Any news on better shielding or safer designs that might allow replacing a house or car's power plant?
> When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859
> The proposal comes as most of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year operating licenses. Many plant operators have sought licenses to extend the operating life of their plants past the original deadlines, even as experts have warned that aging plants come with heightened concerns about safety.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe...
> The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police themselves. The NRC “is listening” to this advice, the Associated Press reported last month. “Annie Caputo, a former nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of four board members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, told an industry meeting this week that she was ‘open to self-assessments’ by nuclear plant operators, who are proposing that self-reporting by operators take the place of some NRC inspections.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-tru...
I dont think I would trust one in my home, given flood risks and all, but a megawatt power plant for the neighborhood wouldn't be amiss.
Keyword there is "functioning". I believe GP's point is that the public can't be trusted to maintain household-scale nuclear reactors to the same level of safety that large-scale operators with competent staff and chains of responsibility can.
Surely an in-home reactor would require safeties of an appropriate degree. Perhaps those would make in-home nuclear infeasible, I wouldn't know. With a bit of careful planning, any given house could easily take out half a city block or more given someone with intent to cause harm, though, and without knowing the actual amount of radioactive material in any given in-hime reactor, I couldn't begin to compare.
Edit: this is why I am a whimsical commenter on the internet and not the person in charge of whether or not we give redneck engineers nuclear reactors.
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/neighborhood-transfor...
No matter how many bananas you eat, your radiation exposure will stay the same as your body keeps the amount of potassium constant.
Grave nuclear accidents probably happen every few decades and more smaller reactors will make that just more likely.
The same way the FAA allowed airplane manufacturers to decide wether their planes needed re-certifying when they changed them, and allowed them to certify themselves?
Because that's also how we got the Boeing 737 Max.
You're talking about a lapse in safety relative to an industry that is 2nd only to Nuclear power in doing no harm. In absolute terms they were still reasonably safe.
What I did say, is that this approach seems remarkably similar to the process that is both partially credited with the 737 Max issues, and one of the reasons some other countries' regulators refused to trust the FAA's later decisions regarding that plane.
> You're talking about a lapse in safety relative to an industry that is 2nd only to Nuclear power in doing no harm.
Yes, and that’s why when evaluating the use of a safety process in one, it is both relevant and interesting to look at the impact some conceptually similar process had on the other's safety record.
Regarding the cars analogy… really?
You mean the plane that was grounded for having 4 accidents per 1 million flights? Do you mean the industry with 1 fatal accident for every two million flights? An industry so safe that most people have a higher likelihood of dying on the drive to and from the airport than on their flight? If that is your nightmare scenario of safety failure, I’ll happily take the FAA model of safety.
Speaking of comparisons, how many people do coal plants kill every year with fly ash, just as a matter of course and not even as a safety failure? We aren’t comparing nuclear power risks to nothing.
But there still are huge conflicts of interest in self-certifying equipment, wether it’s an airplane or a nuclear power plant.
In this case, following the crashes, the FAA's safety model is one of the reasons the EASA refused to delegate safety approval to the FAA on that specific plane.
Clearly signalling they consider Boeing, the FAA and the FAA's safety model to be untrustworthy.
I really don’t see why a process that is considered untrustworthy in the aerospace industry should be applied to nuclear power plants.
Now, to be clear, if some US airline's plane full of US citizens suffers some malfunction due to some design defects and crashes in the middle of the US because some government agency in the US decided to trust some US plane manufacturer to certify itself, it’s sad, but it’s a US problem for the US people. I really couldn’t care less.
Same with US power plants. Should a US nuclear power plant suffer catastrophic failure because some US regulator couldn’t learn from the FAA's mistake and decided to trust some US power plant operators with their own inspection, it would be a problem for the people living in and around the US.
Regarding the totally unrelated coal plants tangent and the blatant attempt to change the topic, I don’t care either. Over here, considering the dangers they pose, it’s been decided they should be entirely phased out over the next year.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that I am somehow against nuclear power, or consider it inherently too dangerous.
I am not, and I do not. I’d even go as far as to say I consider it to be one of our best bets in facing climate change, air pollution, and our need to quickly and drastically lower global greenhouse gases emissions.
[1]: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
Where is my flying car I believe is the title. Earlier this year I saw a book review from the star slater codex substack. Didn't read it tho
If that is thanks to the Green Movement, then let me thank the Green Movement.
The trick is, as always, to make a sealed system and scare people into not messing with it.
This has happened, a lot.
Most of the needless venting comes from automotive systems and that's going to be a non-issue in a few years as OEMs continue to switch over to newer refrigerants that are less polluting.
Having a nuclear reactor in every house would be insane. Even if they don't leak radiation during their lifespan in normal operation. You can scare most people out of opening them. But can you scare every single person out of doing so? Considering some will be mentally unstable too, or outright psychopathic.
The most dangerous thing a mad person can do right now is blow up their house with natural gas. Which is pretty bad, it can damage houses in the nearby area. It absolutely pales in comparison to creating a mini meltdown or even nuclear pollution however. One alpha-emitting dust particle inhaled into the lungs is enough to kill over time.
And this is not a fantasy. It's happened in real life. Consider the Goiania incident for example and it's not the only one.
I'd bet there's a reactor design that's tamper-proof enough to be less lethal than vending machines.
That just leaves very determined, educated terrorists trying to harvest the fuel for radiotoxins or a dirty bomb. There are probably less convoluted ways to cause mass death and destruction than that, but "radioactive" and "fallout" are certainly more terrifying than "gunman" "bomb" or "poison" even if the actual damage is likely much lower.
> The most dangerous thing a mad person can do right now is blow up their house with natural gas.
Wiki says the Oklahoma City bomb cost USD5000 and was equivalent to 5000 lbs of TNT. I don't have a TNT figure for gas explosions in buildings (even the worst-case intentional one you describe), but it sounds like they're way less powerful than that. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271492483_Hazard_an...
Don't forget to weigh all this doom and gloom against the massive (green) upsides of distributed power generation!
Really, look at that Goiania incident. 93 grams (3.3 oz, less than half the weight of an average smartphone) of radioactive material found by some scavengers who dragged it around the city.
Result: 4 people dead. 249 contaminated of which many with health issues. More than $100 million in cleanup. It was one of the worst radiological incidents.
Now imagine having this kind of material available in every house...
There'd also be massive proliferation of nuclear waste which may or may not be processed and stored correctly.
Well, except for the ozone. That's getting better, though.
Hydrocarbon refrigerants went out of vogue for performance reasons but were/are still used the world over in certain applications and there's been a recent uptick now that we care more about not destroying the environment. The fuel:air mix you need for fire is narrow enough that ignition is mostly not a problem in practice, it also helps that society have moved away from open flames for a lot of heating and lighting applications.
Google "R600a"
No, it is about knowing where the cutoff point of risk vs reward is. It is about understanding when diminishing returns makes something impractical. Trying to design a nuclear reactor small enough for a house or car, that is also so safe, tamper proof, and unweaponizable that it is ok to just have 10s of millions of them floating around is pointlessly difficult. Building a reactor to go into personal vehicles that crash all the time is ridiculous. It’s the different version of the flying car, when we realized that maybe having everyone moving themselves around in personal vehicles that would plummet out of the sky in the event of mechanical failure instead of just pulling over in the breakdown lane. It is a “that would be cool” idea.
Replacing coal plants with nuclear plants is a far better idea. Building self-contained smaller reactors to provide power on the neighborhood, sub division, or factory complex level is a far better idea. Why would I even want a reactor taking of space in my house when I could just get the same electricity from a more efficient reactor installed in a large concrete shed for my whole block? Why would I want to buy an insanely over engineered nuclear car, when I could just charge up my Battery Electric using my neighborhood reactor off peak electricity? Or I could fill up my hydrogen electric car produced by my neighborhood reactor through electrolysis during times of excess power generation.
The main reason why nuclear isn't a thing except in communist countries (or countries with a big centralized state power), is that scaled nuclear require central planning. You really can't expect private operators to run nuclear, because the cost of the fuel is actually 0.01% of the operating cost, and the most efficient way of running a nuclear reactor is full power.
But anyway there is some truth in what you say but I’ll would rephrase « centralized power » as « political will + state controlled company ».
You probably need this to be operated by a state controlled company because as much as I trust nuclear power, I’d never trust plants managed with a profit driven company. There must be unlimited warranties in case things goes wrong. But that is far from communism. You just can’t allow scenarios such as the power plant going bankrupt while being operated or maintenance costs being reduced to pay bonuses.
A lot of liberal countries have state controlled electricity providers. In France we even have multiple energy companies but just one is state controlled.
Looked very handy thing that nuclear hand warmer. Like big cabin stove, which runs for ever and needs no fuel.
Just because nuclear power has been unfairly maligned doesn't mean it would unilaterally solve our climate problems. Beware mood affiliation when posting short pithy comments.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... (see page 44)
But that still ignores the huge capital costs of building a nuclear power plant, not to mention the liability insurance that has to be provided by the government.
Farming is a tricky one but again, with cheap electricity things like hydroponics become more feasible. A lot of things are physically possible but simply ruled out by the economics of energy cost.