361–370 of 554 posts
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This is IMO a positive for nuclear, not a negative. You're forced to confront the cleanup as opposed to fossil fuels, where you just blow your waste out into the atmosphere and make it the commons' problem.
If only a method for permanent disposal of nuclear waste actually existed.
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You need a sufficiently large reserve to allow the reactor to cool, not an infinite supply. Reactors can be shut down and in this case the pool is sized to absorb all decay heat from the shutdown, plus a significant safety margin.
Great, and ideally gravity can be used to move it. Remember, at Fukushima power to the pumps was lost.
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Leak to where? It's below grade and it's not under any pressure greater than atmospheric.
The elephants foot in Chernobyl was so hot that melted the concrete and dug into the soil. Is this pool bottom impossible to melt?
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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.
Bill Gates is funding a company called Terrapower that is planning to bring compact MSR to market in the next 10 years. They already have working prototypes but are still a few years behind NuScale.
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This is IMO a positive for nuclear, not a negative. You're forced to confront the cleanup as opposed to fossil fuels, where you just blow your waste out into the atmosphere and make it the commons' problem.
If only a method for permanent disposal of nuclear waste actually existed.
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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.
Climate change his hardly an existential threat for humanity. We survived the last ice age with stone tools, this is a less severe change. Economic impacts from things like rising sea levels really depend on how much we spend on maintaining things as they currently are vs adapting to the new normal. Aka do you live below sea level, raise the city, or move somewhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chica…
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> DHRC is decay heat. CNV is reactor containment vessel. So drain the pool and the reactor is in trouble. In some reactor designs overheating slows and eventually stops the reaction in a controlled/deliberate manner. The reactor system may still fail irreversibly, but it wouldn't necessarily meltdown in a way that risks widespread contamination or excessively expensive site remediation, such as by exposing unapproach…
I haven't had time to read all of the info, but I get the impression that this is still a pressurized water reactor, just on a smaller scale. It will fail in pretty much the same way as current reactors like Fukushima and Chernobyl. I believe that the point is that the pool provides an extra level of failsafe against coolant loss, and additionally that the substantially smaller size of the core limits the amount of h…
This reactor is a much smaller PWR with a double containment and natural circulation, without these failure modes.
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It's a people problem. People are fallible on the best days, assuming everyone did their very best from nuclear physicists to construction workers, mistakes are made. You take steps to reduce the risk. Research gets review. Engineering schematics get review. Construction gets inspection. Still some mistakes will get through. And people always act their very best all the time right? You can even have a perfect design,…
This. Humans are spectacularly bad at this kind of scale in time/project budget/size...
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You'd still need a heat exchanger at some point, and you want a lot of surface area and thin walls for that.
Random thought experiment -- why not just drop it in the middle of a lifeless desert, forget about heat exchangers, and just let it slowly melt its way down through the crust of the earth? Assuming it went straight down and into the mantle, it would probably not impact the ecosystem.
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This. Humans are spectacularly bad at this kind of scale in time/project budget/size...
We are scary good at it actually. For example check out this and think about the architects who started vs those who finished it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Cathedral