BYU profs create new nuclear reactor to produce nuclear energy more safely
news.byu.edu
news.byu.edu
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
2. https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#what-are-the-safes...
It's like saying new t-shirts are more wearable.
>We need to do something, this is something, egro we must do it.
You can't fix stupid.
Fast forward to today, where governments are now facing pressure to extend the life of old existing nuclear plants past their shutdown date to reduce dependence on gas.
The only measure of nuclear safety I trust is the liability cap. Currently in America it stands at 0.04% ($300 million) the cost of 1 Fukushima ($800 billion).
No, overreaction to Fukushima caused the shutdowns.
Because journalists and activists spun it into a near-total shutdown of new nuclear production, and for no other reason.
By what metric? The exclusion zone has been completely lifted. The amount of radiation released into the ocean is negligible.
If new reactors like this one can avoid such outcomes where the old ones cannot, it's a decided improvement.
The bar of safety (or comfort) changes with the times.
Modern designs are intended to be “intrinsically” or “inherently” safe, unlike older designs.
This kind of logic smacks of something that ends with Logan's Run.
An inherently safe reactor design might be a little cheaper to operate, but might be even more expensive to build. Or might be a little less.
But for any reactor to be worth building today, it would have to cost a lot less. That is unlikely, particularly since the regulations are written for inherently unsafe reactors, and this new safe-ish one would still need to conform to existing regulations, strictly needed or not.
Even relaxing regulations, it would still cost much more to operate than alternatives we now have available.
The US generates ~22% of its power from coal, about 900TWh. As such, coal kills 22,500 people per year in America - five and a half Chernobyl's per year. [2]
Meanwhile the US generates ~19% of its power from nuclear, about 800TWh. This accounts for 32 deaths. [2]
The disparity is so huge that even if you include the 2202 people who died evacuating the area around the Fukushima plant (who may well have evacuated anyways due to the tsunami), the nuclear power plant saved significantly more lives than it cost vs. having a coal, oil or natural gas plant there.
[edit] For those curious about the math, the Fukushima plant has a nameplate 5306MW capacity and operated from 1979-2011. That means it generated a maximum of ~1500TWh. Based on the numbers in [1]:
- A coal plant at Fukushima would have killed 36,900.
- An oil plant would have killed 27,600.
- A natural gas plant would have killed 4,200.
- A biomass plant would have killed 6,900.
- Hydro would have killed 1,950.
So the second-worst nuclear accident in history was safer than a natural gas power plant even if you count the worst-case metric of everyone in the area who died leaving the area they may have left anyways.
UK Extends Life of Third Coal Plant to Secure Winter Electricity https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-13/uniper-ex...
China's command economy creates perverse incentives that do not translate to the outer world. And, announced plans often do not reflect reality.
They have also announced >200 new nukes, and last I checked had broken ground on three. I doubt those will end up operating, even if finished, because of cost. But they might be, because [see above].
They're planning on building 30 reactors in OBOR countries by 2030 [2] and 150 domestic ones by 2035.
> China is one of the world's largest producers of nuclear power. The country ranks third in the world both in total nuclear power capacity installed and electricity generated, accounting for around one tenth of global nuclear power generated.
They're going to be a global nuclear powerhouse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-nuclearpower/china-...
They will produce a lot of kWh and displace a lot of CO2 in the meantime. But nowhere near what the same money spent on solar and wind would have.
This is projected to cause problems to the energy market's ability to provide reliable baseload power from now until the 2030s, but crucially, it's not government mandated. Coal plants are increasingly expensive to run, because renewables are eating their profits during the day and they're barely recouping that at night.
[0] https://www.leadingedgeenergy.com.au/blog/timeline-for-coal-...
Everybody's coal consumption in Europe will go up this year. One of the few viable quick replacements for gas is power plants that were about to be turned off.
Lots of people are even worried about CERN... monkey logic.
My province gets 90% of its electricity from hydro though, I'm glad I don't have to think about this issue too much
Oil, coal, gas, hydro, etc inflict casualties gradually and predictably. They are, generally speaking, not capable of the sudden region-wide catastrophic disasters that nuclear power is capable of. Those are rare events. The Poisson distribution, with regard to inflicting mass casualties, is completely different for nuclear power.
We haven't had a true nuclear catastrophe yet. We came close with Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, but those events were not nearly as bad as they could have been. The number of casualties could have been orders of magnitude higher.
In other words, our sample size with nuclear power is small. All it would take is one nuclear catastrophe and the safety stats averaged over the last century suddenly look much different.
No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. Passive safety is a given now.
Your emotion-driven conservatism has to be weighed against the real harms caused by other viable baseline power systems. Advocacy against nuclear power is advocacy for fossil fuels, like it or not.
I think your choice in phrasing speaks more to your emotional state than mine.
> No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl.
You are discounting the fact that many of the nuclear reactors that remain in operation today were designed decades ago and were built decades ago.
Of course newer nuclear technology is safer -- I don't think anyone would ever disagree with that. But we are considering the safety of nuclear power as it exists today. Why would we omit nuclear reactors that are currently in operation today (and will continue to be in operation for quite some time) from the discussion?
> But we are considering the safety of nuclear power as it exists today.
Even then, it's not a homogeneous blob of risk. There are different reactor designs, run by authorities of different competence levels, built at varying distances away from cities. There's no substitute for a case by case analysis.
I sense a hand-wavy aspect to the argument. I want some harder facts. What percentage of currently live reactors have an equal or greater risk than the Chernobyl plant? Is it 2% or 50%? Such distinctions make a big difference to the tail risk.
Current reactors are burner reactors. They cannot power the world (there is not enough sufficiently cheap uranium). To power the world, breeder reactors are needed.
Breeder reactors will burn the bred isotopes, either Pu isotopes or U-233. These isotopes, when fissioned, produce about half the delayed neutrons of U-235. As a result, reactors burning them are skating closer to the edge of prompt criticality than today's reactors. Chernobyl was a prompt criticality accident. A prompt criticality accident in a fast reactor (any breeder using Pu will be a fast reactor) is potentially much more serious than even Chernobyl.
Fukushima is older than Chernobyl. This type of thinking is how these catastrophes happen. People keep obsolete designs in operation for 50 years or more and basically make any safety gains today pointless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
No, it did not. That water was drained, precisely because of concerns that it would melt down and come into contact with water.
If it wasn't close, as you suggest, then why did a crew of people wade into highly radioactive water -- a probable suicide mission -- to manually operate the valves to drain the water?
> That water was drained, precisely because of concerns that it would melt down and come into contact with water.
Even if the concrete base under the reactor was breached, the water underneath had been drained. In retrospect this was unnecessary, but it added another layer of precaution.
Furthermore, what makes you think a potential explosion after coming into contact with water would be "massively" worse than the original reactor explosion? In case you aren't aware, the RBMK-1000 was a water cooled reactor. The explosion happened because the temperatures inside became so high that the pressure vessel ruptured. By comparison, the contact with the water beneath the reactor hall would not be trapped in a pressure vessel and wouldn't result generate such pressure.
What actually produced the most amount of nuclear contamination was the period of time when the fuel rods were exposed to atmosphere and burned. This put large amounts of contaminants - radioactive smoke, essentially - into the atmopshere.
However, it's not just Andrew Leatherbarrow who thinks so. All it takes is a simple Google search and you'll find reputable research papers hosted by the IAEA whose primary conclusion is that the accident could have been much worse. Here's one example: https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:18009127
I did not say that the IAEA paper was about molten rods hitting the coolant water. There is more than one way that Chernobyl could have been much much worse. According to the paper, different wind and rainfall could have made the disaster 200-400x worse in terms of radiation consequences to humans. To say that is significantly worse would be an understatement.
> Popular books have the incentive to garner sales - often through dramatization - not report accurate findings.
It seems like you've made up your mind and no amount of evidence to the contrary will change it. I don't think I'll bother to continue participating in this line of discussion.
This is a common myth (probably recently propagated by the scare-mongering TV series), but that mission was perfectly safe. Three men, equipped with dos meters, waded into the water and opened a valve, that was it. One died of a heart attack at 65 and the other 2 are still alive.
Furthermore, the operation was in the end unnecessary: there was no risk of such an explosion.
I guess the point is that it doesn't matter; if you believe something to be a probable suicide mission, then you don't do it unless you are very afraid that a disaster will otherwise occur.
But then you also have to question if their assessment of the risk of further disaster was also correct. But I guess subsequent studies have confirmed that high level of risk?
To stop this, loads of sand, boron, and lead were piled onto the ruptured reactor, eventually burying it. The concern is that the molten fuel rods underneath this blanket of material would melt through the concrete below and come into contact with water. But with no pressure vessel to contain the boiling water, it would not produced nearly as much pressure as the original failure.
> It was feared that if this mixture melted through the floor into the pool of water, the resulting steam production would further contaminate the area or even cause a steam explosion, ejecting more radioactive material from the reactor. It became necessary to drain the pool.[71] These fears ultimately proved unfounded, since corium began dripping harmlessly into the flooded bubbler pools before the water could be removed. The molten fuel hit the water and cooled into a light-brown ceramic pumice, whose low density allowed the substance to float on the water's surface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Bubbler_poo...
That line in the Wikipedia article seems to conflict with the book I read by Andrew Leatherbarrow "Chernobyl 01:23:40". In the book he states that if the water hadn't been drained and if the molten core had reached the water it "would have done unimaginable damage and destroyed the entire power station, including the three other reactors."
It's a shame that the Wikipedia article doesn't cite it's source on that claim. It would be interesting to reconcile the seemingly conflicting information.
And how, pray tell, would it have generated an explosion so large without a pressure vessel to build up pressure?
"5 serious accidents in 60 years represents an actual historic global annual risk of 1/12 or 8.3% per annum" [2]
"If no cooling system is working to remove the decay heat from a crippled and newly shut down reactor, the decay heat may cause the core of the reactor to reach unsafe temperatures within a few hours or days, depending upon the type of core."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_damage_frequency
[2] https://silo.tips/download/complexity-implies-unknowable-ris...
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_...
If you spend $200B on one plant, the economics of that are nuts, right, which is why we don't. You'd have to spend $200B on each plant, where nuclear you'd have spent $200B twice in the last 60 years. These are of course just ballpark numbers.
Which we can't do for ~any amount of money, and definitely not for 200 billion.
"Coal kills more people when working as designed" is a better comparison, and true.
Comparing things like this is like saying we shouldn't worry so much about opioid deaths because so many more people die in car crashes.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
The 'unfounded hysteria' is the only thing keeping the industry to account.
Only the most rudimentary linear models predict non-negligible diffuse loss of life from these events. More robust models predict minimal impact, or even a net positive impact on health! E.g. radiation hormesis models.
Props on winning the gaslighting olympics there.
Additionally 'negligible' in the context you used is still hundreds which is a great deal bigger than 1
"The total number of deaths already attributable to Chernobyl or expected in the future over the lifetime of emergency workers and local residents in the most contaminated areas is estimated to be about 4000. This includes some 50 emergency workers who died of acute radiation syndrome and nine children who died of thyroid cancer, and an estimated total of 3940 deaths [...] lifetime of about 600,000 people under consideration." - WHO https://apps.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index1.html
Chernobyl was a disaster but its death toll is equivalent to a month of North America's opioid epidemic.
But it's more than enough to make my point. The hypervigilance around nuclear is the only thing stopping monthly chernobyls, as evidenced by the sheer malice and incompetence exhibited in every nexus of power and danger we are not that hypervigilant about. Bringing up the opioid epidemic makes that point pretty clearly.
It's like arguing that dimethyl mercury is perfectly safe and should be used to fuel passenger liners in spite of costing many times as much and requiring you to bring your exhaust with you because the one time someone tried to use it as a rocket fuel someone with sense told them to go f themselves and to never call the chemistry lab where it was made again.
Find the deaths. We'd love to see better research.
> hypervigilance around nuclear is the only thing stopping monthly chernobyls
A few airliners caused thousands of deaths and billions of dollars of damage. Turns out that a lot of our infrastructure is dangerous. You should learn about dams!
But this is a reason to double-down on nuclear. Pretty much every existing reactor is bespoke because we didn't build all that many and technology was being developed the whole time. And they're still safer than everything else. Volume building would let us improve our design and perfect our execution.
> Bringing up the opioid epidemic makes that point pretty clearly.
Yes, virtue-signalers are the biggest problem in both cases. In nuclear it's the "green" fear mongering and in the opioid epidemic it's the "compassionate" free-drugs movement.
LNT is used at the low levels of nuclear accidents because the deaths are impossible to find (and because LNT is mechanistically plausible). They are lost in a sea of ordinary cancers, statistically undetectable by any practical experiment.
Note that there is no good evidence that LNT is incorrect. The NRC responded to a recent petition to abandon LNT with a polite slapdown of the petitioners, for this reason.
This does NOT mean cancers predicted by LNT can ignored. Regulation is not a game of technologies being innocent unless proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
If anything, nuclear stans should fear abandonment of LNT. Without it, the regulatory framework could become more conservative, with the assumption that the number of cancers caused is the maximum not ruled out by evidence. For low levels of radiation, this would result in LARGER estimates than from LNT.
No, this is the 'excess deaths' problem we just encountered estimating Covid fatalities. Either there are unexplained deaths that you can call low-dose deaths/illnesses, or there are not. If the influence per-person is so low it can't be detected that's the same as not causing many deaths/illnesses in the population.
> Note that there is no good evidence that LNT is incorrect.
Yes, there is. High natural background-radiation areas don't show an increase in cancers for residents.
> If anything, nuclear stans should fear abandonment of LNT
It's not a game and we aren't rooting for a team. We want the most accurate models.
> the assumption that the number of cancers caused is the maximum not ruled out by evidence.
This is the standard we should be using, but Chernobyl is the evidence you're talking about. We're actively developing the models based on observations.
> For low levels of radiation, this would result in LARGER estimates than from LNT.
No, that is the LNT model.
> excess deaths as in Covid
Deaths from a nuclear accident are much more diffuse than deaths from Covid were. Unlike the deaths from Covid, below a certain rate they are impossible to detect. The statistical noise in ordinary cancer deaths swamps them.
> Yes, there is. High natural background-radiation areas don't show an increase in cancers for residents.
This claim is directly rebutted by the NRC in their response to the LNT petition. The results cannot be disentangled from non-radiation effects on cancer rates. Epidemiology is a blunt instrument.
https://www.regulations.gov/document/NRC-2015-0057-0671
(look under "Comments Supporting the Petitions—Assertions That There Are No Observable Adverse Effects From Background Radiation")
> It's not a game and we aren't rooting for a team. We want the most accurate models.
No, what you want is something confirming your biases. This is apparent from this nonsense you are emitting, nonsense that is in direct contradiction to the non-cherry-picked and properly interpreted evidence.
> No, that is the LNT model.
Obviously not. There is some nonzero radiation level at which LNT is at the limit of statistical detectability. Below that radiation level, the effect by LNT becomes progressively weaker. So, at those lower radiation levels, the conservative estimate of the effect (as I defined it) will be larger than the prediction of LNT.
Safety costs money.
Traditional pressurized water reactors have their water under a pressure of 150 atm. A stovetop pressure cooker has a pressure of 2 atm. Sometimes pressure cookers explode, and it's not pretty. Now take that, multiply by 75, and make sure it's safe. There's only one way to do that: very thick steel walls. Walls that can only be made with huge forging presses, like in this eye-popping quote [1]
Westinghouse says that the minimum requirement for making the largest AP1000 components is a 15,000 tonne press taking 350 tonne ingots.
This is what keeps the costs sky-high.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
You're correct about the infrastructure needs to construct pressure vessels. That's a large part of why nuclear plants were cheaper when built at scale during the 1960s and 70s. It's a lot easier for heavy industry to recoup the investment of building a heavy press if they have an order of 40 pressure vessels instead of 4.
1. Which, by the way, resulted in no radiation exposures or lasting exclusion zone.
This is all just as true about steam pressure in coal power plants. In fact, we now build coal power plants that work with supercritical steam, at 220+ atmospheres.
Coal plants don't irradiate their steel with neutron radiation either, nuclear plants do, and it changes the material properties of the reactor structure over time.
(Near miss) Davis Besse
Soviet submarine K-19
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
there was a time nuclear was too cheap to meter. obviously we can't get that back, but it's likely that a nuclear-friendly environment lasting a decade or two can cut that levelized cost to half or less
> By the mid-1970s, it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[46]
> Over-commitment to nuclear power brought about the financial collapse of the Washington Public Power Supply System, a public agency which undertook to build five large nuclear power plants in the 1970s. By 1983, cost overruns and delays, along with a slowing of electricity demand growth, led to cancellation of two WPPSS plants and a construction halt on two others. Moreover, WPPSS defaulted on $2.25 billion of municipal bonds, which is one of the largest municipal bond defaults in U.S. history. The court case that followed took nearly a decade to resolve.[47][48][49]
> Eventually, more than 120 reactor orders were cancelled,[50] and the construction of new reactors ground to a halt.
> [..]
> The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible.[53]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
Or as, Hyman Rickover also called: "Father of the Nuclear Navy" said:
> An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:
> - (1) It is simple.
> - (2) It is small.
> - (3) It is cheap
> - (4) It is light.
> - (5) It can be built very quickly.
> - (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’).
> - (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components.
> - (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
> On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics:
> - (1) It is being built now.
> - (2) It is behind schedule.
> - (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem.
> - (4) It is very expensive.
> - (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems.
> - (6) It is large.
> - (7) It is heavy.
> - (8) It is complicated.
> The tools of the academic-reactor designer are a piece of paper and a pencil with an eraser. If a mistake is made, it can always be erased and changed. If the practical-reactor designer errs, he wears the mistake around his neck; it cannot be erased. Everyone can see it.
> The academic-reactor designer is a dilettante. He has not had to assume any real responsibility in connection with his projects. He is free to luxuriate in elegant ideas, the practical shortcomings of which can be relegated to the category of ‘mere technical details.’ The practical-reactor designer must live with these same technical details. Although recalcitrant and awkard, they must be solved and cannot be put off until tomorrow. Their solutions require manpower, time and money.
> Unfortunately for those who must make far-reaching decisions without the benefit of an intimate knowledge of reactor technology and unfortunately for the interested public, it is much easier to get the academic side of an issue than the practical side. For a large part those involved with the academic reactors have more inclination and time to present their ideas in reports and orally to those who will listen. Since they are innocently unaware of the real but hidden difficulties of their plans, they speak with great facility and confidence. Those involved with practical reactors, humbled by their experience, speak less and worry more.
i acknowledged in my comment that "too cheap to meter" isn't a realistic expectation for a modern plant, and made the point that nuclear can be _more affordable than it is now_. for further technical reading you can start with https://world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/onlin...
davis besse: no deaths
k-19: fire in a submarine caused by a hydraulics failure doesn't seem to have anything to do with civilian power plants
K-19 is an example of a loss of coolant event due to failure of a pipe, resulting in 22 deaths. (Not civilian, but it's an example of the forces at play- civilian reactors have more layers of protection of course).
The point being, it happens.
So... jobs created, businesses paid - sounds like a functioning economy to me.
We still build them to not spring a leak, which I think was OP's point.
This is one of the reasons nuclear power plants have relatively low power plant efficiency, they want more headroom before stuff breaks.
You really cannot argue with statistics. Per unit energy, nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than coal.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
There is no comparison to a nuclear power plant or its operating policies.
I consider nuclear proliferation as one of the largest dangers we are facing, because it increases the risk of conflicts escalating into nuclear wars. So everything that makes it harder to create nuclear weapons is important.
While one reactor did generate power, they were all designed to create plutonium, which you would not otherwise do if power was the only goal. Thus, the blame is solely on weapons development, not power.
> The weapons production reactors were decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, and the Hanford Site became the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup. Besides the cleanup project, Hanford also hosts a commercial nuclear power plant, the Columbia Generating Station, and various centers for scientific research and development, such as the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Fast Flux Test Facility and the LIGO Hanford Observatory. In 2015 it was designated as part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Generating_Station
> The nuclear power plant was also known as Hanford Two, with Hanford One being the 800 MWe power generating plant connected to the N-Reactor (decommissioned in 1987), a dual purpose reactor operated by the Atomic Energy Commission: producing plutonium for the nuclear weapons stockpile, as well as generating electricity for the grid.[4]
...
> Columbia's original NRC license to operate was scheduled to expire in December 2023. In January 2010, Energy Northwest filed an application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a 20-year license renewal – through 2043. In May 2012, the NRC approved the 20-year license renewal.
And as we get better at working with molten salt engineering it probably makes more sense to apply it to solving the solar baseload problem and not nuclear:
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-molten-salt-corrosive-effect.h...
The biggest problem are the shrooms because they actively seek out and concentrate radioactive elements in the ground for whatever reason, and then the wildlife eats the contaminated shrooms, further concentrating the radioactivity.
[1] https://www.jagd-bayern.de/jagd-wild-wald/jagdpraxis/rcm-mes...
[2] https://www.merkur.de/bayern/bayern-wildschweine-tschernobyl...
It would be interesting to see an insurance companies evaluation of a person living downstream of a hydro electric dam where the energy is made from wind, solar and hydro, compared to a person who live near a nuclear plant where the energy is just made from that single plant.
I think the risk that you have to evade everyone in a circle of several kilometers has to be taken into account.
This is the reason why the numbers for the Chernobyl accident range from 30 direct vitims to 985,000 premature deaths.[1] The estimates (for nuclear ar well as for non-nuclear) also vary widely depending on the underlying models, where a lot of uncertainties about causes and effects are located. Just one example: Cancer develops over decades, because a cell needs to accumulate a certain amount of mutations to turn into a cancer cell. Exposure to radioactivity causes mutations. How does that influences premature deaths? Well, the more reputable studies estimate an average value of lost lifetime. As a statistical average it applies to everyone. Taken individually, this means that everyone has a premature death due to nuclear (as well as to any other risk whatsoever).
[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
Heavy metal poison also develops over decades and enter the body primarily from the food we eat. Lead ruptures the red blood cells, causes axons of nerve cells to degenerate, and kills the immune system. It is a slow and painful death.
As a statistical thing, every item of steel that we own or use, like electricity and the devices that run on it, has statistically produced some amount of lead waste. It causes a half million death per year, it causes almost 10% of intellectual disability of otherwise unknown cause, and every single person who lives has some amount in them. You and me have lead in our bodies.
We can look at the waste from a nuclear plant, collected and stored and estimate how dangerous or how long it will last. We can also look at the waste from a mine, generally put in a large hole next to it, and estimate how dangerous it is and how long it will last. Mines generally also release a lot of waste into the environment like radon, so we can estimate how much radiation a mine is legally allowed to release into the environment compared to a nuclear plant.
If you live anywhere near a mine or where mining activity has occurred in the past, the level of radiation in the air from mining pollution is measurable and quite dangerous in high levels. Here in Sweden it's also recommended that people buy and own detectors in case those levels are too high, and fans with filters to remove the radon particles down to acceptable levels. There is no such recommendation for people who live near nuclear plants, despite Sweden having several of those. A bit odd is it not?
#1: Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Those numbers will be reliant on industry data, and regulatory agencies that have always wanted to keep the reactors in operation. And can we REALLY get a proper accounting of Chernobyl?
#2: Solid fuel rod waste: it needs to be transported, stored, and all the safety on that is reliant on massive amounts of human faith and they can't forecast all the things that could cause solid fuel waste to be spilled, stolen, lost. Transport requires shutting down infrastructure (like the tunnels on the interstate in colorado).
#3: Humans are necessary to monitor and maintain the safety systems. If a solid fuel rod starts runaway fissions, and the heat skyrockets, recovering from that is hard. Unlike MSRs which have a plug and a cooling pool that automatically compensates for an out of control reaction, no active systems, no human intervention, solid fuel rods require constant active monitoring.
Even if you have the safety systems for real reliable statistics (and how could you know without as good a safety system as the MSR/LFTR plug), solid fuel rod processing, reprocessing transport, safety, lack of scalability will simple never be price competitive with solar/wind/battery. It can't compete with the current prices, and solar/wind/battery is still improving on 5-15% annual improvements.
Obviously that won't continue indefinitely, but the point is that there is NO WAY to predict a stable price to even target for a 10-years-out nuclear project for a gigantic dome solid fuel rod reactor (and you HAVE to go big with solid fuel rod, both by design and for any chance of economics).
But an MSR is much much much more scalable. This BYU one is closet sized, the original ORNL reactor that got politically axed was closet sized. I guess liquid is more "spillable" than solid rods, so it does have that going against it, but still. Very glad to see MSR research.
Now, I'm pretty sure a "scalable" MSR will require as many or more of the headaches of solid rod nuclear waste transport, because I think that you can't compress all the equipment/processes for fission product extraction in a reactor, it would probably require transport to a central processing plant. But it might simply reduce to a "dangerous chemical" problem rather than "dangerous nuclear waste" problem, a distinction that is a political one.
It may be that all fission and fusion research these days is a moot point in the shadow of solar/wind/battery economics, but I think it is valuable and I think there's a place for nuclear in the economy.
A couple of years later, a professor actually invited me through the door I had tried to enter. It turned out that what was inside was a gymnasium-sized physics lab that was directly under one of the larger quads on campus. The major feature of which was a particle accelerator. That fact might have been known among the physics majors, I don't know, but it certainly was not common knowledge among the student body at large.
There was another "secret" door on campus, this one into the hill that the Honors Department main building sat on. That door led to the nuclear reactor. Nobody ever tried to get in there.
For a private, mostly undergraduate university, it had a surprisingly active nuclear physics research group.
1. https://www.theonion.com/byu-scientists-convert-matter-into-...
If a reactor were located on the BYU campus, I would expect it to be public knowledge and tracked by the IAEA.
I used to work on the top floor of MEB for many years and had the opportunity to see the glow of the core in the pool of water on multiple occasions.
Tangentially, the UofU reactor made national headlines last week when a student made a threat to blow it up if the football team lost [3].
1. https://www.deseret.com/2011/3/16/20370414/university-of-uta...
2. https://dailyutahchronicle.com/2016/11/04/sole-nuclear-react...
3. https://www.sbnation.com/platform/amp/college-football/2022/...
https://universe.byu.edu/2011/06/13/byu-once-housed-undergro...
The reactor was not particularly common knowledge in mid-2000s, even among engineering students. It became a bit more common knowledge later for various reasons (apparently it was in the news now when I tried to google the 1/2 watt reactor - so I couldn't find much on that now)
When your lead in is gibberish (that would be obvious to anyone with half a brain) it’s hard to take the rest seriously.
It just shows that the author is incapable of meaningful thinking about the topic.
Expecting to read anything better than technobabble rah-rah from such a source is kinda like expecting a milk cow to give you 20-year single-malt whisky.
This always dovetailed really nicely, in our opinion, with the plain-as fact that Zion and her people would eventually become the envy of the world and could already easily out-engineer the best engineers that any first-world nation could muster.
The same sentiments were shared in classrooms with the topic of internet backbones "coincidentally passing right through" Utah. Why was it so? Well because the Lord would insist upon only the finest internet for his finest priesthood-engineers in the latter days, of course. Do your home teaching!
There were lots of lovely little cultural side-alley discussions like these.
https://www.deseret.com/2011/3/16/20370414/university-of-uta...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_research_react...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_E._Jones#Links_covering...
Molton salt reactor designs work because of the properties of salts. The radioactive fuel is mixed into the Molton salt and the salt acts as a moderator for the reaction. Using molten salt lets you achieve much higher temperatures(and thus higher energy outputs) without having to use a high pressure vessel like in modern light water reactors. There are a couple other properties that remove the possibility of a runaway reaction, and they can develop some unique safety mechanisms like a 'freeze plug' that can be passively triggered to drain the fuel medium into a storage tank to cool down in the event of catastrophic failures of other systems.
There are a lot of hidden cost with nuclear. One of them is security. You say micro reactor, I say dirty bomb waiting to happen. Nuclear reactors of any kind need expensive security. The most cost effective way to do that is to locate them in a handful of places that are easy to keep secured. So, the notion of distributing tens, or hundreds, of thousands of micro reactors all over the place kind of goes against that. It would be a security nightmare. From a cost point of view this is disastrous. And it only takes 1 incident for this whole industry to grind to a halt and get bogged down in lengthy and expensive security related bureaucracy and hassle.
So, the more like scenario is that they start replacing conventional reactors as a somewhat cheaper alternative. Instead of hosting 1 or 2 of those, we'll have dozens/hundreds of them on a single site. But that site will still be a nuclear plant with all the security and safety procedures that come with those. And those won't be free. So, it will make building those sites more cost effective than they are right now. But it will still be expensive.
It's very hard to compete with wind, solar, and batteries on cost. They need very little security and you can just install them wherever. Like in your house. There are now consumer grade products that allow you to more or less go off grid. It's cheap enough that people are starting to do this to reduce their overall cost. And cost keeps on dropping. Cheaper panels, cheaper batteries, less exotic materials, easier mass production, etc.
I struggle to find people who properly scale statistical models up from “a handful” to “hundreds”. It always seems to catch people by surprise when they end up spending time every week or two dealing with failures instead of a couple a year. Odds multiply, and .99^100 is a lot smaller than your brain thinks it is.
This is not true. Water is the moderator in a light-water reactor. Without water the reaction will stop. Water is both the coolant and the moderator, unlike the Chernobyl reactors, which used graphite as the moderator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat#Power_reactors_in_s...
Some reactor designs can dissipate this decay heat with passive circulation, while most require active pumps to circulate for a while after shutdown. But a total loss of coolant is probably going to result in fuel melt to some extent.
Not that it's all sunshine and roses, hot salts are awfully corrosive and that's been the primary engineering challenge on every MSR design I'm aware of.
> This is not true. Water is the moderator in a light-water reactor. Without water the reaction will stop. Water is both the coolant and the moderator, unlike the Chernobyl reactors, which used graphite as the moderator.
If what you're saying is true then the Fukushima reactors would not have melted down. It's important to remember that there's not just one nuclear reaction going on there's the initial fission of the uranium fuel, and then there's several following radioactive decays that generate heat as well.
Even spent fuel rods that have been removed from reactors for years still have to be kept in a chilled storage pool.
Sounds too good to be true! Wonderful news
This article is reporting on what amounts to a paper reactor design, which is really only like 0.1% of the effort required to actually build. There are plenty of good design concepts for new and fancy reactors, but the business, regulatory, and PR side is where the challenges really lie. But this general technology is a big deal in the nuclear industry right now and it seems increasingly likely that they might finally build some fully functional plants. Strictly speaking they are actively building some MSR plants, but given the not great track record of actually completing new nuclear plants I will remain pessimistic until they are ready to go critical.
There are approximately a squillion conceptual designs floating around for next-generation nuclear reactors and a distinct shortage of actually existing examples of next-generation nuclear reactors.
These designs are meltdown-proof as well. Because the fuel is fluid, you place a "plug" underneath it that is cooled to keep it solid. If the reactor starts to get out of control, the plug melts. The liquid fuel then flows into a shallow pool, which if you understand the basic concept of neutron economy/chain reactions, drops the criticality beneath a sustainable chain reaction.
I believe some designs also self-regulate temperature in other ways because hotter salts expand, which reduces criticality as well, so there is a secondary mechanism of regulation, but I'm hazy on that.
Anyway, all that is 1960s knowledge/facts on MSR that is well known. I applaud this because it means MSRs are getting back to the square zero, but there isn't anything on costs, materials innovations, or other design enhancements to the ORNL design.
And I just see YET ANOTHER MSR reactor coming online in academia, just as China boots up their prototype scaled-up reactor. And yet, 60 years of previous academia didn't boot a single one. This is the third I believe, in addition to new projects at the national laboratories.
Maybe there actually was a policy against approving any MSR reactor for the last 60 years, which is what Kirk Sorensen of one of the LFTR companies contends, but all the mainstream nuclear folks say there wasn't institutional bias against this design.
I'm a huge MSR stan, I'm glad this project is starting at the "closet sized" scale which I think is key to an economical nuclear reactor.
> While the DoE is still investigating ways to get around these showstopping corrosion issues, Prof Memmott said that his team, along with Alpha Tech Research Corp (the commercializing partner for the BYU MSR, and of which Memmott is director and senior technical advisor), believe they have solved the problem by removing water and oxygen from the salt, massively reducing the corrosion issue.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/05/micro_molten_salt_rea...
This is a much more informative article, thanks.
There's absolutely no risk of anyone being able to get their hands on some to make plutonium if there were hundreds of breeder reactors in every country.
And you definitely can't just buy it as a private citizen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGw6fXprV9U
Yes, if you got a hold of a ton of depleted uranium and had a ton of money to burn and somehow hide what you were doing, you could breed it. I suspect you could use a neutron generator to do it at a staggering cost in electricity (at least until you bred enough fissile material that you could then sustain the rest of the breeding). But these things are not remotely trivial, and they're definitely not cheap. They're within reach of large corporations, but not small ones or individuals.
If you can run it on thorium and U233, then it's much easier to run on U238 and Pu.
Also you wouldn't need 'heaps' of depleted uranium, just the number of depleted uranium bullets lodged in the wall in the average afghani kindergarten
Apparently, it is helpful to think of this design in the same way as fractional distillation of oil is viewed by industry: each stage of the process results in valuable byproducts.
In this case cobalt and other rare elements.
That's a 25' trailer sized deisel generator. Or one 1.5-3MW wind turbine. Or 3 truckloads of regular solar panels. Or one truckload of glassless solar panels. Storage for such a system is one or two truckloads more of batteries.
These other options also have the benefit of existing.
These reactors pose no risk. The radioisotopes produced could in principle be misused, but are in any case very small amounts.
Maybe we should just build them in orbit without containment and let the surface tension hold it together or something.
Also, this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck for transport to remote areas and can power up to 1000 homes.
Suppose you could use some kind of ablative material, but that would mean short runtimes and constant expensive refits. Sort of like taking that wingless plane and launching it with a trebuchet. Technically makes it fly but not in any way that matters.
I'm still not seeing how this prevents corrosion of the system, but I suspect their actual intention is to just run it in short bursts for material production which may be workable to some extent. A transmutation reactor of sorts?
Industrially speaking, short bursts resulting in spent reactor components might be manageable for recycling, too, so it definitely seems interesting.
I’m curious as to how long it would take for the corrosive action to cause unmanageable defects in the reactor.
Until then, I’m afraid it’s been sufficiently demonized that no amount of logic or will overcome the emotional fear of it.