NuScale Power Awarded $226 Million To Deploy Small Nuclear Reactor Design 210
New submitter ghack writes "NuScale power, a small nuclear power company in Corvallis Oregon, has won a Department of Energy grant of up to $226 million dollars to enable deployment of their small modular reactor. The units would be factory built in the United States, and their small size enables a number of potential niche applications. NuScale argues that their design includes a number of unique passive safety features: 'NuScale's 45-megawatt reactor, which can be grouped with others to form a utility-scale plant, would sit in a 5 million-gallon pool of water underground. That means it needs no pumps to inject water to cool it in an emergency - an issue ... highlighted by Japan's crippled Fukushima plant.' This was the second of two DOE small modular reactor grants; the first was awarded to Babcock and Wilcox, a stalwart in the nuclear industry."
Fix the comma (Score:2)
Re:Fix the comma (Score:4, Funny)
Oh hi, you must be new here. Welcome to slashdot! You're fitting in just fine
I say we put him in charge of the safety of the new reactors.
What about accidents? (Score:5, Insightful)
Any kind of leak and you've suddenly got 5 million gallons of contaminated water.
Of course, this assumes that your containment pool doesn't leak (yea right).
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Leaks can be detected and contained at relatively low levels and happen with "big nukes" too. And it's nowhere near the environmental risk that meltdowns are.
earth quake? (Score:2)
and what happens if the earth splits and the water drains away?
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Depends on the design. But if it's anything based on the CANDU designs, no coolent is no problem. It just stops on it's own.
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Not to mention that we're already running down our aquifers...
Kinda wish the article made any attempt to explain how "put it in a pool of water" makes it supposedly automatically safe in the case of accident. Wouldn't they still need pumps to circulate the water through the reactor to absorb the heat?
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Wouldn't they still need pumps to circulate the water through the reactor to absorb the heat?
Assuming they designed it well, the convection currents caused by the heating of the water would be sufficient to circulate the water through the reactor.
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Five million gallons is absolutely nothing for a power station, even for a desert community. It's a cube less than 20 m on each side.
Much, much, much more water is already blown into the atmosphere by the cooling towers which are a necessary part of any nuclear, coal, gas, solar-thermal, or other steam turbine-driving technology.
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Actually it's a good bit more than a 20 m cube; not less.
5 million gallons of fresh water times 8.33 lb/gal = 41.7 million lb divided by 2000 lb/ton = 20,900 tons = 19,000 tonnes
19,000 tonnes = 19,000 m^3 = 26.7 x 26.7 x 26.7 m
(minor roundoff errors are of no significance to the point)
That is one hell of a lot of water. Not from a use standpoint; normally there would be zero usage once filled; but in case it gets contaminated and then leaks away.
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Good catch; I did the calculation earlier and forgot which way I had rounded. It's a 30-m cube.
But it doesn't matter, because 5MG is not a hell of a lot of water from a utility-scale water management perspective (the field I work in, incidentally). This plant (http://www.srpnet.com/about/stations/kyrene.aspx), which is a 520 MW power plant, uses more than 3 MG daily in make-up water. Others use more or less.
The GP was musing about impact on declining aquifers, and my point was that the communities buying po
Not even close to running out of water (Score:2)
Not to mention that we're already running down our aquifers...
Which doesn't matter much because there are huge reserves of water under the ocean [the-americ...terest.com].
Not to mention the amount of water we are talking about is really tiny when compared to the amount used even by a small city.
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5 million gallons may sound like a lot, but it's not event that big. 5 million gallons, equates to...a pool the size of an american football field, at 4 meters deep.
So how big does a pool have to be before you consider it to be big?
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Did you know that they seal garbage dumps? That's an enormous area. There are entire Superfund sites that are multiple times that size, completely sealed. Then there are the neutrino detectors, which are not only huge and sealed, but sealed to the point where no impurities at all can contaminate the detector. So yeah, it's a good sized pool, but we know how to do that really well.
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It wouldn't be hard to contain the water ... unless, like, a big earthquake happened and split your container all to hell. Think.
Should have given that $226 mil to Focus Fusion (Score:2)
Re:Should have given that $226 mil to Focus Fusion (Score:4, Insightful)
This company can produce power now. Focus Fusion might be able to produce significant amounts of excess power in a 10-25 year time frame. Or maybe never.
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Focus Fusion might be viable on the horizon, especially at a potential price tag of only $226 million, but you can get a Hybrid Fusion for about $22,000 MSRP.
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http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/12/senior-fusion-researchers-give-major.html [nextbigfuture.com]
In a major endorsement of the fusion energy research and development program of start-up Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP), a committee of senior fusion researchers, led by a former head of the US fusion program, has concluded that the innovative effort deserves “a much higher level of investment based on their considerable progress to date.” The report concludes that “In the committee’s view [LPP’s] approach to fusion power is worthy of a considerable expansion of effort.”
Talk to Ford - you might be able to sell 'em just on the fact that supporting "Focus Fusion" is free advertising for two of their models...
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Price comparison to wind (Score:3)
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The biggest problem with nuclear is that people run that industry - short sighted, greedy, sometimes incompetent people. Let me know when you find a technical fix for that.
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Nobody is buying it, unless very short to you is 30 years. That is the half-life of Cesium-137, and Cesium-137 is hideously harmful.
Nothing magic happens after 30 years, either. In 30 years it is half as hideously harmful as it is now. In 60 years, 1/4. In 90 years, 1/8. Still hideously harmful.
Apples and Oranges (Score:2)
And when its not windy you have a 0MW wind farm.
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The biggest problem with wind is that it doesn't adjust to demand. Even in reliably windy areas, you sometimes get a calm day. At least with solar, you get peak output during peak energy demand (hot summer days, although the demand is shifted more to the late afternoon. There's a time lag as buildings and the air heat up. Peak production is 10am-4pm, peak demand Is noon-8pm). Ultimately, if you don't want to burn fossil fuels, nuclear is a very dependable strategy. Wind is fine if your alternative sou
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Offshore wind runs about $5/MW of dataplate energy according to a report today on the BBC about a major project that's just been cancelled -- £5.4 billion ($8.6 billion) for an 1800MW capacity wind turbine array (Three hundred 6MW units). Offshore gets a little bit better capacity factor than land-based units, maybe 30% so that's 540MW average over a year or so. Expected lifespan of offshore wind turbines is about 15-20 years but the industry has been quite coy over failure rates and actual operating
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You are taking a pessimistic view on the wind power side here.
In Denmark, we just completed a 400 MW offshore site which gets a non-inflation-adjusted strike price at 0.19 USD/kWh for the first 10-12 years. After that it operates on market terms. The capacity factor is expected to be around 45-55% as far as I know (other offshore sites have similar factors - the numbers are publicly available in an open catalogue of all Danish turbines). Modern turbines have much improved capacity factors compared to the ol
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I understand the site off Tiree for the planned 1.8GW dataplate wind farm involved hard-rock mounts for the turbines and apparently the engineering costs for the mounts were going to raise the price -- this wind farm was to be situated in the north Atlantic which is a much harsher environment than the sheltered southern reaches of the North Sea. Some other wind farms in the south of Britain closer to major population centres in shallower more sheltered areas such as the Irish Sea have gone ahead at that str
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No. They are lower. At least for modern wind farms.
More Corporate Pork (Score:2)
Sounds like this is just big enough to power a huge data center or corporate campus. So this is probably not a plant for the average citizen, but one to make power cheaper for corporate users. No surprise. It helps Google get cheap power, while we keep paying for coal and gas.
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You don't use just one of them.
45MW is about the same as a GE LM6000 natural gas turbine. You stick three, or four, or a dozen of those together to make a single plant of worthwhile size. You'd use these mini-nukes in the same manner.
Pebble Bed (Score:3)
....what ever happened to these?
China gets one running and... ...then nothing? A few people stopped funding theirs?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor [wikipedia.org]
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http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/2001/october/a6oct01.html outlines the issues with pebble bed reactors.
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Problem is, hardly anyone is recycling spent fuel even if it is possible. In view of that, pebbles would be infinitely preferable to what we put up with now.
A comment on size (Score:3)
5 million gallons of water is approximately the size of one football field x 12 feet deep... or 360' x 160' x 12' ... or if you prefer cubed... about 87.4' cubed of water
Small containment vessel (Score:2)
Here's a description without the hype. [nrc.gov] This has a small containment vessel, only slightly larger than the reactor pressure vessel. It's a vacuum bottle setup - there's normally a vacuum between the pressure vessel and the containment, as insulation. In an emergency, the reactor vents into the containment vacuum, which allows more heat conduction to the outside. The outside water pool is just a big heat sink.
Most containment vessels are much bigger than the reactor vessel. One of the problems with the re
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A couple of interesting design characteristics (Score:2)
This design is built primarily off site, which should greatly reduce construction costs. In addition, a standard design would reduce O&M as well.
Its modular design allows refueling of a plant while the other continue to operate, which could yield large savings since you could refuel during light load periods and stagger the refueling throughout the year.
Turbine design would be interesting - do you build a turbine for max anticipated load or for installed laid and then upgrade?
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Isn't that what is happening at Fukushima right now?
Very little. As I understand it, smaller reactors don't have such a big heat problem as large utility scale reactors especially if the cooling fails.
Plus, even if one of these SMRs has problems, they are so much smaller that they don't cause anywhere near as much trouble as larger reactors.
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These have a smaller core. In the event of a catastrophic failure, there is a much smaller meltdown.
As I understand it, the whole reactor lives in a giant pool of water [nuscalepower.com].
Also, this reactor appears to be able to self-cool without external power [nuscalepower.com]. (Core cooling is by convection, not pumped coolant.)
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Re:This gets funding (Score:4, Informative)
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You missed a few other open issues related to decommisioning (e.g., mostly what to do with the salt).
In any case, the only efforts I know of are:
FUJI which I think died in the fund-raising stage back in 2011.
TTS [ttsinc.jp] an attempt to resurrect this.
Thor Energy [thorenergy.no]
MSRE showed that the physics worked, however, as with many things, the engineering problems remain. AFAIK, most people are attempting to figure out the salt problem. The metal problem is currently unsolved (and a much more important problem since you need th
Re:This gets funding (Score:5, Informative)
The metal problem was solved with Hastelloy-N [moltensalt.org] by adding various alloys (primarily 1.1% Nb) and they predicted it to have a sufficient lifetime for an operational reactor. That was in 1977.
A metallographic examination (Fig. 10) of the tensile tested specimen showed a complete absence of grain boundary cracks.
We have found that if the U(IV)/U(III) ratio in fuel salt is kept below about 60, embrittlement is essentially prevented when CrTel.266 is used as the source of tellurium.
They recorded a crack depth of 0, and very minimal cracking for other sources of Te.
The evolution of fluorine gas was solved in 1970 [moltensalt.org] by putting insulation (a reflective layer) around it.
Nevertheless it is clear that prevention of fluorine evolution from stored MSR salt will not be very difficult or expensive,
A decommissioning process [nap.edu] was developed in 1997 and the original MSRE, without the later developments, improper defueling and storage and all, was decommissioned [doe.gov] and now serves as a source of thorium for medical research at present. The original decomissioned procedure in 1969 was simply to turn it off and walk away. So we don't do that anymore. Wiki [wikipedia.org] summaries:
Cleanup of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment was about $130 Million, for a small 8 MW(th) unit. Much of the high cost was caused by the unpleasant surprise of fluorine and uranium hexafluoride evolution from cold fuel salt in storage that ORNL did not defuel and store correctly, but this has now been taken into consideration in MSR design.
If the fluoride fuel salts are stored in solid form over many decades, radiation can cause the release of corrosive fluorine gas, and uranium hexafluoride.[94] This was due to radiolysis of the salt from remaining fission products, when colder than 100 degrees Celsius.[79] The salts should be defueled and wastes removed before extended shutdowns. Fluorine and uranium hexafluoride evolution can be prevented by storing the salts above 100 degrees Celsius.[79] Because some of the fission product fluorides have high solubility in water, fluorides are less suitable for long term storage. For longer term storage, fluoride containing wastes could go through a vitrification process to be encased in insoluble borosilicate glass suitable for long-term disposal.
Corrosion from tellurium—The reactor makes small amounts of tellurium as a fission product. In the MSRE, this caused small amounts of corrosion at the grain boundaries of the special nickel alloy, Hastelloy-N used for the reactor. Metallurgical studies showed that adding 1 to 2% niobium to the Hastelloy-N alloy improves resistance to corrosion by tellurium.[24](pp81–87) One additional strategy against corrosion was to keep the fuel salt slightly reducing by maintaining the ratio of UF4/UF3 to less than 60. This was done in the MSRE by continually contacting the flowing fuel salt with a beryllium metal rod submersed in a cage inside the pump bowl. This causes a fluorine shortage in the salt, reducing tellurium to a less aggressive (elemental) form. This method is also effective in reducing corrosion in general from the fluoride salt, because the fission process produces more fluorine atoms freed from the fissioned uranium that would otherwise attack the structural metals.[92](pp3–4)
Radiation damage to nickel alloys—The standard Hastelloy N alloy, a high nickel alloy use
Meanwhile - after the 1970s (Score:3)
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Listen to yourself. Predictions, theoretical fixes and a decommissioning plan that hinges on it all working. There is a reason why people won't invest in this technology, especially when proven clean energy sources with predictable costs are competing for funding.
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FUD: If it doesn't work the first time, just keep spouting nonsense.
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They were abandoned because they didn't produce weapons-grade output, which was a priority at the time, not due to any real technical failures.
Re:This gets funding (Score:5, Informative)
Getting Thorium power off the ground is going to require at least $20B, two orders of magnitude more money than what we're talking about here.
I'm a proponent of Thorium power, but there is an absolutely massive amount of work to be done between now and industrial scale power generation.
Re:This gets funding (Score:4, Insightful)
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Of course we need to put funding into Thorium research ASAP. But $226M is not going to produce anything substantial.
Thorium reactors don't melt down, but they are fully capable of having major accidents with massive impacts. U-232 is nasty stuff.
Thorium.. (Score:2)
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In California, they have a bunch of bonds allocated for building a HSR that will never happen - maybe with a slight of hand their legislators could redirect that to making Thorium reactors practical!
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Getting Thorium power off the ground is going to require at least $20B
Thorium is already off the ground. India, which has 25% of the world's thorium, but little uranium, is already developing commercial thorium reactors [wikipedia.org].
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Yes, India is investing billions of dollars into Thorium and that's great. But they are very far from real industrial scale energy production.
The Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor is mostly built, and will eventually produce 500MW. The average US nuclear plant produces twice as much power. The PFBR *could* use Thorium, but will use Uranium for the foreseeable future.
The Advanced Heavy-Water Reactor will use Thorium, but it won't be completed for several years and it will only produce 300MW.
There is a very l
Re:five million gallons later, who'da thunk it (Score:5, Interesting)
This gets funding, but the LIFTR doesnt? yeah.. seems like a great idea.
I am not an anonymous coward and I approve this message. It seems like despite the citation of this Thing as an 'answer' to anything useful... the lesson of Fukushima was not universally learned after all.
That means it needs no pumps to inject water to cool it in an emergency - an issue ... highlighted by Japan's crippled Fukushima plant.'
All this for 45 megawatts?? And in the case of containment failure you have contaminated five million gallons of water.
The solution is to surround nuclear energy with less water, not more. None is best. Such as fissile contained in stable salts that, in case of a reactor breach, merely sit there not reacting to water or air or spreading into the environment until they can be cleaned up and recycled.
The chemistry of LFTR may seem odd and frightening to the proponents of water reactors, but if it takes ~7.5 olympic size swimming pools to thermally stabilize a 45 megawatt reactor, the idea of chaining these to provide utility levels of hundreds of megawatts is, um, just more silly?
Micro-reactors are being suggested as a means to give little communities a little bit of energy with only a little worry. And there is a small community somewhere who hopes to be given one of these. One would look great in your neighborhood. Then another and another. Pretty soon the combined cost and overhead of little things begins to exceed the cost running wires to fewer, bigger (shared) things. But we are committed to little things now. Little things sneak up on you that way.
The most likely scenario is that this 'fortunate' community runs aground on the unforgiving shoals of 45 megawatts, cannot afford to grow even past the point where it can afford to maintain even that. And some day it is all forgotten (except the decommission cost) and CAT disels save the day [wordpress.com]. By my logic, which I invite everyone to poke holes in, micro-reactors are a trap because an insufficient ratio of watts/person is a trap.
I am completely in favor of micro reactors, but honestly believe that micro-solutions should be scaled-down versions of proven and viable mega-solutions, and not pursued with any vigor until the mega-problem is solved.
In terms of survival this is common sense, it is why some in the medical profession choose to cure diseases rather than individual patients. But there are not enough engineers tackling these 'big' problems.
Be wary of itty-bitty things that could never scale to become a big-things. Build big things that can become itty-bitty. Because molten salt fissile technology is not explosive on any scale, its minimum size is (theoretically) limited to the mass of its physical containment and the cleverness of our engineering. And our resolve to get it done.
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Obligatory bump to Thorium Alliance [youtube.com] and my letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate [scribd.com]
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate [scribd.com]
Off Topic, But Really Cool (Score:2)
Re:ON Topic, But Really Cool (Score:3)
Did you know that McMurdo base in Antarctica operated a small (1.2MW) nuclear micro-reactor from 1962-1972 [everything2.com]? It had a disappointing but uneventful service record -- until it reached sudden end-of-life when cracks were discovered at welds in the pressure vessel. That is why I really said "CAT diesels to the rescue" but forgot to add the context.
To avoid weld vulnerabilities at any stage of life, modern light water reactor designs call for a single-casted pressure vessel of 'nuclear grade steel' [youtube.com]. Nuclear Gr
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Micro-reactors are being suggested as a means to give little communities a little bit of energy with only a little worry. And there is a small community somewhere who hopes to be given one of these. One would look great in your neighborhood. Then another and another. Pretty soon the combined cost and overhead of little things begins to exceed the cost running wires to fewer, bigger (shared) things. But we are committed to little things now.
We perhaps learned something from behemoth reactors running near the physical limits of the materials used in them? That and the exceptionally impressive results when they do go south?
I've always likened the big ones to the supercharged engines in top-fuel dragsters versus my little 4 cylinder Jeep that is probably going to go well over 200 K miles.
Having raced in my youth, even running a nitromeathane drag motorcycle, I think the high power stuff is awesome. But they do fail more often, and often in q
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We perhaps learned something from behemoth reactors running near the physical limits of the materials used in them? That and the exceptionally impressive results when they do go south?
Here is a good list of nuclear energy lessons learned [1952-2011] [theguardian.com]. Also have a look at some NRC uptime data for 104 US reactors [2006-2013] [l-a-k-e.org].
All in all in terms of gigawatt-hours over fatalities nuclear power is the safest 24x7 base load energy source ever devised by humankind.
And yes, I would be very much in favor of a small plant running in a conservative and over-engineered manner in my area. I would however fight strenuously against a megaplant. All the excuses, all the "That disaster was because of the old (and dangerous reactor that we told you was safe when we built it)" just make the rationale for the megaplants have zero credibility.
There is very little in the 'lessons' list that was not known in the days of Weinberg and Wigner. Weinberg even sacrificed his career in 1973 over his publicly expressed safety concerns (putting LFTR research into limbo). The effect
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All in all in terms of gigawatt-hours over fatalities nuclear power is the safest 24x7 base load energy source ever devised by humankind.
Those bizarre life loss versus Watt hour or statistics are about as specious as we can get.
Allow me to show this with something more familiar to people
It is difficult to find the total orbital miles each shuttle has flown, but the info I could find was 537,114,016 miles for the total fleet, and missing the last shuttle launch. Given that there were 14 fatalities in the program, that works out to an astounding 38,365,287 orbit miles per fatality, probably the safest means of transportation ever - no d
Re:five million gallons later, who'da thunk it (Score:4, Interesting)
I am completely in favor of micro reactors, but honestly believe that micro-solutions should be scaled-down versions of proven and viable mega-solutions, and not pursued with any vigor until the mega-problem is solved.
That's the thing, especially in nuclear power things don't necessarily scale up or down well at all. Consider how easily we can 'tune' a nuclear weapon more than an order of magnitude in detonation size merely by controlling the timing of the shaping explosions, minute adjustments in the alignment of the various pieces of the core.
Take your standard 1 GW 'mega' reactor, it's 22 times the size of the proposed one, which is actually a lot bigger than the Kilowatt/signel digit micro reactors I've read about. To compare it to something that's probably closer to home, that's about the same difference in power between a car and a push-type lawnmower. To expand: It's the difference between an engine that needs an elaborate water-cooling solution and one that is perfectly fine being air cooled.
I like the idea of micro-reactors as well, though I think that chaining them up isn't the greatest idea. If you're going to make them that small, best to distribute them so they're also useful for things like providing heating to facilities and industrial processes.
All this for 45 megawatts?? And in the case of containment failure you have contaminated five million gallons of water.
On the scale of things, the thing to realize is that the 7.5 swimming pools isn't actually all that much, and the plant is small enough that you don't need pumps/elaborate cooling systems to prevent a meltdown. As for the contamination - water is actually 'pretty hard' to make radioactive, one of the reasons we like using it in reactors. Plus, what's the most likely cause of a containment failure? The biggest cause I can think of would be a meltdown, which is a lot harder the smaller your power system - it's a surface area vs internal thing, same with animals. Elephants are nearly hairless and have huge ears to help dissipate heat because they're so large, while meerkats have to have fur and huddle at night to stay warm.
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On the scale of things, the thing to realize is that the 7.5 swimming pools isn't actually all that much, and the plant is small enough that you don't need pumps/elaborate cooling systems to prevent a meltdown. As for the contamination - water is actually 'pretty hard' to make radioactive, one of the reasons we like using it in reactors. Plus, what's the most likely cause of a containment failure? The biggest cause I can think of would be a meltdown, which is a lot harder the smaller your power system - it's a surface area vs internal thing, same with animals. Elephants are nearly hairless and have huge ears to help dissipate heat because they're so large, while meerkats have to have fur and huddle at night to stay warm.
After a quick soul search I realize that you're right, I probably went off a bit on that five million gallons (NYT article says ten million gallons [nytimes.com]). It probably never will get contaminated anyway. It shouldn't. It can't. And even if it does there are some great techniques being deployed at Fukushima right now to clean and filter water. But I do glimpse NuScale Power's intent here. They want to over-build the water pool infrastructure for the first unit, then encourage the purchase of additional drop-
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They want to over-build the water pool infrastructure for the first unit, then encourage the purchase of additional drop-in 45MW 'thermos bottles' to ramp up the output. With each additional unit the safety margin becomes smaller, and presumably they have a threshold at which they might refuse to add another. If I was convinced this idea would scale globally I might be concerned.
It's failure mechanics. You need X water available to cool a failed reactor. Trick is, if you have, say 4 reactors, what are the odds that all 4 will fail catastrophically at the same time? So the formula tends towards 'Ax +y', where A is the number of reactors, x is gallons per reactor, and Y is the emergency threshold. You could have a situation where with 4 reactors 2 could fail catastrophically and you'd still have enough cooling mass.
But I'm not concerned. "All this for 45 megawatts??" and probably thermal megawatts to boot.
Nope, its 45MWe [nuscalepower.com]
As for the scaling, I live in Alaska where we hav
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Hardly. Oil and NG isn't gong anywhere, and both are far cheaper than electricity for heating.
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Re:Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
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Oil and nuclear don't compete. Natural gas and nuclear compete, but energy needs will keep growing fast enough to keep all providers happy.
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They're probably going to do a Microsoft, just wait until someone develops the technology to a point where it's worth building, and then buy their way in. Safer and cheaper than doing their own research and development, and they get to play the stock market game in the process.
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One would think that "energy needs will keep growing fast enough to keep all providers happy" but there is the greed factor where the established industries don't want any competition any time for any thing. They want the entire market to themselves. They will work to crush and destroy any competition (real or perceived). This is capitalism. I want it all to myself. Screw everyone else (and the environment while we're at it).
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No, that's the strawman with the "capitalism" sign hanging on it. Capitalism is simply a system whereby control of the means of production is for sale, and so largely accrues to those with a history of efficiently controlling the means of production.
It's a nice feedback loop with a huge built-in incentive for technological progress, but one that is unfortunately sabotaged by bailouts. Still it's less sensitive to political corruption than a system whereby control of the means of production is awarded by g
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In the pursuit of profits, organizations quickly learn that it is best to have government on your side. This includes bailouts, regulatory capture, contracts, etc. We are well on our way to this in the US. Some would label it Fascism.
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Sure, but you cannot fix the "government corruption" problem by "giving the government more control". That should be as obvious as any other tautology, but people seem to have a hard time seeing that.
I have a real problem with that definition of "Fascism", though, because it would mean that Nazi Germany wasn't a fascist state, and so doesn't fit with common usage - instead, it's a blatant and obvious attempt to Godwin any sensible discussion of economic politics.
No, opposite of obvious (Score:3)
I know that's opposite to the "small government" propaganda line you seem to think is "obvio
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They can use their existing money and assets to buy into nuclear plants. The reason the Koch Brothers, and every rich person who didn't inherit it, has and keeps their money is because they move it where there is more money to be made. Right now it is oil and pipelines, but killing pipelines will not kill people like that. It's not entirely certain if silver or garlic will either.
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Soros? Left?
What the fuck are you smoking?
Re:Thorium (Score:4, Insightful)
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In over 15,000 hours of critical operation, not once did the system exceed its safety margins.
That's two years. Do you really think two years is enough to demonstrate safety? Fukushima was built in the 80s, after all, and even Chernobyl ran for years before melting down.
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You don't really know until you try (Score:2)
That only applies if you get a second chance and see if what has been figured out actually does the job.
For example you mentioned elsewhere that the metal embrittlement problem had been "solved" in 1977. Well the French had access to that information and the same alloys since then and it didn't seem to be solved for them. They had sodium leaks all over the place even after retubing in the 1
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No. I'm interested that you are. Very odd.
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Air pollution causes over 10,000 deaths every year in America alone due to respiratory distress. Nuclear's disasters pale in comparison.
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A properly designed reactor will not go "boom" but an improperly designed, operated or fueled reactor can go pphhhhfftt. (the way Chernobyl did). You need enough delayed neutrons to make the reaction growth rate controllable and it is possible to get out of that regime and make a mess.
Nuclear power is not inherently dangerous, but it needs to be designed, built and operated by intelligent careful people. This is probably my only objection to small reactors - it seems like it will increase the chance that