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Transatomic Power

transatomicpower.com

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Re: Transatomic Power

#71

Post by vidarh »

justatdotin wrote: post #60
opo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...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 plant…

if only there was like, some alternative to coal and uranium ...

If only those alternatives were actually safer than nuclear.

People die in installation and operational accidents for wind and solar at a higher rate relative to amount of electricity provided than all deaths attributable to nuclear.

And hydro has a quite horrible track record thanks to construction accidents and dam failures (even if you exclude the single worst incident - the Banqiao dam failure that killed an estimated 171,000 people).

Re: Transatomic Power

#72

Post by vidarh »

trhway wrote: post #22
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.

>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 at least your children can look using 2 eyes. If not for Greenpeace the expected value would be uniformly distributed anywhere between 0 and 4 or 5...

Coal contributes vastly more to radioactive environmental contamination than nuclear does, by hurling radioactive particles into the atmosphere. So on the contrary, the fear over nuclear has done far more to increase our exposure to radiation that what we would have if coal plants had been replaced by nuclear.

Re: Transatomic Power

#73

Post by 7952 »

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.

I am sure the industry has been held back in part due to public anxiety, but that is hardly the whole story. Whilst nuclear power maybe acceptably safe, that comes at a huge cost in terms of time, money, and complexity. If you need to acuire grid capacity in the short term these are major issues. In the longer term all we hear are new unproven designs that require massive investment just to prove a concept.

Re: Transatomic Power

#74

Post by zymhan »

madaxe_again wrote: post #62
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…

Because nuclear weapons aren't a byproduct of this kind of reactor, and that renders it useless in the eyes of politician-warmongers.

That was more true in the 60's, and so we never spent the time to try bringing this to production. We don't need to make all of our nuclear reactors capable of producing weapons-grade material anymore, and I don't think there's much objection to new reactor types on those grounds.

Re: Transatomic Power

#75

Post by DennisP »

pheo wrote: post #26

"Fast," "Breeder," or "Salt" reactors breed weapons grade fissionable material (Ie. Plutonium 239) from relatively un-enriched materials (Ie. Uranium 238 and Thorium). Fast reactors make nuclear weapons as byproduct. Thats why we don't use them.

The question though is whether the fissionable material is usable for weapons in any practical sense.

In the Integral Fast Reactor, for example, you end up with a mixture of the four isotopes of plutonium. It's impossible to use that mixture for weapons, and it's much harder to isolate the Pu239 than it is to enrich natural uranium.

In some thorium designs, the fissionable U233 (bred from thorium) is mixed with U232, which is also very hard to separate and makes the material unworkable for weapons. (However, this is not true of all thorium designs. Chemically separate the protactinium and it will decay to pure U233.)

If you had one of the nonproliferating designs and were silly enough to attempt using it for weapons production, you would need much larger and more sophisticated enrichment facilities than if you just enriched natural uranium. If you get your startup fuel from other countries, you can forgo enrichment facilities entirely, making it very clear that you don't have a weapons program.

Re: Transatomic Power

#76

Post by DennisP »

beefman wrote: post #24
Maxels wrote: post #2

So this is a company with a pretty ui that is advocating the same thing Kirk Sorensen has been advocating for a few years now. I know every time this molten salt vs light water reactor debate comes up, people much smarter than I talk about how the salt is corrosive and there are currently no viable solutions to deal with this. Is there anyone out there smarter than I that can explain whether this company is doing any…

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…

Why would the fission products be "all over the place?" They're contained in the reactor core, just like any other reactor.

Re: Transatomic Power

#77

Post by DennisP »

madaxe_again wrote: post #62
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…

Because nuclear weapons aren't a byproduct of this kind of reactor, and that renders it useless in the eyes of politician-warmongers.

Natural gas plants don't produce weapons material either, and we're building plenty of those.

The weapons material we do produce comes from specialized reactors, not civilian power plants.

Re: Transatomic Power

#78

Post by musername »

ptaipale wrote: post #65
MichaelGG wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed. BTW my old boss said the same after Chernobyl: he used to be worried about nuclear safety, but after Chernobyl, where everything went as much wrong as it can go - you have an unsafe type of reactor, incompetent staff blows it up, the accident is covered and evacuations are delayed, etc - and still the death toll is much smaller than the impact of coal mining, which is the practical alternative picked by e.g.…

it's overwhelmingly not coal, a majority share is imported gas. Local energy is coal and renewables are under 5% last time I checked, that's true.

Re: Transatomic Power

#80

Post by gjem97 »

jccooper wrote: post #52
BendertheRobot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cheapest and easiest way to deal with spent fuel is to store it for decades That is insane. The best way to deal with waste is to recycle it.

Waiting for the hottest stuff to go away is part of the recycling process. It's just a very slow part.

The funny thing about nuclear waste is that it's not the "hottest stuff" you have to worry about. The hottest stuff has a very short half life and disappears relatively quickly. On the other side things like Carbon 14 that have a multiple millennium half life are not radioactive enough to cause much of a problem. It's the stuff that has a half life of about 10 to 1000 years that you have to worry about.
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