Reminds me of a TV reporter in the Los Angeles area who did a segment on how easy it was to commit voting fraud. He went to a bunch of polling stations on election day, signed up using the "register to vote at the ballot" option which was available at the time, and voted. He didn't mark anything on each ballot, and tore them in half before dropping it in the ballot box to assure it wasn't counted.
After his TV segment was aired, rather than address the potential for voting fraud he exposed, the government promptly charged him with voting fraud. Served half a year in prison if I recall.
Even if he cast those ballots they probably wouldn't have been counted. Those are provisional ballots. They are often not counted unless there is a very close election and in those cases there are many filters for the ballot to pass for it to be counted. Some of those filters are reasonable and some not so much (like iffy signature matching done by an untrained human). Its a bit of uninformed gotcha style journalism. So the irresponsibility of his reporting (assuming your description is accurate) is probably mostly what got him into trouble. A more scientific study of voter fraud probably wouldn't have been treated the same way.
PS There are more 2: Insightful posts (meaning at least 1 up and 1 down mod) on this topic than I've ever seen on/.
is it really in this professor's scope of work to troll them?
The simple fact that we are talking about it, suggests that yes it is in the scope of their work. Analyzing and criticizing the research published on a topic is a long standing method in academia. Many papers include this in their intros and entire papers are on this topic alone. Doing their research through deception is the only way to honestly study the filters of peer review. Pointing out flaws in the peer review process is the only way to make it better. So yes, this is really in the scope of a professor's work.
Batteries are replacing peak load electricity generation plants.
I was with you till this careless piece of thought. No, no they are not. Batteries are great things that can efficiently store electricity. They are several orders of scale smaller than the grid though. They work on islands or when you are buffering two working and back'ed up grids. They don't handle any sort of large scale balancing of load on a grid. It would take the entire planet's output of batteries for many years to backup just the CA grid and even then it wouldn't handle 2 cloudy days in a row. I love EVs and am on my second one. But I'm still an engineer who can do math so I know their limitations.
What's the problem? Burning for power IS recycling.
Clearly you have never burned plastics before. Its a nasty process that releases lots of weird toxic fumes. I don't even want to know what happens when you do it at an industrial scale but it couldn't be very *environmentally friendly*. The fumes released could be just a simple hydrocarbon, or it could contain cyanides, or PCB’s, or Dioxins or lots of other substances. Without knowing what the plastic was it would be difficult to know what are the likely volatiles it would create. Scrubbing all those different types of material from a waste stream would be prohibitively difficult. Then there's the fact that it takes LOTs of energy to burn plastics, probably more than to melt a metal with a low melting point like Aluminum. Basically, its a terrible idea. But without really intensive sorting, which is almost impossible due to our very common practice of mixing of different types of plastics into single products, you can't really recycle plastic except to make more poor quality plastic with it. With sorting you can make less poor quality plastic with it, or more complex chemical processing becomes possible. Burning plastc, is like burning bunker fuel, its a terrible idea done because we can't think of anything else to do with this sludge and keeping it around isn't an option.
Depleted Uranium is not found in nature. It has less U-235 then natural Uranium hence the name
You are right, I mangled the terms for a non-nuclear audience. Its a distinction without merit though as I'm not talking to physicists (mostly).
Having a coolant that is a moderator is not inherently bad. Light water reactors (LWRs) are designed such that the systems are "undermoderated" when critical (self sustaining). This means that in the case of a loss of coolant accident (LOCA) or rise in power that the loss or change in coolant density causes a negative reactivity insertion. All US LWRs are designed such that they have a negative temperature feedback coefficient during operation meaning as temperature goes up reactivity inherent in the reactor physics decreases and you get less nuclear reactions as a result. There is an exception to that during startup of PWR systems which use borated water. Boron is a neutron absorber, and during startup the density of the water is high enough that due to the inclusion of boron, rapid changes in density due to temperature can cause a reactivity insertion. Reactor operators avoid this by bringing the system up to 10% power on the reactor pumps alone.
It is bad. It comes up in every LWR incident. You are just used to it by now. Its not a great solution if it requires a special procedure by the operators to be safe.
Enriching U above 20% U-235 is would violate treaties.
please do more research
You are correct. What I'm questioning is the logical basis for picking that number as opposed to another number. Really, there is no difference in difficulty in enriching Uranium with 50% U-235 vs enriching Uranium with 20% U-235. No real difference in radioactivity of the material. No real difference in the technical knowledge to do. No real difference in the type of equipment needed to do it. At the same time, putting the number at 20% makes certain kinds of reactors really hard to build, even though those reactors might not use the more highly enriched Uranium as fuel after the initial kick-start. And it sounds like you know enough about this stuff to know that so don't be a dick and act like LWRs are the only type of reactor in existence. They are 1940's technology and you know it.
Most information I've read states that the amount of Pu-240 present in removed fuel assemblies has to do with the amount of time the fuel was in the reactor - weapons production would use far shorter fuel cycles in order to maximize creation of Pu-239 and minimize the amount of Pu-240. The difference is quite easy to detect based on watching when the operator is refueling the reactor.
This seems likely to me. Also the energies of the free neutrons (the spectrum of the reactor, ie fast vs thermal) which are dependent upon the isotopic ratio of the original fuel and the types of moderators used can impact the creation of different isotopes. However, these are difficult and dangerous aspects of a reactor to change. So you can design a sealed reactor that intentionally creates less Pu-239 but there still will be an optimum time where Pu-239 in the reactor are at its peak.
Thanks for the informative post AC, it doesn't happen often:p
Regardless what you melt, the efficiency will only be around 40% or lower. (Thermodynamics... you know, the laws no one grasps)
A fly wheel is 99% efficient... approaching 100% slowly (General physics, law of conservation of energy... the most important law, I wonder why no one grasps it on/. either)
Then there are billions in profits to be made. What the hell are you doing posting on/.? Found a company that makes grid scale flywheels and get going. Otherwise, it just talk, or perhaps there is some other reason why this doesn't work?
Reactors such as BWR don't use coolant to manage the reaction. The coolant (AFAIK) has to be there to sustain the reaction, but control rods are used to control the reaction.
You are being very pedantic there. While not the first choice of an operator, trying to boost the amount of coolant exposed to the core is an option they have. Also BWRs have huge reserves of water that are designed to pour over the core to cool it in the event of an emergency. Just because you call water a coolant doesn't mean it won't cause the reaction to increase in intensity (this has happened). This is a classic problem with all LWR type reactors and is well studied.
Who is better?
a) An anti nuclear nimby who nows nothing about it
b) A pro nuclear idiot who knows nothing about it
???
Both vote. Some guys in the b) bracket even get hired... and there is the problem.
From a risk management point of view: b) is the bigger risk.
Obviously there are two other groups:
c) Anti nuclear protagonists who actually know their stuff, like Merkel
d) Pro nuclear protagonists who know their stuff (don't know/remember one in that bracket... if you would not write so much nonsense about nuclear, I perhaps had put you here)
Nice false dichotomy there. I would rather decisions on nuclear power be made by those that understand nuclear power. Since those folks are overwhelmingly pro-nuclear that pretty much says it all.
And Merkel doesn't qualify given the fact that both Germany's energy prices and CO2 outputs have rocketed up under her direction. Her closing of the nuclear plants will probably (indirectly) result in ending her political career. Artificially raising energy prices has all sorts of negative unintended consequences.
It also uses water as a coolant which is a bad idea we need to retire. A coolant that increases the intensity of the chain reaction is a really, really bad idea.
Care to explain this statement? Why is it a bad design to rely on having coolant to sustain a nuclear reaction?
Coolants aren't bad. Coolants that are also moderators are bad. A moderator in a nuclear reactor is the substance that slows down (reduces the energies of) neutrons and increases the change of a fission and improving the neutron economy. Making your coolant, which you increase to slow down the reactors, the same as the moderator, which you remove to slow down the reaction, makes managing the core difficult. That's why people want to use anything but water for a coolant including molten salts (both fluorides and chlorides), or molten metal.
Wouldn't Pu-240 contamination be too high to use PUREX extracted plutonium from these reactors for weapons?
That's about the reactor, not the enrichment process you use afterwards. If you modified the reactor you could control the isotopes of Pu you made. I don't believe there is a known way to isotopicly enrich Pu so it has to be about the reactor. But there could be some piece of classified tech that does this through.
Load factors for Wind, Solar and Hydro in the UK in 2017 according to the Digest of UK Energy Statistics published by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
Onshore wind: 28.0%
Solar photovoltaics: 10.7%
Offshore wind: 38.9%
Hydro: 36.5%
The load factor for UK nuclear plants hovered betweeen 65 and 77% and onshore wind in particular beats UK Nuclear on energy prices quite handily, onshore wind even managed to beat Combined Cycle Gas Turbines.
Now please start talking about 'breeder reactors' I have some choice quotes from the US navy and some scientific publications on those things.
I said capacity factor. You responded with load factor. Capacity factor is when the power is needed, how much is available. Load factor is when the power is available (ie wind is blowing, sun is shining), how much of it do you get...in other words, efficiency. Load factor ignores all the time when solar and wind are not available which is most of the time. Also, I don't like fast spectrum breeder reactors but I do like thermal spectrum breeder reactors. I doubt you know the different between those concepts either.
China are pursuing nuclear technology. They will do it with our without American tech.
Without China, this American tech will just be whitepapers and simulations.
No, we built a MSR in the late 60's called the MSRE. Then we abandoned it for the fast breeder because of politics (clearly not of engineering because fast breeders have failed to deliver). That's the crown jewel we are giving to the Chinese. It worked, it was ready to be scaled up, and it was abandoned and only resurrected purely by accident and given to the Chinese because we can't get the US to license one.
It was the only way to get the turn key exports and safe guards.
All about jobs and reactor sales to nations begging for their own reactors.
The strange part is why would China be buying into this.
They have all the dual use and mil production plants they want.
China wants this method for something.
China is doing LFTR because its a huge CO2 free source of energy and they have tons of Thorium (as in Liquid Fluoride THORIUM Reactor). They do 90% of the rare earth mining so they have 90% of the extracted Thorium sitting in big piles next to those mines. Plus without the messy western regulations, nuclear becomes really, really cheap. Oh, and the leader of China's LFTR effort said they would get a research reactor up and running by 2040 so I wouldn't hold my breath on the LFTR just yet. Kirk Sorensen has finally gotten permission to do his Fluoridation research for the LFTR, only took 7 years to get the license.
Molten salts have been done many, many times. Not too efficient, and dangerous. Doing small scale at lower temps helps - but also reduces the amount of energy that can be stored. Better to use large, slow-rotating, low-loss, low-cost flywheels. Much less dangerous, scalable, easy to use.
Molten salts are not volatile and don't explode. And unless you mess up the chemistry are reasonably safe, they just run at a high temperature. You are correct about the lack of efficiency. If you want efficiency, you would use molten metal or sodium (except sodium explodes). Much better heat carrying capacity and transfer efficiencies of those coolants.
Because the US foolishly abandoned it 50 years ago? China now has an aggressive LFTR program based upon our own extensive research, which is openly available. Once they put the finishing touches on it, they can lock us out by using our own regressive system for monopolizing ideas. Some make a habit of displacing their feelings onto China, but I'm having a difficult time blaming them for our own spectacular stupidity here. I'd suggest directing that anger at our own government for the stagnation of nuclear technology for several decades, helped by "environmental" groups in an unholy alliance with coal and now natural gas.
TerraPower's TWR didn't work out as envisioned, and is no great loss. Research on the MCFR is more promising, but the chloride chemistry is less developed, and it requires 10-15 times more fissile, which is very expensive. China is already pursing the better option, and have little use for it, nor is it the only fast MSR in development. LFTR needs only a small amount of fissile to start up, which could be affordably extracted from spent fuel, enabling a rapid expansion of nuclear power, while also eliminating the waste "problem".
Ignorance by the people may enable the opposition, but anti-nuclear groups know better, and are deliberately engaged in a war on nuclear, funded by and benefiting fossil interests. Nuclear threatens to replace fossil energy entirely, while renewables will continue to depend on it as an increasingly expensive crutch for a family of technologies that can't stand on their own.
For the TL;DR version of that link focusing on a concise presentation of data, see the complete case for nuclear.
Molten salt only lasts about 6 hours. Malta, a Google spinoff so good they didn't invest in them is doing the same thing. BTW, MSRs use the same stuff to transfer heat from the core to the turbines. Also, those "batteries" have about a 40% efficiency so any energy that goes in, comes out 2 1/2 times more expensive. Some solution. If they do improve that efficiency, we could use that tech in a nuclear reactor though. The research is good, your conclusions about the ramifications of the research, not so much...
Thank you thank you thank you 110010001000 as I certainly realize you are being facetious. Good to know I'm not the only one recognizing the generally ignored via Tunnel vision AI experts of the dangers of AI tech
The dangers of AI tech are the same as the dangers of "trusting the computer". ML algorithms all have an error rate. That's part of the package. The problem is that humans don't seem to understand this. This is fixable just as people now understand that the DB might have been updated incorrectly and there might be a mistake that can be investigated.
They were less than 10% in 2016, I don't think we've more than tripled our generation in California. And yes, I live in California. For the US, it's closer to 5%, not 18%.
The GP and you are confusing two different numbers. The GP is talking about total deployment. You are taking about how much power was actually produced. Which illustrates a great point. A 200MW wind farm doesn't equal a 200MW reactor. Solar and wind load factors are in the single digit percents. Nuclear's is north of 90%. So our 5% deployed nuclear generates 9% of our energy, but 18% of deployed renewables generates 5% of the power. Either way the real problem is the batteries needed to handle renewable deployments of more than about 20% energy generation. Without those batteries, its nuclear or natural gas.
The idea is that soil samples (embassy workers) and other collected intelligence would detect the production once a nation went for a dual use production run for its mil.
So much effort went into making the waste difficult to work with.
Well PUREX plants are much larger but also more low tech. Compare this to the centrifuges that are unique to uranium enrichment. The parts of PUREX are often used in other chemical plants.
U-232 in the Th-U fuel cycle is a much more effective anti-proliferation material than Pu-238 in the U-Pu fuel cycle. U-232 decays through 3 different gamma emitters including one at 75MeV. Pu-238 by contrast emits mostly alpha radiation (can be shielded by sunscreen or your clothes) and has no gamma emitters in its decay chain and comes along with a whole zoo of transuranics. I believe what you are saying reflects the thinking of the anti-proliferation folks but that doesn't mean it makes sense from a physics perspective. Also, the DMSRs are harder to control due to the Pu-239 being more sensitive to the neutron energies than U-233. Denaturing is something we do because regulators say we have to, otherwise we would solve these issues in entirely different ways.
No easy, free pathway to a hidden mil production line from the side door of an approved export designed nuclear reactor.
Denatured Uranium fueled reactors breed Pu-239. You still have to process it out of the waste but its created. Alternatively, 50% U-235 (medium enriched uranium) still has to be processed to make a bomb too. Neither process is much harder than the other (although PUREX is more complex and creates horrible waste like at Hanford). The Denatured route makes nasty waste that lives for a very long time. The medium enriched fuel makes much less nasty waste and is easier to control in a reactor. Both of these choices are worse than a Th-U fuel cycle reactor. The only reason to make a DMSR is because you can do it today. You could also make an MSR that uses medium enriched fuel too. And you could also make an MSR that uses Th-U fuel. Of these 3 choices, we can do the first 2 of them today. One is clearly better than the other but we do the worse one out of some poorly thought-out anti-proliferation argument. The basic idea is that we can detect the creation of a PUREX plant more easily than tracking of centrifuges. Not sure we really have a problem doing either but not creating the Pu-239 in the first place seems like the best option.
We are pursuing these older designs out of a difficulty getting newer ones approved. This is a classic case were more regulation makes the situation more dangerous, not less. Its the classic fallacy that doing nothing has no cost. Doing nothing in the world of power always has a cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of a TV reporter in the Los Angeles area who did a segment on how easy it was to commit voting fraud. He went to a bunch of polling stations on election day, signed up using the "register to vote at the ballot" option which was available at the time, and voted. He didn't mark anything on each ballot, and tore them in half before dropping it in the ballot box to assure it wasn't counted. After his TV segment was aired, rather than address the potential for voting fraud he exposed, the government promptly charged him with voting fraud. Served half a year in prison if I recall.
Even if he cast those ballots they probably wouldn't have been counted. Those are provisional ballots. They are often not counted unless there is a very close election and in those cases there are many filters for the ballot to pass for it to be counted. Some of those filters are reasonable and some not so much (like iffy signature matching done by an untrained human). Its a bit of uninformed gotcha style journalism. So the irresponsibility of his reporting (assuming your description is accurate) is probably mostly what got him into trouble. A more scientific study of voter fraud probably wouldn't have been treated the same way.
PS There are more 2: Insightful posts (meaning at least 1 up and 1 down mod) on this topic than I've ever seen on /.
is it really in this professor's scope of work to troll them?
The simple fact that we are talking about it, suggests that yes it is in the scope of their work. Analyzing and criticizing the research published on a topic is a long standing method in academia. Many papers include this in their intros and entire papers are on this topic alone. Doing their research through deception is the only way to honestly study the filters of peer review. Pointing out flaws in the peer review process is the only way to make it better. So yes, this is really in the scope of a professor's work.
Batteries are replacing peak load electricity generation plants.
I was with you till this careless piece of thought. No, no they are not. Batteries are great things that can efficiently store electricity. They are several orders of scale smaller than the grid though. They work on islands or when you are buffering two working and back'ed up grids. They don't handle any sort of large scale balancing of load on a grid. It would take the entire planet's output of batteries for many years to backup just the CA grid and even then it wouldn't handle 2 cloudy days in a row. I love EVs and am on my second one. But I'm still an engineer who can do math so I know their limitations.
What's the problem? Burning for power IS recycling.
Clearly you have never burned plastics before. Its a nasty process that releases lots of weird toxic fumes. I don't even want to know what happens when you do it at an industrial scale but it couldn't be very *environmentally friendly*. The fumes released could be just a simple hydrocarbon, or it could contain cyanides, or PCB’s, or Dioxins or lots of other substances. Without knowing what the plastic was it would be difficult to know what are the likely volatiles it would create. Scrubbing all those different types of material from a waste stream would be prohibitively difficult. Then there's the fact that it takes LOTs of energy to burn plastics, probably more than to melt a metal with a low melting point like Aluminum. Basically, its a terrible idea. But without really intensive sorting, which is almost impossible due to our very common practice of mixing of different types of plastics into single products, you can't really recycle plastic except to make more poor quality plastic with it. With sorting you can make less poor quality plastic with it, or more complex chemical processing becomes possible. Burning plastc, is like burning bunker fuel, its a terrible idea done because we can't think of anything else to do with this sludge and keeping it around isn't an option.
Because there's no such thing as *Grid Scale* batteries.
FIFY
Unlikely wind turbines will be running during the storms and, if damaged, will need repair before resuming operation
I'm not aware of any infrastructure that holds up well to storms.
Seriously? All of them except wind and solar do well in storms.
Depleted Uranium is not found in nature. It has less U-235 then natural Uranium hence the name
You are right, I mangled the terms for a non-nuclear audience. Its a distinction without merit though as I'm not talking to physicists (mostly).
Having a coolant that is a moderator is not inherently bad. Light water reactors (LWRs) are designed such that the systems are "undermoderated" when critical (self sustaining). This means that in the case of a loss of coolant accident (LOCA) or rise in power that the loss or change in coolant density causes a negative reactivity insertion. All US LWRs are designed such that they have a negative temperature feedback coefficient during operation meaning as temperature goes up reactivity inherent in the reactor physics decreases and you get less nuclear reactions as a result. There is an exception to that during startup of PWR systems which use borated water. Boron is a neutron absorber, and during startup the density of the water is high enough that due to the inclusion of boron, rapid changes in density due to temperature can cause a reactivity insertion. Reactor operators avoid this by bringing the system up to 10% power on the reactor pumps alone.
It is bad. It comes up in every LWR incident. You are just used to it by now. Its not a great solution if it requires a special procedure by the operators to be safe.
Enriching U above 20% U-235 is would violate treaties. please do more research
You are correct. What I'm questioning is the logical basis for picking that number as opposed to another number. Really, there is no difference in difficulty in enriching Uranium with 50% U-235 vs enriching Uranium with 20% U-235. No real difference in radioactivity of the material. No real difference in the technical knowledge to do. No real difference in the type of equipment needed to do it. At the same time, putting the number at 20% makes certain kinds of reactors really hard to build, even though those reactors might not use the more highly enriched Uranium as fuel after the initial kick-start. And it sounds like you know enough about this stuff to know that so don't be a dick and act like LWRs are the only type of reactor in existence. They are 1940's technology and you know it.
Most information I've read states that the amount of Pu-240 present in removed fuel assemblies has to do with the amount of time the fuel was in the reactor - weapons production would use far shorter fuel cycles in order to maximize creation of Pu-239 and minimize the amount of Pu-240. The difference is quite easy to detect based on watching when the operator is refueling the reactor.
This seems likely to me. Also the energies of the free neutrons (the spectrum of the reactor, ie fast vs thermal) which are dependent upon the isotopic ratio of the original fuel and the types of moderators used can impact the creation of different isotopes. However, these are difficult and dangerous aspects of a reactor to change. So you can design a sealed reactor that intentionally creates less Pu-239 but there still will be an optimum time where Pu-239 in the reactor are at its peak. Thanks for the informative post AC, it doesn't happen often :p
Regardless what you melt, the efficiency will only be around 40% or lower. (Thermodynamics ... you know, the laws no one grasps)
A fly wheel is 99% efficient ... approaching 100% slowly (General physics, law of conservation of energy ... the most important law, I wonder why no one grasps it on /. either)
Then there are billions in profits to be made. What the hell are you doing posting on /.? Found a company that makes grid scale flywheels and get going. Otherwise, it just talk, or perhaps there is some other reason why this doesn't work?
Reactors such as BWR don't use coolant to manage the reaction. The coolant (AFAIK) has to be there to sustain the reaction, but control rods are used to control the reaction.
You are being very pedantic there. While not the first choice of an operator, trying to boost the amount of coolant exposed to the core is an option they have. Also BWRs have huge reserves of water that are designed to pour over the core to cool it in the event of an emergency. Just because you call water a coolant doesn't mean it won't cause the reaction to increase in intensity (this has happened). This is a classic problem with all LWR type reactors and is well studied.
Who is better? a) An anti nuclear nimby who nows nothing about it b) A pro nuclear idiot who knows nothing about it ???
Both vote. Some guys in the b) bracket even get hired ... and there is the problem.
From a risk management point of view: b) is the bigger risk.
Obviously there are two other groups: c) Anti nuclear protagonists who actually know their stuff, like Merkel d) Pro nuclear protagonists who know their stuff (don't know/remember one in that bracket ... if you would not write so much nonsense about nuclear, I perhaps had put you here)
Nice false dichotomy there. I would rather decisions on nuclear power be made by those that understand nuclear power. Since those folks are overwhelmingly pro-nuclear that pretty much says it all.
And Merkel doesn't qualify given the fact that both Germany's energy prices and CO2 outputs have rocketed up under her direction. Her closing of the nuclear plants will probably (indirectly) result in ending her political career. Artificially raising energy prices has all sorts of negative unintended consequences.
Care to explain this statement? Why is it a bad design to rely on having coolant to sustain a nuclear reaction?
Coolants aren't bad. Coolants that are also moderators are bad. A moderator in a nuclear reactor is the substance that slows down (reduces the energies of) neutrons and increases the change of a fission and improving the neutron economy. Making your coolant, which you increase to slow down the reactors, the same as the moderator, which you remove to slow down the reaction, makes managing the core difficult. That's why people want to use anything but water for a coolant including molten salts (both fluorides and chlorides), or molten metal.
Wouldn't Pu-240 contamination be too high to use PUREX extracted plutonium from these reactors for weapons?
That's about the reactor, not the enrichment process you use afterwards. If you modified the reactor you could control the isotopes of Pu you made. I don't believe there is a known way to isotopicly enrich Pu so it has to be about the reactor. But there could be some piece of classified tech that does this through.
Load factors for Wind, Solar and Hydro in the UK in 2017 according to the Digest of UK Energy Statistics published by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy: Onshore wind: 28.0% Solar photovoltaics: 10.7% Offshore wind: 38.9% Hydro: 36.5% The load factor for UK nuclear plants hovered betweeen 65 and 77% and onshore wind in particular beats UK Nuclear on energy prices quite handily, onshore wind even managed to beat Combined Cycle Gas Turbines. Now please start talking about 'breeder reactors' I have some choice quotes from the US navy and some scientific publications on those things.
I said capacity factor. You responded with load factor. Capacity factor is when the power is needed, how much is available. Load factor is when the power is available (ie wind is blowing, sun is shining), how much of it do you get...in other words, efficiency. Load factor ignores all the time when solar and wind are not available which is most of the time. Also, I don't like fast spectrum breeder reactors but I do like thermal spectrum breeder reactors. I doubt you know the different between those concepts either.
Why the fuck is US tech going to benefit China?
We're not building any here.
China are pursuing nuclear technology. They will do it with our without American tech.
Without China, this American tech will just be whitepapers and simulations.
No, we built a MSR in the late 60's called the MSRE. Then we abandoned it for the fast breeder because of politics (clearly not of engineering because fast breeders have failed to deliver). That's the crown jewel we are giving to the Chinese. It worked, it was ready to be scaled up, and it was abandoned and only resurrected purely by accident and given to the Chinese because we can't get the US to license one.
It was the only way to get the turn key exports and safe guards. All about jobs and reactor sales to nations begging for their own reactors. The strange part is why would China be buying into this. They have all the dual use and mil production plants they want. China wants this method for something.
China is doing LFTR because its a huge CO2 free source of energy and they have tons of Thorium (as in Liquid Fluoride THORIUM Reactor). They do 90% of the rare earth mining so they have 90% of the extracted Thorium sitting in big piles next to those mines. Plus without the messy western regulations, nuclear becomes really, really cheap. Oh, and the leader of China's LFTR effort said they would get a research reactor up and running by 2040 so I wouldn't hold my breath on the LFTR just yet. Kirk Sorensen has finally gotten permission to do his Fluoridation research for the LFTR, only took 7 years to get the license.
Molten salts have been done many, many times. Not too efficient, and dangerous. Doing small scale at lower temps helps - but also reduces the amount of energy that can be stored. Better to use large, slow-rotating, low-loss, low-cost flywheels. Much less dangerous, scalable, easy to use.
Molten salts are not volatile and don't explode. And unless you mess up the chemistry are reasonably safe, they just run at a high temperature. You are correct about the lack of efficiency. If you want efficiency, you would use molten metal or sodium (except sodium explodes). Much better heat carrying capacity and transfer efficiencies of those coolants.
Because the US foolishly abandoned it 50 years ago? China now has an aggressive LFTR program based upon our own extensive research, which is openly available. Once they put the finishing touches on it, they can lock us out by using our own regressive system for monopolizing ideas. Some make a habit of displacing their feelings onto China, but I'm having a difficult time blaming them for our own spectacular stupidity here. I'd suggest directing that anger at our own government for the stagnation of nuclear technology for several decades, helped by "environmental" groups in an unholy alliance with coal and now natural gas.
TerraPower's TWR didn't work out as envisioned, and is no great loss. Research on the MCFR is more promising, but the chloride chemistry is less developed, and it requires 10-15 times more fissile, which is very expensive. China is already pursing the better option, and have little use for it, nor is it the only fast MSR in development. LFTR needs only a small amount of fissile to start up, which could be affordably extracted from spent fuel, enabling a rapid expansion of nuclear power, while also eliminating the waste "problem".
Exactly...also the Sierra Club has been getting funding from fossil fuels for some time
Ignorance by the people may enable the opposition, but anti-nuclear groups know better, and are deliberately engaged in a war on nuclear, funded by and benefiting fossil interests. Nuclear threatens to replace fossil energy entirely, while renewables will continue to depend on it as an increasingly expensive crutch for a family of technologies that can't stand on their own.
For the TL;DR version of that link focusing on a concise presentation of data, see the complete case for nuclear.
Exactly. Also the Sierra Club took funding from Natural Gas CEOs
Do you mean batteries like the ones being developed at MIT? https://www.cbc.ca/news/techno...
Molten salt only lasts about 6 hours. Malta, a Google spinoff so good they didn't invest in them is doing the same thing. BTW, MSRs use the same stuff to transfer heat from the core to the turbines. Also, those "batteries" have about a 40% efficiency so any energy that goes in, comes out 2 1/2 times more expensive. Some solution. If they do improve that efficiency, we could use that tech in a nuclear reactor though. The research is good, your conclusions about the ramifications of the research, not so much...
Thank you thank you thank you 110010001000 as I certainly realize you are being facetious. Good to know I'm not the only one recognizing the generally ignored via Tunnel vision AI experts of the dangers of AI tech
The dangers of AI tech are the same as the dangers of "trusting the computer". ML algorithms all have an error rate. That's part of the package. The problem is that humans don't seem to understand this. This is fixable just as people now understand that the DB might have been updated incorrectly and there might be a mistake that can be investigated.
Mod parent up
They were less than 10% in 2016, I don't think we've more than tripled our generation in California. And yes, I live in California. For the US, it's closer to 5%, not 18%.
The GP and you are confusing two different numbers. The GP is talking about total deployment. You are taking about how much power was actually produced. Which illustrates a great point. A 200MW wind farm doesn't equal a 200MW reactor. Solar and wind load factors are in the single digit percents. Nuclear's is north of 90%. So our 5% deployed nuclear generates 9% of our energy, but 18% of deployed renewables generates 5% of the power. Either way the real problem is the batteries needed to handle renewable deployments of more than about 20% energy generation. Without those batteries, its nuclear or natural gas.
The idea is that soil samples (embassy workers) and other collected intelligence would detect the production once a nation went for a dual use production run for its mil. So much effort went into making the waste difficult to work with.
Well PUREX plants are much larger but also more low tech. Compare this to the centrifuges that are unique to uranium enrichment. The parts of PUREX are often used in other chemical plants.
U-232 in the Th-U fuel cycle is a much more effective anti-proliferation material than Pu-238 in the U-Pu fuel cycle. U-232 decays through 3 different gamma emitters including one at 75MeV. Pu-238 by contrast emits mostly alpha radiation (can be shielded by sunscreen or your clothes) and has no gamma emitters in its decay chain and comes along with a whole zoo of transuranics. I believe what you are saying reflects the thinking of the anti-proliferation folks but that doesn't mean it makes sense from a physics perspective. Also, the DMSRs are harder to control due to the Pu-239 being more sensitive to the neutron energies than U-233. Denaturing is something we do because regulators say we have to, otherwise we would solve these issues in entirely different ways.
No easy, free pathway to a hidden mil production line from the side door of an approved export designed nuclear reactor.
Denatured Uranium fueled reactors breed Pu-239. You still have to process it out of the waste but its created. Alternatively, 50% U-235 (medium enriched uranium) still has to be processed to make a bomb too. Neither process is much harder than the other (although PUREX is more complex and creates horrible waste like at Hanford). The Denatured route makes nasty waste that lives for a very long time. The medium enriched fuel makes much less nasty waste and is easier to control in a reactor. Both of these choices are worse than a Th-U fuel cycle reactor. The only reason to make a DMSR is because you can do it today. You could also make an MSR that uses medium enriched fuel too. And you could also make an MSR that uses Th-U fuel. Of these 3 choices, we can do the first 2 of them today. One is clearly better than the other but we do the worse one out of some poorly thought-out anti-proliferation argument. The basic idea is that we can detect the creation of a PUREX plant more easily than tracking of centrifuges. Not sure we really have a problem doing either but not creating the Pu-239 in the first place seems like the best option.
We are pursuing these older designs out of a difficulty getting newer ones approved. This is a classic case were more regulation makes the situation more dangerous, not less. Its the classic fallacy that doing nothing has no cost. Doing nothing in the world of power always has a cost.