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UPower (YC S14) Is Building Nuclear Batteries

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Re: UPower (YC S14) Is Building Nuclear Batteries

#81
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"dirty bomb" is a radiological weapon, not a fission/fusion weapon, and is exactly what detonating explosives (or H gas, or whatever) inside a commercial power reactor or RTG would be.

Except that a dirty bomb is designed to maximize the hazardous effects of such an event while a reactor is designed to minimize the hazardous effects of such an event.

No, a dirty bomb is mainly designed to maximize fear, not hazard. Once its gone off, telling people it was safe is probably not going to work very well.

Re: UPower (YC S14) Is Building Nuclear Batteries

#82
Three advantages of building very small reactors:

1) Because heat output scales with the cube of the size and passive thermal dissipation scales with the square, small units can be more easily designed to stay within thermal bounds when active cooling fails.

2) One of the biggest cost for nuclear construction is interest costs during the construction process, reducing that time makes a big difference.

3) When you build 20 small units you get 20 chances to make small enhancements and 20 chances to get better and faster at building them. When you build one large unit (which is almost definitely more cost effective on paper) you get one chance to do it and it takes so long that even if you build more than one of the same design, you'll never have the same team building multiple units.

Re: UPower (YC S14) Is Building Nuclear Batteries

#83
post #42
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Japan and I don't consider that the outcome was as catastrophic as the media said it was (they are always ready to jump on the apocalyptic trigger). Everything went wrong (even the backup generators as they were blown away by the tsunami) and it was still reasonably contained and the levels of ambient contamination are nowhere as high as they initially predicted. EDIT: > most tightly regulated and technolog…

Also if there's any lesson here, it's that government intransigence is the real threat here. They don't want to build new reactors, they don't want to shut down old ones, but they still need electricity too. And of course consider the scale - something like 8,000 people died from that tsunami. Oil refineries burned for hours (how much heavy metal got dumped into the ocean and soil?)...how many people did Fukushima ac…

No, there are other lessons too. Read the official report.[1]

"For all the extensive detail it provides, what this report cannot fully convey – especially to a global audience – is the mindset that supported the negligence behind this disaster. What must be admitted – very painfully – is that this was a disaster “Made in Japan.” Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity.

[1] https://www.nirs.org/fukushima/naiic_report.pdf

Re: UPower (YC S14) Is Building Nuclear Batteries

#84
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right that there are explosions, but it isn't an explosion like an atomic bomb. You understand the difference, but unfortunately there is a fundamental misunderstanding for the general public that a reactor could function like a bomb. There just isn't the energy density to do that. There was physical damage to structures at Fukushima but that didn't cause any real damage outside the plant or releases. The rel…

Actually Chernobyl was (partially) a nuclear explosion. Lots of misunderstanding about this, even among nuclear engineers.

Go on, my understanding is that the "explosion" was basically a steam pressure explosion which blew the top off of the reactor, if that is incorrect do you have a reasonably easy to understand source?

Re: UPower (YC S14) Is Building Nuclear Batteries

#85
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there- I am pleased to see a company like yours cropping out of YCombinator. Not for nothing but: get some help with your website. It might seem like such a frivolous thing, but having a well-designed website goes a long way (or rather, having a bad web design mars your authority and reputation undeservingly).

Ouch. :) you're dead on. we've tried to be one of the companies that focus more on doing than publicizing... but it's definitely not good if it mars reputation. Thanks for comment.

The website IS well designed! It is literally the only website I've seen this year which makes me want to purchase something!

Sure, more information would not hurt, but the overall style is perfect for the target audience.

Re: UPower (YC S14) Is Building Nuclear Batteries

#86
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> essentially dirty bombs without detonators and must be protected as such. No, it's completely wrong. That's not how a nuclear plant works. And as you can see, a nuclear plant does not "explode" when it goes amok. The chain reaction is very tightly controlled and there are multiples redundancies in case things don't work as expected.

Except you just have to look at Fukushima to see that things can still go badly wrong, resulting in a meltdown of 3 reactors. And this happened in arguably one of the most tightly regulated and technologically advanced countries in the world.

Except you just have to look at Onagawa to see that things can still go exactly right.

http://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant-...

The cause of Fukushima was complete and utter corporate (at TEPCO) and regulatory failure. I would argue against "tightly regulated"; on paper it may be, but in practice it obviously was not or we wouldn't have been in this situation in the first place.

Re: UPower (YC S14) Is Building Nuclear Batteries

#87
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key-est takeaway is the need to persuade people not to be terrified of nuclear energy. That's likely to require an effort on a par with any technical advances you make.

Realizing the cost advantage of fission will change minds pretty quick. Of course there's the catch-22 of being able to do it before their minds are changed. uPower's plan of trying offgrid first may be worth a shot. A little understanding of FUD psychology can help too. Today's nuclear industry flunks on that. Telling people nuclear is safe is a classic mistake. Safety is a feeling, and it's hard to feel safe about…

"cost advantage of fission" -- you state this like a fact, but it is actually a subject of much discussion.

Re: UPower (YC S14) Is Building Nuclear Batteries

#88
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Chernobyl was (partially) a nuclear explosion. Lots of misunderstanding about this, even among nuclear engineers.

Go on, my understanding is that the "explosion" was basically a steam pressure explosion which blew the top off of the reactor, if that is incorrect do you have a reasonably easy to understand source?

There were two explosions - first was a steam explosion followed 2 or 3 seconds later by another more powerful explosion - with the cause of the latter still being debated. However, one theory does describe it as follows:

"However, the sheer force of the second explosion, and the ratio of xenon radioisotopes released during the event, indicate that the second explosion could have been a nuclear power transient; the result of the melting core material, in the absence of its cladding, water coolant and moderator, undergoing runaway prompt criticality similar to the explosion of a fizzled nuclear weapon."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Experiment_a...

NB I'm in the process of reading *"Atomic Accidents - A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: from the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima" - but I haven't got to Chernobyl yet....

http://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-M...

Re: UPower (YC S14) Is Building Nuclear Batteries

#89

First off: I'm very pleased to see that YC are backing startup concepts other than an endless stream of privacy-invading "social" surveilices, games, and new forms of intrusive and annoying advertising. I'd posted something of a rant on that subject about 7 months ago which didn't go over hugely at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7063690 Secondly: this is actually what I'd consider a "Big Problems" sta…

I love that you bring up the global scale. It's in the global scale things sound daunting. But it's in the global scale that what is really important becomes clear. Maybe the most important fact it all boils down to is energy density. Nuclear is literally millions of times more energy dense than any other energy source. Practically, that means millions of times less waste. (See let's talk about physics baby http://ww…

Net of total space requirements for a nuclear reactor site (and not counting processing or mining space), nuclear is only about 2-4x more dense than solar. That is, you could take a nuclear power plant site, remove the reactors, fill it with solar PV, and you'd have ~1/4 - 1/2 the energy output.

When you consider that solar energy can be co-sited with many other land-uses, the situation gets even better. Residential, commercial, or industrial buildings, highway rights-of-way (not on the freakin' roadways, but alongside), or of course, high-potential solar in desert or other largely empty space.

Coal fails for multiple reasons, including in the long term that there's simply not enough of it: the global R/P ratio is 113, that is, there are 113 years' supply at present rates of use. And that rate is increasing -- the R/P ratio has fallen from above 200 in 1993 to just over 100 in 2013. Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy, June, 2014 http://bp.com/statisticalreview

Then there's that little issue about global warming.

Solar has markedly little waste issue. The life of PV panels is 20-25 years, they're comprised largely of silicon, and other materials can be recycled from them.

Total present US energy usage (not just electricity generation) could be provided from a region 233 miles on a side (54,400 mi^2). Via GNU units and some fairly standard values:

    You have: 100 quad / (1 kW/m^2 * 0.3 * 0.17 * 0.9 * 0.55 * 0.94 * 1 year )
    You want: mi^2
    	* 54397.603
    	/ 1.8383163e-05
    You have: sqrt(54397.603)
    You want: 
            Definition: 233.23294
Switch instead to solar thermal, and you're now free of virtually any

The more significant problem is that there are more humans, consuming more resources, by a long stretch, than the Earth can support. We might be able to provide for 3-4 billions sustainably, but at a standard of living equivalent to slums of Manilla, Kolkata, or the favellas of Rio. Or worse.

Or 500 million to 2 billion at a higher rate of resource consumption, though likely markedly lower than that of the present-day US.

The thing about those 1.8 million security forces is that they represent themselves a vast level of resource allocation that's not itself directly productive. It's an overhead that other energy systems don't require.

Your land-area charts mostly show that biofuels aren't viable. I don't disagree with that conclusion:

http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_intr...

(More: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=biofuels&restri...)

Note that the delta for nuclear and solar isn't particularly significant, again noting that solar power can be co-located with other land uses.

I'd also strongly suggest you actually read and view my references before responding, as several of these aspects are addressed. And you've wholly avoided addressing the large-scale, long-term, unavoidable systemic risks of nuclear.

Re: UPower (YC S14) Is Building Nuclear Batteries

#90

I am one of the UPower founders. The key takeaways here are that the main hindrances to novel nuclear are (1) meeting regulatory and safety necessities without huge testing costs, which also require a customer interested in purchasing, and (2) competing with the grid, (3) huge scientific/technical risks if not yet proven. UPower meets these by (1) being small enough to build a very tough, full scale emulator for test…

A couple side notes on TC article specifically for those interested: 1) NO reprocessing as somewhat indicated in article ("processing"). We use the low enriched used fuel from the reactor to make new fuel for the next deployment. We don't isolate dangerous parts as done in reprocessing which is the main concern with reprocessing. 2) True waste elimination- it's not just "less of a pain", which is definitely good: the…

Hi. First of all, best of luck with your startup. I'm all for better nuclear technology.

However, I'm related to a nuclear engineer (who is currently in a senior position at IAEA, thus the anonymous account), and I understood that both steps you're currently undertaking were commonly know to be viable and efficient, BUT contravened most non-proliferation agreements (note: I'm not a nuclear engineer or physicist. Just interested).

So, you're "disrupting" an industry in dire need of disruption (due to the massive amounts of red tape), but you're also walking a tightrope.

I believe what you're doing is safe and needed, but if public opinion or perception turns against you (any article hinting at terrorist use, for example, or concerns over breaking the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), it might end your company.

You probably have taken all of this into account, and I hope you have a strategy in place on how to deal with this :) .

Once again, I wish you best of luck and I hope to use your generators in the future !! :)

EDIT: I haven't talked with my relative yet, all what I wrote above is my (probably misinformed) opinion.

Second edit: It seems several others have already raised most of my concerns, and better than I have. I've also

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8195589 (regulatory concerns)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8195642 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8196075(the tech being commonly known)

and, most important, the "dirty bomb" factor

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8195495

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