Oklo Has a Plan To Make Tiny Nuclear Reactors That Run Off Nuclear Waste (cnbc.com) 133
An anonymous reader shares a report: The face of nuclear energy is changing, and one of the companies working to redefine what nuclear energy looks like is Oklo. The 22-person Silicon Valley start-up has a plan to build mini-nuclear reactors, powered by the waste of conventional nuclear reactors and housed in aesthetically pleasing A-frame structures. "Microreactors are an exciting innovation that completely flips the technology story for nuclear energy," Alex Gilbert, a project manager for nuclear power think tank the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, told CNBC.
Historically, nuclear energy producers aimed to be competitive with "economies of scale," meaning they save money by being massive, Gilbert said. That strategy, however, often results in construction projects being mired in delays and cost overruns, like the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia, where estimates for the project have ballooned from $14 billion to an estimated $27 billion or more. "Microreactors promise to turn this paradigm on its head by approaching cost competitiveness through technological learning," Gilbert said. Oklo is the brainchild of the husband-and-wife co-founder team, Jacob DeWitte and Caroline Cochran, who met when they were teaching assistants in 2009 for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Reactor Technology Course for utility executives with nuclear power plants as part of their grid.
Historically, nuclear energy producers aimed to be competitive with "economies of scale," meaning they save money by being massive, Gilbert said. That strategy, however, often results in construction projects being mired in delays and cost overruns, like the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia, where estimates for the project have ballooned from $14 billion to an estimated $27 billion or more. "Microreactors promise to turn this paradigm on its head by approaching cost competitiveness through technological learning," Gilbert said. Oklo is the brainchild of the husband-and-wife co-founder team, Jacob DeWitte and Caroline Cochran, who met when they were teaching assistants in 2009 for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Reactor Technology Course for utility executives with nuclear power plants as part of their grid.
HOLD UP! (Score:5, Funny)
I know how this conversation goes...
Flower Power: "You can't make a nuclear reactor here! What are we going to put all the nuclear wast---oh you bastards."
Scientists: "Checkmate."
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Trust me, logic has no effect on the anti-nuclear power crowd that thinks nuclear power plants are the same thing as bombs
Of course, if they listened to logic, they would take responsibility for 50 years of coal power plant build outs that were needed because they sued all nuclear projects into bankruptcy
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Trust me, logic has no effect on the anti-nuclear power crowd that thinks nuclear power plants are the same thing as bombs
Of course, if they listened to logic, they would take responsibility for 50 years of coal power plant build outs that were needed because they sued all nuclear projects into bankruptcy
Almost as much logic as the pro nuc crowd has by ignoring accidents, saying nuc power is safest thing evah, and calling anyone who disagrees as stupid asshole.
Here's your problem fellow - You might be thae smartest person evah, and you might bedealing with retards - You aren't, but let's say
You as the person with the knowledge have to convince the retreads that you not only have the knowledge but can show them how they have absolutely nothing to worry about.
And if you think that the present tactic o
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Who is ignoring the nuclear power accidents?
Here's a few charts on nuclear power compared to other energy sources, on both safety and CO2 emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/saf... [ourworldindata.org]
Here's more on nuclear power safety compared to others: https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]
Do you mean "ignore" nuclear accidents like this?
Nuclear - global average 90 deaths/TWh (11% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)
Nuclear - U.S. 0.1 deaths/TWh (19% U.S. electricity)
If we are going to talk about nuclear power safety in the USA then why consider the mistakes of regulating nuclear power safety by governments outside the USA? This is not ignoring the accide
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What about them? If the safety numbers upset you then find someone that compiled that data or compile it yourself. Deaths are a binary thing and therefore easier to measure. If we were going to use some other metric then there's likely to be some debate on how well it reflects reality. If nuclear power accidents were injuring people in some measurable way greater than wind and solar power then I suspect someone would have come forward with it by now.
Now tell us about the really low death rate from Covid 19 infection - 1.8 percent in the USA. Why did we waste money on creating a vaccine for it?
The point is, fixating on a monovariant always smacks of dishonesty. And it's usually missing other important aspects of the topic
How much real estate value is lost for a Chernobyl or Fukushima, or even a Three Mile Island. How much Gross National Product? How much public credibility is there when "safe" reactors go boom?
What I'm trying to tell y'all is th
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Now tell us about the really low death rate from Covid 19 infection - 1.8 percent in the USA. Why did we waste money on creating a vaccine for it?
It was not a waste of money because the death rate for some portion of the population was far higher. As I recall those older than 65 years, and those over 40 years and having one or more chronic illnesses had a very high risk. For some people the side effects of the vaccine carries greater risk of death than COVID-19, such as males under 25 and females under 40 as I recall, and those people are told to not get vaccinated. Since large numbers of people were vaccinated before the warnings of blood clots a
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Their data is a bit out of date, and looks at all energy production rather than just electricity.
Nuclear provides around 10% of the world's electricity supply, which is now the same level as renewables. However renewable energy output has doubled in the last 5 years and is continuing to increase.
The figure they give doesn't account for this (their most recent source was published in 2019 so would have been using 2018 stats) and like nuclear a lot of the accidents were early on during development of the tech
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Part of the reason that nuclear power is so expensive is because a stated tactic of the anti-nuclear movement is to exploit the legalism of Western nations to create construction delays and otherwise drive its cost up, then point to that increased cost.
The liability is also a false point of comparison. People talk about nuclear liability because the risk model of nuclear is "most of the time nothing bad happens; in the exceedingly rare event that it does, there is substantial economic damage but not that mu
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If this tactic is so effective then why doesn't the nuclear lobby use it against renewables? For that matter why don't the coal and gas industries use it, why is it only the anti-nuclear movement? We see other industries using this tactic all the time.
As for coal and gas, who cares? They are dying too, and they are not the main competition for investment now.
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If this tactic is so effective then why doesn't the nuclear lobby use it against renewables?
Because they are not assholes.
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Lol they would sell their own mothers if it helped them make a buck.
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Okay then, you tell me, why is it that the nuclear power industry isn't using "lawfare" against the wind and solar industry?
Anti-nuclear organizations like Greenpeace are full of assholes. These people claim to be pointing out how vulnerable nuclear power facilities are by staging "demonstrations" of terrorism. As in they become terrorists. "Demonstrating" acts of terror is terrorism. Terrorizing power plants is an act of sedition, and Americans terrorizing American power plants is treason. Sedition ca
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Well it's obvious, there is no legal basis for "lawfare". It's easy for renewable energy projects to obtain full insurance, meet all safety requirements, do the applicable impact studies and for offshore it's hard even for NIMBYs to complain about the view. Any cases would be quickly thrown out, and of course people have tried.
If you have reached the point of calling people who point out flaws in nuclear power plants "terrorists" then you have comprehensively lost the argument.
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Okay then, you tell me, why is it that the nuclear power industry isn't using "lawfare" against the wind and solar industry?
Anti-nuclear organizations like Greenpeace are full of assholes.
Now there's logic.
The problem is more than just saintly men and women of the nuclear industry, versus assholes, which are apparently anyone opposed to it.
See what ya do? How well does convincing people of your cause work when you call anyone disagreeing an asshole?
Some things to think about - Wind farms do not have to have the government indemnify them and pay the bill for catastrophic large scale wind farm accidents.
We had an experiment in nuclear power generation. It had mixed results. And the lon
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Well it's obvious, there is no legal basis for "lawfare". It's easy for renewable energy projects to obtain full insurance, meet all safety requirements, do the applicable impact studies and for offshore it's hard even for NIMBYs to complain about the view. Any cases would be quickly thrown out, and of course people have tried.
If you have reached the point of calling people who point out flaws in nuclear power plants "terrorists" then you have comprehensively lost the argument.
I for one, think Wind turbines look pretty cool. The Nimby's lost pretty bad in our area. They ended up looking like the people who think there's a 5G chip in the Covid-19 vaccines.
They went on about Electrical waves, fan noise, dead bats, and destruction of the purity of nature.
Electrical waves? Like my Grams who went around and plugged things into all the outlets so the electricity wouldn't leak out?
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Part of the reason that nuclear power is so expensive is because a stated tactic of the anti-nuclear movement is to exploit the legalism of Western nations to create construction delays and otherwise drive its cost up, then point to that increased cost.
It's them damn regulations I tell ya! Why, we could have living room reactors makin our electricity and keepin' us warm if it wasn't for that durn safety bullshit.
So now that I have your attention, how about telling us what regulations we need to get rid of. Tell us of the laws that need passed to allow nuclear to have no oversight so that the reactors can be built as cheaply as possible. After all - you have defined the enemy - it is now time to go to war with them and resurrect the safest form of power
Forgetting the goal (Re:HOLD UP!) (Score:2)
So now that I have your attention, how about telling us what regulations we need to get rid of.
Nuclear power plant operators tell us what regulations are driving them out of business. It's preferential treatment for wind and solar power that require them to curtail output when there is an excess of wind or solar capacity. What they want is to be treated like any other low CO2 energy source.
That's not likely what you expected, and it's likely to be upsetting to you. Facts don't care about your feelings. The fact is that we need nuclear power more than we need wind and solar power. Our laws don't
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However, this focus on deaths/kWh is just to distract from the real reasons why nuclear is declining. It's too expensive, the liability is so great only governments can cover it (and even then not really), and there are much easier options that represent safe investments.
The point of liability is an excellent one. Nuclear electrical power would disappear very quickly if not for the governments acting as insurers In the USA, that is the Price-Anderson act. A rather strange concept that the presumptive safest method of power generation cannot afford to insure itself.
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The nuclear power experiment has been running for almost 70 years now and it has proven itself to be unreliable, costly and pointless.
Speaking as someone who has worked in the industry and dealt with nuclear generation specifically, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you're a) speaking out of your arse, and b) incorrect.
Unless you have numbers to back up your claims that nuclear power is less reliable than other generation types; less cost-effective than other generation types; or is more... pointless? (how is that in any way a useful metric?)... than other generation types, you should probably sit down and let those who know
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Logic tells me nuclear plants are too expensive and rely on massive subsidies to turn a profit. Renewable energy is getting cheaper every year while nuclear plants do nothing but balloon their budgets.
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Well their design is a start probably, but you need to go smaller yet with lower power output, basically the fuel lasting the life of the reactor, all made as safe and foolproof as possible by smart design and there is a way to readily do that. Build it anywhere, most merchant ships flagged reliably and regularly inspected with prison sentences for approaching failure, continuously externally independent monitored, could run several of them.
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Yes, its a new market, nuclear is an old market and if viable, should be able to stand on its own 2 feet by now.
You won't need nuclear for concrete/steel in the future, there are a few experiments using hydrogen as a r
Hydrogen is not the "fuel of the future" (Score:2)
Hydrogen is not a replacement fuel for anything. That is because hydrogen is not an energy source. Petroleum is an energy source, a very convenient and abundant energy source. Another problem with hydrogen as a fuel is how difficult it is to handle. It's a much easier fuel to handle when attached to some carbon atoms. We are seeing rockets to space switch from hydrogen to methane fuel. Another popular fuel is RP-1, rocket propellant one, or what is essentially just clean burning jet fuel or kerosene.
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Then what happens if we see a nuclear power that doesn't "balloon their budget"? Will you consider nuclear power then?
You mean IF, not WHEN. Since it's never happened BEFORE, there's no good reason to assume it will happen LATER. That's not a reason to assume it won't happen later; physics provides those.
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You mean IF, not WHEN. Since it's never happened BEFORE, there's no good reason to assume it will happen LATER. That's not a reason to assume it won't happen later; physics provides those.
I'm pretty sure I did use if and not when. But your comment does show I should have specified that when nuclear power can stay on schedule and under budget we will see a shift in the energy markets. Some of this is because of the rules of physics, some the rules of economics.
People will like to claim that wind and solar are cheaper than nuclear power and prices will continue to fall. That's an obvious lie. The prices for wind and solar cannot get lower than the cost of the raw materials. And wind takes
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I do.
There's a nuclear plant about thirty miles down the road from here; it's the oldest power reactor in the US. It sits there and makes power and there are no issues.
If a new power reactor opened in the middle of town I would think "Good! This means I'll always have a job here, and we'll have clean power!"
I've lived near a coal plant, too. Guess which one I prefer?
Nuclear power will be the hero again (Re:HOLD UP!) (Score:2, Interesting)
Trust me, logic has no effect on the anti-nuclear power crowd that thinks nuclear power plants are the same thing as bombs
Organizations like Greenpeace runs its entire campaign on confusing the two. A trend among the treehuggers are to constantly demand something new, some technology that hasn't been proven practical yet. Then when proven practical they consider this new technology evil and in need of being replaced with something new.
As a fan of old school sci-fi I can remember all kinds of stories from the 1950s and 1960s where nuclear power was the "hero". The Star Trek series was built on the promise of nuclear power.
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Excellent post.
Regarding Fukushima Daiichi: people often don't talk about how this disaster happened in the context of a tremendous earthquake and tsunami that killed 20,000 people. It turns out that if you throw enough seawater at most things, they'll fail. The nuclear aspect of that disaster, as you point out, killed almost nobody, and was a rounding error in the overall impact of its severity.
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The claim that the high cost of nuclear is because of lawsuits is bogus. The cost of lawsuits is a tiny fraction of the price, and besides which renewables get them too. Many NIMBYs do not want windmills or solar farms near them, or even offshore.
Let's just take a step back and review this story. We have a Silicon Valley tech bro startup, renowned for their honest appraisals and dedication to quality, promising a new wonder-reactor that will produce... 1.5MWe.
So it's competing directly with other micro gene
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If they're not bombs, why does America care what Iran's electricity generation does with itself?
Because you don't need to enrich Uranium for nuclear power. The only possible reason to do that is to make a U-235 type bomb. Of course, the much easier way is to make a Pu-239 type bomb (like everyone else) but that way they couldn't bleed the west for concessions for years over a bomb program that thankfully has no intention of coming to completion.
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Because you don't need to enrich Uranium for nuclear power. The only possible reason to do that is to make a U-235 type bomb.
It may be possible to use unenriched uranium in a reactor, but most designs require enrichment.
Of course, the much easier way is to make a Pu-239 type bomb (like everyone else)
Easier!? Oh dear, get a clue. U235 bombs are far simpler, but heavier. The US did not even bother to test the Little Boy design before dropping it on Hiroshima.
The Trinity test was a plutonium core. Even South Africa built U235 weapons.
And where do you think they'd get Pu-239? Ordinary reactors are not suited to weapons-grade Pu production (due to Pu-240 contamination), and if they built a reactor designed to
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Of course having seen what happened to their neighbours, Iran has every reason to want nuclear weapons for self defense from aggressive foreign powers.
Really? Which foreign powers would those be? If UK, USA, or even tiny little Israel, wanted Iran gone then Iran would be pounded into the sand, sand that would be so hot from all the bombing and shelling that it would glow in the dark.
The only aggression to Iran has been in response to their own aggression. If Iran wants the "aggression" against them to stop then they can stop harassing their neighbors.
I don't know why they can't just withdraw from the NPT.
Because it is their agreement to the NPT that allows them to claim Israel is the aggressor. If they le
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Israel is illegally maintaining a stockpile of nuclear weapons.
[citation needed]
What makes Israel's weapons 'illegal', in your narrative?
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Because Israel is illegally maintaining a stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Israel never signed any nuclear non-proliferation treaty. There is nothing illegal about their stockpile.
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It may be possible to use unenriched uranium in a reactor, but most designs require enrichment.
the CANDU reactors [wikipedia.org] can use straight "yellow cake" Uranium ore, no refinement or enrichment needed.
Re: HOLD UP! (Score:2)
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Pakistan never signed the NPT. Likewise India.
And they have not been invaded since, or been treated as a Pariah like North Korea. QED.
(We don't count the brief incursion on Abbottabad as an invasion.)
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I know how this conversation goes... Flower Power: "You can't make a nuclear reactor here! What are we going to put all the nuclear wast---oh you bastards." Scientists: "Checkmate."
Yeah the IIH (Invincible Invisible Hippie) has been holding nuclear power down for 50 years, never giving it a break.
When, oh when, will the industrial capitalist not be crushed by the IIH's dirty Birkentock?
Although there are opponents to nuclear power around, sure, there are opponents to anything at all around, but even at the most charitable interpretation of facts only a couple of the nuclear power projects that have failed have actually been due to environmentalist lawsuits (and the couple of examples
Oklo is a clever name (Score:5, Informative)
It's the name of the site where naturally occurring fission reactors were found in Gabon. They ran for a few hundred thousand years, about 1.7 billion years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Mini reactor shuts down (Score:1)
Bubba heads down the road with a hammer and pipe wrench to get it back on line in time for Hee Haw show.
WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong.
Renewable Green Nuclear Energy? ORNL MSRE (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, even if it is 'green', it's not 'renewable'. Of course there are enough thorium reserves currently to hypothetically keep the world going at current energy consumption rates for thousands of years, it doesn't really need to be renewable, but it's just an incorrect term to throw in there.
Re:Renewable Green Nuclear Energy? ORNL MSRE (Score:5, Interesting)
Like all fission technology, economy is the bitch - thorium plants are expensive, just like uranium. Also, the thorium cycle is much more an Indian innovation rather than American.
Another lie: thorium does not stop nuclear proliferation. Simply, it would enable U-233 bombs instead of U-235 - and yes, these have been built and tested [wikipedia.org] already in the 50's.
The Oak Ridge MSRE was indeed "decommissioned" by just turning it off in 1969. Only problem is that is required continued patching for decades afterwards for millions of dollars [archive.org], so I'm not sure what kind of "decommissioning" that was.
It's not just a question of environmentalism: both technically and economically, nuclear energy has produced more failures since WW2 than the US military.
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Yes a big problem is economics.
There is a general rule where one big plant is cheaper that two small ones. But it doesn't apply everywhere. Two exceptions are telescope mirrors and nuclear reactors.
The bigger the mirror, the more support it needs, the harder to grind the surface, and the bigger the mount and supporting equipment. Read about the trouble they had with Mt Palomar sometime.
Reactors are the same. Control requires that neutrons be able to leak out of the core, and on a big reactor the neutrons in
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If they want small reactors the Navy already knows how to build them.
Yes, very very expensively per MWh produced. And they know how to crew them too... also very very expensively per MWh produced.
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Do you want safe and reliable or not?
Most of the crew on a submarine is not in the engine room. And if you are only generating electricity you don't need the throttleman at all, so there is one less already.
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Do you want safe and reliable or not?
Yep. Solar and wind are awesome.
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Nuclear is not a renewable, because it uses fuel. "Green" is a marketing term meaning "carbon-free energy source that liberals like," so you can't use that term either.
The ORNL molten-salt reactor pointed the way to a new generation of designs that not only can run on multiple fuel types (including those derived from waste) but can run hotter than the present PWRs. We would no longer have to site them on coasts, but could put them in places where dry air could be used as the heat sink. We could locate them
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Nuclear is not a renewable
By your definition, neither is solar or wind. Or are rare earths renewable now? All energy sources (except biofuels which are often a waste) use some mined minerals. In the case of a Thorium MSR, that source is already mined (in the tailings of rare earth mines). In the case of other energy sources you have to do new mining, in some cases huge amounts. Or did you think that a semi-conductor the size of a piece of plywood was made from switchgrass?
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A renewable exploits energy that is already being released in nature. When a river runs downhill it dissipates the same amount of energy whether or not humans capture some of it in a dam.
You could think of geothermal as being a renewable nuclear source, because it exploits the energy of fissioning natural isotopes that keeps the earth hot inside.
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I'm really (truly) enjoying this pedantry, particularly because it is putting me in mind of "The Last Question" https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html [multivax.com].
People use the word "renewable" when referring to energy in quite a different sense than its literal meaning. It tends to be a synonym for "We're not burning something".
There's no such concept as renewable energy - the amount of energy in the Universe is (as far as we know) fixed, so there is nothing to renew. Our "energy sources" are really "low entropy
Re:Renewable Green Nuclear Energy? ORNL MSRE (Score:5, Informative)
The ORNL experimental molten salt reactor was tiny (7MWth) and suffered from significant problems that basically killed thorium reactors due to unresolved problems and cost.
There was significant cracking with only speculation about how to reduce it, but not enough to get a decent lifespan out of a commercial reactor. Decommissioning was an even bigger problem, full of nasty and expensive surprises.
Every now and again someone comes along claiming to have solved all those issues, but they need billions of Dollars to prove it. Investors look at it, see that other countries have also failed to resolve the issues and lose interest.
This is my favorite (Score:2)
The spray of water and steam knocked two operators onto the floor, killing one and severely injuring another. The No. 7 shield plug from the top of the reactor vessel impaled the third man through his groin and exited his shoulder, pinning him to the ceiling.[11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The spray of water and steam knocked two operators onto the floor, killing one and severely injuring another. The No. 7 shield plug from the top of the reactor vessel impaled the third man through his groin and exited his shoulder, pinning him to the ceiling.[11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Oh god, the SL1 Accident. The faithful don't count that because they need reasons. Nothing like being buried in lead or lead lined coffins. Here's the poor guy http://www.arlingtoncemetery.n... [arlingtoncemetery.net] I only hope his end was quick enough to spare him the horror of being impaled above an open reactor core.
Marie Curie, 30 Chernobyl Liquidators, The dead in the SL1 Accident, lead lined and in solid concrete Goiania Radioactive incident. https://www.phactual.com/magic... [phactual.com] K-19 deaths https://english.pravda.ru/news. [pravda.ru]
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Oh god, the SL1 Accident. The faithful don't count that because they need reasons.
Who says it is not counted in nuclear accident statistics?
Depends on who ya talk to. I've dealt with some people who don't count anything before 2012. That's the problem with statistics.
If we see a bad history from a car or airplane built in 1961 then do we take that into account on the safety of a 2021 Tesla Model 3? Of course not. Do we ground Airbus jets because of a problem with the Boeing 737 MAX? No. We don't even ground the Boeing 737 NG. That's because the problem with the MAX was in the changes made since the NG.
Why do we consider the safety of the GE BWR-4 at Fukushima when thinking about building a WEC AP-1000? That seems silly. One is a boiling water reactor and the other is a pressurized water reactor, so not only different designs but different operational principals. Neither of them are a Rosatom RBMK like at Chernobyl. The reactors at Three Mile Island were B&W PWR type, apparently one-of-a-kind designs called TMI-1 and TMI-2.
We don't "count" SL-1 because that was an experimental military reactor built in 1961.
No true Scotsman, I suppose.
Humans are what makes nuclear power generation unsafe.
Nuclear power is the most dangerous energy, except for all the others.
Then there is the Kyshtym disaster
That was a nuclear weapons accident, and it happened in the USSR.
Andreev bay
Also in USSR. Possibly involving weapons. Certainly not a civil power accident in the USA.
Tokaimura fuel prep accident
In Japan.
Goiania Radioactive incident.
Also in Japan, and a medical device, not a nuclear power accident in the USA.
I could go on for hours.
You quote my first sentence, then miss ever
Give options then. (Re:This is my favorite ) (Score:2)
If the problems are humans make dangerous things, therefore we should not have nuclear power, then what is your solution?
There is uncertainly with living with nuclear power. That's better than the certainty of dying in the cold and dark.
If you don't like nuclear power then give options. In places like Japan, UK, and Hawaii there is not enough wind, water, and sun to meet all of their energy needs. That means choosing fossil fuels, nuclear power, or freezing to death in the dark.
Japan is going to build mo
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His name has to be Montgomery Burns.
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Wow, we can wait two hundred years to see if it works. No reason to rush ahead and fuckup the entire planet.
It is God's will, and he will rain his largess down upon us if we only do as he wishes.
Okay, but (Score:4)
When Microreactor snobs start rambling on about how they prefer seasonal reactors, etc... I'm out. :-)
Way ahead of you (Score:1)
I plan to start a company that makes nuclear reactors based on any leftovers from these nuclear reactors that consume nuclear waste...
Surely I can at least get some good AA performance out of the scraps!
Too soon? (Score:1)
Is it safe to think that nobody who saw The China Syndrome is around to bitch about it? Hell, people conveniently forget things that happened 5, 10, 20 years ago.
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So, you really think that Chia Syndrome was based on reality?
Chock one up to green peace propaganda (TM supporting coal industry since 1970)
Re:Too soon? (Score:5, Funny)
lol CHINA syndrome, since Chia Syndrome was result of spilled chia seeds growing in skin folds of rather large people
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Point of information... the initial incident from the plot of The China Syndrome was based on an incident at Dresden Generating Station in 1970 [wikipedia.org]. The real impact of the movie, however, came about because twelve days after it was released Three Mile Island's reactor 2 suffered a partial meltdown and radiation leak [wikipedia.org]. Call it propaganda all you want, but people freaked out for a valid reason.
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And only a few paragraphs into that nice link you provided it states "However, epidemiological studies analyzing the rate of cancer in and around the area since the accident determined there was not a statistically significant increase in the rate and thus no causal connection linking the accident with these cancers has been substantiated."
So what was that "valid reason"?
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So because it didn't kill a bunch of people, despite the possibility that it could have, that somehow renders their worries invalid? "Hey guys, it worked out this time. Chill out." -- is not a valid response to people legitimately concerned about both the risk of meltdown and radiation leaks.
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You might want to think through the scenarios a bit more. Their worries were invalid because even multiple additional Chernobyls would have been better than what we ended up with.
We could have built many more nuclear plants like we had -- that were overly-expensive, and not entirely failsafe, with the risk of turning the surrounding area in a 30km radius into a nature preserve. Instead we saved money and avoided fear by burning coal and gas in immense quantities with impacts that you are implying were wor
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So now it's not just that it didn't kill a bunch of people the way things could have gone, but that even if it had we'd still have been better off because sacrificing lives and land is better than releasing CO2 from burning coal. I'm sure people living in the shadow of Three Mile Island and Fukushima Daiichi are real happy to know that people like you think so little of their lives.
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There are all kinds of claims about how coal plants harm the health, economies, etc., of nearby communities. If any of that is true, then it's a certain damage that was taken in trade for a possible damage from nuclear plants. We could have also used the money saved from using coal instead of nuclear to build cleaner coal plants, and to help those communities, but that's not the way humans work. This situation we're discussing is a good example of how too many of us still let fear and selfishness drive ou
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Just noticed this article when perusing Google News. Wow the internet found something that validates my world view! ;-)
https://www.cnet.com/features/... [cnet.com]
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According to Klingon lore, "A running man can cut a thousand throats in a single night".
In your fear fueled imagination I suspect you would ban all running, because a lot of people COULD have been hurt
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Men choose to run. Men do not choose to suffer the effects of a meltdown. Your point would be valid if the effects of a meltdown were entirely contained to the reactor facility. I could get on board with that in fact. Let me know when you work out the design. I'm sure the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will be thrilled to accept your proposal.
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Prepares photocopy of Palo Verde Nuclear Generation Station, "*ahem* I'd like a few more of these then"
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"China syndrome" is a fanciful term that describes a fictional result of a nuclear meltdown, where reactor components melt through their containment structures and into the underlying earth, "all the way to China".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So, you are saying that a nuclear power plant melted down and the core went all the way to China in 1970and I missed it?
Wow, oh wow, you amaze me
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No. No I didn't say that at all. I said precisely that the movie was based on the event cited in the link provided, and was boosted by Three Mile Island's partial meltdown 12 days later, which rightly left people concerned about plant safety.
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>>Is it safe to think that nobody who saw The China Syndrome is around to bitch about it?
Still, you seem to be attempting to portray a move who's title is the epitome of exaggeration as somehow factual enough to take as reality
Nothing new, and all ideas bad (Score:5, Insightful)
So, we would have lots of small nuclear power plants, with no security whatsoever, and not even minimal safety given that I don't see a containment building, distributed around the country and running on nuclear waste (which communities will be thrilled to have shuffled around in their literal backyard), based on an old and failed technology with a horrific economic track record to begin with, and that involves lots of weaponisable plutonium (did I mention no security? In fact, no personnel at all?), dropping economies of scale when the main problem of nuclear power is its enormous CAPEX.
Have these guys even read how a real plant operates, let alone seen? Aside from the main reactor, you have turbines. These need regular maintenance and you simply must have people on site to care for them. What about cooling? Small turbines will be inefficient (even more than the ones of present nuclear plants, that reject 2 MW of heat for each 1 MW of electricity); I see no cooling tower in their design, so what are they going to do? Dump megawatts of heat in the local river and kill all local wildlife?
Also, nice realistic schedule: "a number of reactors by the mid-2020's". That is, 3,5 years from now, starting from nothing. That's twice as fast as the Manhattan Project, for comparison. In peacetime, that time won't even be enough for red tape, let alone actual design and construction of a prototype, much less a fleet.
In the meantime, the cost of solar and wind keeps dropping [lazard.com], and building and operating renewables is now close to be cheaper than just operating nuclear power plants, even if they were free to build.
At least they have their priorities straight and have designed nice, stylish mountain huts for the reactors. In fact, remove the reactors and sell the houses, that's probably the only viable business case.
I think what I am experiencing is the befuddling feeling that physicists in the nineteenth century had looking at the last fools trying to build a perpetual motion machine.
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The attraction of small reactors is not that you would want to scatter them one by one all over the place, but that a reactor type that could be factory-built and trucked into place would be a faster build clustered on large, guarded sites than today's gigawatt-sized devices. If it takes ten or twenty of these to produce a gigawatt, you benefit by not having to spend twenty years pouring concrete on site. What makes plants expensive is build time.
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There is no up side to lots of small reactors because there are per-reactor costs which only go up when you build more reactors, and because we can move electricity around to many sites much easier than we can move nuclear waste around to many sites.
The idea that making lots of reactors will bring the costs down through mass production is stupid, because you're STILL not going to be making THAT many of them that the costs of making the parts will come down substantially, and meanwhile EVERY SINGLE REACTOR h
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Factory build would allow us to certify reactors by type, just like aircraft. The inspection of individual reactors would be purely to make sure that each is a copy of a certified type, with the same performance profile.
In the converse: if we certified airliners in the same way that we certified reactors, could anybody afford to travel?
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I have trouble understanding the 1.5MW size decision. Even if it is 3MWt and you have a good use for the low grade waste heat, it seems awfully small capacity compared to the (presumed) building size. Optimistically the value of electricity produced is $1 million/year, which would require the plant to cost less than about $7 million to build and $50k/year to operate.
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TFA mentions that the reactor is expected to have an output of just 1.5 MWe.
At that level most places could just erect a single wind turbine and a battery for equivalent output.
Meanwhile the world is moving towards massive distributed generation and long distance DC transmission, so a 1.5 MWe reactor is going to be kind of pointless.
Silicon Valley should NOT be working with nukes. (Score:2)
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Driving a car is complicated, controlling a reactor isn't. Heck Chernobyl was about dumb arrogant human overriding controls... that and being dumb enough to not have containment building.
dogfooding required (Score:2)
Foundation Atomics (Score:2)
No one else seems to have mentioned it, but Isaac Asimov's Foundation has micro-reactors that become a key trading item for the Foundation to the out-worlds, are sealed units that can't be opened without causing an explosion, and allow the foundation to gain considerable power during the course of the series.
I'm hoping this gets explored in the AppleTV series dropping any day now.
What a ghreat idea.... (Score:2)
And, based on the "artist's picture" of a tiny power plant - what's that provide, power for 500 homes? 100 homes? One factory? - all someone needs to do is wait till one's built and turned up... and drive an explosive-loaded semi into it, and *boom* dirty fallout all over. The unpleasant people won't even have to buy radioactives....
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This isn't happening, folks.,/quote>
It's not happening here, but if this tech pans out, China will be cranking these out in factories, like aircraft.
Democrats broke it. (Re:A whole 22 people?) (Score:3, Informative)
That's how many lawyers you need to approve the new color of a nuclear reactor's break room.
That is until the government gets some engineers and scientists in the room to explain that without nuclear power the nation's lights go out. Then the lawyers are chased out of the room and the politicians start issuing construction and operating permits for nuclear power plants.
For 50 years we saw Democrats in the USA hold up plans for a radioactive waste processing and disposal site while complaining about all the radioactive waste being piled up at nuclear power plants. For 50 years they said we have o
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All these nuclear techs are heading for extinction because they'll never be able you get their costs down.
Do you want to put money on that?
It appears that there's plenty of people willing to put their own money on nuclear power getting it's costs down. It only takes one success to take the energy market down a new road. Bill Gates seems to think you are wrong. If you'd listen to him explain the problem then you will understand why you are wrong. One example is Japan, and there is a video of Bill Gates explaining why Japan needs nuclear power. It starts with wind, solar, and hydro power needing a lot of lan
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Just like any other large civil project. That includes the mess left behind with solar PV projects that might get ripped up by a tornado or pounded into little sharp and toxic bits by a hailstorm. Your point?
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The reason being cost, a partially complete reactor is cheaper to complete than to start from nothing somewhere else.
Sunk cost fallacy.
A fallacy? Where? (Re:Probably not worth it) (Score:2)
Where's the sunk cost fallacy?
I bring this up as a possibility, not some absolute. If there is evidence of the costs being lower to start from nothing elsewhere then I expect that path to be taken.
Consider Watts Bar Unit 2, that was a reactor that sat unfinished for something like 20 years before construction resumed. Was that a sunk cost fallacy too?
It's only a fallacy if there is another option at lower cost. As I expect this is a lower cost option there is no fallacy. If it in in fact not a lower cos
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Consider that you had the option to educate me, and the rest of the class, what a sunk cost fallacy is but you chose to make a snarky comment instead. Here's an idea, how about instead of pointing out how you are more educated than me you share your education? It would have taken only a tiny bit more time than you took to make your comment and everyone reading it would have been better off for it.
I suspect you don't know the definition of a sunk cost fallacy. If you did then this was an opportunity to sh
Because we choose to. (Re:Probably not worth it) (Score:2)
And wind and solar have a long way to go to be as reliable and energy dense as nuclear fission.
In places like Japan, Hawaii, and UK there is simply not enough land for wind and solar power to meet their energy requirements. Offshore wind is an option but it costs more than nuclear power.
Cost is not an argument if there isn't enough of the cheaper solution to go around. If fossil fuels become unavailable to us then the economic theory of supply and demand will dictate that wind and solar power prices will
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To do it properly, you put the reactor in a waterproof concrete pit in the ground, then seal it up with more concrete. Only water pipes in and out, the device has to have a 'lifetime' of fuel on hand when installed, and it has to be designed as failsafe - if it overheats, it shuts down instead of melting down.
The surface building would only need the steam turbines and cooling equipment. A tornado - or even a terrorist driving a bomb-laden truck into it - would only take out the surface equipment and leave