pelvic computed tomography (CT) scan, with and without contrast, is 30 mSv.
In the tsunami there were 16,000 people dead and missing. In all of that chaos and death people focused on the relative non-event that happened at the nuclear power plant. I will emphasize that didn't say the meltdown was a non-event, only that in the aftermath of the tsunami anything that happened at the power plant is minimal by comparison. I recall hearing of dead bodies found on the site of the power plant, the circumstances were such that it is suspected they drowned there in the flood. Again that's my recollection, go find something counter if you like as I already pointed to a report by the UN that no one died as a result of the accident.
There's another report out there that considered the evacuation around Fukushima to have caused more deaths than if everyone had stayed. Maybe the area should have been evacuated but it should have been done more slowly, and with greater care, to avoid the deaths from over exertion, traffic accidents, and so forth, that happened in the mad dash out of the area. We've learned to be more cautious in ordering evacuations, because the risks of deaths from an evacuation is not zero.
Think about that. It's quite possible the Japanese government caused more deaths in the evacuation than could have been caused if everyone stayed in place. We've gotten so scared of nuclear power that we are killing more people to "keep them safe" from it.
So, sure, I'll agree that claiming there were zero deaths from Fukushima is "bullshit". More people died fleeing the radiation than if they had all refused to leave.
Life is dangerous and everything we do carries a risk, and that includes doing nothing. Is there a risk from using nuclear power? Of course. That risk is far lower than using anything else, or using nothing at all.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.