Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welding What point are you trying to make here?
no heat, no melting. just welding
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Application submitted for US molten salt research reactor
201–210 of 217 posts
Re: Application submitted for US molten salt research reactor
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to me that companies like GE and Westinghouse have tons of money. Add that to the billions pro-nuclear folks have in SV and you've got quite the war chest to fund effective pro-nuke campaigns.
Westinghouse went bankrupt a few years ago[0]...and GE hasn't been doing well and is splitting up[1]... [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/westinghouse-tos... [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2022-07-18/ge-...
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Re: Application submitted for US molten salt research reactor
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also sad that industry completely failed to convince the population that they can provide a safe solution. For all the credit we give BigCo for creating propaganda, it's curious that they were unable to be successful here, given the stakes.
The existing technology isn't actually that safe. The safe technology isn't that existing, actually. The "population" tends to not believe claims about certain accidents being impossible if they keep happening. The safety of nuclear power is a fantasy. No, the track record is not enough. Given the enormous potential for catastrophe and the timespans for nuclear power project, questioning assumptions like "nobody is g…
OTOH if you used bayesian reasoning like your username suggests, you'd understand that nuclear energy is the safest form of energy there is.
Re: Application submitted for US molten salt research reactor
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah im not exactly mad about it being hard / impossible for people to set up a lab-based experimental nuclear reactor near me due to regulations
Those reactors will be much safer then the street in front of your house.
Prove it.
And thus the reason for all this regulation.
Re: Application submitted for US molten salt research reactor
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
The existing technology isn't actually that safe. The safe technology isn't that existing, actually. The "population" tends to not believe claims about certain accidents being impossible if they keep happening. The safety of nuclear power is a fantasy. No, the track record is not enough. Given the enormous potential for catastrophe and the timespans for nuclear power project, questioning assumptions like "nobody is g…
OTOH if you used bayesian reasoning like your username suggests, you'd understand that nuclear energy is the safest form of energy there is. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
And that's exactly the wrong reasoning in this case. Because you want to predict the future from the past, over a really long time span and with the adverse events being extremely catastrophic. Just read up on how the Fukushima cleanup is going and how the cost estimates have risen...
Bayesian reasoning would require you to argue about priors. You want to take priors from the past. Fine and dandy, when trying to predict the weather or even where the stock market is going. But when talking about how likely it is that something blows up and contaminates a huge area, maybe there are higher standards. And philosophizing about the average is all nice and well, until you happen to live near the site of an accident. And in Ukraine the assumption "nobody is going to shoot around a nuclear plant", which most assurance of nuclear safety depend upon, doesn't hold anymore.
Re: Application submitted for US molten salt research reactor
#206Re: Application submitted for US molten salt research reactor
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The standard way to test material's resistance to molten salt is to put a coupon in a crucible full of salt for a few hundred hours. Q: What is a coupon in this context?
A coupon is an informal term for a small sample of material, most often metal. It’s perhaps most commonly used in welding where practice welds for people first training to weld are done on pieces of metal often referred to as coupons. :) It is usually an artifact of materials like metal which are hard to cut, and can’t efficiently just be cut as needed during a task, but are prepared and pre-cut into small pieces you…
In the mid 1970s, in my welding class, the school was located down the street from a small manufacturer that formed various metal alloys.
They would provide the school with bins of scrap from their manufacturing free of charge. Those were our practice coupons in class. We had to be careful to return the welded scraps back to the proper bin so the manufacturer could recycle them.
Our class was just a very small part of their recycling flow. It was a great relationship, we needed practice materials, and they hired welders.
Re: Application submitted for US molten salt research reactor
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Energy too cheap to meter doesn't sound like a good investment from a capitalistic viewpoint.
You don't understand capitalism then. And you fell for propaganda and fantasy of the nuclear industry apparently. Nuclear power isn't that cheap. Certainly not without subsidies and once you price in all the externalities.
And you fell for the fossil fuels propaganda claiming nuclear is too expensive to without subsidies. Seriously.. new nuclear is on the drawing board with huge investments in the UK, France and Sweden.
Nuclear will be cheap when the industry grows and reactor designs are standardized.
It's really simply the superior technology any way you look at it and the "nuclear is too expensive" is just a tired and arguably false argument against it. I'm so sick and tired of people saying that it's too expensive to save the planet..
Re: Application submitted for US molten salt research reactor
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not compltly accurate. It's true that the half-life of tritium is short compared to long lived actinides. However, like hydrogen, it diffuses very easily and it's not easy to contain. In fact, it's one of the few things emitted in the environment during normal reactor operations. As beta emitter, you are right that it's dangerous only when ingested, but it's very easy to breath of to get it from other ambient sources
> you are right that it's dangerous only when ingested Not really. Tritium is Hydrogen. It cannot bioaccumulate. Each atom of Tritium will spread out to become one among the quadrillions of atoms of Hydrogen in our body. Most will get out of the body in a matter of days, long before they've had a chance to decay. Even when they decay, they undergo beta decay, which is not very damaging. But even if it were damaging,…
> Not really.... But even if it were damaging, the damage would be very localized, it would affect at most one cell, and the immune system is easily able to handle that.
you could not be more wrong about this. Alpha and Beta are fairly safe OUTSIDE the body. In the case of Alpha it is not able to penetrate the layer of dead skin on your hands.
Internal, it is VERY damaging because there is no "dead skin" to protect the internal organs.
https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-basics
"Some beta particles are capable of penetrating the skin and causing damage such as skin burns. However, as with alpha-emitters, beta-emitters are most hazardous when they are inhaled or swallowed."
Re: Application submitted for US molten salt research reactor
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't understand capitalism then. And you fell for propaganda and fantasy of the nuclear industry apparently. Nuclear power isn't that cheap. Certainly not without subsidies and once you price in all the externalities.
And you fell for the fossil fuels propaganda claiming nuclear is too expensive to without subsidies. Seriously.. new nuclear is on the drawing board with huge investments in the UK, France and Sweden. Nuclear will be cheap when the industry grows and reactor designs are standardized. It's really simply the superior technology any way you look at it and the "nuclear is too expensive" is just a tired and arguably false…
In reality there is a lot of research pointing to nuclear power certainly not being anywhere near as cheap as "too cheap to meter". Claiming this is all "fossil fuel propaganda" is stupid and lazy. So far, there has rarely ever been a nuclear power plant built on budget and on time. Most run way over. And often the costs for cleanup and decommissioning are not priced in properly or even at all. Most industries have to pay insurance for their risks, the - actually uncomputable - risk of nuclear power rests on the whole society, while the profits accumulate with the shareholders of the power company. Ask Japan how that is working out for them currently...
"Drawing board" is the operational term. Nuclear power is always late and it's always more expensive than promised. Why is the nuclear power industry subsidized so much everywhere when it's actually a good investment? Have government agencies suddenly become good at investing or are they just charities for corporate interests?
I'm not even saying it's "too expensive", by the way. I'm not totally against nuclear power, I do see the benefits. It has its place, probably. But I know about fat tail distributions and the unpredictability of the future. You really don't want anybody shooting rockets and artillery shells around a nuclear facility a few hundred miles near you. Today that's Ukraine and much of eastern Europe, who says that in the next fourty or fifty years, the lifespan of a typical plant, that's not you either? In Mossul ISIS hunted around for nuclear material to build a dirty bomb, luckily they didn't find the stuff that actually was there. Who says your country will not have a rogue militia like that in the next fifty years?
And then the nuclear industry is unwieldy. It requires a large and expensive specialized infrastructure. Which can be amortized eventually, yes. But much of that investment is upfront and the recuperation is dependent on a lot of things going exactly right for a very long time. Also it requires a huge labor force that has to be trained for this specific task and then can hardly do anything else. France has the problem of a shortage. In short: It's hard and expensive to get into nuclear technology and it's even harder to get out of it.
And in order to solve the climate crisis using nuclear power there are two major problems: First, it's already too late, because nuclear power is so slow. Secondly, you'd need to nuclearize much of the world, including countries with questionable regulatory regimes to say the least. This makes all the problems we see now a lot worse...