21–30 of 122 posts
The usual quip in the industry is that the remote maintenance is such a complicated robotics problem. that which ever company is able to solve it, is better off converting to a robotics company and just drive Kuka, Fanuc and ABB out of business.
Or just use that money for solar panels and batteries and not build a combination power plant / doomsday weapon.
Nuclear is a great compliment to photovoltaic. One of the reasons Japan was able to go large on PV (and cause prices to come down for the rest of us) was their huge pumped water infrastructure that had been built for nuclear. One problem with nuclear was all the excess power created at night, so they would pump water uphill at night and then run it down to generate power at the daytime peaks. Of course with PV the ti…
Or just use that money for solar panels and batteries and not build a combination power plant / doomsday weapon.
MIT studies suggest that deeply decarbonizing is actually cheaper when you do some nuclear alongside your variable renewables + storage [1]. The cost of filling those seasonal solar gaps and 10-day wind gaps gets pretty large without nukes. [1] https://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon...
The usual quip in the industry is that the remote maintenance is such a complicated robotics problem. that which ever company is able to solve it, is better off converting to a robotics company and just drive Kuka, Fanuc and ABB out of business.
Is it a hard robotics problem or a hard radiation-hardening problem?
I thought LIFTR was the coolest thing ever. MSRs could have revolutionized power generation... about two decades ago. Solar/Wind/Storage are beating almost everything. Everything they aren't... they will, very soon. It's possible that MSRs could be scaled down and their liquid nature means that the reactor could simply be replaced on a schedule and the entire old reactor "reprocessed". But the investment won't be the…
Or just use that money for solar panels and batteries and not build a combination power plant / doomsday weapon.
MIT studies suggest that deeply decarbonizing is actually cheaper when you do some nuclear alongside your variable renewables + storage [1]. The cost of filling those seasonal solar gaps and 10-day wind gaps gets pretty large without nukes. [1] https://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon...
I thought LIFTR was the coolest thing ever. MSRs could have revolutionized power generation... about two decades ago. Solar/Wind/Storage are beating almost everything. Everything they aren't... they will, very soon. It's possible that MSRs could be scaled down and their liquid nature means that the reactor could simply be replaced on a schedule and the entire old reactor "reprocessed". But the investment won't be the…
I agree. I posted detailed calculations arguing this point of view a week ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20365309 .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firstly heat from inefficient low temperature solid-fuel reactors can't be used directly for many applications. So consider electricity. Cars/planes/kitchen-stoves cant use uranium or nuclear heat!! All 4.5 billion tons can't be extratcted. More we extract, concentration decreases and harder it gets. I keep asking this question: If seawater extraction of metals is practical, why aren't we extracting other costly meta…
Don't confuse solid fuel with traditional light water reactors. The highest temperature reactors are triso fueled helium cooled solid fuel reactors like HTTR with outlet temperatures over 1000C. Also, fast breeder reactors with solid fuel are just as sustainable as any fluid fuel breeder. Molten salt is one of about a dozen advanced reactor techs that has huge potential. Hard part is economics. Hazardous coolant has…
Once we setup a pebble/advanced fuel making factory, closing it will takes decades (because people may lose jobs) and the new solid-fuel factory will again pause nuclear innovation for another 100 years. The only way to continuously improve nuclear reactors is to go fluid-fuel. No engineered fuel, so no job loses. Reactor innovation is independent of fuel factory. Nuclear fuel becomes a commodity instead of engineered speciality. Example: MSRE ran U235 and U233 without any modification.
Secondly, solid fuel reactors throw away fuel along with heat exchange surfaces (clad). Fuel also undergoes crystal structure degradation along with other solid structures. Maybe there is enough fuel in the seawater, but there may not be enough places suitable for geological repositories.
Solid-fuel reactors always need excess reactivity reserve. Always needs control rods, and if someone (or a bad actor) pulls all the control rods, reactor gets supercritical. Needs highly skilled people and needs security.
For emergency shutdown of solid-fuel reactor, poison is added to coolant, not fuel. In an emergency, poison is added to the liquid-fuel, permanently destroying the fuel. Emergency can be anything, from a natural disaster to terrorist attack. Fluid-fuel reactors offer unbeatable safety features against anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I posted detailed calculations arguing this point of view a week ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20365309 .
I was very disappointed, expecting you to show something about storage costs, but you just handwave that part, even though you go into very specific numbers and extrapolation for the actual pv's. May I suggest this is a major blindspot and probably where it completely falls down?
Both India and China have massive deployments of renewable energy, yet the demand for energy is outstripping projected build-out. LTFR is going to be one of the best answers if it can be made safe.