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As China Option Fades, Bill Gates Urges US To Take the Lead in Nuclear Power, For the Good of the Planet (geekwire.com)
In his year-end letter, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says his to-do list for 2019 includes persuading U.S. leaders to regain America's leading role in nuclear energy research and embrace advanced nuclear technologies such as the concept being advanced by his own TerraPower venture. From a report: "The world needs to be working on lots of solutions to stop climate change," Gates wrote in the wide-ranging letter, released Saturday night. "Advanced nuclear is one, and I hope to persuade U.S. leaders to get into the game." Gates acknowledged that tighter U.S. export restrictions, put in place by the Trump administration, have virtually ruled out TerraPower's grand plan to test its traveling-wave nuclear technology in China. "We had hoped to build a pilot project in China, but recent policy changes here in the U.S. have made that unlikely," Gates wrote. He said "we may be able to build it in the United States" if regulations are updated and the investment climate for nuclear power improves.
Then what do you use for shielding?
mired in bureaucracy and political bs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
THere are a number of new intrisically safe (relatively speaking) self contained nuclear vessels. For example the Hyperion reactor. You bury in you backyard and it makes power till the fuel runs down. Then you can did it back up. In the meantime it minds it's own business and the type of nuclear fuel can't run away. Same with the Thorium reactors. Sure you could cut them open and spill the contents but that's actually pretty easy to clean up since unlike chemical spills radioactive materials are easy to find to clean up. Also things like uranium and thorium with long half lives just are not that "hot" to begin with.
The idea is that once you foreclose all possibility of a meltdown or steam explosion then nuclear power can done more safely and with less emissions than any other on-demand power source even when the operators are incompetent.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Nuclear pipe dreams:
LFTR: We're looking at an investment of about $40 billion and at least a 10 year Manhattan Project style gathering of the greatest physicists in the world to catch up to where the last research team left off in building a molten salt reactor. On top of that, we have to drill through the whole Thorium cycle to prove it out. Theoretically, it is very promising on paper. We'll have to see how well it proves out in reality. It has all the added benefits of being less toxic than the current Uranium cycle, with little to none of its byproducts that can be weaponized, and the end result material after the cycle is complete is only radioactive for a few hundred years, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of years in the Uranium cycle.
Thorium reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There is much less nuclear waste— two orders of magnitude less with thorium. It's abundant so it's more accessible. And it's prohibitively difficult to use as a nuclear weapon so it's safe to let developing countries without mature or stable state apparatuses develop these. The reactor designs use a lithium floride container that will melt, draining out the fuel in the even of an over temperature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Uranium Nitride safety: http://www.ans.org/pubs/magazi...
They can be built small, they do NOT produce weapons-grade uranium as a by-product, and they can’t melt down due to an uncontrolled “chain reaction.”
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Wrong. Regulations and cheap natural gas are the reasons.
Gates's focus on new, un-proven, and frankly more complex fission reactor designs is hopelessly misguided. A much better idea was the Gen III+ approach of standardized units that are improved lower cost versions of proven PWR technology, like the Westinghouse AP1000.
And no, it is not "opposition to nuclear power" holding it back in the U.S.
The primary problem is and has been the high capital cost of the plants. Without regulation guaranteeing sufficient stable returns over a long time to recover the investment it is a difficult pitch, and even then the long pay-back time makes it less desirable than natural gas plants if that is an available option. How to make capitalists and investors want to sink their money into these plants in large enough numbers to be helpful?
And this problem has led to the second - so few plants built that the industry to do it has become moribund, thin and the supply chain brittle.Westinghouse, the developer and backer of the AP1000 plant went bankrupt two years ago.
The U.S. has had a stream-lined licensing process for a few decades now, and since 2008 seven new units were licensed - all of the AP1000 design. Investors/utilities have dropped out of five of these, and the projects are dead. None of these projects were killed by "opposition", it was due to the projects going over budget and becoming uneconomical, and Westinghouse going bankrupt, not problems an untried new technology is likely to fix.
Only the two Vogtle units are still being built and have gone massively over budget. How far over budget? The original estimate for the two units was $4.4 billion and is now expected to be $25 billion. In large part this is has been due to difficulties in getting the major parts manufactured, and errors in construction, requiring rework, and delaying the schedule. And this is due to the brittleness of the industry supporting it at this point.
An AP1000 is running in China right now (started up in June of this year) and three more are under construction, but these units have also been delayed by years due to supply problems
The nations that have either a) built a mostly nuclear electricity grid (France); b) are actively building many nuclear power plants (China); or c) have a well-proven track record for building plants on-time and budget (South Korea) have one key thing in common. All of the companies doing this are majority government owned. That is to say, they are socialist enterprises.
The capitalistic model of the U.S. for nuclear power has failed. It has not maintained economies of scale, has been shown robustness to overcome "teething" problems, and is unable to "take a bath" on early units to perfect the supply system and overcome the learning curve.
It you want to see nuclear power making a come back in the U.S. the only option, on the evidence, would be creating a government run corporation to build them. If you don't support that, then you don't support nuclear power. And complaining about NIMBYism, or environmentalists, as if they were stopping nuclear power is simply beating a convenient whipping boy. Makes you feel good inside to bash people you don't like, but accomplishes nothing.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The biggest problems with nuclear power come decades down the road. Any "lead" endorsed by the political establishment won't focus much further than two presidential election cycles.
What we should do is do a crash program in nuclear waste management and plant decommissioning; once we lick that problem there's not much serious objection to proceeding with even third gen reactors, to say nothing of fourth gen designs with better inherent safety.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
when we've got Clean, Beautiful Coal?
Jokes aside the reason nuclear is a nonstarter in America is Americans don't trust their government and private institutions to keep it safe. Given the levels of corruption we routinely see that's not unreasonable.
Now, I personally think if we could convince Americans that government regulation works it wouldn't be an issue. But sooner or later somebody comes in with talk of "Job Killing Regulations" and an anti-gov't ad blitz and gets 51% of the voters to put somebody in power that'll gut safety regs for short term profit.
Look at Fukushima. 3 70 year old executives more or less destroyed a city for a quick buck and they _might_ finish out a life of opulence and splendor in prison. Or they might tie it up in court until they die of old age. See the problem?
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... such as the concept being advanced by his own TerraPower venture.
Not even trying to hide it.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
so that makes him a nuclear engineer and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Given the realities of climate change, air pollution, and poverty it is immoral to oppose nuclear energy. Also assuming renewables can replace fossil fuels is the equivalent to believing in the toothfairy.
DoE just signed a contract with UAMP to basically own 2 NuScale reactors out of the 12 that are coming. It will take a bit of time to build these (on-line in 2026), but they will be able to scale up to 1 reactor / month. IOW, by 2028, they can start building out new sites with 10-12 reactors for 600-720 MW sites. While this is less than massive 1+GW reactors that GE-Toshiba or Westinghouse push, these are near impossible to meltdown, can go up quickly, are passive meltdown proofed, and are quite cheap compared to coal, and even AE (if you add in the batteries for short-time on-demand).
The question becomes, will DoE under Perry and CONgress work together to push Nuclear power. One thing that he really should be doing is requiring that at least 2/3 to 3/4 of the energy be capable of on-demand for at least a week, if not a month. We are moving to electricity being the main form of energy (esp by moving our transportation to electric), so, it really needs to be solid. While price figures in, so should national/states security.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
LOL.
What exactly do you think that Uranium is doing constantly? Where do you think that GEO-THERMAL ENERGY comes from? U think that the sun is warming our planet? Nope. A big part of that heat is from radioactive decay.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ever used a titanium razor blade? They go dull really quickly.
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Regulations exist for a reason.
Gross corporatist propaganda to limit liability for negligence, incompetence and criminal actions.
The big radioactive elements on a human timescale are strontium 90, and cesium 137. They each have a half life of about 30 years. After about 300 years, their radioactivity is down by a factor of 1,000. Next is Americium-241, which emits alpha particles, and has a half life of ~400 years.
So, after guarding the spent fuel for several hundred years. I'd then consider it not so dangerous, and dump it in some out of the way place, like Antarctica, and not worry to much about leaks.
Let's see, when he published his book The Road Ahead in 1994, he barely mentioned the Internet.
And pretty much every "innovation" from Microsoft under his leadership was stolen or purchased from someone else.
Not to mention the great technologies that they crushed out of existence (e.g., the Go corporation's PenPoint OS.
Solar and wind produce power when they can, yes. So they don't work by themselves without storage, which is why we need better batteries, though pump storage has existed for a long time.
But nukes produce power whether they need it or not -- they don't start and stop on demand. So they are only good for baseline power, or you have to start throwing away their output. It takes days to start and stop a nuke, vs. hours for coal (bad fuel for other reasons) and minutes for gas.
So a balanced power system require a mix of baseline and peaking capacity, or plenty of storage for peaking purposes (nuclear) or low-generation (solar/wind) times.
Solar and wind do tend to peak at different times, though, so they complement each other.
Not before long i am afraid.
Molten salt reactors are a very interesting concept (You can do molten salt reactors with uranium too). But there are several technical hurdles to overcome. They are not necessarily nuclear. Some have to do with sustaining higher pressures and solving metallurgy challenges.
Nothing that seems scientifically undoable but huge investments would be required and private companies are simply not going to invest the billions needed. And industrialists will focus their efforts on the technologies that already exist.
I hear left and right about diverse experiments financed by the public but we are way short of the mark.
For a quick overview of what can be done with reprocessing you can google " breeder reactors"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Russian BN600 and BN800 do work already.Breeders would be a neat solution if nuclear energy was used more widely. But since the sector stagnates, there is no shortage of fuel to be spent in the classical way so not enough incentives to build such devices.
One of the well known by-products of reprocessing is plutonium, which has civilian uses. Right now, as i write this comment, a space probe is preparing to observe a very distant Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule. That probe uses electricity that comes from a Radioisotope Thermal Generator that is fuelled by plutonium. More news after the 1st of December 2019. :)
Nuclear power is simply the release of energy stored over a very long time. As such it is simply adding heat to the environment. Solar power and wind power simply use heat that would be here anyway. Thus it is far better at preserving the environment than operating a nuke.
Wrong. It was stored when the supernova exploded pretty much instantaneously. Its just been stored for a very long time. And Solar and wind require batteries big enough to be seen from orbit. When you back solar and wind, you are also backing natural gas and pretty much embracing climate change. If you believe otherwise, you simply haven't done the math or understand how power is used. Both CA and German CO2 releases have gone up during the same period when wind and solar were being deployed in great number and electricity prices rose in those places over the same period. And this is only accelerating as we double down on these policies. Hopefully you realize how much damage your solar and wind policies are doing before its too late for all of us. If not, guess who will be blamed first?
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
But nukes produce power whether they need it or not -- they don't start and stop on demand. So they are only good for baseline power, or you have to start throwing away their output.
MSRs can load follow as can many of the more modern nuclear designs. The alternative I like for existing nuclear (and other baseload power) is methane extraction to produce synthetic natural gas which can be sold (at which point the rest of the efficiency issues are someone else's problem). But that's wouldn't make a good or efficient chemical battery because you would only get 16-40% of the power back after burning the natural gas. Most conversions between different forms of energy are less than 50% efficient which is why batteries are hard and why powerplants that make electricity for immediate consumption are preferred.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
The AC is referring to a post tying Soros, Muslims, international conspiracies and all kinds of non-sense and quoting various media and "media" outlets. I answered to it by referring to a Russian incident involving Orthodox priest, iron cross and orthodoxy. Somebody reported. The off-topic conspiracy vibe was too strong and just too trivially stupid to live on.
I'd rather say until the Sun goes out... it could be used to power everything. The Sun puts more energy on the Earth than a thousand civilizations could use. We already know how to convert it to electricity and panel efficiency is now high, we know how to store it for later, we know how to distribute electricity for 1500 miles with UHVDC lines
Clean fusion power, there for the taking. Stop with these other distractions.
...and solar.
Uh, no. If an electrician falls off a nuclear cooling tower while servicing beacons to warn approaching aircraft, that's an industrial accident, it's not a failure of nuclear power. If that same electrician falls off a wind turbine while servicing a beacon to alert approaching aircraft, that's an industrial accident, not a failure of wind power.
When a wind farm creates a deadly tornado, or a solar farm creates an Archimedes ray and burns a town to the ground, then we can talk about the number of deaths compared to nuclear power. But not before then. Whereas we have two nuclear plant meltdowns on our hands which were failures of nuclear power. Womp womp.
Laughable statement. Wind and solar farms don't need to have immediate evacuation plans for every human in a 20 mile radius because there's not risk of meltdown.
And if you add a zero to that number to replace all coal as well as bypass wind and solar, you'd be looking at a Chernobyl or Fukushima every couple of years, instead of every few decades.
Because this siphon is going to appear out of nowhere? It's not going to require constant observation and maintenance by future generations? Costs that wont apply to wind and solar, because they don't use radioactive fuel.
Unless it's unpredictable, blowing a gigawatt+ sized hole in your grid.
Because that's still going to require surplus generating capacity across the grid, or a massive battery (like a large pumped storage facility) to back it up. You know, the same as you would for wind and solar. Without all the risk and expense of nuclear power.
At least in Germany, the sum insured is much too small. Something like 2.5 billion Euros mandatory sum insured, and anything beyond that is up to the operator.
If we consider Chernobyl and Fukushima, an appropriate sum insured would be at least 200 billion. The last estimate I read about the total damage from Fukushima was around 190 billion, and I think insurance should cover the sums that "typically" happen in a worst-case scenario. We had two of those so far, so they are not impossible.
Now a group of major insurance companies might be able to collectively pay that sort of payout and offer insurance. But the premiums would probably make nuclear power quite unattractive.
C - the footgun of programming languages
If wind power needs 1000x more service calls than solar, wouldn't you say solar is safer than wind?
If nuclear needed people to walk a tightrope across a windy chasm full of razor blades, wouldn't you say that nuclear was dangerous?
Well it used to be a point in favor of Slashdot that they would not censor stuff. I happily accepted conspiracy theories and GNAA posts as price for that.
But now, perhaps I should stop reading and posting on Slashdot. The lack of crazy conspiracy theories suggests that the allegations of censorship are true :(
C - the footgun of programming languages
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Contraciting yourself:
So, more tall things to make people fall will result in more deaths, but exponentially more nuclear power plants wont result in more meltdowns. Riiiiight.
It's a fact you're conflating industrial accidents with the danger posed by the powersource itself, which is nuke fanboy bullshit. Again: wind and solar farms don't have immediate evacuation plans for everyone in a 20 mile radius because they pose no danger to the surrounding populace.
Not according to nuke fanboy math its not, no moreso than uranium mining accidents are.
In the same breath you note that wind and solar don't have no possibility for extreme disasters and then wonder why nuclear insurance is "hard to get"? Laughable indeed.
You mean cut corners to save money? But of coooourse they do. Hell, here's an article back from the Reagan Administration on how safety is given second priority. Fukushima was a once in a thousand years disaster - if you think all US plants could survive the same, you're wearing some mighty big clown shoes.