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Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#231

Post by Accujack »

e12e wrote: post #127
roenxi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If literally all the electricity ever produced by the human waste had been produced by current generation nuclear technologies, there would be a small hill of high-level nuclear waste somewhere. It wouldn't be an issue except locally where it was stored. To believe that is a problem is to not have grappled with just how big the world is and how much of it is uninhabitable to humans already. The human population is co…

> If literally all the electricity ever produced by the human waste had been produced by current generation nuclear technologies, there would be a small hill of high-level nuclear waste somewhere. I'm not sure what kind of "modern nuclear technology" you're referring to. Are you saying that our legacy power plants are bad, and should be replaced? At what cost? > It wouldn't be an issue except locally where it was sto…

Most of the nuclear waste that exists is from weapons production. Nuclear generating plants produce only a very small amount.

Right now, small enough amounts of waste are produced that reactors generating power actually store the stuff on site.

>but could the be modified?

Modern reactor types are specifically designed not to be proliferation risks. The only reason the older reactor types are risks is because the governments who originally built them wanted to produce weapons, so they chose the technology that allowed them to do so.

Waste could be used for a "dirty bomb" in some sense, but it wouldn't be terribly effective. "High level" is relative, and the isotopes that would make a dirty bomb truly scary aren't available except in fuel rods shortly after their removal from a reactor... at which point no one does anything to extract those isotopes anyway, they just stick the fuel in cooling ponds to decay down to lower levels of radiation.

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#232

Post by stjohnswarts »

EliRivers wrote: post #61
LatteLazy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, in a word. You expect a technology to be made to work first, then to be made to work profitably, and only then commodified, miniaturised, etc. Nuclear works, but no one has made it work profitably. There is no reason to think shrinking it will make more profitable. Quite the opposite in fact: nuclear has big fixed costs. That's why you usually see multiple reactors build close together on single sites. The more p…

I believe you have not disagreed with me, but you have introduced additional intermediate stages and conditions with which I disagree. I disagree that it is necessary for technology to be made profitable before becoming commoditised. I would argue that some technologies only become profitable when they are commoditised. There is no reason to think shrinking it will make more profitable. I cannot see into the minds of…

He's also failing to identify hidden costs like destroying the global climate that we're most likely going to absorb at the government level despite what greedy lasseiz-fare capitalists want to admit

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#233

Post by stjohnswarts »

koheripbal wrote: post #118
simonblack wrote: post #17

Nuclear reactors' biggest drawback is the cost and danger of dismantling and disposing of them after their working life is finished. Up till then they are clean and cost-effective.

Why does no one ever factor in the cost of dismantling other major projects, like the Hoover Dam, or the Three Gorges Dam? ...or thee solar plants being built, or the wind turbines? Why does nuclear power have this enormous additional requirement that literally no other power source seems to have to account for?

those dams can basically survive indefinitely as long as they are properly maintained so I don't think that is a fair comparison.

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#234

Post by papreclip »

AtlasLion wrote: post #26
grabbalacious wrote: post #15

>Environmentalists are divided over nuclear power, with some maintaining it is dangerous and expensive, while others say that to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 all technologies are needed. Yes, a mix of technologies. But there's more to it than that. We're going to need increasing amounts of power in the future to explore the solar system and to solve all kinds of existential problems. Energy usage is not inheren…

baby steps I'd say. Let's first fix all the mess we are making here on earth before thinking of space exploration.

I think space colonization is an even bigger fantasy than relying on "future tech" that will magically terraform the earth and reverse climate change. We can have a tiny structure housing 10 or 20 people somewhere in our solar system for the price of millions of pounds of fuel and billions of dollars.

Inter-system travel will never happen. Forums like this tend to have a healthy population of the sci-fi minded, so it won't be a popular opinion here, but the laws of physics simply rule it out. And the "men once thought they couldn't fly" argument doesn't carry water with me. We know a lot more about what we don't know now than we did then

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#235

Post by stjohnswarts »

imtringued wrote: post #67
simonblack wrote: post #17

Nuclear reactors' biggest drawback is the cost and danger of dismantling and disposing of them after their working life is finished. Up till then they are clean and cost-effective.

The huge cost leads to mismanagement. Obsolete or unsafe nuclear plants keep running even when they shouldn't. Those plants should have been replaced with new designs immediately but it is cost prohibitive and that is what lead to accidents like Chernobyl. If you can't afford to shut it down then don't build expensive big designs. Build smaller ones that you can actually afford to take offline.

Chernobyl's design was amazingly primitive compared to the vast majority reactors outside of the former USSR. Any reactors that unsafe in any western nation would be immediately shut down.

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#236

Post by Accujack »

throw0101a wrote: post #145
vidarh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could grind nuclear waste from current nuclear plants into fine powder and intentionally blow it into the atmosphere and still cause fewer deaths than coal, as well as cause the release of less radioactive material, as the coal industry causes huge amounts of uranium dust to be released in the air. So as it stands, if we look at the real world instead of some hypothetical future, we continue to depend on types of…

> We could grind nuclear waste from current nuclear plants into fine powder and intentionally blow it into the atmosphere and still cause fewer deaths than coal, as well as cause the release of less radioactive material, as the coal industry causes huge amounts of uranium dust to be released in the air. How does the math work on this? It seems... hyperbolic.

It's not.

Naturally occurring radioactivity in coal ash means that coal burning power plants release far more radioactivity into our environment than nuclear plants do. In fact, if you want to get the least amount of radioactivity into your body, the safest place is behind the shielding of a nuke plant, because it would also protect you from naturally occuring radiation.

If you add up the total of radioactive elements in Bequerels released annually by coal plants and then assume 100% of all waste from power generating plants could be ground up and released and count that up, the amount of radioactivity from nuclear plants would still be less than coal.

We burn a LOT of coal, and despite the media's portrayal of how much a problem radioactive waste is, it's very overblown for power generating plants. Weapons production is another matter, but we've already been trying to stop that from happening for years.

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#237

Post by Accujack »

rusk wrote: post #106
christophilus wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy has a PR problem that is very hard to solve. It doesn’t help that movies dramatize it. From what I remember, the only people who died due to Fukushima were those that died of fear. The reality is that nuclear is remarkably safe, clean, etc.

I'd imagine the death toll from Fukushima will probably not be fully estimable for a few years yet.

Same thing for the death toll from coal burning plants. All that ash, deaths from that radioactivity and lung disease, deaths caused by global warming, etc.

If you look at a long enough time scale, anything can seem like a giant problem.

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#238

Post by stjohnswarts »

koheripbal wrote: post #120
radicalbyte wrote: post #33

We shouldn't be using nuclear energy for power. Solar, wind and batteries will solve that. What we should be doing is using nuclear energy for HEAT. We need a LOT of heat for a variety of chemical and industrial processes, not to mention heating of homes in colder climates. For these uses nuclear fission has massive potential.

The batteries at the scale needed to provide consistent baseload, simply do not exist and are still entirely theoretical at this point.

Yes I try to bring it up to my "only natural sources!" friends but they won't hear it. We need at least a 100 fold improvement in energy storage to make it practical and provide "base load" on par with what we have now with nuclear and fossil fuels.

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#239

Post by mercutio2 »

pjkundert wrote: post #195
Firadeoclus wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As we expand to space. On Earth there is an effective upper limit to the amount of heat we can release into the atmosphere before we'd cause catastrophic warming even without greenhouse effect.

That upper limit is probably orders of magnitude higher than we’re currently dissipating. We could blanket every city and town with permanently heated streets, and - as long as we stopped pumping water vapour into the dry upper troposphere - we wouldn’t even notice an increase in temperature. The big problems are 1) gigatons of soot coming over the north poles, permanently lowering the albedo of the planet and 2) pum…

Sea ice radiative forcing and overall albedo effects are on the order of 10% of well mixed greenhouse gas radiative forcing.

Short term cloud layer albedo effects are even smaller.

If we switched all our greenhouse gas emissions to nuclear, I agree there’s huge room for localized waste heat. But reducing albedo effects isn’t going to help if we keep emitting greenhouse gases.

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#240

Post by ars »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #29

Sure why not, but let us not get carried away and think THIS is the solution to global warming. It is unproven, it will be too late, and not scale up quick enough. By unproven I mean that the economics of it is unproven. We have no proof that SMR will be cheaper than large reactors. The article points this out as well. By late I mean at current fast pace of development a lot of will happen with wind and solar in the…

By your standards there are NO energy sources available.

All of them will be too late and are of unproven economics.

I guess best option is to sit back and watch the fireworks?

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