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Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

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Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#91

Post by quirkot »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #87
quirkot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe has about 60,000 tons of nuclear waste storage[1], so lets say the global nuclear waste quantity is 2-3x or 120,000 to 180,000 tons. That sounds like a lot, however it's less than 2 weeks of coal deliveries to a coal plant (at 1 train of 115 cars each with 116 tons of coal = 13,340 tons delivered per day[2]). To take another approach, the average landfill size is 600 acres[3]. The "eh, just bury it" approach i…

I thought something like 30 tons per Gwatt capacity per year was the ballpark for high level waste without reprocessing? How are you arriving at a 120,000 ton estimate?

Footnote has the backup. 2-3x is guesstimate, but it doesn't really matter. The answer is there's just not much waste to store

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#92

Post by dpark »

pfdietz wrote: post #89
dpark wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A full launch on F9 (with recovered S1) is estimated to cost $15M Estimated by who? SpaceX charges 74 million for this. Nothing credible I can find indicates that SpaceX is running an amazing 80% profit margin on Falcon 9 launches. > And here's the problem: you started from an emotional reaction and are trying to rationalize that. No, your premise is “just launch the trash into space” and you’re hand waving away th…

SpaceX charges what the market will bear, and because they have no good competitor their profit margins can be very large. Anyway, the number is from fairly old Musk interviews. Costs have likely decreased since then. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2026/02/spacex-falcon-9-true-c... > No, your premise is “just launch the trash into space” and you’re hand waving away the complexity, costs, and danger. At least I didn't…

> SpaceX charges what the market will bear, and because they have no good competitor their profit margins can be very large.

Is your premise that SpaceX will ship nuclear waste at or below cost? Because the 74 million is a publicly available price. And when SpaceX ships stuff for the government the prices go up, not down.

> Anyway, the number is from fairly old Musk interviews.

Yes, Musk is famously honest and accurate with his claims.

> At least I didn't trot out a string of obvious errors like you did.

What obvious errors are those? You don’t seem to like that I’m using publicly available pricing.

> When people do that, it's a strong tell they're engaging in broken thinking. What you did, I think, is believe something, then try to rationalize it. When your thinking reached a justification you liked you just stopped thinking

Pot, meet kettle. You are basing your entire premise on a speculative future that doesn’t exist. You should have just proposed sending it up the space elevator.

None of this idea makes sense from a financial, physical, or risk stand point. “This stuff is too dangerous to store in a hole, let’s launch it into space in 3000 rockets, and then we’ll push it away from earth with another thousand solar electric rockets, and then we’ll use solar energy to evaporate it all! What could go wrong?”

Honestly if you’re betting on a hypothetical future where all this is effectively free, why not just bet on a future where reprocessing uranium drops in price as well?

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#93

Post by dang »

coldtea wrote: post #22

That's just what we needed! Nuclear autotune.

Can you please roll back the snark and flamebait in your comments? It has been upticking again for quite a while, to the point where notice I'm bracing myself when I see your username in threads.

Since you've adjusted this in the past, I'm sure you can do so again, and we'd appreciate it. We like that you're here, but need you to stay within the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#94

Post by lenerdenator »

tech_ken wrote: post #59

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.

That's originally what the SL-1 reactor was meant for. It was also developed at Idaho Falls.

Instead of parking diesel generators up at Arctic radar stations (and other remote locations), we'd use a nuclear reactor, which is a logical choice.

The problems were:

1) one control rod could send the entire reactor prompt critical

2) rods could get stuck, requiring that they be "exercised" very carefully as to prevent them from making #1 happen

3) this maintenance was being done by a man in his early 20s who had been sleep deprived and received a phone call before his shift from his wife asking for a divorce

The result was the only immediately-fatal reactor accident in American history.

Glad to see that we're getting over this and moving forward with the concept. Only took us 60+ years...

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#95

Post by boznz »

ggm wrote: post #2

TRISO fuel so.. pebble bed? Is there a reluctance to market on this? The Chinese were all-in. Great to see engineering deliver on time. I wonder if Rolls Royce will also have a smooth ride. It's a PWR.

The Rolls Royce modular reactor update page [1] leaves me scratching my head as to where they are, it seems they've passed some really hard UK regulation though, maybe the official source is not the best:

[1] https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com/our-progress

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#96

Post by lenerdenator »

pfdietz wrote: post #61
api wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think that's the case, if launch costs are low enough. The options you describe there are quite expensive. Reprocessing costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $1000/kg. Even fast reactor have trouble disposing of the seven very long lived fission products. A fully reusable launcher might get costs down to $10/kg to LEO. Even if one had to wrap the waste in 10x its mass in launch armor this could be much cheap…

The problem with launching anything into orbit using current rocket motor technologies is that heavier stuff costs more to put into orbit.

The elements that are used in nuclear reactors (particularly Uranium and Plutonium) are pretty dense, and thus heavy.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#97

Post by mandevil »

roenxi wrote: post #37
pfdietz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost is not only relevant, it's paramount. Efficiency is only important insofar as it affects overall cost. Diesel generators have the advantage of being very cheap -- an order of magnitude cheaper than NPPs per unit power output -- and of having much of their total cost being fuel cost, so they can operate at lower capacity factor. But even so, we don't see large power plants composed of arrays of diesel microgenera…

> Cost is not only relevant, it's paramount. Efficiency is only important insofar as it affects overall cost. Oh sorry, I thought you were talking about efficiency. Ok, what is the cost is for these plants? > A single full time employee, like a security guard, will cost a good chunk of that. I dunno, a 1MW nuclear plant could end up being pretty small. It might easily be economic to install them places that already h…

Back in the 1950's, as part of a study for putting ICBM bases in Greenland, the US Army built a 2MW reactor (PM-2A) and deployed it to the test base (Camp Century) in Greenland. It powered the camp for about three years, modulo a little problem where it was shut down for a while after a prototype (SL-1) killed two soldiers and a sailor in Idaho. In addition, the Navy operated another one (PM-3A, 1.75MW) for a decade in Antarctica at McMurdo Sound, until they cut it up and brought it back to the US. There was also the MH-1A (10MW- and the only one I've mentioned that used LEU instead of bomb-grade HEU) sitting on a freighter in Lake Gatun to power parts of the Panama Canal Zone.

All of these reactors were built in the early 1960's and the last (MH-1A) was retired in 1978. All of them were operated in places that had lots of soldiers around (though McMurdo and Camp Century relied more on being really difficult to get to than actual sentries) And they were never replaced. Because even having guards already paid for didn't help the economics of the situation. Maybe things are different now. But I've yet to see any evidence for it.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#98

Post by coldtea »

dang wrote: post #93
coldtea wrote: post #22

That's just what we needed! Nuclear autotune.

Can you please roll back the snark and flamebait in your comments? It has been upticking again for quite a while, to the point where notice I'm bracing myself when I see your username in threads. Since you've adjusted this in the past, I'm sure you can do so again, and we'd appreciate it. We like that you're here, but need you to stay within the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sure.

I never do flamebait and rarely do snark tho (usually only after several increasingly futile exchanges).

Flippant comments (like the autotune one) and/or sincerely held even if unpopular opinions, I'll stoop to, yes.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#99

Post by fc417fc802 »

quirkot wrote: post #91
fc417fc802 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought something like 30 tons per Gwatt capacity per year was the ballpark for high level waste without reprocessing? How are you arriving at a 120,000 ton estimate?

Footnote has the backup. 2-3x is guesstimate, but it doesn't really matter. The answer is there's just not much waste to store

Sure there isn't a prohibitive quantity either way but regardless I think the 120k number might be off by one or two orders of magnitude even before reprocessing reduces the amount by ~95%.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#100

Post by dang »

coldtea wrote: post #98
dang wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please roll back the snark and flamebait in your comments? It has been upticking again for quite a while, to the point where notice I'm bracing myself when I see your username in threads. Since you've adjusted this in the past, I'm sure you can do so again, and we'd appreciate it. We like that you're here, but need you to stay within the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sure. I never do flamebait and rarely do snark tho (usually only after several increasingly futile exchanges). Flippant comments (like the autotune one) and/or sincerely held even if unpopular opinions, I'll stoop to, yes.

Thanks! Yes, translated into your terms it sounds like the flippant ones I was referring to.

Unpopular opinions are fine in principle - we definitely want to hear minority views on HN. But it's super common for people to pre-emptively load their unpopular-opinion comments with sarcastic or aggressive language, no doubt as a defensive against the anticipated negative reacction from the majority (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). That never works well. But I'm just speaking generally - I don't know if it applies to your posts.

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