231–240 of 287 posts
Not sure what 'sama means by this, but I guess it's what I feel - government projects tend to go slow unless there's an actual, real security reason for them to go faster, in which case - like with Manhattan project - you get crazy amount of productivity and progress.
> The big government projects, like NIF and ITER, unfortunately have the feel of peacetime big government projects. Not sure what 'sama means by this, but I guess it's what I feel - government projects tend to go slow unless there's an actual, real security reason for them to go faster, in which case - like with Manhattan project - you get crazy amount of productivity and progress.
Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer? I'm not really sure about creating radioactive waste that has such huge half lives... From Wikipedia: Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 15.7 million years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few tho…
Compare that to waste generated from burning dead dinosaurs - its storage is not a problem only because it's dumped into the atmosphere to poison everyone. You can say that nuclear plants have one less externality here.
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My point mainly is that if there's more demand when solar produces more energy, then you can pretty much run the nuclear plants all the time and get a decent balance. But I suspect the small reactors will be more flexible. Molten salt reactors are supposed to load-follow automatically with a lag of thirty seconds or so. (And of course with small fusion reactors it wouldn't be a problem at all.)
You're right. It is also a common misconception that nuclear reactors cannot load follow, they can: http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/02/14/responding-to-system-de... One of the main limitations is the stress it puts on the fuel. Many advanced reactors overcome these limits, and if financially incentivized, they will definitely load follow. On top of that, the UPower reactor has a thermal transport time constant nearly…
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Solar may have been weaponized as early as 214 BCE.
Photovoltaics can't really be weaponized, and we can't stop bad actors from getting access to large mirrors.
Humanity needs to find a way to deal with high-energy technology if we're to move forward as a species.
> By combining our years of experience in fusion, newly available electronics technologies, and a revolutionary design using cutting-edge physics, Helion is making a fusion engine 1,000 times smaller, over 500 times cheaper, and realizable 10 time faster than other projects. What?!? I certainly appreciate the ambition, but humanity has spent seven decades and at least hundreds of billions of dollars on this very same…
> at least hundreds of billions of dollars on this very same project. How is that a measure of doing something meaningful ? Take EADS making the Ariane rocket launchers, they have been spending billions and billions of Euros making rockets for years, yet they have no project like SpaceX and yet they will be rapidly obsolete once SpaceX works as expected. It's not about the amount you spend, it's about experimenting i…
But to be honest, I think we need to encourage more effort, so I applaud the project anyway, and keep my fingers crossed.
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Rather than batteries, i think pumping water up a hill will be a lot cheaper. use the water to drive a generator. massive daily over production to fill the nightly (or much longer) reserve.
That is the state of the art for energy storage today and basically all the sites are taken. Sure, if energy costs go up a LOT a few more will become viable, but if you look around, for example, Californa, it's hard to find another viable site.
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Sry, that is a terrible argument. You are saying that we do not have to worry about nuclear waste, because we currently do not worry about other waste.
I'm saying that nuclear waste is treated with far more paranoia than it deserves, as illustrated by how we dispose of other waste much less carefully, even though it's just as dangerous. And mostly successfully, too. That doesn't mean that it's something to be ignored, or that current methods of waste disposal are perfect, but if we aren't shutting down the entire chemical industry (for example) over this problem the…
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Yes it surely is. We need to take everything into the equation on where to go. - grey energy invested - full lifetime costs from start of construction until fully recovered land - inclusive recycling costs - inclusive environmental impacts
This is one of the great challenges nuclear has to overcome on paper. Most of these costs are based on absurd standards that have consistently been proven wrong. Fukushima's cleanup would be orders of magnitude less if they didn't have to treat nearby soil as waste when its radioactive signature is far lower than the soil found at the ski slopes in CO, and even less than beach sand in Brazil. We treat low level radia…
Low level radion is dangerous. http://www.ianfairlie.org/news/recent-evidence-on-the-risks-...
"However the latest study, (Zablotska et al, 2013) is very large (over 110,000 workers) and succeeded in finding statistically significant leukemia increases, even at the relatively low doses experienced by most of these adult workers (average dose = 92 mSv)."
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On a positive note: While I have major questions/concerns about distributing poorly secured fast reactors and toxic waste sites all over the planet, if this tech really does turn out to be a practical way to reduce the half life of waste... Why not just turn the waste storage sites into reactor farms? That would sidestep the problems stemming from decentralization and probably achieve some economies of scale too. May…
They are not poorly secured, and the material is not weaponizable. Not to mention they are not toxic sites, the waste is put into a block of metal that is completely passively cooled so it can't melt. It is buried, and it is secured. And they would generally be deployed in multi unit farms. Plus, no need to throw away the energy, especially if it's cheaper than energy from gas or coal.