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Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

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Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#11

Post by Robotbeat »

le-mark wrote: post #6

Always a treat to read something by Charles Stross. Seems like Accelerando was required reading for the previous generation, is it still? I was not familiar with the UK advanced gas cooled reactors, which use CO2 to cool the core and transfer heat to the steam. From the name it seems to be gas and not supercritical CO2 although I may have that wrong. Power generation is the one topic that makes thermodynamics crystal…

Supercritical is the state of the CO2 gas. Smoothly intermediate from a regular gas to a liquid.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#12

Post by nickcw »

> ...although it's one of the safest and most energy-efficient civilian power reactors ever built it's a a technological dead-end, that there won't be any more of them, and that when it shuts down in thirty or forty years' time this colossal collision between space age physics and victorian plumbing will be relegated to a footnote in the history books. "Energy too cheap to meter" it ain't, but as a symbol of what we can achieve through engineering it's hard to beat.

Fantastic article. Well worth a read.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#13

Post by arethuza »

6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote: post #9

The Ferranti mainframes mentioned in the article are probably Argus 700 machines developed in 1968/9 [1] Amazing that such tech was still running important infrastructure only a decade ago. 1. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/16225/Ferranti-Argus-...

The training simulators used custom hardware from Marconi Simulation as well - a long long time ago I didn't get to job to work on them at Torness.

Mind you I did end up on an academic project that included modelling of Hunterston, so I got the "behind the scenes" tour there that Charlie got for Torness.

The Project Manager from Scottish Nuclear had worked on the construction of Torness and he lots of interesting stories.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#14

Post by dls2016 »

le-mark wrote: post #6

Always a treat to read something by Charles Stross. Seems like Accelerando was required reading for the previous generation, is it still? I was not familiar with the UK advanced gas cooled reactors, which use CO2 to cool the core and transfer heat to the steam. From the name it seems to be gas and not supercritical CO2 although I may have that wrong. Power generation is the one topic that makes thermodynamics crystal…

My old man was a Navy nuke turned instrument tech at Three Mile Island... he can go on and on about steam tables.

I worked there one refueling outage while lazing about after college. Highlights include: sweeping river muck out of the empty cooling towers, scrubbing pipes for x-ray analysis, standing "fire watch" since doors were propped open, taking a smoke break on top of the Unit 2 control room building (that Unit 2), staring at the humongous, partially-disassembled turbine (they may have replaced it that year), spotlighting deer at the end of the island. I also remember a very strange feeling while listening to radiation monitors go crazy when the spent fuel was being removed... if you walked a few dozen feet past the warning tape you were probably dead.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#15

Post by camtarn »

JonathanBuchh wrote: post #7

Archive: https://archive.is/TTX4g

The last paragraph was truncated for me. I had to look at the page source to read it! Reproduced here for those on mobile browsers:

"It's a weird experience, crawling over the guts of one of the marvels of the atomic age, smelling the thing (mostly machine oil and steam, and a hint of ozone near the transformers), all the while knowing that although it's one of the safest and most energy-efficient civilian power reactors ever built it's a a technological dead-end, that there won't be any more of them, and that when it shuts down in thirty or forty years' time this colossal collision between space age physics and victorian plumbing will be relegated to a footnote in the history books. 'Energy too cheap to meter' it ain't, but as a symbol of what we can achieve through engineering it's hard to beat."

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#18

Post by ArtWomb »

"nothing like this will be built again"

ITER / DEMO / PROTO plants planned to eclipse everything previous in scale. And with nuclear fission now classified as green tech by the EU, maybe the political will is finally here ;)

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220109-europe-nuclea...

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#19

Post by darkteflon »

dls2016 wrote: post #14
le-mark wrote: post #6

Always a treat to read something by Charles Stross. Seems like Accelerando was required reading for the previous generation, is it still? I was not familiar with the UK advanced gas cooled reactors, which use CO2 to cool the core and transfer heat to the steam. From the name it seems to be gas and not supercritical CO2 although I may have that wrong. Power generation is the one topic that makes thermodynamics crystal…

My old man was a Navy nuke turned instrument tech at Three Mile Island... he can go on and on about steam tables. I worked there one refueling outage while lazing about after college. Highlights include: sweeping river muck out of the empty cooling towers, scrubbing pipes for x-ray analysis, standing "fire watch" since doors were propped open, taking a smoke break on top of the Unit 2 control room building ( that Uni…

Great anecdotes - only on HN. Cheers for sharing.

Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

#20

Post by boringg »

dls2016 wrote: post #14
le-mark wrote: post #6

Always a treat to read something by Charles Stross. Seems like Accelerando was required reading for the previous generation, is it still? I was not familiar with the UK advanced gas cooled reactors, which use CO2 to cool the core and transfer heat to the steam. From the name it seems to be gas and not supercritical CO2 although I may have that wrong. Power generation is the one topic that makes thermodynamics crystal…

My old man was a Navy nuke turned instrument tech at Three Mile Island... he can go on and on about steam tables. I worked there one refueling outage while lazing about after college. Highlights include: sweeping river muck out of the empty cooling towers, scrubbing pipes for x-ray analysis, standing "fire watch" since doors were propped open, taking a smoke break on top of the Unit 2 control room building ( that Uni…

I'm getting flashbacks of the engineering problems I had to solve at school with all this talk of steam look up tables. Not sure if its enjoyable or suppression nostalgia :)
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