51–60 of 84 posts
The majority of AECL (the CANDU reactor team) is un- or under employed after the buyout from the Canadian government - that's an entire workforce to tap into.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then you have to operate in France, which by all accounts (from my European colleagues) may not be worth the cost :)
Luckily you can just Change The World by doing a node.js startup in the Mission...
If so, why is the now quite well-known MSR advocate Kirk Sorensen not involved in this project, but instead started his own company (Flibe Energy) to design and produce a thorium MSR?
Still, I have a feeling that two US private startups is no match vs Chinese government MSR let alone other nuclear energy technology spending.
Anyone know if this is a thorium-based Molten Salt Reactor? If so, why is the now quite well-known MSR advocate Kirk Sorensen not involved in this project, but instead started his own company (Flibe Energy) to design and produce a thorium MSR? Still, I have a feeling that two US private startups is no match vs Chinese government MSR let alone other nuclear energy technology spending.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Luckily you can just Change The World by doing a node.js startup in the Mission...
I think what the GP tried to say is that France is not the easiest environment to launch a startup. Labor laws, taxes etc. make it one of the less desirable places in Europe to start a company.
Anyone know if this is a thorium-based Molten Salt Reactor? If so, why is the now quite well-known MSR advocate Kirk Sorensen not involved in this project, but instead started his own company (Flibe Energy) to design and produce a thorium MSR? Still, I have a feeling that two US private startups is no match vs Chinese government MSR let alone other nuclear energy technology spending.
I think this has to do with using nuclear waste from currently running reactors to generate electricity. (If thorium is part of that waste and you already knew that sorry)
The majority of AECL (the CANDU reactor team) is un- or under employed after the buyout from the Canadian government - that's an entire workforce to tap into.
I thought CANDU was acquired by a private company--do you foresee another Canadian research reactor after Chalk River?
I'm so glad there are nuclear startups. There's so much to be done in this field. It's enormously tough to disrupt but licensing a design might be a start. Talent is extraordinarily hard to find for this. All the great engineers with domain experience are starting to retire. The ones that are left are extremely risk averse. You have to attempt to poach from GE or Westinghouse. I worked for Westinghouse for two years…
"There are funny things that happen to steel piping at 2250 psi and 600 degrees Fahrenheit." And why we have to use steel piping at 153atm and 300C? The fact is that we are using a design that is totally obsolete and designed for creating nuclear bombs, not for giving us energy. The good thing about startups is that they could think different, use creativity to innovate and invent new methods. Einstein was not very i…
Despite the risks there is a lot to be said for a Very high temperature reactor (1000C) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_high_temperature_reactor
PS: There are actually a lot of reactor designs out there, but overall most designed are based on a small number vary old basic designs and a large number of tradeoffs. For example many people love Pebble bed reactor's, but they are gas cooled and use a lot of graphite at high temperatures which will burn with just a little oxygen at which point you lose your moderator and things can go vary badly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"There are funny things that happen to steel piping at 2250 psi and 600 degrees Fahrenheit." And why we have to use steel piping at 153atm and 300C? The fact is that we are using a design that is totally obsolete and designed for creating nuclear bombs, not for giving us energy. The good thing about startups is that they could think different, use creativity to innovate and invent new methods. Einstein was not very i…
Hold on there buddy. All Western designed PWRs or BWRs (which is nearly all of them) are not designed to be yielding bombs. Their neutron flux is simply not high enough to give enough enrichment. Two other types of plants you might be thinking of when taking bomb materials into account. The russian design for Chernobyl was meant to produce electricity and bomb fuel which is why it had a graphite moderator which creat…
This isn't actually accurate. Reactor core water is pressurized to raise the boiling point -- at 0.1 MPa (atmospheric) it's 100 ºC, at 15 MPa (reactor coolant) it's 342 ºC, so they can push water to around 300 ºC and still keep it liquid in the core. The higher the temperature, the higher (in general) the efficiency of converting heat to work (in the case of nuclear plants, efficiency of the steam turbine). This is pretty much independent of the size of the reactor.
(Why liquid water? One huge reason is neutronics (the nuclear part): a very high density of hydrogen nuclei (H in H2O) is useful for scattering neutrons, which slows them down to speeds where they get absorbed by heavy nuclei (reactor fuel) and start fission reactions. [This isn't necessary: in fact "fast reactors" work with neutrons flying at relativistic speeds. But it's much easier.])
300 ºC is actually pretty cool; the steam from coal power plants gets up to around 600 ºC [1], and internal-combustion gas turbines can reach temperatures of even 1,600 ºC [2]. Water-cooled reactors are held back in efficiency by the need to keep water liquid at core temperatures. Conceptually they can get a bit further by pressurizing water to supercritical conditions [3], at about 510-550 ºC/25 MPa; these aren't being built. (These are fast reactors; the density of this supercritical water is very low, about 0.1 kg/L, so it's a weaker moderator).
[1] http://www.ge-energy.com/products_and_services/products/stea...