Transatomic Power Receives Seed Funding From Founders Fund Science 143
pmaccabe writes "The company aiming to make a Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor(WAMSR) is now getting $2 million from the venture capital firm Founders Fund. From the article: "The Founders Fund is the firm behind some of the more successful Internet startups out there including Facebook, Yammer and Spotify, but also some science-focused companies such as Climate Corporation, Space-X and satellite startup Planet Labs. The fund, which was created by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and his partners, promotes this manifesto: 'we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.'”
Getting permission... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Getting permission... (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting the technology is relatively simple. Getting government permission to build it might be a bit harder...
Getting permission for an unconventional commercial reactor is hard. Permission to build a small research reactor is much easier.
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Which means that if this is really going to happen, the effort has to take place offshore, perhaps literally. So finally, there will be a real-world use for those daffy country-on-a-ship plans that Silicon Valley people keep making.
Re:Getting permission... (Score:5, Interesting)
daffy country-on-a-ship plans
Or China.
Greenies don't actually trump everything, everywhere.
WAMSR is a paper reactor. It has all the problems of any molten salt reactor, plus a few new ones thrown in for good measure.
It requires fuel channels made of unobtainium. We can't actually make unobtainium so we use Hastealloy instead which cracks at some rate faster than anticipated plant life, as found in ORNL's MSRE. Neutron flux embitterment is also an issue for fuel channels and the long term effect of this is not perfectly understood. WAMSR actually runs at slightly higher temperatures than MSRE which will not improve the cracking problems due to even greater temperature gradients. Transatomic speculates about using certain exotic ceramics to solve this, and that could pan out; materials science does actually solve problems from time to time, but this one hasn't been solved yet.
The reactor produces relatively large quantities of tritium (~12y half life) requiring active separation and storage of the gas. It's effectively impossible to capture all the tritium (hydrogen is slippery stuff), however enough could be retained to bring it in line with conventional reactors, they claim. This assumes the capture system works, is maintained and doesn't leak. Good luck with that. Amusingly the Transatomic Power Technical White Paper [transatomicpower.com] claims the addition of Lithium-7 can reduce tritium generation, and you can read about it in section 2.6.4, which doesn't actually exist ...... hopefully the ~$2 million funding injection will get that written. Tritium is among the larger spikes being driven through the heart of Entergy's Vermont Yankee right now, in case one wonders how much this might matter.
As with all MSR designs, fuel must be reprocessed on-site concurrent with reactor operation. This is always offered as a nonproliferation benefit of MSRs. Unfortunately handling molten reactor fuel is a difficult mechanical and chemical process that has never actually been fully modeled in an experimental reactor and would probably be a source of the usual drama inherent in chemical processing operations; leaks, fires and whatnot. Personally I believe this to be the biggest risk involved with MSR reactors; any failure mode that leads to uncontained fuel will produce a lethal radiation flux, fires lofting clouds of radionucleotides and other fun stuff. Bear in mind that every single plant and its resident Homer Simpsons will have to operate their own reprocessing facility for the entire life of the plant; it's not a question of if a mistake will happen, but rather; how heinous are the consequences when it happens. Liquids tend to get away [nytimes.com] from people.
Finally, WAMSR uses zirconium hydride as the primary neutron moderator, which is pretty novel and a source of some unknowns. The zirconium hydride exists as rods inside the reactor core which also contains the molten fuel and the primary loop coolant water. If, for whatever reason, the zirconium hydride came into contact with the super-heated water in (the inevitable) presence of oxygen, huge quantities of explosive molecular hydrogen would be produced. This is what blew up the reactor buildings of Fukushima no. 1 and 3. The moderator, fuel and coolant are all in close proximity inside the reactor core, flowing through what appear to be relatively fine tubes. Again, due to the chronic shortage of uncrackable unobtainium, we make vessels and tubing such as these out of various steel alloys which frequently crack and corrode and leak.
So, WAMSR is not without its problems.
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It's not a serious attempt to build a new reactor. $2M will pay some salaries for a few years, that's it. They are not going to produce any serious plans, let alone build anything. It's just a paper exercise, probably some kind of R&D tax write-off. The Founders' Fund just sprays money about willy-nilly, hoping that occasionally it will end up with a small stake in the next Facebook.
Re:Getting permission... (Score:5, Interesting)
> Greenies don't actually trump everything, everywhere.
Or anything, ever. It was native rights that killed the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, for instance, not the legions of greenies.
The nuclear industry loves to point fingers at practically everyone as the cause of their problems, and the softer the target the better. So they point at the eco hippies and chant "its their fault". When that doesn't work, they point at the regulators, then the local governments, the local residents and finally the bankers. That last one is called biting the hand that feeds you.
But the root cause of the problem is and always has been the soaring CAPEX. In spite of herculean efforts, $/W continues to go up, up and away.
http://www.synapse-energy.com/Downloads/SynapsePaper.2008-07.0.Nuclear-Plant-Construction-Costs.A0022.pdf
And if you care to turn to page 5, you'll find that the reason for this has little to do with nuclear anything, and that the cost drivers are out of the industry's control. Copper prices aren't going down if we do or do not build a reactor somewhere. On page 6 we learn that most of the suppliers have left the field, and if a new reactor was to be built in the US, it would rely almost entirely on foreign companies.
It's dead. That noise you hear is the dead cat bounce.
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Also, how does it detroy waste products that have very low neutron capture rates like 137Cs?
Re:Getting permission... (Score:4, Informative)
Another inconsistent argument.
Tritium production can be minimized by avoiding Lithium-6 in the reactor. That's IF the salts used by this reactor will have Lithium at all.
Using no water in the reactor (molten salt primary and secondary loop plus CO2 or Helium loop turbine) allows collection of the Tritium in a few fairly economical ways.
Once again, the paid anti nuclear agitators try to do their worst against nuclear power and resort to creating factoids where they simply don't have technical information to do so.
Anyhow, making WAMSR a reality in today's NRC context is probably a billion dollar project. Just getting scaled down demonstrator reactor licensed and built will cost a few hundred million USD. It's not like they are a threat to coal yet.
But coal is the real enemy. Even natural gas is a much bigger enemy to the earth and human kind than nuclear.
And all anti nuclear agitators ignore that inconvenient fact.
Coal kills. Nuclear saves lives (by preventing coal power plants in the first place).
If mankind didn't stop building nuclear in the 70s, close to 20 million lives would have been saved by the coal power stations not built.
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Absolutely - chemically speaking hydrogen is hydrogen, the isotope only effects nuclear reactions, including spontaneous decay. Water might not be the best option though - tritiated water can be absorbed through the skin making it particularly hazardous. But I'm sure there's some fairly stable hydrogen-rich solids that could be created instead. And since tritium undergoes beta decay (electron emission) to form non-radioactive He3 the waste isn't terribly dangerous to store so long as it's stable - the bet
Re: Getting permission... (Score:2, Insightful)
You're an ass
Re: Getting permission... (Score:2)
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> No - most look like you. Because of people like you.
Bam!
But... but nucular is bad! (Score:3, Insightful)
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They should re-position the reactor as a nuclear waste destruction system that just happens to generate power as a waste product. It wouldn't even be entirely untrue.
Net waste gain (Score:3, Informative)
They should re-position the reactor as a nuclear waste destruction system
I'm not sure that this is really true. The reactor appears to be able to burn already "spent" fuel rods from other reactors but this is not going to result in less radioactive waste but rather more. The dangerous waste is the fission products, not the remaining unburnt Uranium which is practically stable (half lives in billions of years). In this design they will be extracted from the molten salt and will then need to be stored somewhere resulting in an increase in the net waste stored since each fission g
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If this is like other designs I've read, it would use that radioactive waste to generate power, the the waste from that would be at BACKGROUND radiation levels in 200-500 years.
Yes, coming out it's 'more redioactive' but it's less material, and radioactive for a much, MUCH shorter period.
at 200-500 years would could keep it buried on site.
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Currently, the plan is for the spent fuel to be stored underground for thousands of years. After running it through this reactor, the resultant concentrated waste is to be stored not more than 500 years. The great reduction in volume and storage time is a tremendous simplification of the whole problem.
If we replaced all fossil fuel power plants with these reactors, we could run for over 100 years on nothing but the waste we are currently committed to put somewhere. Meanwhile, holding the spent fuel above gr
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That's exactly what they are doing. WAMSR = Waste Annialator Molten Salt Reactor. First mission destroy spent nuclear fuel, secondary mission produce electricity offseting the cost of the primary mission and turning a profit.
Re:But... but nucular is bad! (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, the realities of Chernobyl and Fukushima are the realities of ancient, outdated equipment, bad design and unsound engineering. Oh, and human stupidity in playing with dangerous things.
The fact is, we can build reactors that don't blow up NOW.
But people are so conditioned to nuclear = BOMB! that a bunch of know-nothing, luddite politicians and cronies are never going to let it happen.
All because stupid people are scared and conditioned to outbreed smart people.
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The thing is, the realities of Chernobyl and Fukushima are the realities of ancient, outdated equipment, bad design and unsound engineering. Oh, and human stupidity in playing with dangerous things.
The fact is, we can build reactors that don't blow up NOW.
Fukushima's failure had less to do with any outdated technology than the "human stupidity" in placing backup generators in the basement rather than atop a hill, and underestimating the severity of potential tsunami. If your generators fail, and you have a prolonged containment loss, no variant of a light water reactor design (the only kind with any sort of significant track record) can save you from a meltdown.
As for the molten salt design, the primary coolant itself is highly radioactive and, being a circ
Re:But... but nucular is bad! (Score:4, Insightful)
Fukushima's failure had less to do with any outdated technology than the "human stupidity" in placing backup generators in the basement rather than atop a hill
Fukushima's failure was due to technology in that it relied on continuous power to provide essential cooling even after the reactor was powered off. Even putting the emergency generators on a hill would not help if, instead of a tsunami, the hillside they were on collapsed due to the earthquake. You would then be arguing that it was 'human stupidity' to put all the generators on a hill instead of in a basement. For me the 'human stupidity' factor was that they did not insist on flying in backup generators as a number one priority after the tsunami. However I would also argue that the technology itself is also flawed since it requires continuous cooling even after the reactor is subcritical.
Re:But... but nucular is bad! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, had the seawall been built to proper specs, there's every possibility that the onsite generators would NOT have been swamped and Fukushima could have shut down in a controlled manner.
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And there is also the possibiity that onsite reactors fail without Tsunami. See Forsmark, Sweden in 2006. After power loss half of the redundant backup power systems were lost due to a failure mode which *could* have affected all backup power. Also control room equipment and half of the cooling was lost.
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Actually, in Fukushima's case, you're then arguing into the realms of fantasy.
As for the POSSIBILITY of generator failure, this is also one of the reasons I'm a big fan of the MSR concept.
No water to explode.
Power failure results in shutdown with a clean dump to the dump tank. Or, at worst, into the outer containment vessel which then drains into the dump tank.
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There was actually emergency cooling available even after the pumps were swamped. They had pump trucks on side and pumping water into the cooling system. The problem was that the cooling system was damaged during the earthquake, and most critically a valve was in the wrong position so much of the water was syphoned off to storage tanks. No-one noticed because the monitoring equipment was damaged in the earthquake and the tsunami made physical access impossible.
Had that water reached the reactors then full m
Re:But... but nucular is bad! (Score:5, Interesting)
No. Fukushima was a study in human stupidity.
Real engineers had warned them the sea walls weren't high enough.
They ignored it.
TEPCO has had a history of stupid decisions like this, and it pretty much ALWAYS comes back to bite them in the ass, Godzilla-style.
As for the molten salt design.
Uhm. You know the molten salt design is essentially a double-hulled containment vessel that's not running under pressure.
In the event of a loss of power to the cooling device (a fan/blower keeping a plug of salt cold and solid, it drains the fuel out of the reactor vessel, in a gravity-fed situation, and into a dump tank, away from the catalyst.
This immediately kills the reaction.
And, if the line to the dump tank is somehow compromised, the fuel merely spills into the outer hull of the reactor vessel.
Also, steel melts around 1300C. If you put in plumbing of sufficiently large gauge, in a dump tank reactor flush, the fuel is already cooling off as it hits the pipe, and doesn't spend long enough in there to heat the plumbing to sufficiently dangerous levels.
So. Exactly how do we have a "radioactive disaster"?
You have two scenarios. Both of which wind up requiring you to pump the fuel back into the reactor vessel after re-plugging it. The messier of the two options requires some cleanup of a reactor vessel interior which was never open to the outside world anyhow.
http://daryanenergyblog.files.... [wordpress.com]
Re:But... but nucular is bad! (Score:4, Informative)
In the event of a loss of power to the cooling device (a fan/blower keeping a plug of salt cold and solid, it drains the fuel out of the reactor vessel, in a gravity-fed situation, and into a dump tank, away from the catalyst.
Assuming that the system isn't damaged by something like a magnitude 9 earthquake, or a fire, or poor maintenance etc.
Exactly how do we have a "radioactive disaster"?
Because you spend all your effort securing the reactor and forgot about the on-site reprocessing system that is an absolute necessity for any MSR.
I'm not saying nuclear is "safe". There's no such THING as "safe". But coal isn't safe. Oil isn't safe. Natural gas isn't safe. Wind isn't safe. Wave isn't safe. Solar isn't safe. Hydro isn't safe. All of them come with their own risks and tradeoffs.
The damage done by a wind turbine falling over, or solar panel slipping off a roof tends to be orders of magnitude less serious than a major nuclear accident. That's why wind farms and solar installations can get insurance, and nuclear can't.
The reason we have the shitty nuclear infrastructure we have now is some jackass politicoes (not scientists and engineers) essentially PICKED a winner 50-ish years ago because they had a budding industry, and wanted to protect it.
Lots of different designs were tried in different parts of the world, and most of them sucked so were abandoned. The UK is currently dealing with the legacy of gas reactors, for example. India has been trying to build a commercial MSR for decades, and there are no shortage of western MSR research projects that all encountered severe difficulties.
No private investor wants to throw money at a commercial MSR because the risk of the project failing (not just accidents, the chance that it will never work, or never recoup costs, or some problem will create huge clean-up costs after only 5 years of operation etc.)
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Assuming that the system isn't damaged....
How exactly does an earthquake or a fire or poor maintenance damage...GRAVITY?
If there's a loss of power to the reactor, the salt plug melts, and whoosh, into the dump tanks goes the fuel.
Because you spend all your effort securing the reactor and forgot about the on-site reprocessing system that is an absolute necessity for any MSR.
Most of which happens in-situ, as opposed to reprocessing in solid fuel setups.
As for safety. You're splitting hairs. Sure, if you blow up a reactor and spray fuel all over the place, the environmental impact is ridiculous.
Hence why we should be building a reactor that doesn't (and can't) blow up.
As for your assertions a
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How exactly does an earthquake or a fire or poor maintenance damage...GRAVITY?
If there's a loss of power to the reactor, the salt plug melts, and whoosh, into the dump tanks goes the fuel.
Exactly. You need a plug, which has to survive the rather harsh conditions inside the reactor without degrading to the point where it fails but still works in the event of an accident. You have to find a material that will last the lifetime of the reactor (because replacement is impossible) but still fail in the designed way at any time. Assuming of course that during the huge lateral forces of an earthquake the pipe below it doesn't detach or warp, and the reactor itself doesn't fail before the plug does e
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The "plug" is yet more of the salt matrix. It's simply cooled to the point where it's no longer molten.
So you're not worried about wear and tear on the plug.
And if something bad DOES happen, the plug stops getting cooled, the plug melts, you default to a safe drain-off of the fuel.
So. Do you want to try your "no suitable materials exist" line again?
As for the reprocessing of fuel requiring high energies and temperatures. You mean like the reactor itself?
Nasty chemicals, you mean like the catalyst stack?
I
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Okay we need to be able to scale them UP as well. Because singular large installations tend to cut down on points of failure.
The US is currently consuming around 4 BILLION megawatts of power a year.
While I'm not saying small or portable MSRs couldn't be HUGE business for portable power (and overall grid diversity), we need to look at replacing the existing nuclear, coal and oil capacity we already have with something that is hopefully superior in overall output, cheap and simple enough to maintain.
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I'm not saying nuclear is "safe". There's no such THING as "safe". But coal isn't safe. Oil isn't safe. Natural gas isn't safe. Wind isn't safe. Wave isn't safe. Solar isn't safe. Hydro isn't safe. All of them come with their own risks and tradeoffs.
The damage done by a wind turbine falling over, or solar panel slipping off a roof tends to be orders of magnitude less serious than a major nuclear accident. That's why wind farms and solar installations can get insurance, and nuclear can't.
Wind also kills birds. Solar requires rare earth elements that are toxic to mine, refine, and dispose of at the end of the panel's life. The damages involved are more than just "[object] falls over."
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And their tritium side-
Declaring victory prematurely (Score:5, Interesting)
So. Exactly how do we have a "radioactive disaster"?
From the problems you don't predict. From unexpected design flaws. From the black swan events. We have little operational experience with reactors of the sort you describe so there undoubtedly are problems we haven't come across yet. There could be problems with containment materials like embrittlement or corrosion. The design may have flaws we aren't aware of yet. Overlooked/neglected maintenance. Parts of the reactor not being built properly. Improper management of the core mixture. Externalities like natural disasters or wars. Management may take shortcuts in pursuit of economic gain. Etc. There are plenty of failure modes out there and not all of them can be addressed with an improved design.
All the advantages you describe sound great on paper but there are lots of designs that are great on paper but not so great in the real world. Until we've actually tried (and we should) its a little premature to declare that it is perfectly safe.
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That's the thing.
We HAVE tried this form of reactor before. It IS proven technology.
What needs to happen now is the R&D to mass produce and up-scale.
Oh yes, and the time and bribes necessary to get the uber-paranoid NRC to agree to anything. Because you say "nuclear" to the NRC right now and they automatically shift into "Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope" mode.
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We HAVE tried this form of reactor before. It IS proven technology.
What needs to happen now is the R&D to mass produce and up-scale.
Only one of those two arguments can be correct. If it hasn't been scaled up and put in widespread production then we haven't really tried it. Please note that I'm not arguing that we shouldn't, merely that we haven't yet made commercial reactors beyond a few proof of concept models. While it might work great and I'm hopeful it would, there is a huge leap between proof of concept and full on deployment.
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Do a little research on Molten Salt reactors.
You'll see the two statements aren't as diametrically opposed as you'd like them to be.
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> All molten salt reactors operate at near atmospheric pressure.
All zero of them.
> All water cooled reactors operate at least at 70 atmospheres
So the "solution" is to replace this with a caustic radioactive chemical system. Because nothing could possibly go wrong with that.
> Only the ignorant label it a nuclear disaster
The industry labels it as a disaster, especially to their bottom line.
But keep up the handwavium and insults, that's well known to convince people you're right.
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There are 400 operational nuclear reactors in the world. How many were lost due to nuclear accidents ? Perhaps 10.
The real economics of properly built and maintained nuclear reactors are awesome over their full lifetime.
Nuclear reactors are the cash cows of electricity generating companies that own them. Once built they cost a fraction to fuel, maintain and staff than an equivalent natural gas powerplant AND generate next to zero CO2 emissions compared even to natural gas.
Currently operating nuclear reactor
Re:But... but nucular is bad! (Score:4, Interesting)
> All because stupid people are scared and conditioned to outbreed smart people.
No, people like you are the problem. Dismissing people with concerns as "stupid" and touting the idiocracy meme as a way to marginalize them is the very same thing that causes them to distrust people like you in the first place.
40 years ago there were people just like you saying how perfectly safe nuclear power is. It is entirely reasonable for normal people to believe in the principle of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." Self-righteous technocratic arrogance is a pretty strong predictor for failure. If you want to undo the damage done by your idealogical fore-bearers then the last thing you should be doing is calling people stupid because, in the entire history of mankind, that has never even once been a successful argument.
Re:But... but nucular is bad! (Score:5, Insightful)
40 years ago there were people just like you saying how perfectly safe nuclear power is.
No, 40 years ago, people (but not like me) were saying how perfectly safe it is.
Because they were relying on complex rube-goldberg devices that were supposed to anticipate any and every problem that could come up in a solid fuel reactor and deal with it.
We all know how well that works when you throw something it was NOT designed to handle at it.
The reason MSRs are a better technology is that they're actually relying on very SIMPLE engineering principles to generate safety. You remove the fuel from the reactor chamber, via simple gravity feed. The reaction shuts down. Done. Sure, you have to clean up your dump and fill tanks after an event. but you are never in a situation where loss of power leads to a runaway reactor and high pressure steam blowing things up.
I'm not saying nuclear is "safe". There's no such THING as "safe". But coal isn't safe. Oil isn't safe. Natural gas isn't safe. Wind isn't safe. Wave isn't safe. Solar isn't safe. Hydro isn't safe. All of them come with their own risks and tradeoffs.
The reason we have the shitty nuclear infrastructure we have now is some jackass politicoes (not scientists and engineers) essentially PICKED a winner 50-ish years ago because they had a budding industry, and wanted to protect it.
It is entirely reasonable for normal people to believe in the principle of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me."
If that's all that was happening, that'd be fine.
Self-righteous technocratic arrogance is a pretty strong predictor for failure.
Only to people who don't know what they're talking about. The whole notion that someone's too smart and therefore arrogant and therefore bound for a fall. It's a very popular luddite meme. But that's all it is. A meme.
If you want to undo the damage done by your idealogical fore-bearers then the last thing you should be doing is calling people stupid because, in the entire history of mankind, that has never even once been a successful argument.
Sorry, but political correctness isn't going to help this situation. All it does is hand idiots a bunch of tools to use to shut down useful discussion because, somehow, they twist it around into offense.
I'm not saying you have to LIKE what I'm saying. Nor do you have to AGREE with what I'm saying.
But, if you ACTUALLY think the way forward is with wind, wave, hydro and solar backed by minimal/no non-renewables like coal/oil/NG, as opposed to nuclear, backed by solar, wind, wave and hydro? You're an idiot with no grasp of the actual power requirements for this country going into the next several centuries. An idiot who is hell-bent creating an artificial (and totally unnecessary) scarcity of the most costly possible power.
In the face of something like that, I refuse to "make nice".
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But, if you ACTUALLY think the way forward is with wind, wave, hydro and solar backed by minimal/no non-renewables like coal/oil/NG, as opposed to nuclear, backed by solar, wind, wave and hydro? You're an idiot with no grasp of the actual power requirements for this country going into the next several centuries. An idiot who is hell-bent creating an artificial (and totally unnecessary) scarcity of the most costly possible power.
I hope this site is around in 10 years so I can link to your post the day Germany turns off its last nuclear reactor.
Re:But... but nucular is bad! (Score:4, Informative)
40 years ago there were people just like you saying how perfectly safe nuclear power is.
... and here we are, 40 years later, and know it to be true. Even the worst failure scenarios possible have not resulted in catastrophe. On the contrary, nuclear has turned out to be the safest energy production method of all.
If we want to be rational and stick to the facts, of course.
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No, there are exactly zero big catastrophes going on right now. If you want to find catastrophes you need look no further than the actual tsunami that caused Fukushima - which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths (compared to zero from the failing reactors).
I live in Sweden, one of the countries that was actually affected by Chernobyl fallout. We had to make sure we didn't eat mushrooms for a short while - and that was it.
The "Big Lie" is that there have been nuclear catastrophes. A statement not support
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Japan had a 9.0 earthquake.
Japan also had a 9.0 earthquake about 300 years ago, and another 300 years before that. They were due for another. It was predictable. When nuclear power plants are not even prepared for routine events, why should we trust them to withstand something unforeseen?
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When those rector were designed and built, plate tectonics was a new science.
And it still did pretty good. Considering:
The Earthquake itself did little damage. The tsunami was what caused most, if not all, of the damage. Couple that with the people running it were not handling the waste properly because they didn't want to cut into their profit.
This is why I am pro-nuclear, and solar, but I want the government running the nuclear plants. Government employees, government management. No private industry.
over-
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This is why I am pro-nuclear, and solar, but I want the government running the nuclear plants. Government employees, government management. No private industry.
Like Chernobyl?
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Question.
Did the nuclear reactor MAKE the nincompoops running TEPCO decide to cut corners and install too short of a sea wall?
And, again, the earthquake was over a hundred miles from Fukushima. It didn't damage any of the reactors, but those that were active were put into shutdown immediately.
The tsunami is what swamped the generators and doomed the facility.
And a 9.0 earthquake is NOT a "routine event". It's one of the most destructive forces on the planet. It's the equivalent of setting off a 480 MEGAT
Big earthquakes are expected events (Score:4, Insightful)
And a 9.0 earthquake is NOT a "routine event".
Maybe not routine but certainly expected. An earthquake of magnitude 8 or greater occurs on average about once a year somewhere in the world. In a location like Japan it is not merely possible, it is almost certain to occur eventually. Over 80% of the largest earthquakes occur somewhere along the Pacific Rim. Anyone who is surprised that a magnitude 9 earthquake struck near Japan is an imbecile.
The largest nuke mankind has ever set off was 50 megatons. So strap 9 of those bad boys together and that's what you're trying to engineer against. Ask an actual engineer about the logistics of building for something like that.
Well I am an actual engineer. Nobody promised it would be easy. Want to build something dangerous? Better plan for some worst case events. If you can't deal with a natural disaster that was as predictable as a big earthquake/tsunami in Japan then perhaps the activity isn't such a good idea.
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And a 9.0 earthquake is NOT a "routine event".
Maybe not routine but certainly expected.
Bull.
Besides. The actual shock that hit the Fukushima area was a 6.6 (as it was over a hundred miles from the epicenter).
That ISN'T what damaged the reactor.
The reactor going into overheat, and the cooling system overheating and exploding (water does that when you put it under pressure and heat it up) is what destroyed the plant.
The reason it went into overheat was because the sea wall wasn't built high enough and couldn't protect from the Tsunami that swept through and swamped the facility.
The largest nuke mankind has ever set off was 50 megatons. So strap 9 of those bad boys together and that's what you're trying to engineer against. Ask an actual engineer about the logistics of building for something like that.
Well I am an actual engineer.
You'll forgive
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Bull.
I bow to the eloquence of your argument. [/sarcasm]
Besides. The actual shock that hit the Fukushima area was a 6.6 (as it was over a hundred miles from the epicenter). That ISN'T what damaged the reactor.
All of which is well understood and wasn't under debate. What is under debate is the assertion that large magnitude quakes are so unusual that they cannot or should not be planned for. The fact that a tsunami was the proximal cause of the damage in the case of Fukashima does not mean that large earthquakes as well as their follow on effects can be ignored because they are not common. Once a century or even once per millennium events have to be considered
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We also expect to be hit by large asteriods in certain periods of time. Does that mean we build each and every building to be strike-resistant on a multi-millennial basis?
This is why your argument that we must build everything as if it were going to be slapped by a 9.0 every day is bull.
All of which is well understood and wasn't under debate.
If you're trying to blame earthquake damage for the failure at Fukushima.
Japan also had a 9.0 earthquake about 300 years ago, and another 300 years before that. They were due for another. It was predictable. When nuclear power plants are not even prepared for routine events, why should we trust them to withstand something unforeseen?
So you're telling me that a building with a 30-50 year lifespan should be constructed in such a way as to anticipate something that happens on a 300+
Re:But... but nucular is bad! (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually the Fukushima reactor DID survive the earthquake. Mainly because it wasn't under the epicenter.
Had it been sitting on the epicenter there's pretty much NOTHING that could have saved it.
It was nearly 110 miles from the epicenter.
What Fukushima did NOT survive was the TSUNAMI. And, had the sea wall been built as their engineers had suggested, it's entirely possible that the facility COULD have shut down gracefully. But the sea wall had been built shorter, despite evidence from the engineers that it should be built higher. Therefore the tsunami topped the wall and flooded the generators. A day later the battery backups ran out and...POOF.
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Actually the Fukushima reactor DID survive the earthquake. Mainly because it wasn't under the epicenter.
You still haven't watched this, have you? http://youtu.be/vpA0TOgB9-o [youtu.be]
or this: http://youtu.be/ayW4mC1o8CQ [youtu.be]
The cooling system was damaged by the earthquake. Fire engines were available to pump water in to cool the reactors, but because of the earthquake damage most of the water never reached them. The full meltdowns and explosions could have been averted if not for the earthquake damage.
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Can you at least give me a time code to the portion that supports what you're saying?
Every other source I read talks about it like this:
9.0 Quake happens, hits at 6.6 in Fukushima, 110-ish miles from the epicenter.
G-Force tolerances were exceeded and shock parameters were still within tolerance.
Reactors 4-6 already shut down.
Reactors 1-3 SCRAMed.
50 minutes later the tsunami arrived.
It topped a too-short sea wall and flooded the facility.
When the generators were flooded it tripped over to battery backup desi
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http://youtu.be/ayW4mC1o8CQ?t=... [youtu.be]
You really need to watch the whole thing to fully understand what happened. A later documentary from NHK which doesn't seem to be online discovered that the valve in question was actually damaged by the earthquake, as was equipment supposed to monitor the flow and alert the operators to it being in the wrong position. That wasn't known at the time of this documentary due to the area being inaccessible.
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What is under debate is the assertion that large magnitude quakes are so unusual that they cannot or should not be planned for.
And maybe I will. At another time. I'm currently at work and not able to burn 50 minutes watching a video.
Hence my asking for a quick link to the portion that discusses the damaged done directly to the plant by the quake, in support of your assertion.
Instead I get "The truth is out there, look it up yourself".
Thanks for nothing.
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Don't focus on what stupid/ignorant people think. They can be managed.
That's just it. They can be. But only to a certain point. Never underestimate the destructive potential of stupid people in large numbers.
As to "claiming it's entirely safe". Sorry, but there's no such thing. Not for ANY power generation technology.
And anyone telling you otherwise is feeding you a line.
This is what sound engineering is for. Minimizing risk.
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All energy sources have some level of risk. Studies show that rooftop solar PV and wind farms kill more people per TWh of electricity produced than nuclear.
I'm pro everything that doesn't emit burn fossil fuels. Nuclear is actually the safest option.
The only problem with nuclear is the extreme ability of the paid anti nuclear lobby to attack nuclear. Some of those guys are right here on this forum.
Ignore nuclear fears, study nuclear FACTS. If nuclear was really that risky, nuclear safety deaths/cancers woul
Re: But... but nucular is bad! (Score:2)
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Basically, for this to fail, one of 3 things MUST happen:
1) a 10 earthquake or a new volcano opens up a fissure right under the reactors upon which the reactor tumbles down and then the walls collapse again, crushing the reactor and allowing the uranium rods and thorium fuel to mix. Of course, if you have a 10 earthquake or a new volcano under your feet, you have ot
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Actually that is a misunderstanding of probability. The probability of something going wrong is some constant, essentially an unknowable constant but an estimable one. The length of time that actually elapses before an accident has absolutely nothing to do with mysteriously increasing or decreasing the probability.
Tossing a coin is the classical illustration. The probability of heads is 0.5. As long as the coin is not rig
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Whether he meant it this way or not, he's actually correct: the probability does increase with time, insofar as mechanical parts wear out over time, electrical parts reach the end of their service lives, metals reach stress and fatigue limits, etc.
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I trust the technology. I don't trust the people implementing it.
Haven't solved those problems yet (Score:3)
The thing is, the realities of Chernobyl and Fukushima are the realities of ancient, outdated equipment, bad design and unsound engineering.
Operational nuclear reactors have a service life of 30+ years. Any design you can come up with is likely to be obsolete and the equipment in it outdated possibly even between the time it is designed and built, much less for the full service life. State of the art doesn't remain state of the art for long.
As for bad designs and unsound engineering, those don't magically disappear just because time has marched on. Dealing with that takes a focused effort and even if the engineering is done perfectly, if it
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> The thing is, the realities of Chernobyl and Fukushima are the realities of ancient, outdated equipment, bad design and unsound engineering
And here's the other example of hand waving that goes on *every time*. What, there was a nuclear disaster that's going to cost hundreds of billions to clean up? Don't look at that, because *insert lame excuse*.
No one is ever going to trust anyone that doesn't own their mistakes.
> that a bunch of know-nothing, luddite politicians and cronies
And there you have it.
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how will you extract energy from the plastic waste? burning it will only dump the contents into the atmosphere as particulates which will either be inhaled or rained back into the oceans again.
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Are you confusing pressurized water reactors with boiling water reactors?
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It doesn't matter to the argument. PWRs and BWRs have the same design deficiency. Given decay heat and geometry, any design which relies on circulating water to prevent meltdown is fatally weak, because if the circulation fails for more than a short period of time, or if the water leaks out and can't be replenished quickly, you have a meltdown.
HTGRs and LFTRs can be designed to be FUNDAMENTALLY free from such a weakness.
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After drilling down to the article, this one, should it work (big if) would burn down existing spent fuel rods by squeezing more energy from fission reactions. It would therefore have a huge amount of already-a-problem fuel to decontaminate even further.
It's said to use uranium or thorium as a fuel source. Indeed it could fuel the expense of your desalinizing plant and conceptually a helluva lot more in a package that's much smaller that shuts itself down safely in the event of failures. So, IN THEORY, no
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And it would use up all of that 'already-a-problem fuel' that will remain radioactive for 20,000 years, and instead will give you about 5% of the mass that will remain radioactive for less than 200 years, while the 95% is 100% spent.
Thorium is the fuel. Uranium from the previous nuke waste, is a source of neutrons. So, it is not one OR the other, it is both.
In addition, it would use the thorium that we have already dug and is sitting on top
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No, the flat-earth lobby has already decided that Desalination Would Be Bad, for some reason.
Chump change (Score:2)
WTF are they going to do with $2 million? They're going to need a fuckton more cash than that to develop anything that has a hope of success.
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Keep on keeping on until it happens.
Maybe just maybe, six more weeks of payroll and expenses is all you need. How many innovations fell six weeks and a single instance of fortuitous happenstance short of making it. The sinking of the Titanic must've seemed like a miracle to the lobsters in the kitchen.
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The sinking of the Titanic must've seemed like a miracle to the lobsters in the kitchen.
probably not cuz the lobsters were on deck 7a and nobody made to off of the galley deck alive. mostly poor people so no surprise there.
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TFA says they will use it to study suitable materials and the corrosion issues around the molten salt hanling.
Flying cars? (Score:2)
what? (Score:2)
'we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.'”
instead? there wasn't some group that said, "well..we have the tech for flying cars.. but lets go with 140 characters."
To our current understanding of physics and material science, a flying car* is not possible. where as sending text over the internet is possible.
we wanted clean nuclear fuel, what we got was alarmists twerps that have done far more to hurt the environment then nuclear ever did.
*a la 5th Element
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a flying car* is not possible.
It's quite possible to build a flying car. It won't be cost-effective to build or operate, because it will need bizjet-sized jet engines for VTOL. Elon Musk once remarked that he'd like to build one "just for fun". I wish someone would, just to shut everybody up. Quadrotors work just fine, after all. Scaled Composites could probably have something flying in a year. Probably not much range, but flying.
Just because Moller has been failing at this for 40 years doesn't mean it's impossible. That's a problem
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we wanted flying cars ... a flying car* is not possible ... *a la 5th Element
Will a hoverbike [msn.com]* suffice?
*Apologies for the link source.
I'm sure we'll see this become a reality in the next couple of years. Honest! :P
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'we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.'”
Good.
A more expensive way to get from A to B that uses dramatically more energy, is inherently more dangerous and doesn't really save any time? No, we don't really need that.
A system that allows me to receive information from anywhere on the planet, selectively, sorted and filtered? That sounds like something we actually need.
2 million whole dollars? (Score:2)
my god, they could almost pay to have the first feasibility or environmental impact study planned out.
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$2 million? What a joke; that'll buy what, some office space?
Hey, don't knock it, that's .0105% of WhatsApp's buyout price! And slightly more money than the 'Yo' app received during its VC round! Seems like a reasonable assessment of priorities to me...
Re:A Joke (Score:4, Funny)
$2 million is enough to re-market the electrical grid as a nuclear reactor that can be 'friended' with other generating stations ("Like Facebook, but with thorium!"). That's when the California billions and billions of dollars will flood in.
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$2 million? What a joke; that'll buy what, some office space?
It'll buy some seeds, after all it was *cough* "seed funding."
Re:A Joke (Score:4, Informative)
$2 million? What a joke; that'll buy what, some office space?
Yes. This is "seed money". It is just enough to get them started. They are not going to use the $2M to actually build anything. They are going to use it to refine the design while sitting in ... offices. Once they get the design worked out, they will come back for another, bigger, round of funding. That is the way venture capital works.
Re: A Joke (Score:2)
Materials Testing... (Score:2)
...from other articles.
The biggest issue with molten salt reactors is corrosion, so they need to find just the right materials to build the thing.
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Just enough to do their detailed due dilligence, finalize their base design, run detailed computer simulations.
Once they are ready to petition the NRC for a license to run a test reactor, they will in the order of US$ 200 million to build the test reactor and operate it for a few years. Assuming the NRC will actually allow it.
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Also, molten salts reactors are not good on ships and submarines.
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Because you say so? I really want to know. WHY are they not good?
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Sorry, I was thinking of pebble bed reactors, which are big and heavy and so are not fit for shipboard use.
Liquid salts fueled reactors need "on-site" chemical plant to manage core mixture and remove fission byproducts - not optimal in a warship.
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Wrong. There are lots of MSR variants. Some are designed to need no reprocessing at all, example the DMSR.
A DMSR design is being worked on right now. Canada's Dr. David LeBlanc, Terrestrial Energy Inc.
You need reprocessing to achieve close to 100% burnup of nuclear fuel (water cooled reactors achieve less than 3% burnup).
DMSR can achieve around 20% burnup without reprocessing, a huge improvement.
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Wrong. MSRs could be used to power ships and subs.
The primary reason water cooled reactors were chosen was: The US NAVY was far more comfortable with water cooling than anything else. There was no reactors cooled by anything but water when the US Navy submarine reactor program started. The first MSR research reactor took another 15 years to come to be.
Gas cooled reactors were actually discarded because they weren't as compact as water cooled reactors.
But MSR reactors are about an order of magnitude more com
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I believe part of the concept of the flying car is that flying it be as easy as driving a normal car. helicopters fail in that respect.
Other than everyone dreaming about flying cars there really isn't much need for them. what problem do they solve?
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And what is hypocritical with this situation.
Note that I do not agree with his notion, but I see nothing wrong with his current stance.