NPR - Climate Change Motives New Generation of Nuclear Engineers - Sensationalist Headlines

As Nuclear Struggles, A New Generation Of Engineers Is Motivated.. I just graduated this year in a class of 23 students (2 of which are women engineers). The article has a nice graph showing how small the programs are and how much it is growing. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/222187/c8631c2f-a189-4b7d-bfc6-301e6e4ddf3a/18F65CCC-3C33-4827-AF21-5354A4F13DCD.jpeg

Would totally go in for nuclear engineering but its existence here in the UK is basically fuck all. Might have a look and see what exists out there

I had a guest lecturer from the University of Surrey visit my school to speak about the research they do in their Nuclear and Radiation Physics program. I would suggest looking there or at some of the online programs offered by American universities (Penn State, NC State, etc) if you are interested in this area and want to stay in the UK.

We'll need more and more of y'all. My immediate family works on a nuclear project here in the South and besides dealing with constant political battle between the proponents of the project and radical anti-nuclear folks+DOE, they've mentioned for years that most of the people who work in the industry are aging rapidly. My father has been in the industry since before the Cold War ended, working on nuclear subs all the way to now, working on his current project. We do need new blood, and we need innovation- our current reactors are nearly all old, Gen II designs from the mid-late 20th century, and unless we start replacing and supplementing them for baseload power in our energy grids with Gen III+ and Gen IV reactor designs that are safer, more efficient, and potentially cheaper in the long run, we're gonna be having an extremely hard time meeting our energy needs while also meeting our goals for stemming climate change's effects around the world and trying to stay under 2.0 degrees Celsius warming globally.

Ok, As long you don't screw it up with creating Nuclear explosion in these Plants and that will be more worse than Climate change.

Veterans from the nuclear navy in the US make up about 1/3rd of the reactor operators at the nuclear plants. I personally think the role of nuclear power in the Navy introduces more down-to-earth people to nuclear science/engineering than any other program. They also build new reactors each time they build a new aircraft carrier/submarine so they have stayed on top of the game whereas the commercial nuclear industry has suffered from a lack of experienced trained laborers, driving up construction costs. I have a lot of hope for SMRs (NuScale in particular) but the days of large, 3000MWt reactors from the Gen II/Gen III are quickly running out.

there's a difference between a nuclear bomb and a nuclear power plant.

The mentality for the design of Gen II nuclear plants (the ones that have had all the major accidents) was that you would have 4 of the same safety components for redundancy so that in case one breaks you have 3 extra for backup. That design fails when everything goes wrong (even though the chances of everything going wrong are very small, it has happened). Modern designs for Gen III/IV reactors is that rather than relying on backup safety systems, the physics of the reactor is such that it will be able to shut down and cool itself without human intervention. NuScale's reactor doesn't have any pumps in its design and relies on density changes from heating the water to force the water to flow and cool the reactor. Their design is still going through the NRC right now and I am really excited to see how their design performs once it is constructed and undergoes safety testing.

lmao aren’t these power plants essentially beefed up steam turbines? A nuclear reactor is not even remotely the same as a nuclear bomb dude.

I understand that but still depends of how they keep under control manual way for keep atoms from being exploded inside Plant and releasing radiation poisoning throughout area like what happen in Pripyat.

Pripyat was a leak, not an explosion.

And still leak out radiation poisoning hours or days after small explosion with Pripyat plant.

No I really think you do not understand. Nuclear bombs are designed to explode, whereas nuclear reactors are designed not to. You have to try really hard to make a well-designed reactor blow up, and in more sophisticated designs it is all but impossible to do that.

Yeah. Anyone who tells you that a nuclear reactor is a ticking time bomb or some other anti-nuclear energy crap is spewing uninformed, scientifically unsound bullshit. Chernobyl was a case of sheer idiocy by the Soviet operators in conjunction with that RBMK reactor design being far from the best in terms of safety features. They literally turned off the safety systems it actually had for a test, which resulted in the accident. Then the initial cleanup and evacuation was somewhat disorganized and botched because once again- it was under the Soviet Union. Need I dig up Snowmew's old post shitting on that one vehemently anti-nuclear nutter from a few years ago?

Basically yeah. The nuclear reaction just generates heat, a lot of heat. All that heat does is turn water into pressurized steam, which turns a turbine, and goes out the cooling tower. A meltdown is just when the reaction goes out of control and generates far more heat than it's supposed to, which can start melting the reactor core and release radiation. This also can generate way too much steam, creating a steam explosion which can damage the reactor casing and allow radiation to escape.

This is why theres so much red tape bullshit, delays, and fear mongering about the best power source we have so far.

Don't run your mouth about things you clearly know nothing about

Please, please, please go educate yourself about how reactors actually work before you post anything about nuclear energy again.

This is a field I've always loved, but the maths is such an impenetrable wall for me.

But it's nothing like a nuclear explosion. It's not even remotely similar. Please read up on this.

I wish the US would get its head out of its ass on nuclear. We need a totally new long term plan, free of any partisan "think" tank bullshit. sadly we won't get that because long term thinking is dead in congress and in statehouses across the country

Just as an aside for those interested, there is some debate in the science community on whether or not the first explosion at the chernobyl event was in fact a small-scale nuclear explosion which then triggered the larger steam explosion later on. Again 90% of reactors are designed not to do this, but the RMBK design is so utterly shite that it really didn't have very many safety features in the first place.

It's also worthy of note that the Chernobyl reactor had multiple safety features that could have been activated to stop the disaster in its tracks, but the people working there were so uneducated they didn't know how to actually use them.

That and the plant its self was vastly out of date even when it was constructed, so you had a dated plant design and people who didn't know how to run it. It was just a timebomb.

Why nuclear? Why not Thorium reactors?

...Aren't Thorium reactors a type of nuclear reactor?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle It is.

The pripyat plant was not only outdated but massively misused, they practically asked for it to melt down. To cause another accident like that you practically have to do it intentionally by throwing idiots at it and waiting.

I still find it mind boggling that in an age where nearly every bit of human knowledge is at our fingertips there are still so many people that are either uninformed or against actual reasoning, think of nuclear power as this terrible bad thing that the nasty science men want to make to blow us all up. There is not a single argument someone can make against nuclear that cannot be immediately shut down by the tiniest bit of research, literally everything about it is just a flat upgrade from everything else. Meanwhile here we are in 2018 where Australia, the country that has like 33% of the worlds uranium has got ZERO nuclear reactors while the price of electricity is out of control despite a near infinite source of power existing a days drive from almost all major cities. Its disgustingly obvious that the coal companies have the majority of politicians here in their pocket, especially when we get shit like "the great barrier reef is dying so rather than doing anything to save it lets build a new coal port/expand an existing one that is guaranteed to damage the reef even more than it already is"

Unfortunately a depressingly large portion of humanity seems to be of the mindset that education and intelligence is bad. You know, despite that being literally exactly what separates us from other animals.