301–310 of 415 posts
Not sure if it's quite the same thing, but Argentina has been building a modular reactor for a while now. Doesn't look like it'll be ready anytime soon (probably financing problems). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAREM https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Nucleoelectrica-cont...
"Financing problems" translates to "people finally recognized it could never earn back what they would need to put in to finish it".
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Yes, ideally all the energy released by the reactor would go into the turbine. But no engine is 100% efficient, and waste heat is inevitable. Waste heat is "free" energy in the sense that it would have otherwise not been harnessed for something useful.
Waste heat is not free to the degree that you're not cooling your cold side as efficiently. If "sending heat to homes" has the same thermal resistance as "just dissipate it", then sure. However, I find it elegant that heat is directly used to heat homes, rather than turning it into low-entropy electricity just to turn it to heat again (which is inelegant, even with heat pumps).
We need a heat pump that is heat-powered…
This is really exciting. I wish we had nuclear power here in Australia. I know I might get downvoted for this comment. But with advancement in technology and large amount nuclear fuel (Uranium deposit) available, it's a great choice. 1. Vast swathes of uninhabited land can absorb some of the risks/fears associated with a nuclear accident. With technology like this, the risks are even lower. 2. It's lot cleaner than c…
The nuclear plants need to be built near water, which means they're likely to end up near habitation. Like renewables, much of the cost of nuclear is in construction - unlike renewables, this has gone up not down over the years. > Of course the coal companies won't like that. This is a fairly important reason why it's not going to happen in Australia.
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The nuclear plants need to be built near water, which means they're likely to end up near habitation. Like renewables, much of the cost of nuclear is in construction - unlike renewables, this has gone up not down over the years. > Of course the coal companies won't like that. This is a fairly important reason why it's not going to happen in Australia.
> The nuclear plants need to be built near water, which means they're likely to end up near habitation. Does it? Article says this new reactor is helium cooled and vents heat. No mention of water cooling.
The system described in the article punts the "how do we use the heat this system outputs" to some other facility/plant. It could use the heat directly in a variety of industrial processes, or it could be used to boil water for a steam turbine.
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I'm a bit surprised that Australia has no nuclear plants while other countries along the Pacific Rim already do. Any idea why it hasn't happened? Domestic opposition or lack of need before now?
Don't nuclear plants need vast amounts of water? Australia's kinda lacking that in the middle of the country.
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> The nuclear plants need to be built near water, which means they're likely to end up near habitation. Does it? Article says this new reactor is helium cooled and vents heat. No mention of water cooling.
Conventional nuke plants don't consume a ton of water for cooling. I believe (definitely not an expert) that any water used for cooling is kept in a closed loop system. The vast majority of the water consumed by a nuclear plant (or any thermal power plant) is used by being converted to steam, which is then used to spin a turbine (though some percentage of that water can also be reused by condensing it in cooling towe…
- Power company executives live in on-site "VIP housing", and work from offices within the outer containment structure. In case of a major spill, they're issued mops, buckets, and lead underwear, and deployed as front-line clean-up workers.
- NIMBY's shiver in the dark.
The background on Canada's plans for small modular reactors (of which this is just one of three projects) can be found here: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Canadian-provinc... Supposedly this is promoting clean energy and fighting climate change, but the details don't always match this rhetoric. In particular they're thinking they can use nuclear power to replace piped-in natural gas to mine the Alberta…
A town not too far from where I grew up had most of it's economy based around a single factory (Hershey Chocolate in Smith's Falls, Ontario). There were lots of other stores and whatnot, but money flowed into the town via the factory paying workers' salaries, then bounced between hands from in shops, services, whatever else.
When I was in high school, that factory closed down. The inflow of money stopped. And so did the rest of the economy of the town. Hard to run a flower shop when nobody in town can afford to buy flowers, you know?
Stopping mining of tarsands entirely would be a bit like doing that to the entire province of Alberta. The money enters the province via the dirty oil they sell. We should never have gotten into this situation, no doubt, but now that we're here it's politically impossible to stop.
And being major exporters, they're also a big reason for the value of the Canadian dollar. Stop exporting all the dirty oil and the exchange rate goes to crap- now all the things we buy from the USA and China are more expensive. What political party wants to be elected on that promise?
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Conventional nuke plants don't consume a ton of water for cooling. I believe (definitely not an expert) that any water used for cooling is kept in a closed loop system. The vast majority of the water consumed by a nuclear plant (or any thermal power plant) is used by being converted to steam, which is then used to spin a turbine (though some percentage of that water can also be reused by condensing it in cooling towe…
I think it's fair to say a nuclear power plant "uses" the water that it discharges its waste heat into as it flows out into a river or large body of water. If it didn't use that water, it would have to dump its heat somewhere else.
They don't all work that way.