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Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

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Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#71

Post by killjoywashere »

tempsolution wrote: post #48
killjoywashere wrote: post #21

The topic is small modular reactors, which are defined as reactors producing less than 300 MW. The Voyager RTGs generate "a few hundred watts" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... ). The Virginia class submarines use a GE S9G, which produces 150 MWt. Power output is a mix of electric and shaft torque ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S9G_reactor ) The Los Angeles class submarines use a GE S…

Interesting, wouldn't it make A LOT of sense for the US government, or any government to heavily invest in this space, since it get two flies with one stone (i.e. better energy for land AND sea AND potentially space)?

Enlarging the nuclear engineering workforce would have arguably an even greater societal benefit. "Nuclear engineering" sounded pretty cool when I was choosing majors. The residual knowledge of things like linear algebra and material science those engineers take into other endeavors.

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#72

Post by acidburnNSA »

SECProto wrote: post #41
killjoywashere wrote: post #21

The topic is small modular reactors, which are defined as reactors producing less than 300 MW. The Voyager RTGs generate "a few hundred watts" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... ). The Virginia class submarines use a GE S9G, which produces 150 MWt. Power output is a mix of electric and shaft torque ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S9G_reactor ) The Los Angeles class submarines use a GE S…

Nuclear submarines use highly enriched uranium as a fuel. That's not a practical thing to use in civilian reactors.

You can still make that size reactor with low-enriched fuel. It just doesn't last 30 years like it does in subs. Instead, it lasts 3-5 years.

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#73

Post by Krasnol »

StillBored wrote: post #3

A few years ago Toshiba was going to build a small reactor in Alaska. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena_Nuclear_Power_Plant But it got canceled, and for the life of me I can't understand why anyone thinks its better to truck in heavy fuel oil for generators vs having a small reactor buried in the ground for 30 years. I've been saying for a few years now that green energy only advocates are basically on the side of…

> A few years ago Toshiba was going to build a small reactor in Alaska.

What an understatement. Let's quote one of the sources there:

> But the project never began the mandatory, lengthy and extremely costly process of gaining approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

> This would include a site license, which takes tens of millions of dollars and several years, as well as a design permit. No design of this type has ever been approved, though one other has made it through the first step of the process, which took about six years.

So they were far away from "going to build" there.

> I've been saying for a few years now that green energy only advocates are basically on the side of coal and natural gas plants

Yeah we heard you. It's a quite popular tactic in this "last scream of nuclear" advertisement. In the same generalistic way the evil green energy only advocates could say that you are an ignorant shill.

There is nobody on the side of coal who wants green energy and natural gas or gas as battery for renewables is not the same thing as coal...

Fission has been in development for many decades. Eating up money and not coming up with a solution. So please...tone it down. Nuclear is expensive, dangerous and most of the countries on this planet have no space or (economic) means to make the waste disappear.

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#74

Post by acidburnNSA »

WalterBright wrote: post #16

Bill Gates' foundation was ready to build a thorium reactor. Canada should investigate using that design.

The premise is incorrect. Bill Gates' nuclear investments are centered around a liquid-metal cooled solid fueled uranium-plutonium reactor and a molten chloride salt fueled uranium-plutonium reactor. Thorium gets mixed up with molten salt technology (which also gets mixed up with liquid sodium metal), but you can do molten salt without thorium too.

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#75

Post by vidarh »

jlawson wrote: post #49
StillBored wrote: post #3

A few years ago Toshiba was going to build a small reactor in Alaska. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena_Nuclear_Power_Plant But it got canceled, and for the life of me I can't understand why anyone thinks its better to truck in heavy fuel oil for generators vs having a small reactor buried in the ground for 30 years. I've been saying for a few years now that green energy only advocates are basically on the side of…

The most extreme-left political advocates, who dominate green advocacy because of their high motivation, aren't interested in solving climate change alone. What they want is to dismantle what they see as an entire system of racist sexist capitalist corporate transphobic colonialist evil. Nuclear power, if it was used and solved climate change, wouldn't help with the other aspects of that goal. And, in fact, it would…

"The most extreme-left" has historically been firmly pro-nuclear. There's a massive schism between the traditional far left, whose ideologies tends to be founded on the basis of a firm belief in the advancement of technology (e.g. half of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto is praise for the advancement brought by capitalism and what it will make possible), and the groups you describe, that tends to elicit disdain from the far left.

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#76

Post by acidburnNSA »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #17
StillBored wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge part of that is all the lawsuits and "regulations" designed to keep new plants from being built. Regulations pushed for by the green energy constituency... I'm all for safety but if you read some of the regulation stories we would be banning CT scanners from hospitals..

Fukushima was a good reminder that these “regulations” exist for good reason.

Radiation hazards are very real, as we saw graphically with Chernobyl. With Fukushima, we see that they're still real, but we realize we're doing a lot better. Fukushima accident is now estimated to cause up to 1 long-term death from radiation. Chernobyl killed ~70 first responders acutely and up to 4000 long-term.

For comparison with other energy sources, Banqiao dam failure killed 100,000 [1] and fossil fuels (84% of the world's total energy) kill about 4.3 million people every single year [2]. This is why hydro and fossil emissions are regulated too. The regulations are necessary and useful. The Clean Air Act of 1970 has saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and counting (from fossil air pollution deaths).

Just looking at numbers, we find that nuclear is ridiculously safe. The perception is way different though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#1975_Banqiao_Dam_f...

[2] https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#77

Post by bsder »

Baneofbatman wrote: post #43
killjoywashere wrote: post #21

The topic is small modular reactors, which are defined as reactors producing less than 300 MW. The Voyager RTGs generate "a few hundred watts" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... ). The Virginia class submarines use a GE S9G, which produces 150 MWt. Power output is a mix of electric and shaft torque ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S9G_reactor ) The Los Angeles class submarines use a GE S…

Do you know how efficiency and safety scales with power output and size? If you're building a new power plant why not just install a bunch of A4W reactors that have been well proven instead of designing and building bigger reactors?

> If you're building a new power plant why not just install a bunch of A4W reactors that have been well proven instead of designing and building bigger reactors?

The naval reactors are not built to be refueled, as I understand it.

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#79

Post by acidburnNSA »

natmaka wrote: post #69
andbberger wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I doubt anybody will get the costs down enough to make them viable [citation needed] This was discussed recently and I really down understand the immense skepticism exhibited on HN (and in general) towards nuclear energy. Sure it's expensive now, but it's been misregulated into a pulp and all extant nuclear reactors are using decades old designs. AND you need to compare the cost of nuclear to renewables PLUS st…

Many nuclear power-plant projects, conducted by experts, are way late and over-budget. See Olkiluoto, Flamanville. Many potential units are purely and simply cancelled because they are too financially risky (notwithstanding other risks) given the falling costs of solar and wind. The hot nuclear waste disposal challenge is not solved, wherever you check (France and the US, experts both are "in the process of solving i…

The waste disposal problem has been solved at the Onkalo Nuclear Waste Repository in Finland. It's a deep geologic repository without the political fights associated with Yucca. Deep geologic repositories are basically a consensus solution now. Finns chose to solve the nuclear waste issue and did it.

Fukushima killed up to 1 person from radiation. Meanwhile fossil is killing 4.3 million people per year via air pollution. If fossil had to pay for that health externality (not to mention climate change), then nuclear economics would look exceedingly more fantastic. Though it's true that nuclear builds need to get their act together to maintain relevance.

Small reactors have less radioactive source in them and are proportionally less radiologically impactful than larger higher power reactors in the event of military/terrorist attack.

Wind and solar are doing amazing. There is some serious worry that the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) will go below the level needed to sustain industrialized civilization once variable renewables are deployed at significant enough scale to require massive energy investment in "non-productive" equipment like batteries. For example, see this Nov 2019 paper on the topic [1]. EROI on solar PV is like 3-8. With massive storage it can dip below 3. Nuclear is like 50.

I think a low-carbon future will have a whole lot of wind/solar and a whole lot of nuclear. Both industries can scale by 10x happily and we still will struggle with our climate issues.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1...

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#80

Post by bsder »

WalterBright wrote: post #16

Bill Gates' foundation was ready to build a thorium reactor. Canada should investigate using that design.

> Canada should investigate using that design.

And then reject it.

Thorium has quite a lot of engineering problems that it has yet to demonstrate that it can overcome.

Look at San Onofre--an improvement to the engineering process (more accurate anti-vibration bars) caused water cooling tubes to have a resonance and wear out prematurely.

And that happened in a relatively well-understood technology.

Thorium isn't even close to that level of maturity.

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