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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

Page 7 looks like a single point of failure in an unmaintainable device that would result in a well of contaminated water a mile deep that passes through the water table that could never be fixed.

This sounds like the worst idea I've ever heard.

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Also, I want to add on that if you lined the well to be single fault tolerant you will still be vulnerable to a high likelihood common mode failure from a single seismic event. Truly just the worst. The founders should pivot hard and fast.

There are plenty of places with very little seismic activity.

And how many of those places have we dug 100 mile deep holes in and verified nothing has changed? It doesn't take a long look at fracking research to see that this line of reasoning doesn't hold.

100 miles deep? What are you even talking about?

100x one mile deep holes. It's in the deck you linked for a 1 GWe plant.

You're describing everywhere with mines and a stable seismic environment. Arizona comes to mind.

A mile is much deeper than the water table is almost everywhere. It is normally solid bedrock. So you can just fill the hole with concrete and dirt.

How does this look in practice? You need the water to transfer the heat, so in response to a disaster that has already poisoned the water table you need to extract the water, put it somewhere, and backfill with concrete, all while you've already poisoned miles of water table and fighting from spreading further and damning all workers involved? For what gain?

How exactly will it poison the water table? A mile is in bedrock much deeper than the water table and any radioactive material will stay at the bottom because it is heavy.

I think the goal is if it melts down, nobody should be very bothered. You just leave it there and plug the well

Exactly, the bedrock is an excellent containment material.

Yeah, 76cm (30 inch) bore hole drilling with standard oil&grass rig.

Fill with unshielded nuclear reactor of novel type: super skinny.

Gently lower down until depth of 1 mile is reached.

Repeat 1000x for a 1 GWe power plant.

What could possibly go wrong? Best horror story of the year in 15 slides.

Please explain exactly what you think can go wrong.

Seismic activity collapses the well, trapping the nuke underground, pressure find a way to escape via polluting a "faraway" aquifer, or it doesn't escape and you have a man-made volcano in the works

Not a plausible scenario. The entire point is that by putting these a mile deep that they will self seal if they meltdown. They can't create a volcano because they are only 15MW. If the reactor cracks the radioactive fuel can only contaminate the water at the very bottom of the shaft because it is a mile deep.

I thought the whole point was that the reactor would deliver heated water to the surface for utilization...? But it will magically stop trying to do that if the main shaft is obstructed and there is a separate egress?

Or are you also burying the turbine and power lines a mile deep?

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