371–380 of 500 posts
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>Seems already a bit mad not to standardise internationally on a rough blueprint How do you evolve the design then?
Same way you do for planes, cars, etc. You have long(ish) life-cycles and some pieces that can be independent (e.g., same turbine engine on several plane models).
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Same way you do for planes, cars, etc. You have long(ish) life-cycles and some pieces that can be independent (e.g., same turbine engine on several plane models).
Brings its own risks. See the 737max debacle. Now imagine that but causing a massive radiation leak and requiring all your power stations to be be put offline while a fix is found.
Makes alot of sense. Canada has: - one of the largest uranium reserves - a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU - experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington) and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years. Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that…
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>Not convinced. What, if anything, would convince you?
Compact, mass produced nuclear energy projects with no nuclear proliferation risk and radioactive waste management time limited to less than one human generation's professional career span. That seems like a decent baseline to me. Not sure if fission will ever be able to reach that. Fusion perhaps? I'd certainly like to see that researched with high priority. In the short to medium term at the very least, I see more…
You'll never get waste management below about 300 years with fission, because that's basically what you get from the fission products. But the really long-term stuff is plutonium and other transuranics. Those are unburnt fuel. Fast reactors and some molten salt reactors are supposed to eliminate that. Bury the fission products for 300 years and they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore.
As an American this seems like a long time to me, but when I lived in Germany it didn't so much. We had a brewery in town that had been operating continually for 800 years.
Proliferation resistance gets complicated but some designs are a lot better at it than others. Almost everything requires at least some enriched fuel for startup, even if unenriched works after that. CANDU reactors don't require enriched fuel at all but they don't achieve the waste requirement. Some designs let you extract usable weapons material from reactor fuel (including current CANDU reactors), with others there's no way to extract fissile that's easier to enrich than natural uranium ore.
It might be doable to centralize startup fuel production in nuclear powers, and use reactors that take unenriched fuel after startup, have no way to extract weapons-grade material, and consume the transuranics.
Fusion of course would fix a lot of this. D-T fusion does produce a lot of neutrons that you could use to make plutonium, but you need those neutrons to make more tritium. You get activated reactors parts but those fit your time requirement.
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More renewables means the need for more base load? This is the first I’ve seen anybody say that.
It shouldn’t be the first time, this is what natural gas peaker plants have been about for 20 years. Solar and wind can’t sync the grid, they require sync or the grid collapses. Sync (Hz) can only be provided by base load that quickly spin up or down to balance out the frequency of the grid
That does not explain why Ontario needs more nuclear power generation some nebulous time in the future to support those same wind/solar installations per the original comment and parent reference.
Perhaps relevant. 2005 ish - UK government release energy strategy and declares fission power plant intent. 2010 ish - UK government formally announces Hinkley Point site. It's declared the first reactor will come online 2019. 2019 - it does not. 2026 - best estimate is now 'around 2030'. Historical cost estimates are an utter quagmire - but roughly estimated at £18 billion a decade ago, back when it was estimated to…
These day's it's a common problem in all of the Anglosphere, but it does seem especially bad in the UK; they appear to have just given up the ability to build literally anything.
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My understanding is that this material remains toxic to life for thousands, to tens of thousands of years. Safe means that it's stored such that there's no harm to the environment for that lifetime. In all "bury it" scenarios, the place where the waste is buried will be subject to change resulting in water, air, able to interact with that waste when normal tectonic and erosion processes do their thing.
0.2% of waste is toxic for thousands of years. Page 15: https://international.andra.fr/sites/international/files/202...
> "THORIUM: World's CHEAPEST Energy!" https://youtube.com/watch?v=U434Sy9BGf8 re: Copenhagen Atomics' waste burner designs
Also, there's He3 for Fusion in Natural Gas and ocean water.
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We're talking about Ontario. I live in Ontario. The sky is overcast 8 months of the year. We're not building enough storage to charge for 4 months and drain for 8.
Ontario _already_ gets a quarter of its power from storage, in the form of hydro. If you add some pumps you can use the existing dam capacity more.
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From the article: "If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy and the clean, reliable baseload power it provides," Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists and is a major driver of the increased acceptability of nuclear power production, especially if saf…
Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists Is it? Nothing is more environmentally friendly than hydroelectric dams. In Canada, there are endless rivers to dam, while also leaving endless rivers undammed. Further, damming a river doesn't destroy nature, it does however turn a river into a lake. Over the years it takes to build and complete the project, includin…