• Bill Gates promises his own billions if Congress helps with his nuclear push
    23 replies, posted
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/report-bill-gates-promises-add-billions-congress-helps-nuclear-power-push/
This is good and bad. I personally think the travelling wave idea to be kind of dumb. But it's good to see funding in the area regardless as the materials engineering advances are needed in other reactor designs too.
Why - does this sum it up? https://ieer.org/resource/energy-issues/traveling-wave-reactors-sodium-cooled-gold-at-the-end-of-a-nuclear-rainbow/
Aren't travelling wave reactors the more "disposable" type of reactors? Whereby you don't refuel, the fuel is for the lifetime of the reactor and afterward you just bury it and decommission the plant? There's much better Gen III/Gen III+ reactor designs out there.
Oh hey a billionaire offering to help fund something, if only there was some way for the government to not have to rely on the charity of these lawyered up billionaires. in context, microsoft is 'helping' build 500 million in affordable housing in seattle but its actually just them acting as a creditor to secure low interest financing. we need to build some more reactors in this country but the problem is we don't have a government system set up to set and maintain a national energy plan, one independant of the political winds. Congress ought to codify Obama's energy plan into law but they won't because it was obama's and coal jerbs make it inconvieniant.
We really need to invest in thorium reactors. The material is very abundant all over the world (relative to uranium), the enrichment process doesn't produce any materials that are viable for nuclear weapons, it produces very little nuclear waste and in the absence of human intervention the reactor will mechanically shut itself down without the need for sensors or an external power source. The biggest issue is that developing and perfecting a new nuclear power generation process is extremely expensive so there aren't many entities willing to invest in an reactor that hasn't been tested at full scale.
I never really bought the idea of nuclear proliferation. For civilian grade, power reactors (or even research reactors), that concentration of uranium and transuranics isn't even of high enough grade to make a proper fission weapon. And if some group (lets say ISIS for example) wanted to hijack Iran's nuclear program, they'd need to not only extract the uranium from the reactors (which is time consuming and hazardous enough), somehow load it onto a shielded casket to a nuclear enrichment site which then they'd have to hijack as well to bring it up to weapons grade. In the case of a dirty bomb, you again have to shutdown and extract the uranium and waste material and load it in. There's just too many points of failure for any group serious enough to make dirty/fission weapons out of civilian grade nuclear material that its almost laughable. And there's already tonnes of security covering each part of the supply chain and the reactor itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_accidents it's easier for people to get hurt with these technologies than you think
I mean of course, radiation exposure, etc is terrible (Read up on the SL-1 Meltdown, and how a control rod fucking impaled a dude). But the issue that I'm skeptical about is nuclear proliferation, not accidents by the workers, etc. I'm talking about the fear of "oh if we build reactors and enrichment facilities to create reactor grade fuel then the durn terrorists will steal that and make the bombs". (Read, reactor grade fuel is <80% enrichment of the actual fissionable material, where as weapons grade is >92%). The only part that legitimate nuclear proliferation holds is in old soviet warheads leaking into the blackmarket. Needless to say, its much easier to get old warheads and repurpose towards fission bombs or dirty bombs than it is to hijack a reactor, depressurize the containment vessel, remove the rods, transport the highly irradiated rods and somehow enrich those reactor grade rods to weapons grade.
thats... his point? ISIS or another terrorist group would probably be more likely to hurt themselves in the process of trying to make any kind of nuclear weapon than anybody else. Not to mention the list you're using right there is about things they would already have access too like radium and x-ray tubes.
Can someone explain what a travelling wave reactor is to someone who has zero nuclear technical knowledge?
nuclear non proliferation is more to stop state level actors from developing nuclear weapons with peaceful technology like Iran because we were really shit in the 80s and let india, pakistan, south africa, libya, iraq, North Korea, and israel develop nuclear weapons programs from civilian reactor technology.
So from what I've been reading it would self-sustain for many years without refueling, but people are worried about the decomissioning of them when it's ultimately spent?
That's not what anti-proliferation is about, though. Restricting certain nations from using radioactive material doesn't aim to prevent accidents, but to prevent access to nuclear weapons.
this is like 90% right. The missing part is that the core rod arrangement is continuously shuffled to keep the burning "wave" in a single area of the core. This makes cooling the wave easier since you're containing the reaction to one spot, but it also requires much closer monitoring of the core and automated systems to rearrange the fuel and control roads as necessary. Not doing this would cause a situation like you describe where it burns from the inside out, but when it got to the outer edges and stopped burning you'd have to restart the whole process again from the center with new fissile materials.
I'm skeptical of the neutron multiplication rates required to breed plutonium and at the same time eliminate other fission products through fission. Every other breeder design removes the worst neutron poisons through core reprocessing, this can't.
I think the idea is that you are going to build a sealed unit that is installed, burns, and then is removed like a maritime reactor so it reaching the edge of the core is fine as that's 40 years into its operation. That's at least what I think this company in particular is focusing on.
Thorium would be nice but right now the priority is dealing with climate change, someone thing that needs to be solved now, not 10 years from now after developing an almost new technology.
Would prefer more recyclable reactors. You'd be surprised just how much nuclear waste can actually be recycled, it's a very efficient process if you know what to do with it. Just need to get around all the NIMBYs. Shame that high profile science activists like Bill Nye constantly shit on it instead of embracing it.
If thorium reactors are such a home-run technology, then why aren't more people investing in them? I've read that every variation of them, including molten salt has a ton of issues, from power output stability, long-term viability, fuel disposal, and even containment of material (in the case of a molten salt reactor)
The world is wealthy enough to fund Thorium Reactors research and also fight climate change.
NPPs take a while to build either way, so we might as well use more promising technology. I honestly doubt that nuclear power will be the key to solving climate change, at least in the short term. It would have been if more countries started building them 50 years ago.
It's prohibitive to invest in ANY reactor tech. The only reason why uranium reactors were developed in the first place is because they could produce materials for nukes so the military basically bankrolled their development. Uranium reactors were NOT selected for their energy production potential, that was a side benefit.
That's really not a good idea. It will take 5 to 10 years to build nuclear reactors using present tech, you would have to add another 10 if you wanted to go thorium.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.