Certainly a safer reactor is strictly better. But keep in mind that nuclear power is already one of the safest, and by many metrics the safest forms of power generation [1] [2]. Like shark attacks, people's attention gravitates towards the exotic ways people meet their ends.
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.
There's currently no forge of this size in the US. There's one of 15000 t, but it can only take ingots of 175 t, half of what AP1000 needs.
> 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]
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.
No, because if a coal plant springs a leak, if you are really unlucky a worker might die from a steam explosion. If a nuclear plant springs a leak the, if you are lucky, reactor containment is irradiated with high level waste, resulting in tens of billions of dollars worth of clean up liabilities. If you are unlucky you leak high level waste into the environment.
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.
Engineering is all about designing stuff that will break under specific situations. 150ATM with a safety factor of 2 or more needs to be stronger than 220ATM with a safety factor of 1.
This is one of the reasons nuclear power plants have relatively low power plant efficiency, they want more headroom before stuff breaks.
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).
Not so great if you have to price insurance against such accidents into your operating costs; while competing against other means of electricity generation.
Three mile island is believed to have caused between 0 and 2 deaths from very low level radiation exposure to the general population. Better cancer treatments means this could very well be 0, but we don’t actually know.
You couldn’t confirm any deaths if the expectation was 2,000 deaths from cancer either. Even for cancers that are highly correlated with specific causes an environmental risk could have caused the original cell’s mutation(s).
Interesting. I see that 'subsidized' renewables are broken out separately from non-subsidized in one of the charts, are there similar subsidies for conventional energy sources?
that's largely a regulatory and volume issue, as most post-three-mile-island safety improvements have been driven by fear rather than need, and as nuclear has been stigmatized to the point we're still recovering from brain drain to Computer Stuff
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
There has never been a time nuclear was too cheap to meter, that is an urban legend spread by nuclear proponents.
> 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]
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.
tl;dr. "too cheap to meter" is just a well-known turn of phrase to point to the fact that nuclear is inherently affordable over time if you control for certain factors.
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...
The vast majority of nuclear power plants were built before three mile island[1] and the accompanying increases in regulation. The point is, even the supposedly "unsafe" nuclear plants are still vastly safer than most energy sources.
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.
The effects on the population in the vicinity of Three Mile Island from radioactive releases measured during the accident, if any, will certainly be nonmeasurable and nondetectable. During the course of the accident, approximately 2.5 million curies of radioactive noble gases and 15 curies of radioiodines were released. These releases resulted in an average dose of 1.4 mrem to the approximately two million people in the site area.
This average dose is less than 1 % of the annual dose from both natural background radiation and medical practice. The 1.4-mrem dose may also be compared to differences in annual doses in background radiation from living in a brick versus a frame house, an additional 14 mrem/yr; or living in the high altitude of Denver rather than in Harrisburg, an additional 80 mrem/yr.
The effect of this total dose, averaged over the population in the site area, will be to produce between none and one additional fatal cancer, and between none and one and a half total (fatal and nonfatal) cancers, over the lifetime of the population. In comparison, approximately a half million cancers are expected to develop from all other sources during this same lifetime.
I don't know if the previous commenter was saying all two million people in the area are black, but they do seem to be considered in this Three Mile Island Report volume 1[1], page 153.
This is probably not true. Most studies showed no significant increase in radioactivity at all outside the plant. Some very motivated anti-nuclear groups argued otherwise, but... I guess it depends on who you want to believe.
Is it really true that the forging of the pressure vessel is a significant portion of the billions of dollars it costs to build a nuclear power plant? As your link explains, there are plenty of forges capable of pressing the required ingot size - located in the places that have modern steel fabrication capability. The US doesn’t have these presses because the US doesn’t have modern steel plants - not because the presses are super rare.
I just listened to a freakonomics podcast episode on this topic where they pointed out that more people die of opioid overdose in the US alone every year than have died from the entire history of nuclear reactor incidents.
Coal power kills 25 people per TWh vs nuclear's 0.04 (yes that includes the 4000 people who died at Chernobyl and the 1 person who died in Fukushima). [1]
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.
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.
> This is comprehensively untrue... Your emotion-driven conservatism...
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?
This comment is more clear. Above, you spoke about nuclear power in the abstract. It's good to separate out the discussion like this. Because nuclear power can mean building new safe reactors, or it can mean keeping really old ones running.
> 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.
> No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. Passive safety is a given now.
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.
>No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as 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.
"Assuming there are 500 reactors in use in the world, the above CDF estimates mean that, statistically, one core damage incident would be expected to occur somewhere in the world every 40 years for the 2003 European Commission estimated average accident rate or every 100 years for the 2008 Electric Power Research Institute estimated average accident rate." [1]
"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."
No, Chernobyl is about as worst- ase-scenario as it gets. Entire pressure vessel exploded, with no secondary containment. It was exposed to atmosphere for days (weeks?) Before being sealed.
Chernobyl was very close to being massively worse. At Chernobyl, the melting down core never came into contact with the large pool of cooling water, but it was awfully close. Had it come into contact with all that water, an enormous explosion would have resulted. Some experts say that explosion could have irradiated half of Europe.
That is from the TV show and was never a real danger to irradiate half of Europe.
> 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.
> These fears ultimately proved unfounded, since corium began dripping harmlessly into the flooded bubbler pools before the water could be removed.
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.
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.
You are certainly entitled to your own opinion, but others who have researched Chernobyl far more extensively than you or I have concluded differently. I am primarily getting my information from Andrew Leatherbarrow's book "Chernobyl 01:23:40". In that book, he states essentially the same as I have above.
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
Popular books have the incentive to garner sales - often through dramatization - not report accurate findings. Furthermore, the paper you linked was talking about wind directions not about whether the molten rods reached the cooling water underneath the reactor room floor.
> Furthermore, the paper you linked was talking about wind directions not about whether the molten rods reached the cooling water underneath the reactor room floor.
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.
> why did a crew of people wade into highly radioactive water -- a probable suicide mission
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'm getting my information from the book written by Andrew Leatherbarrow "Chernobyl 01:23:40" -- not a TV series. Yes, according to him they are still alive. It was indeed a probable suicide mission because all of them went in there knowing full well there was a significant chance that they would die from it.
So, considering that all three of them lived, was it that they got exceedingly lucky, or was their risk assessment just way off?
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?
I always get a chuckle when people insist that the water under the core posed such a serious threat, given that the original reactor failure was caused by boiling water. The reactor failed after the water temperatures produced too much pressure for the pressure vessel to handle. This exposed fuel rods to atmosphere, at which point they started to burn. This is what produced the most severe contamination (that, plus debris from the reactor being ejected).
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.
A coal plant at Fukushima would have killed zero people if we spent $200 billion on containing its pollution, which is what it will cost to clean up the radiation from the disaster.
You'd also need to clean up the pollution of all the other coal plants, the counterparties to the hundreds and thousands of reactors that didn't explode.
Which we can't do for ~any amount of money, and definitely not for 200 billion.
And the CO2 emissions leading to rising sea levels? The mining? Transportation? And where do you plan to put the concentrated uranium, thorium, mercury, etc from the smoke stacks? These are all large sources of deaths.
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.
It is very likely that the “4000 deaths” due to Chernobyl is vastly overstated. Actual deaths at the event and subsequently are less than 100. The 4000 is a projection that ignores the biological process of mutation repair.[0]
This completely ignores the stress of evacuating your home town and the fear of having been exposed to a cancer inducing radiation dose. Even ignoring those it would have resulted in poverty for those who had to evacuate and poverty is a known cause of increase death rates
Those were included in the 4000 deaths number. Irrational though the fears were they led to people believing they were 'contaminated' and committing suicide, etc. The overwhelming majority of cancers were thyroid which is 99% curable (especially when you're monitoring for it).
Damn, nuclear seems so obvious... though I know some people really hate it too. Seems very controversial, and fascinating in a way. Maybe we will react the same way to other advanced technologies, like cloning, AI, stem cell research e.g. instant shutdown.
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
Most Australian coal plants are scheduled to be closed before 2050, and the timeline keeps shifting closer and closer, because they're becoming economically unsustainable[0].
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.
China announces plenty, breaks ground for less. Announcements are cheap. Likely, they will not end up fueling any they do build, because it costs too much.
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].
China has tripled their nuclear power generation capacity from 2014 to 2019 and doubled its share of the generation mix. I can't think of any reason they'd stop.
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.
Germany's energiewende has been faltering even before the energy crisis. But what do they have a ton of? I can guarantee their coal consumption will increase before it even thinks about dropping again.
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.
Europe is in a war-driven crisis. Conclusions from activities of the moment would be foolish, at best, where not actually disingenuous and duplicitous.
Good news, the data in [1] shows its safety numbers have it sandwiched between wind and solar, and it produces significantly less greenhouse gas emissions than either (although all three are roughly zero).
Considering that the deaths from fentanyl, alone, in the US are over 60,000 per year, while the total number of documented deaths due to radioactive incidents is well under 1000, the podcast is on safe grounds making that statement.
I think this is something that really needs more publicity. When I was younger street drugs were stupid, but generally speaking not lethally so. Now anytime you take an illicit substance you're risking a fentanyl OD.
Came here to comment on the same thing - that was a great episode. I also found very interesting the stat that, per unit of electricity produced, nuclear has been safer than basically every other form of power production.
How is that a useful or interesting comparison? What matters, as someone downthread referenced, are measures like deaths per unit of electricity produced when compared to other forms of power generation.
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.
Those are addressed in the episode as well and nuclear is at the bottom of the list. The order of deaths per unit of electricity were Coal > Oil > Gas > Hydro > Rooftop Solar > Wind > Nuclear[1]
Considering we're in the middle of a raging opioid epidemic where tens of thousands are dying each year from 100% preventable deaths is not a decent metric for what trade offs we should expect with the basics of powering our society. Even in the face of a 75 year history.
This kind of logic smacks of something that ends with Logan's Run.
The overwhelming problem with nuclear reactors is not safety, but extreme cost to build and to operate.
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.
As a nuclear proponent and recovering addict, that is a ridiculous comparison. If nuclear fission felt like oxy and was as accessible, there would be a lot more deaths.
It can be a dangerous industry, especially if you started in the early days when less was known about safety standards. My dad started in nuclear at Hanford in the mid 70s and died of some weird cancer when he turned 70.
Hanford was for nuclear weapons, not nuclear power. It's a subtle difference, but very important. The mess created there was unnecessary for and not driven by nuclear power, and is like saying solar photovoltaic is bad because coal power plants also generate electricity.
He worked at building the power station, it is still operational. Hanford has a complex history with experimental reactors, a reactor to produce plutonium (I think?) and a full power producing reactor that provides ~8% of WA’s power needs.
There are no running reactors at Hanford and haven't been since 1987.
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.
> 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.
Connected in the sense that one can be used as a political cover for the other, sure. But nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons require very different enrichment regimens. Nuclear fuel usually requires 20-30% enriched uranium. By comparison nuclear weapons require plutonium, enriched to near 100%.
The cover is not only political. One needs the plutonium for enrichment in the first place. If you fuel a nuclear power plant with uranium-235, you get it is a by-product.
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.
The civil nukes have all been massively subsidized by military usage. There is no way a purely civil program could have shouldered those costs. And even the civil program is, separately, massively subsidized. Again, no civil plant could afford to operate without.
Incorrect. Plenty of nuclear programs did not receive subsidies from military usage. South Korea, Japan, Sweden, and Belgium for instance all have significant nuclear power development but no nuclear weapon programs.
Current nuclear power runs the risk of a trillion dollar nuclear meltdown. This is something that solar and wind plants don't need to bother thinking about or mitigating, which makes the engineering vastly simpler.
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:
That is great. We should replace all those hydroelectric dams located in Europe so we don't need to run the risk of flooding. We could try to replace them all with molten salt storage, but I am unsure how much you would need to cover the electrical need of Europe for a few winter weeks/months.
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.
Nuclear is too expensive and slow to deploy to address climate change, it is being used as a distraction in order to slow down the transition from fossil fuels, just like hydrogen was.
Nuclear is so far the fastest way to deploy clean energy and has been for decades. I don't see how the most sustainable source of energy is a distraction?
Fallout doesn't respect human borders. To this day, if you're out hunting game or collecting shrooms in Bavaria, you're well advised to test them for Chernobyl fallout, and required to do so if you're selling it [1]. At the start of last year, that made the headlines in regional papers as a hunter brought in a wild pig that was twice over the radiation limit [2].
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.
I hear people bring up this argument in the Netherlands as well, when talking about the safety of nuclear energy. It does not put me entirely at ease though; the Netherlands is a very tiny and pretty crowded place, you are never far away from a city. And these statistics might very well be based on reactors build in remote areas. Would it still be safe to build one near dense populations, or would a future incident drastically skew the data?
IT kind of is true. Sure the death count directly attributable to nuclear reactors is low. But Fukushima caused the entire countries fleet to shut down - to the present day. Safety isn't about lives lost or health, it's about financial repurcussions of the accidents - both directly at the site (take a look at Fukushima today) and the effects on the wider industry, shutting down all the surrounding power plants, and forcing Japan to import fossils to compensate.
And in the 60s the nuclear industry was just as confident of its own safety as it is today.
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).
But they didn’t. Because it cost money. Because the cost of building a new reactor was so large that they decided to take risks and run the old one past it’s lifetime.
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.
I don't think it's wrong to call them safer. The point is that the older designs were more than safe enough to keep risks considerably lower than hydroelectricity and fossil fuels.
There are two things I would dissent on the statistics. Actually, three.
#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.
I agree nuclear power can be safer, however, those nuclear safety figures need to be taken with a pinch of salt. If these figures would wear a football shirt, it would list the nuclear industry as a major sponsor.
This is a vastly skewed measurement that excludes 99% of the deaths from chernobyl and fukuhsima which are diffuse and externalised. That aside, nuclear in its current form remains safe enough (probably still the safest). However, this stops being true the moment we blindly accept it and let chevron build a nuclear reactor with no oversight in brazil.
The 'unfounded hysteria' is the only thing keeping the industry to account.
"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
The older Linear-No-Threshold model had predicted that small doses of radiation would have a small chance of causing harm. From watching Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and nuclear accidents, our new models have thresholds below which radiation has no observable effect over the lifetime.
Chernobyl was a disaster but its death toll is equivalent to a month of North America's opioid epidemic.
That estimate is contested by many people including the scientists who did the work it was based on.
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.
> Find the deaths. We'd love to see better research.
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.
> LNT is used at the low levels of nuclear accidents because the deaths are impossible to find [...] lost in a sea of ordinary cancers, statistically undetectable by any practical experiment.
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.
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.
(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.
> This is a vastly skewed measurement that excludes 99% of the deaths from chernobyl and fukuhsima which are diffuse and externalised.
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.
Wow. Radiation and having enough money drained from the public purse for cleanup to shut down every fossil fuel plant in the country is good for you acshuallly. That's a new one.
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
These statistics are pure propaganda. The data is not weighted. The one-year time period favours nuclear energy, whose waste has the potential to kill for millions of years. And the most problematic issue is that "mortality rate" can mean anything: If you count only accidents with more or less immediate deaths, you will always get a low number for nuclear; if you estimate prematurely deaths you can dramatically increase the number depending on the limit for "premature" (10 years, 1 year, 1 months, 1 week, 1 day, 1 hour, ...?).
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).
There is a waste that will have the potential to kill until the end of time and produced at most mines, and exist in every electronics. Heavy metals. Lead is obviously the big one. It has the potential to kill every single person who will ever exist, and it is unearthed when we mine iron and stored as waste.
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.
I agree with you that other environment polutions have also very long-lasting effect. But my main point was that isolated statements like "half million death per year" are predenting to be meaningful, but are not when you look closely. (Reminds me on "coast length" -- but this is another story.)
The problem of counting things that potentially can lead to deaths is that we will have more potential deaths than we will have people. If we are counting the decay time, we end up with things like lead which has a very very long decay time.
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?
True story: I was once almost kicked out of BYU for attempting to sneak into one of the tunnels under the campus.
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.
I doubt the veracity of your claims because according to multiple sources [1][2] the only nuclear reactor in the state of Utah is located on the bottom floor of the Merrill Engineering Building on the University of Utah campus.
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].
Most of the infrastructure is likely still there as well. Most DOE facilities are also junkyards with the metals moratoriums so I could imagine this applies to BYU.
I went to BYU and while there are tunnels under campus, they're basically just for maintenance, steam and electrical conduits, etc. as far as I'm aware.
The U has a 100kW reactor TRIGA reactor. It's at the western side of the Merrill Engineering Building (as well as decommissioned 1 or 5 Watt (IIRC) reactor from the ~50s that migrated over there from physics building at one point).
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)
That reminds me of my time at Harvard when I was a high schooler. Me and my buddy were wandering around campus when we saw a door propped slightly open that said "Warning: Cyclotron." Naturally we thought that sounds awesome so we wandered in to see what a cyclotron was. After a bit of explanation we ended up getting an unofficial tour. It was really neat!
Honestly the fact that the very opening line is “ A nuclear power plant produces 8000 times more power than fossil fuels” tells you the author doesn’t understand what they’re writing about. That’s gibberish. What does that even mean? Are they saying the average nuclear plant produces about as much electricity as the average 8,000 fossil fuel plants? (A cursory Google search tells me they’re actually both pretty close to a gigawatt.) Are they saying that a given amount of nuclear fuel produces 8,000 times as much energy as the same amount of natural gas, and thus just comparing energy density of fuel? That seems entirely worthless to know without dozens of other factors (fuel cost, disposal, environmental concerns, etc.).
When your lead in is gibberish (that would be obvious to anyone with half a brain) it’s hard to take the rest seriously.
The article is from a major university's Communications (aka Marketing) Dept.
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.
I would guess that too but that’s also entirely pointless to know. It doesn’t tell you anything of use. Even if nuclear fuel were the same energy density as fossil fuels it might not change the calculus much at all.
It just shows that the author is incapable of meaningful thinking about the topic.
Typical university press release doesn't provide any actually useful information. They have not created anything yet. They have a theoretical design. Good for them I guess.
Well they still might build it I imagine. Back in the 1960s BYU had a working nuclear reactor right on campus which produced a few watts of energy. The underground facility was standing at least as recently as the early 1990s.
I was thinking maybe it was some kind of research reactor like the ones we have at Oregon State University and Reed. But you weren't kidding, it was a -tiny- reactor. Atomics International L77, 10 whole watts. Licensed from 1967 to 1992 [0]
Those stairs lead to the underground physics labs. They're mostly just optic, electron imaging, and solid state labs. There is a linear accelerator and an oil drum housing some equipment from the Steven E. Jones days [1].
I remember hearing about that, and related rumors from coworkers at BYU. They'd point out the guesstimated location as we drove around campus in our work vehicle.
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.
That's because in the 1800s a 200 foot wide transcontinental telegraph right of way was established, running past the Great Salt Lake. Hundreds of cables have been laid along it. There's a string of datacenters along that line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_transcontinental_railroa...
The basic problem for molten salt reactors is that the various reactor components are exposed to hot salts that are chemically corrosive, while being bombarded by radioactive particles. This is of course quite problematic when your goal is a machine that makes electricity consistently for decades. Equipment failures are an inevitability because we don't know of a material that has the properties needed to survive this kind of application. Curious how (or whether) the authors of this design approached this problem.
At least two MSR startups plan to deal with that problem with replaceable reactor cores, which only have to last five years or so before being shipped off to a cleanup facility. We do have materials that can manage that.
It will be interesting to see how well it holds up to prolonged testing. There have been numerous previous attempts at this sort of thing and they have all failed. It turns out to be highly significant because the added cost of preparing, testing, inspecting, and then replacing any damaged parts in contact with the liquid sodium adds up to a considerable expense that challenges the business case for the reactor in the first place. Good that this is being worked on, but bad they seem not to be aware of the serious problems other molten sodium reactors have faced.
From what I’ve read so far (see other links in discussion), the researchers believe that they have likely solved the corrosion issue by removing hydrogen and oxygen from the salt equations.
High school chemistry reminder. A salt is a compound made up of a metallic and nonmetallic element ionically bonded together. There are hundreds of different salts.
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.
The trick is going to be doing this cheaply. The cost gap with renewables is close 2 orders of magnitude already and actually widening. Reducing the safety cost is nice of course. Which is what this does. But is it enough? I don't think so.
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.
> Instead of hosting 1 or 2 of those, we'll have dozens/hundreds of them on a single site.
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.
> If there is not enough of a flow of cooling water, the rods can overheat, and the entire facility is at risk for a nuclear meltdown.
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 there is not enough of a flow of cooling water, the rods can overheat, and the entire facility is at risk for a nuclear meltdown.
> 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.
What you say is technically true but you're forgetting decay heat. The fission chain reaction stops if you remove the moderator in any sane LWR design, but the fission products in the fuel will continue to generate a very large amount of heat for quite a while. This is exactly what happened at Fukushima and TMI.
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.
Which is equally a problem for a molten salt cooled reactor. If molten salt leaks or pumping stops, you're gonna get a melt down in your molten salt reactor. That is unless it's running at super low power density - like these guys: https://www.usnc.com/mmr/, in which case no cooling fluid or pumps or even natural circulation apparently are needed to keep it from melting.
MSRs have an advantage though, which is that a) fuel melt is obviously not a problem and b) if something goes out of control you can pull the drain plug and drain the entire core into multiple crit-safe storage pools. Dividing the core up makes it easier to handle the decay heat, though I'm not sure exactly what any of the current designs do in detail. Fission product gasses are also not soluble in most of the fuels for MSRs which makes it easy to filter them out, which reduces the decay heat to an extent and also mitigates the reactivity feedback effect from xenon that caused the Chernobyl disaster.
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.
Yeah. Decay heat is still an issue but MSRs are inherently able to handle it without the need for active circulation. Plus if shit hits the fan like I said you can drain it out just with gravity into a configuration that is inherently unable to continue fissioning without the need for reactivity control. So, no need for active circulation pumps nor a reliance on the ability to ram in control rods... plus you don't have to worry about hydrogen buildup either.
The idea with molten salt reactors is that they aren't under pressure. Unlike a PWR, which will experience more and more pressure until it pops, a molten salt reactor can handle much higher temperatures before failing. This enables designs that can be passively cooled in the event of coolant system failures.
>A typical nuclear power plant is built with a little over one square mile to operate to reduce radiation risk, with the core itself being 30 ft x 30 ft. Memmott’s molten salt nuclear reactor is 4 ft x 7ft, and because there is no risk of a meltdown there is no need for a similar large zone surrounding it. This small reactor can produce enough energy to power 1000 American homes. The research team said everything needed to run this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck bed; meaning this reactor can make power accessible to even very remote places.
Worth noting that this is not really unique to this reactor, and the technology has been around for a while (including multiple basically fully functional demonstration reactors that were actually built, though they weren't without their technical issues). NuScale's design for example, which is a very different design and also much closer to commercial rollout, has a similar greatly reduced need for a large exclusion zone (https://www.nei.org/news/2018/nrc-staff-agrees-smrs-wont-nee...).
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.
Not sure it's a justified reduction in exclusion zone. Yes they use natural circulation to get rid of decay heat if they lose power to run the pumps. BUT - they can't tolerate multiple reactors failing at once, they can't tolerate more than a few control rod withdrawals, and they can't tolerate clogging of the flow channels - Which to me, seem like reasonable accidents. The reduction in exclusion zone for NuScale is not really justified. If they get a reduction, you can expect the big ass reactors to also get a reduction...
I don't really have an opinion on the matter and I think it's a fair question to consider, but I'll note that the NRC obviously disagrees. At least for now, they could always change their mind. I seriously doubt that they would ever significantly reduce the exclusion zone requirement for any of the currently operating reactors, however.
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.
It's a MSR reactor. 4' x 7', so again close to the "closet sized" ORNL original MSR reactor. Yes, liquid fuel can be used to separate valuable fission products, and the reactor can be used to breed new fuel or other substances. Should be able to reprocess/consume solid fuel rod waste.
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.
Molten salt reactors are nothing new. It would be truly wonderful if these folks solved the corrosion issues associated to circulating high-temperature molten salts, and the ever-recurring military-grade fuel proliferation risk associated with spent fuel reprocessing.
I found another article that talked about corrosion:
> 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.
> Memmott said the micro-design doesn't require salt to flow through the reactor, which means it eliminates components such as pumps and valves, as well as solving operational problems, like having to tightly control flow and temperature.
I can’t speak to the durability of the reactor design, but the reprocessing is one of the primary points of the design.
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.
Good thing no-one who has incentive to build an A bomb or dirty bomb had any U238 shot into their house and/or children or anything.
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.
My comment was really about uranium 233, which is very hard to work with because it emits a ton of gamma rays, which means you need great care in handling it as you purify it from thorium waste.
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.
And my comment was about what happens if one of the proposed millions of megawatt reactors required for this to contribute meaningfully to decarbonisation gets under the control of someone powerful with motives to become a nuclear threat.
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
1.25MW on a truck isn't really a particularly compelling power density for abundant and too cheap to meter energy of the future, especially for claims that aren't at all grounded in reality or anything that will pass safety.
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.
Lots of universities have their own reactor. They are used for a variety of research activities almost all wholly unrelated to generating power. Sometimes you need samples irradiated, other times you need to synthesize custom radioactive isotopes.
These reactors pose no risk. The radioisotopes produced could in principle be misused, but are in any case very small amounts.
Not sure how that helps if it melts through the floor, the truck, and then the ground when you turn it on. Those are nice improvements, but adding a red paint job to a wingless plane won't make it fly.
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.
Hmm so if I understand this right, the idea is to coat the reactor in salt with progressively lower melting points? And I suppose each layer is supposed to extract some specific element.
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?
When we have rolling blackouts with regularity and the realization of a years long deindustrialization process sets in, the public attitude towards nuclear power will shift.
Until then, I’m afraid it’s been sufficiently demonized that no amount of logic or will overcome the emotional fear of it.
Molten-salt-fuel reactors, as described in this article, are so lame... "It's already melted, so you can't have a meltdown." lol. More seriously, molten-salt-cooled reactors have some promise. They use solid fuel, usually TRISO particles, and are cooled by molten salts, which we now have lots of experience with from solar salt power systems. If you are interested in molten-salt-cooled reactors outside of this lame press release - check out Kairos Power. Their website sucks butt. But they are the main player in molten salt-cooled reactors - funded by Henry Laufer of Renaissance Technologies. They actually have the engineering and financing to get one built, and are reportedly doing very well with NRC (unlike OKLO - lolz).
Not an expert but I believe the problem with molten salt cooling for reactor designs is that nuclear reactors are supposed to just run for decades without replacing major parts that are really really radioactive. We just can't make parts that will resist corrosion for that long, unlike those towers in the solar arrays, which are really simple to replace. That's leaving aside the high level waste recovery, disposal, and storage issues.
Certainly a safer reactor is strictly better. But keep in mind that nuclear power is already one of the safest, and by many metrics the safest forms of power generation [1] [2]. Like shark attacks, people's attention gravitates towards the exotic ways people meet their ends.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
2. https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#what-are-the-safes...
> by many metrics the safest forms
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]
There's currently no forge of this size in the US. There's one of 15000 t, but it can only take ingots of 175 t, half of what AP1000 needs.This is what keeps the costs sky-high.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
> 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]
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.
No, because if a coal plant springs a leak, if you are really unlucky a worker might die from a steam explosion. If a nuclear plant springs a leak the, if you are lucky, reactor containment is irradiated with high level waste, resulting in tens of billions of dollars worth of clean up liabilities. If you are unlucky you leak high level waste into the environment.
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.
> No, because if a coal plant springs a leak
We still build them to not spring a leak, which I think was OP's point.
Engineering is all about designing stuff that will break under specific situations. 150ATM with a safety factor of 2 or more needs to be stronger than 220ATM with a safety factor of 1.
This is one of the reasons nuclear power plants have relatively low power plant efficiency, they want more headroom before stuff breaks.
How often has this happened?
Three Mile Island
(Near miss) Davis Besse
Soviet submarine K-19
three mile island: no deaths
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
Indeed no deaths, but very expensive.
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.
> very expensive
So... jobs created, businesses paid - sounds like a functioning economy to me.
Not so great if you have to price insurance against such accidents into your operating costs; while competing against other means of electricity generation.
Three mile island is believed to have caused between 0 and 2 deaths from very low level radiation exposure to the general population. Better cancer treatments means this could very well be 0, but we don’t actually know.
"zero confirmed deaths after 43 years" sounds a lot like "zero confirmed deaths" to me
You couldn’t confirm any deaths if the expectation was 2,000 deaths from cancer either. Even for cancers that are highly correlated with specific causes an environmental risk could have caused the original cell’s mutation(s).
So not often at all?
And now we've circled back to "sky-high cost".
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Interesting. I see that 'subsidized' renewables are broken out separately from non-subsidized in one of the charts, are there similar subsidies for conventional energy sources?
that's largely a regulatory and volume issue, as most post-three-mile-island safety improvements have been driven by fear rather than need, and as nuclear has been stigmatized to the point we're still recovering from brain drain to Computer Stuff
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
There has never been a time nuclear was too cheap to meter, that is an urban legend spread by nuclear proponents.
> 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.
tl;dr. "too cheap to meter" is just a well-known turn of phrase to point to the fact that nuclear is inherently affordable over time if you control for certain factors.
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...
Of course they don't, they just gas the atmosphere causing ~10^5–10^6 deaths per year. /s
You really cannot argue with statistics. Per unit energy, nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than coal.
The vast majority of nuclear power plants were built before three mile island[1] and the accompanying increases in regulation. The point is, even the supposedly "unsafe" nuclear plants are still vastly safer than most energy sources.
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.
You don't happen to have a source for that would you?
[1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5395798 (PDF)
If you believe this, I have some land on the Big Island to sell you.
Note the weasel wording "averaged over". Nobody had "averaged over" exposure. Instead, the people who were most exposed were most exposed.
It would be good to see the data that supports, or at least clarifies, what you're saying.
Thank you for adding race baiting to this nuclear energy discussion, that's sure to cool tempers
What makes you say there weren't radiation exposures? Plenty of locals had radiation burns and lasting effects.
This is probably not true. Most studies showed no significant increase in radioactivity at all outside the plant. Some very motivated anti-nuclear groups argued otherwise, but... I guess it depends on who you want to believe.
Is it really true that the forging of the pressure vessel is a significant portion of the billions of dollars it costs to build a nuclear power plant? As your link explains, there are plenty of forges capable of pressing the required ingot size - located in the places that have modern steel fabrication capability. The US doesn’t have these presses because the US doesn’t have modern steel plants - not because the presses are super rare.
Furthermore, presses of this capacity aren't exactly cutting edge. The US built several on the 1950s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
And we built steel presses ages ago, I can’t believe we can’t build a new one if we really needed one.
Actually, the nuclear steam supply system is only a small part of the cost of a nuclear power plant (about 12%).
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
I just listened to a freakonomics podcast episode on this topic where they pointed out that more people die of opioid overdose in the US alone every year than have died from the entire history of nuclear reactor incidents.
Coal power kills 25 people per TWh vs nuclear's 0.04 (yes that includes the 4000 people who died at Chernobyl and the 1 person who died in Fukushima). [1]
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.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
[2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
I think this logic is flawed.
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.
This is comprehensively untrue.
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.
> This is comprehensively untrue... Your emotion-driven conservatism...
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?
This comment is more clear. Above, you spoke about nuclear power in the abstract. It's good to separate out the discussion like this. Because nuclear power can mean building new safe reactors, or it can mean keeping really old ones running.
> 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.
> No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. Passive safety is a given now.
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.
>No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as 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.
"Assuming there are 500 reactors in use in the world, the above CDF estimates mean that, statistically, one core damage incident would be expected to occur somewhere in the world every 40 years for the 2003 European Commission estimated average accident rate or every 100 years for the 2008 Electric Power Research Institute estimated average accident rate." [1]
"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...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat
No, Chernobyl is about as worst- ase-scenario as it gets. Entire pressure vessel exploded, with no secondary containment. It was exposed to atmosphere for days (weeks?) Before being sealed.
Chernobyl was very close to being massively worse. At Chernobyl, the melting down core never came into contact with the large pool of cooling water, but it was awfully close. Had it come into contact with all that water, an enormous explosion would have resulted. Some experts say that explosion could have irradiated half of Europe.
That is from the TV show and was never a real danger to irradiate half of Europe.
> 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...
> These fears ultimately proved unfounded, since corium began dripping harmlessly into the flooded bubbler pools before the water could be removed.
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.
> would have done unimaginable damage and destroyed the entire power station, including the three other reactors
And how, pray tell, would it have generated an explosion so large without a pressure vessel to build up pressure?
Even the real consequences of the catastrophe are difficult to establish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
> At Chernobyl, the melting down core never came into contact with the large pool of cooling water, but it was awfully close.
No, it did not. That water was drained, precisely because of concerns that it would melt down and come into contact with water.
Yes, it did come close.
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?
I answered this in my comment:
> 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.
You are certainly entitled to your own opinion, but others who have researched Chernobyl far more extensively than you or I have concluded differently. I am primarily getting my information from Andrew Leatherbarrow's book "Chernobyl 01:23:40". In that book, he states essentially the same as I have above.
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
Popular books have the incentive to garner sales - often through dramatization - not report accurate findings. Furthermore, the paper you linked was talking about wind directions not about whether the molten rods reached the cooling water underneath the reactor room floor.
> Furthermore, the paper you linked was talking about wind directions not about whether the molten rods reached the cooling water underneath the reactor room floor.
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.
> why did a crew of people wade into highly radioactive water -- a probable suicide mission
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'm getting my information from the book written by Andrew Leatherbarrow "Chernobyl 01:23:40" -- not a TV series. Yes, according to him they are still alive. It was indeed a probable suicide mission because all of them went in there knowing full well there was a significant chance that they would die from it.
So, considering that all three of them lived, was it that they got exceedingly lucky, or was their risk assessment just way off?
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?
How many people would have died if that happened?
I always get a chuckle when people insist that the water under the core posed such a serious threat, given that the original reactor failure was caused by boiling water. The reactor failed after the water temperatures produced too much pressure for the pressure vessel to handle. This exposed fuel rods to atmosphere, at which point they started to burn. This is what produced the most severe contamination (that, plus debris from the reactor being ejected).
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.
A coal plant at Fukushima would have killed zero people if we spent $200 billion on containing its pollution, which is what it will cost to clean up the radiation from the disaster.
You'd also need to clean up the pollution of all the other coal plants, the counterparties to the hundreds and thousands of reactors that didn't explode.
Which we can't do for ~any amount of money, and definitely not for 200 billion.
And the CO2 emissions leading to rising sea levels? The mining? Transportation? And where do you plan to put the concentrated uranium, thorium, mercury, etc from the smoke stacks? These are all large sources of deaths.
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.
It is very likely that the “4000 deaths” due to Chernobyl is vastly overstated. Actual deaths at the event and subsequently are less than 100. The 4000 is a projection that ignores the biological process of mutation repair.[0]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_...
This completely ignores the stress of evacuating your home town and the fear of having been exposed to a cancer inducing radiation dose. Even ignoring those it would have resulted in poverty for those who had to evacuate and poverty is a known cause of increase death rates
Those were included in the 4000 deaths number. Irrational though the fears were they led to people believing they were 'contaminated' and committing suicide, etc. The overwhelming majority of cancers were thyroid which is 99% curable (especially when you're monitoring for it).
Damn, nuclear seems so obvious... though I know some people really hate it too. Seems very controversial, and fascinating in a way. Maybe we will react the same way to other advanced technologies, like cloning, AI, stem cell research e.g. instant shutdown.
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
Coal is being phased out. There is no point in talking about coal.
Is it? Has anyone told China, India, and Australia that yet?
Most Australian coal plants are scheduled to be closed before 2050, and the timeline keeps shifting closer and closer, because they're becoming economically unsustainable[0].
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-...
Or the UK.
UK Extends Life of Third Coal Plant to Secure Winter Electricity https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-13/uniper-ex...
Wars trigger emergency measures. It would be extremely foolish to project this as a trend.
Who is building new coal plants? Who does not have plans to close coal plants? Who is exploring for new coal reserves?
China is building new coal plants. https://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/press/7488/plans-for-new...
China announces plenty, breaks ground for less. Announcements are cheap. Likely, they will not end up fueling any they do build, because it costs too much.
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].
China has tripled their nuclear power generation capacity from 2014 to 2019 and doubled its share of the generation mix. I can't think of any reason they'd stop.
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-...
And then will mothball them all in a few years when they become unable to produce at a competitive cost.
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.
Germany's energiewende has been faltering even before the energy crisis. But what do they have a ton of? I can guarantee their coal consumption will increase before it even thinks about dropping again.
Faltering how?
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.
Europe is in a war-driven crisis. Conclusions from activities of the moment would be foolish, at best, where not actually disingenuous and duplicitous.
Good news, the data in [1] shows its safety numbers have it sandwiched between wind and solar, and it produces significantly less greenhouse gas emissions than either (although all three are roughly zero).
Considering that the deaths from fentanyl, alone, in the US are over 60,000 per year, while the total number of documented deaths due to radioactive incidents is well under 1000, the podcast is on safe grounds making that statement.
I think this is something that really needs more publicity. When I was younger street drugs were stupid, but generally speaking not lethally so. Now anytime you take an illicit substance you're risking a fentanyl OD.
Came here to comment on the same thing - that was a great episode. I also found very interesting the stat that, per unit of electricity produced, nuclear has been safer than basically every other form of power production.
I’m going to have to listen to that episode. I wonder what deaths occurred from Solar? Perhaps a lot installers have fallen off roofs?
How is that a useful or interesting comparison? What matters, as someone downthread referenced, are measures like deaths per unit of electricity produced when compared to other forms of power generation.
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.
Those are addressed in the episode as well and nuclear is at the bottom of the list. The order of deaths per unit of electricity were Coal > Oil > Gas > Hydro > Rooftop Solar > Wind > Nuclear[1]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
Considering we're in the middle of a raging opioid epidemic where tens of thousands are dying each year from 100% preventable deaths is not a decent metric for what trade offs we should expect with the basics of powering our society. Even in the face of a 75 year history.
This kind of logic smacks of something that ends with Logan's Run.
The overwhelming problem with nuclear reactors is not safety, but extreme cost to build and to operate.
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.
As a nuclear proponent and recovering addict, that is a ridiculous comparison. If nuclear fission felt like oxy and was as accessible, there would be a lot more deaths.
I agree.
"Coal kills more people when working as designed" is a better comparison, and true.
"In a day" would be more accurate.
It can be a dangerous industry, especially if you started in the early days when less was known about safety standards. My dad started in nuclear at Hanford in the mid 70s and died of some weird cancer when he turned 70.
Hanford was for nuclear weapons, not nuclear power. It's a subtle difference, but very important. The mess created there was unnecessary for and not driven by nuclear power, and is like saying solar photovoltaic is bad because coal power plants also generate electricity.
They simply tossed used chemicals on the ground out back. It was wartime.
There is no comparison to a nuclear power plant or its operating policies.
He worked at building the power station, it is still operational. Hanford has a complex history with experimental reactors, a reactor to produce plutonium (I think?) and a full power producing reactor that provides ~8% of WA’s power needs.
There are no running reactors at Hanford and haven't been since 1987.
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.
1987: https://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/HanfordHistory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
> 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.
The two are deeply connected. See Iran.
Connected in the sense that one can be used as a political cover for the other, sure. But nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons require very different enrichment regimens. Nuclear fuel usually requires 20-30% enriched uranium. By comparison nuclear weapons require plutonium, enriched to near 100%.
The cover is not only political. One needs the plutonium for enrichment in the first place. If you fuel a nuclear power plant with uranium-235, you get it is a by-product.
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.
The civil nukes have all been massively subsidized by military usage. There is no way a purely civil program could have shouldered those costs. And even the civil program is, separately, massively subsidized. Again, no civil plant could afford to operate without.
Incorrect. Plenty of nuclear programs did not receive subsidies from military usage. South Korea, Japan, Sweden, and Belgium for instance all have significant nuclear power development but no nuclear weapon programs.
"Military" does not, by itself, imply nuclear weapons.
Current nuclear power runs the risk of a trillion dollar nuclear meltdown. This is something that solar and wind plants don't need to bother thinking about or mitigating, which makes the engineering vastly simpler.
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...
That is great. We should replace all those hydroelectric dams located in Europe so we don't need to run the risk of flooding. We could try to replace them all with molten salt storage, but I am unsure how much you would need to cover the electrical need of Europe for a few winter weeks/months.
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.
It doesn't if you build them away from cities, which many countries are capable of doing.
Not many countries in Europe though. You also need a water source like a lake or river, which is where towns tend to be.
Well there won't be many towns left unless we start to build alot more nuclear thanks to climate change.
Nuclear is too expensive and slow to deploy to address climate change, it is being used as a distraction in order to slow down the transition from fossil fuels, just like hydrogen was.
Nuclear is so far the fastest way to deploy clean energy and has been for decades. I don't see how the most sustainable source of energy is a distraction?
Fallout doesn't respect human borders. To this day, if you're out hunting game or collecting shrooms in Bavaria, you're well advised to test them for Chernobyl fallout, and required to do so if you're selling it [1]. At the start of last year, that made the headlines in regional papers as a hunter brought in a wild pig that was twice over the radiation limit [2].
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...
I hear people bring up this argument in the Netherlands as well, when talking about the safety of nuclear energy. It does not put me entirely at ease though; the Netherlands is a very tiny and pretty crowded place, you are never far away from a city. And these statistics might very well be based on reactors build in remote areas. Would it still be safe to build one near dense populations, or would a future incident drastically skew the data?
Very important point. Calling new designs safer is buying into the narrative that older designs are unsafe, which is simply untrue.
It's like saying new t-shirts are more wearable.
IT kind of is true. Sure the death count directly attributable to nuclear reactors is low. But Fukushima caused the entire countries fleet to shut down - to the present day. Safety isn't about lives lost or health, it's about financial repurcussions of the accidents - both directly at the site (take a look at Fukushima today) and the effects on the wider industry, shutting down all the surrounding power plants, and forcing Japan to import fossils to compensate.
I've said before, and it bears repeating, that Fukushima was the worst environmental disaster in living memory.
Because journalists and activists spun it into a near-total shutdown of new nuclear production, and for no other reason.
Maybe we should steer clear of power sources that can cause the worst environmental disaster in living memory, regardless of the mechanism.
If new reactors like this one can avoid such outcomes where the old ones cannot, it's a decided improvement.
> that Fukushima was the worst environmental disaster in living memory.
By what metric? The exclusion zone has been completely lifted. The amount of radiation released into the ocean is negligible.
Read the second sentence.
Fukushima was designed in the 60s. Had they updated the design to next gen the accident wouldnt have happened
And in the 60s the nuclear industry was just as confident of its own safety as it is today.
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).
But they didn’t. Because it cost money. Because the cost of building a new reactor was so large that they decided to take risks and run the old one past it’s lifetime.
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.
> But Fukushima caused the entire countries fleet to shut down - to the present day
No, overreaction to Fukushima caused the shutdowns.
Politicians caused that, not a power plant.
>We need to do something, this is something, egro we must do it.
You can't fix stupid.
I don't think it's wrong to call them safer. The point is that the older designs were more than safe enough to keep risks considerably lower than hydroelectricity and fossil fuels.
It’s like the polyseyster revolution on fabrics, or as the researcher describes it “a new silicon chip”, for nuclear reactors.
The bar of safety (or comfort) changes with the times.
Modern designs are intended to be “intrinsically” or “inherently” safe, unlike older designs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherent_safety
Tying your shoes is simple. I'd still market the auto-laces from Back to the Future as "simpler".
It’s weird to me to reduce safety to numbers of deaths. If a kitchen machine chops of a lot of fingers of users I wouldn’t call it safe.
I think the risk that you have to evade everyone in a circle of several kilometers has to be taken into account.
Coal causes even more respiratory illnesses than deaths.
There are two things I would dissent on the statistics. Actually, three.
#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.
I agree nuclear power can be safer, however, those nuclear safety figures need to be taken with a pinch of salt. If these figures would wear a football shirt, it would list the nuclear industry as a major sponsor.
One day we're going to learn that the Fukushima nuclear disaster happened because there was a shark in that tsunami who attacked the power plant.
Don't give them new idea for a new Sharknado Spinoff Sharknado: The Rising Shark
That would be when Sharknado will have truly jumped the shark.
Godzilla vs Sharknado!
Sharkzilla.
This is a vastly skewed measurement that excludes 99% of the deaths from chernobyl and fukuhsima which are diffuse and externalised. That aside, nuclear in its current form remains safe enough (probably still the safest). However, this stops being true the moment we blindly accept it and let chevron build a nuclear reactor with no oversight in brazil.
The 'unfounded hysteria' is the only thing keeping the industry to account.
Chernobyl was a disaster but its death toll is equivalent to a month of North America's opioid epidemic.
That estimate is contested by many people including the scientists who did the work it was based on.
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.
> That estimate is contested
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.
> Find the deaths. We'd love to see better research.
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.
> LNT is used at the low levels of nuclear accidents because the deaths are impossible to find [...] lost in a sea of ordinary cancers, statistically undetectable by any practical experiment.
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.
Wow, so much wrongness...
> 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.
Linear No-Threshold doesn't account for bioaccumulation of radioisotopes which is the more likely source of radiation-related disease and death.
> This is a vastly skewed measurement that excludes 99% of the deaths from chernobyl and fukuhsima which are diffuse and externalised.
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.
Wow. Radiation and having enough money drained from the public purse for cleanup to shut down every fossil fuel plant in the country is good for you acshuallly. That's a new one.
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
These statistics are pure propaganda. The data is not weighted. The one-year time period favours nuclear energy, whose waste has the potential to kill for millions of years. And the most problematic issue is that "mortality rate" can mean anything: If you count only accidents with more or less immediate deaths, you will always get a low number for nuclear; if you estimate prematurely deaths you can dramatically increase the number depending on the limit for "premature" (10 years, 1 year, 1 months, 1 week, 1 day, 1 hour, ...?).
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...
There is a waste that will have the potential to kill until the end of time and produced at most mines, and exist in every electronics. Heavy metals. Lead is obviously the big one. It has the potential to kill every single person who will ever exist, and it is unearthed when we mine iron and stored as waste.
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.
I agree with you that other environment polutions have also very long-lasting effect. But my main point was that isolated statements like "half million death per year" are predenting to be meaningful, but are not when you look closely. (Reminds me on "coast length" -- but this is another story.)
The problem of counting things that potentially can lead to deaths is that we will have more potential deaths than we will have people. If we are counting the decay time, we end up with things like lead which has a very very long decay time.
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?
True story: I was once almost kicked out of BYU for attempting to sneak into one of the tunnels under the campus.
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.
I doubt the veracity of your claims because according to multiple sources [1][2] the only nuclear reactor in the state of Utah is located on the bottom floor of the Merrill Engineering Building on the University of Utah campus.
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/...
A quick Google search reveals they had a nuclear reactor till 1992.
https://universe.byu.edu/2011/06/13/byu-once-housed-undergro...
Most of the infrastructure is likely still there as well. Most DOE facilities are also junkyards with the metals moratoriums so I could imagine this applies to BYU.
I went to BYU and while there are tunnels under campus, they're basically just for maintenance, steam and electrical conduits, etc. as far as I'm aware.
There's also an underground data center under the computer science building.
BYU Scientists Convert Matter Into Mormonism [1]
1. https://www.theonion.com/byu-scientists-convert-matter-into-...
The U has a 100kW reactor TRIGA reactor. It's at the western side of the Merrill Engineering Building (as well as decommissioned 1 or 5 Watt (IIRC) reactor from the ~50s that migrated over there from physics building at one point).
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)
That reminds me of my time at Harvard when I was a high schooler. Me and my buddy were wandering around campus when we saw a door propped slightly open that said "Warning: Cyclotron." Naturally we thought that sounds awesome so we wandered in to see what a cyclotron was. After a bit of explanation we ended up getting an unofficial tour. It was really neat!
Honestly the fact that the very opening line is “ A nuclear power plant produces 8000 times more power than fossil fuels” tells you the author doesn’t understand what they’re writing about. That’s gibberish. What does that even mean? Are they saying the average nuclear plant produces about as much electricity as the average 8,000 fossil fuel plants? (A cursory Google search tells me they’re actually both pretty close to a gigawatt.) Are they saying that a given amount of nuclear fuel produces 8,000 times as much energy as the same amount of natural gas, and thus just comparing energy density of fuel? That seems entirely worthless to know without dozens of other factors (fuel cost, disposal, environmental concerns, etc.).
When your lead in is gibberish (that would be obvious to anyone with half a brain) it’s hard to take the rest seriously.
The article is from a major university's Communications (aka Marketing) Dept.
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.
Maybe his next article will be about antimatter?
It's an odd point but I believe they referring to energy density of fission vs fossil.
I would guess that too but that’s also entirely pointless to know. It doesn’t tell you anything of use. Even if nuclear fuel were the same energy density as fossil fuels it might not change the calculus much at all.
It just shows that the author is incapable of meaningful thinking about the topic.
Typical university press release doesn't provide any actually useful information. They have not created anything yet. They have a theoretical design. Good for them I guess.
Well they still might build it I imagine. Back in the 1960s BYU had a working nuclear reactor right on campus which produced a few watts of energy. The underground facility was standing at least as recently as the early 1990s.
I was thinking maybe it was some kind of research reactor like the ones we have at Oregon State University and Reed. But you weren't kidding, it was a -tiny- reactor. Atomics International L77, 10 whole watts. Licensed from 1967 to 1992 [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_research_react...
Was this where that set of stairs that went down into the ground outside North-ish of the ESC went?
Those stairs lead to the underground physics labs. They're mostly just optic, electron imaging, and solid state labs. There is a linear accelerator and an oil drum housing some equipment from the Steven E. Jones days [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_E._Jones#Links_covering...
IIRC it was on the hill south of the testing center.
I remember hearing about that, and related rumors from coworkers at BYU. They'd point out the guesstimated location as we drove around campus in our work vehicle.
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.
Early internet backbone certainly did pass though Utah because University of Utah was one of the original four implementation points (IMP) of ARPANET
U of U also has a small, 100 kilowatt reactor. The BYU one is news to me but I didn't have much connection to that school. https://www.civil.utah.edu/graduate-nuclear-engineering/
https://www.deseret.com/2011/3/16/20370414/university-of-uta...
That's because in the 1800s a 200 foot wide transcontinental telegraph right of way was established, running past the Great Salt Lake. Hundreds of cables have been laid along it. There's a string of datacenters along that line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_transcontinental_railroa...
The basic problem for molten salt reactors is that the various reactor components are exposed to hot salts that are chemically corrosive, while being bombarded by radioactive particles. This is of course quite problematic when your goal is a machine that makes electricity consistently for decades. Equipment failures are an inevitability because we don't know of a material that has the properties needed to survive this kind of application. Curious how (or whether) the authors of this design approached this problem.
At least two MSR startups plan to deal with that problem with replaceable reactor cores, which only have to last five years or so before being shipped off to a cleanup facility. We do have materials that can manage that.
Do they get processed as waste or is there some intresting tech for cleaning them out?
The newly published patent is for something described as a “salt wall” if that helps your imagination.
It will be interesting to see how well it holds up to prolonged testing. There have been numerous previous attempts at this sort of thing and they have all failed. It turns out to be highly significant because the added cost of preparing, testing, inspecting, and then replacing any damaged parts in contact with the liquid sodium adds up to a considerable expense that challenges the business case for the reactor in the first place. Good that this is being worked on, but bad they seem not to be aware of the serious problems other molten sodium reactors have faced.
From what I’ve read so far (see other links in discussion), the researchers believe that they have likely solved the corrosion issue by removing hydrogen and oxygen from the salt equations.
Why use salt at all then? Aren’t there other materials with similar properties?
High school chemistry reminder. A salt is a compound made up of a metallic and nonmetallic element ionically bonded together. There are hundreds of different salts.
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.
The trick is going to be doing this cheaply. The cost gap with renewables is close 2 orders of magnitude already and actually widening. Reducing the safety cost is nice of course. Which is what this does. But is it enough? I don't think so.
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.
> Instead of hosting 1 or 2 of those, we'll have dozens/hundreds of them on a single site.
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.
If I have learnt anything from being in Academia, never bother reading a press release from a university describing their own work.
> If there is not enough of a flow of cooling water, the rods can overheat, and the entire facility is at risk for a nuclear meltdown.
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 there is not enough of a flow of cooling water, the rods can overheat, and the entire facility is at risk for a nuclear meltdown.
> 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.
What you say is technically true but you're forgetting decay heat. The fission chain reaction stops if you remove the moderator in any sane LWR design, but the fission products in the fuel will continue to generate a very large amount of heat for quite a while. This is exactly what happened at Fukushima and TMI.
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.
Which is equally a problem for a molten salt cooled reactor. If molten salt leaks or pumping stops, you're gonna get a melt down in your molten salt reactor. That is unless it's running at super low power density - like these guys: https://www.usnc.com/mmr/, in which case no cooling fluid or pumps or even natural circulation apparently are needed to keep it from melting.
MSRs have an advantage though, which is that a) fuel melt is obviously not a problem and b) if something goes out of control you can pull the drain plug and drain the entire core into multiple crit-safe storage pools. Dividing the core up makes it easier to handle the decay heat, though I'm not sure exactly what any of the current designs do in detail. Fission product gasses are also not soluble in most of the fuels for MSRs which makes it easy to filter them out, which reduces the decay heat to an extent and also mitigates the reactivity feedback effect from xenon that caused the Chernobyl disaster.
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.
I believe that the point of the design is that the salt will soon solidify, once it cools to below 550 degrees, and become industrially manageable.
Yeah. Decay heat is still an issue but MSRs are inherently able to handle it without the need for active circulation. Plus if shit hits the fan like I said you can drain it out just with gravity into a configuration that is inherently unable to continue fissioning without the need for reactivity control. So, no need for active circulation pumps nor a reliance on the ability to ram in control rods... plus you don't have to worry about hydrogen buildup either.
Pretty freaking cool
The idea with molten salt reactors is that they aren't under pressure. Unlike a PWR, which will experience more and more pressure until it pops, a molten salt reactor can handle much higher temperatures before failing. This enables designs that can be passively cooled in the event of coolant system failures.
>A typical nuclear power plant is built with a little over one square mile to operate to reduce radiation risk, with the core itself being 30 ft x 30 ft. Memmott’s molten salt nuclear reactor is 4 ft x 7ft, and because there is no risk of a meltdown there is no need for a similar large zone surrounding it. This small reactor can produce enough energy to power 1000 American homes. The research team said everything needed to run this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck bed; meaning this reactor can make power accessible to even very remote places.
Sounds too good to be true! Wonderful news
Worth noting that this is not really unique to this reactor, and the technology has been around for a while (including multiple basically fully functional demonstration reactors that were actually built, though they weren't without their technical issues). NuScale's design for example, which is a very different design and also much closer to commercial rollout, has a similar greatly reduced need for a large exclusion zone (https://www.nei.org/news/2018/nrc-staff-agrees-smrs-wont-nee...).
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.
Not sure it's a justified reduction in exclusion zone. Yes they use natural circulation to get rid of decay heat if they lose power to run the pumps. BUT - they can't tolerate multiple reactors failing at once, they can't tolerate more than a few control rod withdrawals, and they can't tolerate clogging of the flow channels - Which to me, seem like reasonable accidents. The reduction in exclusion zone for NuScale is not really justified. If they get a reduction, you can expect the big ass reactors to also get a reduction...
I don't really have an opinion on the matter and I think it's a fair question to consider, but I'll note that the NRC obviously disagrees. At least for now, they could always change their mind. I seriously doubt that they would ever significantly reduce the exclusion zone requirement for any of the currently operating reactors, however.
I think that's fair. I bet new large power plants will get the NuScale treatment and reduced exclusion zone though.
When was the last time that one of these university PR press releases turned into a real product?
Wake me when they have a working prototype.
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.
It's a MSR reactor. 4' x 7', so again close to the "closet sized" ORNL original MSR reactor. Yes, liquid fuel can be used to separate valuable fission products, and the reactor can be used to breed new fuel or other substances. Should be able to reprocess/consume solid fuel rod waste.
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.
Molten salt reactors are nothing new. It would be truly wonderful if these folks solved the corrosion issues associated to circulating high-temperature molten salts, and the ever-recurring military-grade fuel proliferation risk associated with spent fuel reprocessing.
I found another article that talked about corrosion:
> 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...
> Memmott said the micro-design doesn't require salt to flow through the reactor, which means it eliminates components such as pumps and valves, as well as solving operational problems, like having to tightly control flow and temperature.
This is a much more informative article, thanks.
I can’t speak to the durability of the reactor design, but the reprocessing is one of the primary points of the design.
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.
Using thorium alleviates the proliferation risk somewhat because the fissile isotopes you get in the waste of a thorium reactor are hard to work with.
Good thing no-one who has incentive to build an A bomb or dirty bomb had any U238 shot into their house and/or children or anything.
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
My comment was really about uranium 233, which is very hard to work with because it emits a ton of gamma rays, which means you need great care in handling it as you purify it from thorium waste.
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.
And my comment was about what happens if one of the proposed millions of megawatt reactors required for this to contribute meaningfully to decarbonisation gets under the control of someone powerful with motives to become a nuclear threat.
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
I have some introductory material on the concept of molten salt reactors here:
https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html
1.25MW on a truck isn't really a particularly compelling power density for abundant and too cheap to meter energy of the future, especially for claims that aren't at all grounded in reality or anything that will pass safety.
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.
Yeah but they can't let you look inside of it, you just have to have faith that it generates energy as they say it does. Dum dum dum dum dum!
TIL, We are allowed to do nuclear related research at universities.
Lots of universities have their own reactor. They are used for a variety of research activities almost all wholly unrelated to generating power. Sometimes you need samples irradiated, other times you need to synthesize custom radioactive isotopes.
These reactors pose no risk. The radioisotopes produced could in principle be misused, but are in any case very small amounts.
What’s different in the actual design of the tractor compared to other MSRs/LFTR? No talk about any of this
MSRs can do everything except leave the impossibly heat and corrosion resistant lab.
Maybe we should just build them in orbit without containment and let the surface tension hold it together or something.
If you read the article, you would see that the MSR design would allow for recycling of the salt and the extraction of the valuable byproducts.
Also, this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck for transport to remote areas and can power up to 1000 homes.
Not sure how that helps if it melts through the floor, the truck, and then the ground when you turn it on. Those are nice improvements, but adding a red paint job to a wingless plane won't make it fly.
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.
According to his patents, the molten salt is the coolant and it would flow multiple stages of salt through the system.
https://patents.justia.com/inventor/matthew-memmott
Hmm so if I understand this right, the idea is to coat the reactor in salt with progressively lower melting points? And I suppose each layer is supposed to extract some specific element.
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?
I’m not a physicist but did take some college chemistry, so take it with a grain of salt, but thats kind of what was forming in my mental model.
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.
But the article is talking about MSR
Only mentions something about making them smaller, not sure how that would solve the core (pun intended) issues.
If you look for the actual design, you will come across a newly published patent in the name of the mentioned researcher.
That wasn’t BYU it was the University of Utah. They are very much not the same school. Also this has nothing to do with cold fusion.
You're right. Failed attempt at humor.
When we have rolling blackouts with regularity and the realization of a years long deindustrialization process sets in, the public attitude towards nuclear power will shift.
Until then, I’m afraid it’s been sufficiently demonized that no amount of logic or will overcome the emotional fear of it.
Molten-salt-fuel reactors, as described in this article, are so lame... "It's already melted, so you can't have a meltdown." lol. More seriously, molten-salt-cooled reactors have some promise. They use solid fuel, usually TRISO particles, and are cooled by molten salts, which we now have lots of experience with from solar salt power systems. If you are interested in molten-salt-cooled reactors outside of this lame press release - check out Kairos Power. Their website sucks butt. But they are the main player in molten salt-cooled reactors - funded by Henry Laufer of Renaissance Technologies. They actually have the engineering and financing to get one built, and are reportedly doing very well with NRC (unlike OKLO - lolz).
Not an expert but I believe the problem with molten salt cooling for reactor designs is that nuclear reactors are supposed to just run for decades without replacing major parts that are really really radioactive. We just can't make parts that will resist corrosion for that long, unlike those towers in the solar arrays, which are really simple to replace. That's leaving aside the high level waste recovery, disposal, and storage issues.