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Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

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Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#51

Post by api »

pfdietz wrote: post #42
api wrote: post #38

Is anyone working in the US on a waste solution that isn’t a big hole with a straight out of cyberpunk sci-fi warning plaque? The French reprocess and recycle fissile material but that’s kind of a gnarly industrial process. Still they do it and it works. The long term solution is to create a second kind of reactor that has a higher burn fraction which means a more fuel efficient fast reactor. Those would be, ideally,…

IMO, the long term solution will be to simply launch the waste into space. With low enough launch costs the extra mass needed to armor the waste against accidents becomes tolerable.

Economically absurd, much more expensive than reprocessing or fast waste burning reactors.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#52

Post by hgoel »

jampekka wrote: post #49
pfdietz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, the long term solution will be to simply launch the waste into space. With low enough launch costs the extra mass needed to armor the waste against accidents becomes tolerable.

Can't wait for one of those launch rockets to explode in the atmosphere!

The requirements for a rocket to be allowed to fly nuclear material tend to be even more stringent than those for flying humans.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#53

Post by hgoel »

pfdietz wrote: post #42
api wrote: post #38

Is anyone working in the US on a waste solution that isn’t a big hole with a straight out of cyberpunk sci-fi warning plaque? The French reprocess and recycle fissile material but that’s kind of a gnarly industrial process. Still they do it and it works. The long term solution is to create a second kind of reactor that has a higher burn fraction which means a more fuel efficient fast reactor. Those would be, ideally,…

IMO, the long term solution will be to simply launch the waste into space. With low enough launch costs the extra mass needed to armor the waste against accidents becomes tolerable.

Probably not worthwhile. If you just leave it in orbit you're going to have to track it and worry about debris/micrometeoroid strikes. The ideal would be to stick it in some permanently shadowed crater on the Moon, it'd be a stable environment without wild temperature swings and much lower risk of somehow ending up where people are. But that's a long way to go and a lot more risk to take for now.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#54

Post by bryanlarsen »

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #46
pfdietz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear partisans like to call renewables ideological, but I think this is another example of "the accusation is a confession". The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. The current focus on variant reactor designs appears to be something of a Hail Mary attempt to get around this sad state of affairs. You sometimes see them making an argument about energy density, which goes back to Vaclav S…

>The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive I have a solution, take the subsidies spent on "renewables" and put them into nuclear! Easy peasy!

Too late, governments have already subsidized nuclear more than they've subsidized renewables.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#55

Post by tech_ken »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #9

I am still quite confused on the scientific consensus: Should we double down on renewable energy and solve its issues with lots of batteries or should we invest in next generation nuclear energy? Both at the same time? Does anyone know?

It's more of an engineering call than something that can be purely determined from inductive reasoning. I think most engineers working in the space would say "both" are needed, but partisans exist on both sides.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#56

Post by rayiner »

pfdietz wrote: post #39
rayiner wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. France nuclearized 75% of its grid in the 1980s while the solar folks were faffing around. It's not a cost issue, it's that anti-nuclear folks have choked out the industry. We need to take the boot off the neck of nuclear. Wind and solar aren't an avenue to moving up the tech tree of civilization, which will involve using vastly more power.

We don't actually know how much that cost France, sine it was mixed in with their military nuclear effort. French auditors threw up their hands trying to figure out the actual costs. What we do know is their attempt to build more NPPs now has gone spectacularly tits up, with costs completely out of control. This should make one view their earlier efforts with great suspicion. Have they become much worse, or were earl…

Costs are out of control due to nuclear regulation.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#57

Post by tech_ken »

rayiner wrote: post #34
pfdietz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear partisans like to call renewables ideological, but I think this is another example of "the accusation is a confession". The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. The current focus on variant reactor designs appears to be something of a Hail Mary attempt to get around this sad state of affairs. You sometimes see them making an argument about energy density, which goes back to Vaclav S…

> The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. France nuclearized 75% of its grid in the 1980s while the solar folks were faffing around. It's not a cost issue, it's that anti-nuclear folks have choked out the industry. We need to take the boot off the neck of nuclear. Wind and solar aren't an avenue to moving up the tech tree of civilization, which will involve using vastly more power.

> moving up the tech tree of civilization

Life isn't Civ 6, there is no tech tree to climb.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#58

Post by netsharc »

mDyJzDPmBdG wrote: post #5
seanhunter wrote: post #3

Congrats to everyone involved. This is a pretty awesome milestone

To add a bit of context there were 11 companies participating in program and only 2 achieved critiality, and the deadline included in "DOE Reactor Pilot Program" was "July 4, 2026", and Aalo Atomics is the only one that might also make it in time.

Sigh, everything is being done for political purposes, now Dear Leader Donny can proclaim on the quartermillenial celebrations that "we achieved a nuclear milestone!". And maybe add that this is possible because of his nuclear physics genius abilities.

I wouldn't even be surprised if the achievements are like "Full-Self Driving", announced hastily with boasts and then slowly revealed to be full of Elon.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#59

Post by tech_ken »

From the article: > We said criticality in 2026, electricity production in 2027, and power to the warfighter in 2028.

Are there any other examples of land-based militaries using nuclear power? Seems kind of like since they can't talk about the energy transition or w/e this has to be a military thing instead.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#60

Post by Tade0 »

api wrote: post #36
Tade0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China does: all of the above, where it makes sense. Renewables and batteries to keep your AC, workplace EV charger, stove, pool heater and (since recently) green ammonia producer going, nuclear to prevent e.g. aluminium smelters from seizing up. Also the cheapest way to make renewables work 24/7 is to build HVDC lines - they cost as much as a highway per unit length and even undersea cables would deploy for less and…

China is also still building coal and has passed Europe and will (if they don’t change course) soon pass the US and Canada and the other big ones on a per capita emitter basis. They already passed everyone as top emitter in an absolute sense. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita Not saying they’re not also building renewables and nuclear, but it seems like the policy is more “build anything and…

According to this graph and assuming both US emissions fall and Chinese grow exponentially at the rate they were over the decade 2014-2024, the figures will cross around 2037.

Personally I doubt that, as US emissions have been going up due to data centers:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-leads-global-co2-...

And while China, like you said, doesn't seem to have a focused goal, it so happens that renewables are the path of least resistance for just having more energy as fast and cheap as possible.

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