Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval

Post by dheera » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

ses1984 wrote: post #157

kbenson wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't the big push (or maybe big PR push) for more research and development of Thorium reactors a few years ago because they fail closed/safely? That seems like the kind of thing you'd want for smaller reactors (which I assume means more and more geographically diverse, but don't really know).

There's no research being done on materials to safely contain molten radioactive salt, that research could be dangerous, pretty much only superpowers would have the resources to do the research.

Post by hwillis » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 11:54 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #246

jhallenworld wrote: post #52

Here is the NRC website about this reactor: https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/nuscale.html Here is an interesting sub-report: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2022/ML20224A525.pdf Information withheld for security reasons. One item concerns the "ultimate heat sink". What happens when the ultimate heat sink is lost? Well a design assumption is that it is not lost: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2020/ML20205L410.pdf…

> So drain the pool As I understand it, the pool has no drain. There's nowhere the water can go. Which would make sense for a passive safety feature.

Post by waterhouse » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 12:04 AM UTC

briffle wrote: post #205

Klinky wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're underplaying the danger and overplaying the value. Who exactly is investing in this "green gold"? If it's so valuable why does no one actually want it, and why is the DoE stuck with half a trillion liability?

They are stuck with the liability, because President Carter Banned reprocessing of Uranium in 1977, and nobody has changed it. If we reprocessed Uranium, we would end up with much less low level waste, and some very, very small amounts of more radioactive materials (that can be burned in some other types of reactors)

Post by pvaldes » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 12:05 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #150

newacct583 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or an attack, of course. Or some other event (social unreset, invasion, coup, etc...) causes an evacuation of staff and it boils off during the resulting excursion. People tend to have poor mental models for the long tail of external failures that happen in real life. It's easy to imagine that things that have never happened in the last century would Never Happen. But... they will, somewhere.

Nuclear sites are designed to withstand a strike from a commercial airliner (747). Like you, the designers imagined many of the events you mentioned and more. A good rule of thumb is that if you, a non-expert, can think of a scenario within 10 minutes, an expert has probably already thought of this scenario. Nuclear power plants and weapons sites have always been considered targets and thus considered extra scrutiny…

Post by throwaway0a5e » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 12:11 AM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #261

xigency wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you could solve climate change for less than that, I think it would be splendid. To put that number in context, which is just an order of magnitude, it's $5,000 for every person on Earth, about 1.5x the current US national debt, and just under the combined market cap of NYSE+NASDAQ. As an existential problem for humanity that doesn't currently have a solution, I think that's a decent cost estimate.

This rhetoric of new nuclear is gonna solve the climate crises reminds of how GMO was poised to increase our food safety and end world hunger. It didn’t. And since I’ve learned that new technology doesn’t save us when there is an underlying social issue that is causing it. With GMO the issue is food distribution. In the climate disaster the cause is a little more complex but undeniably a few actors are making an unfa…