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Transatomic Power

transatomicpower.com

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Re: Transatomic Power

#41

Post by opo »

pavlov wrote: post #7
yc1010 wrote: post #4

I wish Transatomic all the best but they have an uphill battle :( to convince a populace for whom unfortunately "nuclear power" brings up an image Homer Simpson. aside: I think Greenpeace also has a lot to answer for with their campaign against nuclear power. Thanks to them my children can look forward to a world where a coal plant is build every week and fossil fuel fueled climate change is a certainty.

Homer Simpson and the three-eyed fish graced TV screens in 1989. In the preceding ten years, the world had seen a sequence of serious nuclear accidents: Three Mile Island, Sellafield, Chernobyl... The smear campaign was accomplished by the companies and nations that built and maintained those shoddy, dangerous plants. Blaming Greenpeace makes as much sense as blaming them for climate change.

>...In the preceding ten years, the world had seen a sequence of serious nuclear accidents: Three Mile Island, Sellafield, Chernobyl...

Considering that it would be illegal to build a Chernobyl style plant in any other country rather than the Soviet Union, it probably shouldn't be on your list.

>...The smear campaign was accomplished by the companies and nations that built and maintained those shoddy, dangerous plants.

But even including the deaths from Chernobyl, nuclear power has been safer over the last 60 years than all other types of mass energy production: coal, natural gas or hydroelectric.

>...Blaming Greenpeace makes as much sense as blaming them for climate change.

I think the point the OP was making was that by smearing nuclear (a power source that doesn't put CO2 into the atmosphere from generating power) the alternative has usually been to build a natural gas or coal plant that does put CO2 into the atmosphere when it generates power.

Re: Transatomic Power

#42

Post by Gibbon1 »

MichaelGG wrote: post #31
aout wrote: post #10

So ok, the website is cool and the technology is said to be something like 99.9999% better. This might be a stupid question but I'm no nuclear engineer not a specialist about chemistry or physics but I wonder why a such "beautiful" idea would not be already used. I've read the related wikipedia article about Molten Salt Reactors and I understand there are several problems about the technology: mostly corrosion and em…

Probably the same reason Germany shutdown its power plants after Fukushima. Despite Fukushima being a huge success story [1] some people are scared, some unthinking, almost all irrational and unable to handle probability at all. Nuclear power seems magical and shares a word with scary weapons. It's not "natural" for mediocre definitions of natural. 1: Seriously. Fukushima did everything wrong. Huge earthquake and tsu…

The only thing that went right with Fukushima was the wind blew the radio isotopes over the pacific (mostly) and the rest of the stuff that leaked out went into the ocean. People would be singing a different tune if the wind blew all that stuff on shore. Quite a number of nuclear plants are located in places not so fortunate. For instance consider the location of three mile island, located well inland on the Susquehanna River. If you had a containment loss at three mile island, it'd be a big big mess.

People say these plants are all safe, and newer plants are safer, but the near catastrophic failures don't give one a warm feeling. The one that stands out to me was pin hole corrosion through the cladding on the top of a reactor vessel. That lead to a large cavity corroding unnoticed in the mild steel. Which which was discovered when someone noticed an odd budge in the top. if that had failed, you would have had total loss of cooling and a melt down.

Re: Transatomic Power

#44

Post by apendleton »

nosuchthing wrote: post #18
aout wrote: post #10

So ok, the website is cool and the technology is said to be something like 99.9999% better. This might be a stupid question but I'm no nuclear engineer not a specialist about chemistry or physics but I wonder why a such "beautiful" idea would not be already used. I've read the related wikipedia article about Molten Salt Reactors and I understand there are several problems about the technology: mostly corrosion and em…

I'm assuming the "Molten Salt Reactor" method is the same principle as the "Sodium Reactor" that was experimented with around 50 years ago? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment

The ambiguity of "salt" is unfortunate here. The "salt" in "molten salt" is a salt, but not table salt (so, no sodium). The one proposed here is a lithium fluoride/uranium fluoride salt. Conversely, while table salt has sodium in it, the sodium in the sodium reactor isn't part of table salt, it's pure sodium metal. (Turns out they explode, also, so there's not much enthusiasm about them anymore.)

Re: Transatomic Power

#45

Post by Twirrim »

While it's neat to see more companies jumping on board, what they're looking at isn't really revolutionary, despite the polished PR on the website. There are lots of companies, research organisations etc working on molten salt reactors. Lots of them, including Oak Ridge National Lab (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/01/07/nuclear-po...).

On the surface, this seems kind of like launching an IaaS cloud service and claiming you're introducing something new and innovative.

Re: Transatomic Power

#47

Post by jschwartzi »

Twirrim wrote: post #45

While it's neat to see more companies jumping on board, what they're looking at isn't really revolutionary, despite the polished PR on the website. There are lots of companies, research organisations etc working on molten salt reactors. Lots of them, including Oak Ridge National Lab ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/01/07/nuclear-po... ). On the surface, this seems kind of like launching an IaaS cloud ser…

Well, it's not like there would only be room for one company on the market. The problem with nuclear power is fundamentally a marketing problem, and the winners in the market will be the companies that can successfully distance themselves from the disasters of the past. It's going to be less about fundamentally new technology and more about how well you can market yourself to people who associate nuclear power with Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi(which is anyone who hasn't studied the subject extensively). You're especially going to run into problems with the NIMBY crowd. Given their landing page I would have a modicum of faith that they understand this.

Re: Transatomic Power

#48

Post by paulsutter »

yc1010 wrote: post #4

I wish Transatomic all the best but they have an uphill battle :( to convince a populace for whom unfortunately "nuclear power" brings up an image Homer Simpson. aside: I think Greenpeace also has a lot to answer for with their campaign against nuclear power. Thanks to them my children can look forward to a world where a coal plant is build every week and fossil fuel fueled climate change is a certainty.

United States is only 25% of the market for electricity production. There are 185 other countries that use electricity. I don't think Transatomic will have trouble finding countries that are willing to move sooner.

Re: Transatomic Power

#49

Post by flogic »

aout wrote: post #10

So ok, the website is cool and the technology is said to be something like 99.9999% better. This might be a stupid question but I'm no nuclear engineer not a specialist about chemistry or physics but I wonder why a such "beautiful" idea would not be already used. I've read the related wikipedia article about Molten Salt Reactors and I understand there are several problems about the technology: mostly corrosion and em…

In the "what's next" section it indicates the next step is more lab experiments. So, I'd guess that they have quite a bit of work ahead of them.

Re: Transatomic Power

#50

Post by beefman »

jessaustin wrote: post #28
beefman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The zirconium hydride moderator is a genuine innovation, allowing much higher core power density than LFTR, and higher conversion ratios without HEU (assuming their modeling is correct). But like LFTR, you've got loose FPs all over the place and it's hard to see that being acceptable in anything like the current culture. Meanwhile, it's hard to see any benefit from MSR. Edit: There will likely be all sorts of materia…

Wild guess on "FP": fission product?

Yep. (Sorry, I was on mobile earlier)
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