> “Proposed U.S. Army Mobile Nuclear Reactors: Costs and Risks Outweigh Benefits,” authored by Alan Kuperman, coordinator of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
It seems that more than "controversy" there are reports against it.
>“The Army’s mobile reactor program, which was never requested by the Pentagon but rather by nuclear industry cheerleaders in Congress, is precisely how disasters happen,” he said in the report, which was released in April.
It’s interesting how nuclear gets an alliance between green groups and fossil fuel interests. It always makes me wonder how much criticism is in good faith. Nuclear can wipe out natural gas and coal and perhaps even oil with the rise of cheap storage. Fossil fuel interests have an economic interest in defeating nuclear with fear and regulatory red tape.
Debating it is difficult, its a really nuanced topic. It's way too easy for it to devolve into a "you're with us or you're against us" type of argument.
And of course, like you said, deeply entrenched industry leaders have their own interests to protect.
The article isn't meant to be for or against nuclear energy, but rather the pros and cons of deploying a miniature plant
(Edit: seems like everyone is reading this as an argument against nuclear power in the abstract, and skipping the second paragraph. Come on people. You can be OK with large defensible reactors and still think that dropping a 5MW reactor into a random ass residential neighborhood is dumb as shit. Dangerous stuff is dangerous. Be careful with it and use it judiciously.)
As it should. A reactor core is just trivially the most poisonous single object humanity has invented. And by definition it's a operated by controlling a chain reaction that can by its very nature lead to excursions.
And the benefit here is a 1-5MW generator, the same market served by existing largely portable diesel generators.
Seems like a cost/benefit analysis might have a lot to say here. Maybe spacecraft might be a better fit, but... a portable generator? I don't see the need, personally.
Poisoning us on the long term, and worse - starting a runaway greenhouse heating process which will make the planet uninhabitable in just a few hundred years.
Portable/temporary generators are vanishing fraction of global energy generation, and you know that. If we actually care about that last 0.001% or whatever, we can run them on biodiesel.
> Nuclear power is “orders of magnitude more energy dense than any other known technology,” Waksman told National Defense. “That allows the possibility to provide resilient power for years and years, without needing to refuel. … Refueling can be a real burden in remote areas.”
There is a lot of much deadlier chemicals in the factory near your city, only there is no Greenpeace et. al. crowd chanting how all those chemicals with long, complicated names are dangerous, since they spent all their efforts fighting nuclear energy (for good 50 years).
Fun fact, Bhopal was so egregiously horrible, that it is what led to the create of the CSB (Chemical Safety Board). A lot of their investigation videos are on youtube, and absolutely worth watching
This is simply not true. A sustained nuclear chain reaction just needs to be physically reconfigured a bit to produce a reaction excursion. It's true that modern designs have made good progress in things like intervention-free failsafes that make such reconfigurations much less likely. It's simply not possible eliminate the possibility entirely.
And in any case, this is a piece of military hardware which might plausibly be "reconfigured" be being struck by a rocket. It's not a civilian reactor inside a secure facility.
Your statement is analogous to saying "charcoal grills do not start forest fires". Used correctly, they certainly shouldn't. But they sure as hell can if you kick them over on a dry summer day. Same deal here.
What the above poster is probably referring to are reactor designs that are passively safe. Like using lithium as a coolant and moderator. As the reactor heats up the lithium's density drops, which in turn reduces the rate of the nuclear reaction. It creates a stable equilibrium. The reaction would also stop if the lithium were drained - there would be no more moderator to sustain the nuclear reaction.
It stops reacting. If you blow up a nuclear reactor you've made a nice radiological hazard (though Uranium/Thorium themselves aren't particularly hazardous), but as soon as the fuel stops being contained inside of the appropriate neutron-mediating environment and is scattered, it will become subcritical.
The question of whether or not deploying nuclear reactors in warzones is a good idea is entirely different from the question of whether meltdowns are a realistic possibility. A critical nuclear reaction can be sustained with neutron reflectors and moderators using an amount of fuel that would otherwise be subcritical. Any "reconfiguration" only reduces the criticality factor of such a reactor.
And now that's whose bloodstream it can be found in.
Mainly for two reasons, it's half-life is longer than the lifespan of living things, and people spread it around like they never should have done at all.
That makes it analogous to opening Pandora's box more so than all kinds of dangerous things.
I don't think you can really compare the poisonous emissions of diesel exhaust leaked materials from a reactor.
I see your point, any nuclear excursion tends to get blown out of proportion, but it does have some unique dangers.
In particular, diesel fumes eventually dissipate, whereas radioactive materials will settle and continue to be a problem for decades. Which may not be a problem if it's left alone, but anyone unlucky enough to interact with it could end up with it on their body/clothing unaware that they're absorbing an unsafe dose over a period of days or weeks.
But yes, I agree, we do need to move away from fossil fuel sources one way or another.
I don't think you can really compare the poisonous emissions of diesel exhaust leaked materials from a reactor.
Sure you can, you just need to agree on the comparison criteria, like, for example, the total number of illnesses/death from normal (and predicted abnormal) operation of the device. Burning fossil fuels still leads to deaths even if they are spread over a large area and/or time.
I am afraid I don't have the numbers to back up my claim but when I was at university, my thermodynamics lecturer showed us a calculation that background dose from radioactive material at a coal powered fire station is higher than that of a nuclear power station. This is because of the shear amount of coal power stations burn through, and in that fuel, there is a trace amount of radioactive material that eventually gets out into the atmosphere.
I've previously worked on a nuclear licenced site and we were not even allowed to throw smoke alarms in the general rubbish due to there being radioactive material inside.
Yes, absolutely! Coal is pretty much the worst of the worst.
My concerns are solely with how fuel would be managed, so that it isn't lost, and subsequently broken. One example was scrap workers taking a radioactive source to a scrap yard to be melted down, not realizing what it was.
Air pollution in France is responsible for more than 40 thousands deaths every year. Nuclear power, well, Chernobyl in total is estimated at around 10 thousands deaths total. In France it's actually 0 since the radioactive cloud stopped at the border /s.
So the question is what would you rather be hit by a missile? A nuclear reactor or a diesel engine?
The emissions of a diesel engine are irrelevant here because that's a specific use-case that is going to be negligible compared to emissions by cars and industry in general (or even by the army).
Large portable diesel generators that operate with that kind of power in 24/7 operation is very dirty, costly, nosily, and require continuously transporting of fuel. You do not want that near a hospital unless it is an emergency (short duration) or the life lost to the pollution is preferable compared to not having a hospital with power. The design parameters for those portable nuclear reactors is to not having to refuel, and being able to use it in places where pollution is not acceptable.
Uh... there are many hospitals with deployed diesel backup generators already. It's sort of the standard solution in the space, in fact.
Again, no one seems to be understanding the context here and just wants to jump in with knee-jerk pro-nuclear arguments. The application under discussion is a portable generator to be deployed locally as backup power in presumably-chaotic emergency situations. That is simply not where you want a reactor, period.
Backup generators operate during short intervals, not 24/7 for years. Even the pollution created during backup testing runs get documented and is a real point of concern for hospitals. The benefit however of having consistent power outweigh the drawback of temporary pollution.
I don't understand this knee-jerk pro-fossil fuel arguments, using your words. Fossil fuels, especially those in backup generators, are very harmful if run long term. We are currently in a pandemic where one of the primary causes of death is the inability to take up oxygen, and in this context we want to add air pollution?
Maybe spacecraft might be a better fit, but... a portable generator? I don't see the need, personally
I'm not sure I understand how you're concerned about a portable nuclear generator failure or attack releasing nuclear materials, but you suggest that it would be somehow safer (?) to strap it on top of hundreds of tons of explosive rocket fuel and launch it into the sky?
Arrgh. This is misunderstanding the argument in the OTHER direction.
Cost/benefit analysis isn't about deciding what's "safer" in an absolute sense. It's about how much you get for how much risk you're willing to accept. The risk of one meltdown is real, but not impossible to tolerate in all circumstances.
Is it worth keep a bunch of these reactors around to deploying to urban Mogadishu or wherever to supply an invading military force with power? I argue not. The risk is high, and electricity is cheaply available already.
Is it worth launching one reactor into space if it enables an entirely new capability in solar system exploration? Maybe yes. It's just one launch, you can do it in remote areas. The people directly involved can be made aware of the risks (and are taking significant risks already). I don't have a full whitepaper to hand you on this but my intuition says that this might be OK, yeah.
Thorium based reactors can't cause a meltdown and if something happens they simply shut off, the reaction is self moderated, and if power goes off or it gets too hot the reaction slows down, unlike unranium based where they need control rods to NOT explode.
Molten salt reactors in general can't cause a meltdown because they are designed to passively moderate in the event of a problem. That isn't something specific to thorium.
And conversely, pressurized water reactors, especially older designs are not passively safe, and must go through a cool-down process which requires some of the control systems to be operating properly.
In general I'd like to see more development work in the area of molten-salt reactors, especially those that can reprocess existing nuclear waste.
> Molten salt reactors in general can't cause a meltdown because they are designed to passively moderate in the event of a problem.
At least one design I've seen has a plug in the main salt loop that is made of lead or something with a relatively low melting point. It is actively cooled to keep it solid. If there is a total power failure, and nothing is running, the cooling system shuts off, the plug melts, and the main loop drains out into a containment pool.
The MSR is just running at atmospheric pressure, not super-high pressure like a pressurized water reactor (hence the name). You can crack a pipe, and that's bad, but then the loop will drain out to the containment pool below the reactor. [1]
Unlike a PWR, where cracking a pipe may well lead to a steam explosion. Even if initially contained, this is super bad.
It is unfortunate that many of the reactor designs out there in operation now are not 100% passively safe. Having one or two backup systems (like a Fukushima Daiichi) sometimes just isn't enough.
[1] Now note that recovering from such an emergency reactor shutdown on a MSR is no fun process, and will take a while to do cleanup and get things back up and running. A normal shutdown will not drain into the pool, as I understand it. (Edit: this is wrong, see reply.)
The plug was just a bit of frozen fuel salt. The research group used to melt the plug to shut down the reactor when they wanted to go home after a day's work. Then in the morning they would heat up the containment pool to re-melt the fuel, and pump it back up into the reactor.
If you can solve the molten salt problem, then you can hook that up instead to a concentrated solar power plant and you don't have to deal with nuclear waste or regulations at all.
I don’t think you can have one and not the other. I may be too pessimistic but I would guess other nations will steal this technology and not be so encumbered by their concerns for the environment.
The sooner everyone has source of clean energy, the sooner we can stop global warming. Yes, NK can steal the designs, but so what? Like something stopped them from making a nuke.
LOL! That's actually a neat way to combat climate change. "Oh no, you've stolen my nuclear-powered, clean-energy reactor and you have to shut down your coal-fired plants because they're so inefficient now... anyways"
Seriously though, from what I read, these can't be used to make weapons, so it's actually a win/win if they get used or stolen.
“ these can't be used to make weapons, so it's actually a win/win if they get used or stolen.”
I don’t know anything about it, but I worry about who is making those safety assessments and what their conflicts and incentives are. It seems like a lot of things can be weaponized or used to nefarious purposes. I can imagine a portable energy source having a lot of potential uses, say powering small sea craft or whatever.
From my understanding, most?(if not all) types of reactors can produce _some_ materials to make a bomb to varying degrees of dirtiness/nukenes with varying degrees of difficulty of doing so. Those smaller reactors will definitely have to be guarded.
This is a different type of reactor using a different type of fuel. FTFA:
"The concept for the reactors began with the requirement that they would run off of tristructural isotropic particle fuel, or TRISO...Each TRISO particle is made up of a uranium, carbon and oxygen fuel kernel which is encapsulated by three layers of carbon- and ceramic-based materials that prevent the release of radioactive products"
and then further down...
"The fuel has two secondary benefits...the first being its resiliency to proliferation which can help deter the reactors from being targets for bombings or attacks.”
"In Germany, the story about how Frederick the Great was responsible for bestowing “potato happiness” on his subjects is well known. King of Prussia form 1740 to 1772, he is still referred to as “Alte Fritz” (Old Fritz) to this day. It is said that he ordered soldiers to guard a field of field of potatoes, ostensibly to protect this highly precious crop. Their curiosity aroused, the local farmers, who had up till then showed no interest in cultivating potatoes, stole some of them and started growing them themselves – or so the story goes."
This is something to be used on the battefield, in remote locations, or during disaster relief operations. Whether it is 'clean' energy is not that important because that's really a niche, punctual use-case.
The key advantage seems to be that it can be deployed, turned on, then left to run without refuelling for literally years whereas diesel obviously requires constant refuelling.
The key disadvantage is that IMHO it may be big risk, especially in hostile territory because... well nuclear.
That's a massive over-simplification, if not actually completely false.
A lot of the benefits of the Thorium reactors that are being envisaged are because they are a molten salt design, not because they use Thorium. Molten salt reactors can't cause a meltdown, simply because they are already molten. Traditional reactors have the potential to explode because they are cooled by superheated pressurised water, not because they use Uranium. You can run standard Uranium through a molten salt reactor and get the safety benefits, and you can burn Thorium in more traditional reactors. Likewise, you can make self-regulating reactors that aren't molten salt reactors - it's just that molten salt reactors have one particular really neat mechanism for self-shutdown.
Thorium does have some inherent advantages, two of which are plentiful supply and proliferation resistance.
Of course it's oversimplified statement, it's 3 sentences in total, and that's for a reason : to get a point across not write 10 pages of details that nobody would read. A child commenter posted a bit more info with clarifications :)
This is complete nonsense. Fuel choice has little to do with how safe a reactor is.
Pretty much everything you say has to do with they type of reactor, and not the fuel. This is a common misconception (perpetuated by some pop-science youtube video stuff).
You can build reactors with different fuels be passively safe. In fact most companies that would like to develop Thorium Breeders are in fact all starting with Uranium reactors but non are not passively save. Terrestrial Energy from Canada for example is party based out of a group that got to know each other at a Thorium conference, yet they are building a Uranium fast reactor. This reactor is passively save and doesn't need 'control rods' to not explode.
Please stop perpetuating this sudo-science.
There is basically s single real benefit to thorium. That is the ability to breed thorium in a thermal spectrum. U-233 that is the actual fissionable material in a thorium reactor generates 2.1 neutors in a thermal spectrum.
I expect there will be a lot of comments defending nuclear power, and I agree, it has its place in moving humanity forward to a greener future.
However! I believe that the main benefit of central nuclear plants, is there ability to keep poisonous materials in a single location, so that it doesn't get lost.
For example, the radioactive sources used in radiotherapy units, have been known to go missing due to negligent owners, with truly awful effects to those that discover them without realizing that they are. This short video sums it up pretty well:
Once the radioactive material is released from a safe container, the cleanup effort to discover and contain it is immense.
And herein lies the problem, it only takes one or two events like this to cause an extreme amount of damage. And its not a problem with the technology, its a problem with human beings. We're forgetful, lazy, and make mistakes. So widespread deployment of many radioactive sources really increases the complexity and cost of keeping track of them.
While it's a neat point that you bring up about human nature and misplaced radioactive sources, is a portable nuke reactor something that's comparaable to radiotherapy units?
If what they mean is a Small Modular Reactor, they should still be about 40 m^3, and a bit less likely to be left behind.
But it'll be hard to limit these things to just a few that can be secured really well. There will be lots of potential for an energy source like this in remote or underdeveloped regions, and once you pepper the globe with reactors, good luck having everyone adhere to regulations, and not try too hard to circumvent those safeguards.
Ah that is true. In that case the danger would be in the tracking and storage of fuel elements. Assuming re-fueling is required infrequently enough that a regulator organization could keep tabs on them. Although in that case the danger would be the tracking and safe storage of the fuel elements.
> And its not a problem with the technology, its a problem with human beings. We're forgetful, lazy, and make mistakes.
That is true. Another weakness humans have is our inability to intuit large numbers and probabilities.
For example, it's hard for people to really grok that, even if you added up all the people who have died from nuclear and radiation accidents in all of history[1], including not just the sources you mentioned, but disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, it would be far less than the number of people who die from pollution caused by fossil fuels every month[2].
Sure, but if you’re planning a new thing saying we stopped doing dumb stuff in the last isn’t a great justification.
The general public became scared of radiation in part because of the rapid flip flop from this stuff is safe and useful to holy shit no don’t do any of that.
> Sure, but if you’re planning a new thing saying we stopped doing dumb stuff in the last isn’t a great justification.
I'm not sure that argument really works though.
When it comes to radiation, we understand the dangers of radiation a lot more now than Marie Curie did, and we can argue the merits of SMR's based on the knowledge that we've gained.
Furthermore, the argument is very overly general. Sure, it's true that people made a lot of mistakes because we didn't fully understand the dangers of radiation at first. But we're talking about SMR's to generate electricity here, and people didn't even fully understand the dangers of electricity at first, either. The same could be said about fossil fuels.
That leads us to a much different conclusion--don't invent fundamentally new things. Radiation and fission aren't fundamentally new. They're understood, and the risks are understood.
For context the Radium girls won their lawsuit from 1927. By 1950 the belief was all radiation exposure resulted in increased risks, yet these things where used into the 1970’s.
Hell, the nuclear industry continued to use known inherently unsafe designs. Fukushima wasn’t really a failure due to a tidal wave, it’s a failure due to requirements for active cooling. Inherently safe means turn the lights off and come back in a year and it’s fine, not everything is fine as long as you keep doing X.
Doesn't change the end result. Hell, you can add every person who died in the atomic bombings to the nuclear tally (even though that makes no sense at all), and it still won't change the result.
No, you don’t get 2.5 million deaths per year from fossil fuel usage. Though a few seriously flawed studies have gotten some very extreme numbers.
For example respiratory diseases represent ~5% of all Chinese deaths or about 500,000 in 2020. Which is a horrific sign of air pollution except China also has 350 million smokers. Looking at the non smoker population you see air pollution as a major factor, but again not all air pollution is from fossil fuels.
Air pollution is also associated to strokes and heart attacks, but again other factors are involved.
Definitely, but those figures can't be compared directly, since deaths by air pollution are caused by industry scale deployment of both small and large power plants/generators/engines. I fail to see how [2] is related in any way to the conversation. As I said, I do believe that nuclear energy has a place in current and future energy production.
The other things we humans are bad at, is implementing solutions that last decades. It is inevitable, that over a period of 30 or 50 years, there will be multiple lost small reactor installations. My case in point, is meant to be the aforementioned videos, where an extremely expensive radiotherapy machine can be neglected to the point of abandonment.
What I want to highlight, is the insidious nature of a potential loss of a radioactive source. A small amount of material can contaminate a very large area relative to it's size, and its not something that can be seen or detected without equipment.
And the type of damage isn't as immediate or jarring as say a runaway reaction/meltdown, it would be limited to people who unintentionally handle, or ingest particulate.
For example, if you don't realize that you've been exposed to a material like this, you can carry it around on your clothes, or in to your home, and that's the real issue. You're body would be exposed to radiation over a long period of time, eventually resulting in a higher than safe dose. Any cancers/diseases as a result of this may not even be attributed to exposure, since a person may not have even realized they came into contact with it.
> That is true. Another weakness humans have is our inability to intuit large numbers and probabilities.
I'm not sure if this is meant to be a jab at my comment, it's not my intent to be a scare monger, but I would like to point out these past incidents to highlight the unique nature of the danger inherent to these materials.
1) Please stop using fatality comparisons when talking about radiation incidents - it's disingenuous. You need to look at total impact, including negative outcomes like cancers and reduced life expectancies rather than outright deaths.
2) If your argument is "it's better than the worst alternative" then your argument is not very good. You should be comparing to power sources that are not fossil fuel-based, which is the real alternative we want to move toward
1) Fatality statistics are the best measurement we have. Sure, there's a long tail of lesser impacts for nuclear power; there's also a long tail of disabilities and reduced life expectancies for pollution too.
2) How about "it's better than other power sources that can consistently service base load"?
You mine a resource (lithium), that can be recycled endlessly with very little loss.
You are right about Cobalt, but it is already being reduced/removed.
It's not even comparable to fossil fuel mining (even though technically it is fossil fuel mining). Because it's recyclable, so we aren't "losing" any material, in the form of converting it to an unproductive/hazardous byproduct.
When it comes to base load, nuclear is pretty interesting. I remember reading that some plants sell electricity at below cost during low periods (nighttime in some locations), since they can't ramp the reactor up or down quickly.
It's a situation where both intermittent renewable sources and nuclear plants would benefit from a way to store excess produced energy
> 1) Please stop using fatality comparisons when talking about radiation incidents - it's disingenuous. You need to look at total impact, including negative outcomes like cancers and reduced life expectancies rather than outright deaths.
It's my understanding that nuclear power performs very favorably in these metrics as well. Living near a coal-fired plant isn't very healthy, and probably exposes you to more radiation anyways[1].
I don't really follow the alternative power source news, but I don't think anybody's argument actually stops at "it's better than the worst." Most people seem to think that nuclear power makes a good choice because it's a consistent source of power and has a proven track record (see: France).
Comparing it to coal is precisely "better than the worst". Coal is the worst option, and even the US is phasing it out rapidly.
(Developing countries are still using it, and China is still acting as if it were a developing country. But coal simply isn't the alternative to nuclear any more in any developed country. Even natural gas is better for the environment than coal.)
> Comparing it to coal is precisely "better than the worst". Coal is the worst option, and even the US is phasing it out rapidly.
I don't think anybody disagrees with that. The claim is only that there are lots of sufficient reasons for nuclear power that don't stop at "it's not the worst."
> 1) Please stop using fatality comparisons when talking about radiation incidents - it's disingenuous. You need to look at total impact, including negative outcomes like cancers and reduced life expectancies rather than outright deaths.
Granted, you would also need to do the same for whatever you're comparing it against. Fossil fuels have profound negative impact beyond fatalities, like pollution, supporting cruel regimes, environmental spills, and more. And also climate change.
Dams exacerbate water evaporation and disrupt ecosystems. Solar panels require vast amounts of land to generate significant power.
> 2) If your argument is "it's better than the worst alternative" then your argument is not very good. You should be comparing to power sources that are not fossil fuel-based, which is the real alternative we want to move toward
And what are those alternatives? Renewables need to be backed by a dispatchable source to deal with intermittency. If your country already gets 30-50% of its power from hydroelectricity that's great. But for most places, this means fossil fuels. The reality is that the alternatives like wind and solar are really wind and solar plus fossil fuels.
"Plus fossil fuels" is, again, a markedly temporary situation. Numerous storage methods are still vying for which will end up cheapest. Batteries look like they will end up the most expensive, but easiest to field. Underground and underwater compressed air are being proved out. A GW-scale liquified-air system is coming online in UK. We will need efficient electrolytic H2 and NH3 processes anyway, and both are good for both storage and fuel.
So, burning LNG continues for a while because the equipment is already in place, and nobody wants to invest immediately in what might not end up the cheapest storage, or anyway is not yet nearly so cheap as it will shortly be when volume balloons.
Underground compressed air is compatible with existing LNG turbines. Liquified-air storage has useful side products. Fuel you will make anyway is a good storage medium too.
Global battery production remains in the low hundreds of gigawatt hours annually. And only a small fraction of that is going to grid storage, in the single-digit gigawatt hours. Global electricity consumption is 60 TWh per day and continuing to rise. Alternatives like compressed air, hydrogen, thermal batteries, etc. still remain in the prototyping phase. Whether or not they prove to be viable is totally unknown.
We are going to be in this markedly temporary situation until we experience a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage that yields several orders-of-magnitude improvement. Breakthrough technology that's 10-20 years away often stays 10-20 years away for a lot longer than that.
Since we will not need to rely on batteries for utility energy storage, battery production capacity is no impediment to renewable grid storage buildout.
There are plenty of known viable storage methods, which you oddly omit all of except compressed air. There are no impediments to their implementation beyond simply scaling up; no new materials science, no new physics or chemistry, or industrial process barriers need to be solved. It is just not clear which will end up cheapest in each use environment.
Other, less mature technologies, e.g. electrically synthesizing ammonia and hydrogen efficiently, need to be developed anyway, and once developed, will also be incidentally useful for storage. Their independent industrial demand will drive fast improvement, so they may come to displace the others.
There absolutely are impediments to implementation. Producing hydrogen efficiently through electrolysis demands very effective electrodes which we are still trying to develop, for example. We only know that these solutions ar hypothetically possible, not that they are viable. Let alone viable at scale. Let alone cheaper than existing options.
Until one of those storage methods actually becomes viable at scale, rather than in laboratories, we'll be burning fossil fuels.
My point is that we've already been doing this: exploring various storage mechanisms and pivoting to ones that are more viable, to use your terminology. And so far two forms of storage have proven viable: pumped hydroelectricity and electrochemical storage (AKA batteries). Neither are available at the scale required. The market reveals what actually is viable. If these solutions you allude to are viable, then we should see people offering to build this storage at competitive prices
Will some technological breakthrough not only make these alternatives viable, but superior to existing storage by multiple orders of magnitude? Maybe, but a massive leap like that is not something we can depend on happening.
Again: No technological breakthrough of any kind is needed to make viable the alternatives I cited. (This must be why you repeatedly try to divert attention from those alternatives.) All that is needed is scaling up already thoroughly-understood engineering.
A GW-scale liquified air plant is now under construction in UK, after 100% successful pilot projects. Numerous underground compressed-air projects are running, successfully. Neither depends on even a single breakthrough.
Pumped hydro works, but only in certain places. Batteries work, but are expensive and compete with other uses. Alternatives cheaper than batteries are being fielded today. Until they are ready for full-scale use, NG generation is temporarily adequate. Its temporary use in no way invalidates wind-and-solar, backed by storage of a form to be determined, as a primary long-term energy source.
Multiple orders of magnitude is absolutely the norm for scale-up of mature technology, newly useful, like the examples cited. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous. Who do you imagine you are fooling?
> Again: No technological breakthrough of any kind is needed to make viable the alternatives I cited. (This must be why you repeatedly try to divert attention from those alternatives.) All that is needed is scaling up already thoroughly-understood engineering.
What do you mean? I addressed the shortcomings of the alternatives you cited: Hydrogen has difficulties with large scale electrolysis. Ammonia is just the storage mechanisms for hydrogen, so it suffers from the same problem. You referenced hydrogen and ammonia here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696690), so accusing me of diverting attention is rather strange. Compressed air can only achieve good efficiency if the compressed air is not allowed to cool down, which needs good insulation. Can you provide a source for the GW-scale compressed air project? Because all of the ones I can find are in the hundreds of megawatt hours [1]. Again, we need tens of TWh.
I think you're making the grave mistake of assuming semiconductor scaling applies to large infrastructure projects. This is very rarely the case for machinery and big physical engineering projects. Are we able to build dams for 1/1,000th the price as in the 1930s? Are we able to build jet turbines for 1/1,000th the cost? Or cars? We've had plenty of time to optimize and achieve the vast gains we supposedly achieve. Cars did see a sharp decline in cost, but it took a breakthrough to achieve that: assembly line manufacturing. And even then it was more like a factor of 20x improvement, not 1,000x.
Ultimately, we fundamentally disagree on whether is safe to assume that technologies in either the prototyping or demonstrator phase will become 1,000 times cheaper than the present options. I think it's unsafe to assume they will become viable at all let alone orders of magnitude better than the present options. Clearly you think otherwise, and believe in it with such conviction you accuse those who say otherwise of acting in bad faith. I don't think there's anything more productive to say here other that time will tell.
You can be as dishonest as you like, and I will call you on it each time.
I specifically cited ammonia and hydrogen as examples that may someday take over the storage load from the immediately viable alternatives I listed. (BTW, Ammonia is, in fact, not "just the storage mechanism for hydrogen", but is rather the heir apparent to bunker fuel for shipping. An industrial-scale electric ammonia plant is under construction in Norway. We will need just 1000 more of them to fuel all shipping.)
Underground compressed air does, in fact, get excellent insulation from the earth packed around it. Underwater compressed air does not, in fact, need insulation, because it may absorb heat from the water on its way out.
There is no need for air compression to become 1000x cheaper than at present. Air compression is mature technology. It only needs 1000x bigger capacity, achieved simply by scaling up well-understood technology. There is no need for air liquification to become 1000x cheaper. It is already mature, and efficient. It just needs to be scaled up, as we see occurring.
It might not be dishonesty or disingenuousness, it might be simple gullibility. The same person posted a link designed to fool gullible people and then proceeded to demonstrate that he had indeed been fooled by it:
He claimed, with this link as backing, that all nuclear waste would fit in a small space, when in fact the link overlooks the vast majority of nuclear waste and considers only a minuscule though important subset, the spent fuel. We don’t even know if the source article is playing more tricks with words, but the mistake with gullibility here is already bad enough.
To give some credit where (malicious) credit is due, I do believe that the creators of the web page may have been striving for the goal of fooling such gullible people in exactly this way on exactly this matter. While technically honest, the site is dishonest and disingenuous in spirit, because it’s promoting such a misunderstanding, with a clear agenda and a not-so-innocent reason for doing so.
For example, it's hard for people to really grok that, even if you added up all the people who have died from nuclear and radiation accidents in all of history[1], including not just the sources you mentioned, but disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, it would be far less than the number of people who die from pollution caused by fossil fuels every month
That's kind of a false equivalency since fossil fuel plants are much more common than nuclear plants (nuclear generates ~10% of the world's electrical power), and they tend to be highly regulated and maintained, and run by first world nations. But if nuclear was as ubiquitous as fossil fuel plants, it would also be run by poorer nations with less ability to maintain them.
So you can't really compare nuclear plants that exist today with what we'd see if nuclear were as common as fossil fuel plants.
Nuclear power currently makes up 20% of US electrical power. Fossil fuels are 60% of grid electricity. Multiply by 3 and you are there in the US. France is at 70% so they are already there. I don't see any significant deaths from nuclear power there.
I agree that nuclear isn't currently a great solution for stuff like trucks and planes. However for baseline power generation it is one of the best low carbon energy solutions when taking into account storage costs to provide constant power from intermittent sources like wind and solar.
>I believe that the main benefit of central nuclear plants, is there ability to keep poisonous materials in a single location, so that it doesn't get lost.
This is a very interesting point. A grid of mostly renewables backed by a handful of centralized nuclear plants sounds robust to my layman's thinking. Both of these things already require a more robust distribution grid than we have now in the USA, but it would serve us well to do that regardless.
I think it would be nice if we could agree as a society that spending money on projects like this is invaluable to our worth as a nation. Is letting a few people be billionaires really that valuable to us as a society that it's worth puttering along and hoping future generations will pick up the tab? They have taken a disproportionate amount of wealth away from society and their taxes should reflect that. It's only going to get more expensive to fix problems like these and younger generations don't have the money.
> However! I believe that the main benefit of central nuclear plants, is there ability to keep poisonous materials in a single location, so that it doesn't get lost.
Off topic, but: I often feel that problems related to hard-to-manage waste could be ameliorated by thinking of temporary solutions as "entropy-reducing storage". Especially with recycling — which is currently not cost effective [0] but perhaps could be in the future — we ought to keep the nicely sorted waste separated, and avoid mixing it in with other landfill trash. At a minimum, there's no point in actively increasing the entropy of trash and byproducts. That way, today's landfills could become tomorrow's mines with a lower bar for economic viability.
Yes, I was really disheartened when I learned that my city only recycles a few types of plastic, and most of it just goes to the landfill. And now its being theorized that oil industries encouraged recycling as a solution, even knowing its deficiencies, so that plastics would be more readily accepted.
Regarding nuclear waste disposal, this is the coolest solution I've seen so far:
>Once the radioactive material is released from a safe container, the cleanup effort to discover and contain it is immense
Larger than dealing with an oil tanker spil or gas line explosion ?
The main problem with nuclear is potentially global consequences of an accident - small reactors don't have that and people are used to dealing with localised risks.
The fuel here is in tiny containers (about that of a poppy seed https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/triso-particles-most-robu...). You'd have to crack many of them, and that's not likely from an accident. How what's the ratio of bananas to cracked TRISO particle for equivalent radiation?
The reactors can't melt down, so you'd have to physically crack many of these particles and then distribute the results into the air.
These are really interesting! It looks to me like the tiny containers and materials are meant to prevent unintended fission rather than shielding from radioactive decay.
Still, I'd imagine identification and cleanup would be much easier with something like this.
You are not accounting for opportunity cost here. Yes, there were incidents, and people died, and there will be more. But there are also victims on the other end. People who died because they had to breathe coal. People who died because the power was down or too expensive to run AC or some hospital machine.
When people are deprived from basic necessities, their life revolves around survival instead of moving humanity forward. How many Elon Musks have died or lived a life in which they could not realize their potential because of no access to power? If there was cheap and abundant power everywhere, you could get rid of the whole class of environmental and societal issues altogether, not only saving lives, but greatly improving life quality.
Think of how many problems Internet brought up. And then how many it solved.
> Another is what is referred to as the “strategic support area,’” which provides power for equipment that is mission essential, such as radar systems.
The Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office selected two teams in March to continue their work developing transportable nuclear microreactor prototypes as part of “Project Pele.”
Now put those in a car and I will be interested in an electronic vehicle. 23 million miles on a charge and at night you can use it to power your house.
That’s a pretty simplistic cost analysis. All forms of energy production have externalities that affect future generations. For example, carbon based energy generation causes mass extinction of species. The reduction in species diversity will affect humans for thousands of generations.
The problem here in this discussion is looking at yourselves and your corporations as solutions to the world's problems.
Same goes with the recent ESG investment trend. A corporation exists to make a profit, period. Suggesting otherwise is just emotional manipulation, albeit very profitable manipulation.
The corporation causes all these problems, and it does it for profit. The phrase "business ethics" makes zero sense, but it serves a PR purpose. Even the term "national defense" in this magazine is doublespeak for imperialism, looting and pillaging other nations for profit.
I have no interest in the neoliberal fantasy world of corporations solving our problems, because I am a pragmatist. Yet people continue to send billions into ESG companies to ease their guilt, while these companies actually profit from and exacerbate the very issues they promise to solve.
You realize when you say the word "corporation", you mean "people". Like a group of people coordinating together for a common cause. As much as people might confuse a specific Supreme Court ruling, corporations are not actually sentient entities, but just a group of human beings like any others.
And I have no interest in this neoreactionary fantasy that governments are less corrupt than corporations. The data is overwhelming that free markets are less corrupt, less polluting, and less harmful.
> As much as people might confuse a specific Supreme Court ruling, corporations are not actually sentient entities, but just a group of human beings like any others.
What? Corporations as non-human legal entities was actually a monumental legal invention in medieval Europe.
> A corporation exists to make a profit, period. Suggesting otherwise is just emotional manipulation, albeit very profitable manipulation.
This is wrong. A corporation is just an artificial person. Like a person, it can seek a profit or not - eg charitable not-for-profits. There is no legal obligation either way.
Necessary context is the military's unique needs and the vastly changed nature of warfare, which by themselves account for the value of portable reactors to the military.
------------
In military history, a cliche is that 'amateurs talk tactics, experts talk logistics'. Logistics - boring old logistics - is arguably the most critical factor for winning wars. Napoleon was a master of logistics. Think of 100,000 people in the field (which isn't a lot): Multiply that by around 2 lbs of food per day: 200,000 pounds of food must be distributed daily. Think of parts for repairs, ammunition, medicine. Think of how much battery power they need, for example, just for night vision, handheld computers, etc etc - how much fuel is required, daily? Think then of their equipment, which consume enormous resources - how much fuel does one 70 ton tank need? A combat helicopter? With modern technology, electricity demand has exploded.
But delivering it isn't so easy. Unlike civilian uses, the location isn't chosen based on cost-effectiveness of supplies and access to infrastructure. And much more challenging, often there aren't centuries of infrastructure built, as with a city, and the infrastructure you use sometimes is destroyed.
------------
Also, the nature of warfare has changed dramatically recently. We're accustomed to war against low-tech guerilla fighters, not peers, and to WWII-style warfare (tanks, fighters, bombers, etc.), which will be as useful in the next peer war as mid-19th century warfare was in WWII - it was 75 years ago. The next war will be against a peer who uses sensors and precision munitions (e.g. guided missiles/drones), as the US began doing in the Gulf War. The combination enables you to hit targets accurately at great distances: If you can see the target (e.g. by flying a drone or satellite over it) within range of the missile (up to thousands of miles), you can fly a missile there. It greatly reduces the protection of distance - being far away from the 'front' isn't much protection - and it makes large objects, such as tank formations and bases, into a convenient collection of targets.
Among other tactics, the U.S. military is planning to have personnel operate in small, stealthy, highly mobile groups within range of the precision missiles; look up the new plans for the U.S. Marine Corps for example, which has already scrapped all its tanks. The huge generator and supply depots at the major base will be gone. Supplying a large base under precision munitions would be tough - how does the convoy or ship slip through? Supplying lots of dispersed, hidden, small, highly mobile units seems very difficult.
------------
Reducing those supply needs is critical, and if energy - one of the biggest requirements for modern logistics - could be removed from them because the personnel brought a nuclear reactor, then it could greatly reduce costs, reduce death, and increase effectiveness (because they have enough energy to operate).
I'm not saying it's worth the risks of having small nuclear reactors spread around a combat zone, but the benefits should be calculated in.
And what happens when you're fighting an ISIS-like group, and they overrun your remote base and capture your mini-reactor? You've just given them a dirty bomb. Doesn't matter if the reactor is perfectly safe under normal conditions. They can take it apart and use the spent fuel for whatever they want.
I'd say that the following issue mentioned in the article is the biggest concern, if these things are deployed in combat zones:
"Kuperman warns that if soldiers were forced to abandon a reactor under attack, an adversary could potentially come into possession of several hundred pounds of highly radioactive waste."
That's a really good point. Something like that could be used to make a "dirty bomb" which aims to disperse material, rather than try to make it react as in a typical nuclear warhead
How are the concerns any different than for a nuclear powered sub, carrier or other ship. The also could be attacked causing an issue with potential for various radioactive isotopes to leak.
However, no controversy there....
I don't really see the need for controversy we already have mobile reactors they just are in ships and subs.
In the case of a ship or sub, in the event of both catastrophic failure, or even a material leak, its likely going to end up in the ocean. Water is an excellent radiation shield (though I guess it doesn't matter much, since no one would be around), and even a materials leak gets diluted until its not an immediate risk. RIP ocean microbes though
if nuclear magically became 'safe' it would have no limit in it's utility to mankind.
wind power is junk. is doesn't scale. google implicitly acknowledged this with it's google X project for taking windpower 100-200 meters up , using wind kits, to capture 'more' wind. it's not doable because 'more' is 'more destructive'. you cannot bottle hurricanes, let alone the jet stream.
wind power is a disgrace. the german's have numerous engineering reports about why the history of windpower and the future of it, are conclusively garbage and won't and cannot scale.
you may as well spend every last dollar of wind power funding on solar power. the wind can stop blowing far earlier than the sun will explode. windpower CANNOT scale. nuclear, solar , geothermal CAN . the technology behind wind power is fundamentally limited by wind sweep. that is all. there simply ISNT enough capturable energy in the wind. and thus, the only option is to go higher in the atmosphere well above the surface of the earth.
going 'offshore' changes nothing really. you must go well above the surface of the earth. that is simply not feasible.
sometimes the biggest gains from discarding your biggest losers.
If these proliferate all over the place someone is going to abandon one inside of a rusted out shipping container and its going to start leaching into the environment.
139 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadIt seems that more than "controversy" there are reports against it.
It’s interesting how nuclear gets an alliance between green groups and fossil fuel interests. It always makes me wonder how much criticism is in good faith. Nuclear can wipe out natural gas and coal and perhaps even oil with the rise of cheap storage. Fossil fuel interests have an economic interest in defeating nuclear with fear and regulatory red tape.
And of course, like you said, deeply entrenched industry leaders have their own interests to protect.
The article isn't meant to be for or against nuclear energy, but rather the pros and cons of deploying a miniature plant
As it should. A reactor core is just trivially the most poisonous single object humanity has invented. And by definition it's a operated by controlling a chain reaction that can by its very nature lead to excursions.
And the benefit here is a 1-5MW generator, the same market served by existing largely portable diesel generators.
Seems like a cost/benefit analysis might have a lot to say here. Maybe spacecraft might be a better fit, but... a portable generator? I don't see the need, personally.
Poisoning us on the long term, and worse - starting a runaway greenhouse heating process which will make the planet uninhabitable in just a few hundred years.
Thanks to that we are where we are.
Examples at a concentration as dangerous as a reactor melting down?
Hell, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood killed more than the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown.
And in any case, this is a piece of military hardware which might plausibly be "reconfigured" be being struck by a rocket. It's not a civilian reactor inside a secure facility.
Your statement is analogous to saying "charcoal grills do not start forest fires". Used correctly, they certainly shouldn't. But they sure as hell can if you kick them over on a dry summer day. Same deal here.
To be glib: Not vs. fucking rockets they aren't. Those designs imagine that the fuel doesn't move and that the coolant is the medium of failure.
What happens when you move the fuel?
It stops reacting. If you blow up a nuclear reactor you've made a nice radiological hazard (though Uranium/Thorium themselves aren't particularly hazardous), but as soon as the fuel stops being contained inside of the appropriate neutron-mediating environment and is scattered, it will become subcritical.
The question of whether or not deploying nuclear reactors in warzones is a good idea is entirely different from the question of whether meltdowns are a realistic possibility. A critical nuclear reaction can be sustained with neutron reflectors and moderators using an amount of fuel that would otherwise be subcritical. Any "reconfiguration" only reduces the criticality factor of such a reactor.
It was produced for the benefit of all mankind.
And now that's whose bloodstream it can be found in.
Mainly for two reasons, it's half-life is longer than the lifespan of living things, and people spread it around like they never should have done at all.
That makes it analogous to opening Pandora's box more so than all kinds of dangerous things.
When nuclear reactors leak poison gas then something has gone wrong, and it makes international headlines.
Diesel generators are designed to leak poison gas; hundreds of millions of them do this every day.
I see your point, any nuclear excursion tends to get blown out of proportion, but it does have some unique dangers.
In particular, diesel fumes eventually dissipate, whereas radioactive materials will settle and continue to be a problem for decades. Which may not be a problem if it's left alone, but anyone unlucky enough to interact with it could end up with it on their body/clothing unaware that they're absorbing an unsafe dose over a period of days or weeks.
But yes, I agree, we do need to move away from fossil fuel sources one way or another.
Meanwhile, radioactive toxic stuff will remain toxic locally.
Sure you can, you just need to agree on the comparison criteria, like, for example, the total number of illnesses/death from normal (and predicted abnormal) operation of the device. Burning fossil fuels still leads to deaths even if they are spread over a large area and/or time.
I've previously worked on a nuclear licenced site and we were not even allowed to throw smoke alarms in the general rubbish due to there being radioactive material inside.
My concerns are solely with how fuel would be managed, so that it isn't lost, and subsequently broken. One example was scrap workers taking a radioactive source to a scrap yard to be melted down, not realizing what it was.
So the question is what would you rather be hit by a missile? A nuclear reactor or a diesel engine?
The emissions of a diesel engine are irrelevant here because that's a specific use-case that is going to be negligible compared to emissions by cars and industry in general (or even by the army).
Again, no one seems to be understanding the context here and just wants to jump in with knee-jerk pro-nuclear arguments. The application under discussion is a portable generator to be deployed locally as backup power in presumably-chaotic emergency situations. That is simply not where you want a reactor, period.
I don't understand this knee-jerk pro-fossil fuel arguments, using your words. Fossil fuels, especially those in backup generators, are very harmful if run long term. We are currently in a pandemic where one of the primary causes of death is the inability to take up oxygen, and in this context we want to add air pollution?
I'm not sure I understand how you're concerned about a portable nuclear generator failure or attack releasing nuclear materials, but you suggest that it would be somehow safer (?) to strap it on top of hundreds of tons of explosive rocket fuel and launch it into the sky?
Cost/benefit analysis isn't about deciding what's "safer" in an absolute sense. It's about how much you get for how much risk you're willing to accept. The risk of one meltdown is real, but not impossible to tolerate in all circumstances.
Is it worth keep a bunch of these reactors around to deploying to urban Mogadishu or wherever to supply an invading military force with power? I argue not. The risk is high, and electricity is cheaply available already.
Is it worth launching one reactor into space if it enables an entirely new capability in solar system exploration? Maybe yes. It's just one launch, you can do it in remote areas. The people directly involved can be made aware of the risks (and are taking significant risks already). I don't have a full whitepaper to hand you on this but my intuition says that this might be OK, yeah.
If they are uranium based - nay!
Thorium based reactors can't cause a meltdown and if something happens they simply shut off, the reaction is self moderated, and if power goes off or it gets too hot the reaction slows down, unlike unranium based where they need control rods to NOT explode.
And conversely, pressurized water reactors, especially older designs are not passively safe, and must go through a cool-down process which requires some of the control systems to be operating properly.
In general I'd like to see more development work in the area of molten-salt reactors, especially those that can reprocess existing nuclear waste.
> Molten salt reactors in general can't cause a meltdown because they are designed to passively moderate in the event of a problem.
At least one design I've seen has a plug in the main salt loop that is made of lead or something with a relatively low melting point. It is actively cooled to keep it solid. If there is a total power failure, and nothing is running, the cooling system shuts off, the plug melts, and the main loop drains out into a containment pool.
The MSR is just running at atmospheric pressure, not super-high pressure like a pressurized water reactor (hence the name). You can crack a pipe, and that's bad, but then the loop will drain out to the containment pool below the reactor. [1]
Unlike a PWR, where cracking a pipe may well lead to a steam explosion. Even if initially contained, this is super bad.
It is unfortunate that many of the reactor designs out there in operation now are not 100% passively safe. Having one or two backup systems (like a Fukushima Daiichi) sometimes just isn't enough.
[1] Now note that recovering from such an emergency reactor shutdown on a MSR is no fun process, and will take a while to do cleanup and get things back up and running. A normal shutdown will not drain into the pool, as I understand it. (Edit: this is wrong, see reply.)
They can also be captured, which gives the enemy the ingredients for a dirty bomb and/or a nice bargaining chip.
My understanding is also that "thorium-based" means U-233 as fuel [1], so that's what would be in the reactor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233
Seriously though, from what I read, these can't be used to make weapons, so it's actually a win/win if they get used or stolen.
I don’t know anything about it, but I worry about who is making those safety assessments and what their conflicts and incentives are. It seems like a lot of things can be weaponized or used to nefarious purposes. I can imagine a portable energy source having a lot of potential uses, say powering small sea craft or whatever.
"The concept for the reactors began with the requirement that they would run off of tristructural isotropic particle fuel, or TRISO...Each TRISO particle is made up of a uranium, carbon and oxygen fuel kernel which is encapsulated by three layers of carbon- and ceramic-based materials that prevent the release of radioactive products"
and then further down...
"The fuel has two secondary benefits...the first being its resiliency to proliferation which can help deter the reactors from being targets for bombings or attacks.”
"In Germany, the story about how Frederick the Great was responsible for bestowing “potato happiness” on his subjects is well known. King of Prussia form 1740 to 1772, he is still referred to as “Alte Fritz” (Old Fritz) to this day. It is said that he ordered soldiers to guard a field of field of potatoes, ostensibly to protect this highly precious crop. Their curiosity aroused, the local farmers, who had up till then showed no interest in cultivating potatoes, stole some of them and started growing them themselves – or so the story goes."
https://www.alumniportal-deutschland.org/en/germany/eating-d...
The key advantage seems to be that it can be deployed, turned on, then left to run without refuelling for literally years whereas diesel obviously requires constant refuelling.
The key disadvantage is that IMHO it may be big risk, especially in hostile territory because... well nuclear.
I assume, you will fart in their general direction.
A lot of the benefits of the Thorium reactors that are being envisaged are because they are a molten salt design, not because they use Thorium. Molten salt reactors can't cause a meltdown, simply because they are already molten. Traditional reactors have the potential to explode because they are cooled by superheated pressurised water, not because they use Uranium. You can run standard Uranium through a molten salt reactor and get the safety benefits, and you can burn Thorium in more traditional reactors. Likewise, you can make self-regulating reactors that aren't molten salt reactors - it's just that molten salt reactors have one particular really neat mechanism for self-shutdown.
Thorium does have some inherent advantages, two of which are plentiful supply and proliferation resistance.
Pretty much everything you say has to do with they type of reactor, and not the fuel. This is a common misconception (perpetuated by some pop-science youtube video stuff).
You can build reactors with different fuels be passively safe. In fact most companies that would like to develop Thorium Breeders are in fact all starting with Uranium reactors but non are not passively save. Terrestrial Energy from Canada for example is party based out of a group that got to know each other at a Thorium conference, yet they are building a Uranium fast reactor. This reactor is passively save and doesn't need 'control rods' to not explode.
Please stop perpetuating this sudo-science.
There is basically s single real benefit to thorium. That is the ability to breed thorium in a thermal spectrum. U-233 that is the actual fissionable material in a thorium reactor generates 2.1 neutors in a thermal spectrum.
However! I believe that the main benefit of central nuclear plants, is there ability to keep poisonous materials in a single location, so that it doesn't get lost.
For example, the radioactive sources used in radiotherapy units, have been known to go missing due to negligent owners, with truly awful effects to those that discover them without realizing that they are. This short video sums it up pretty well:
- The Samut Prakan Radiation Accident https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxktLtVEH7U - The Goiania Incident https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhL0xQzPSy8
Once the radioactive material is released from a safe container, the cleanup effort to discover and contain it is immense.
And herein lies the problem, it only takes one or two events like this to cause an extreme amount of damage. And its not a problem with the technology, its a problem with human beings. We're forgetful, lazy, and make mistakes. So widespread deployment of many radioactive sources really increases the complexity and cost of keeping track of them.
If what they mean is a Small Modular Reactor, they should still be about 40 m^3, and a bit less likely to be left behind.
That is true. Another weakness humans have is our inability to intuit large numbers and probabilities.
For example, it's hard for people to really grok that, even if you added up all the people who have died from nuclear and radiation accidents in all of history[1], including not just the sources you mentioned, but disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, it would be far less than the number of people who die from pollution caused by fossil fuels every month[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
[2] https://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-...
I have yet to see an estimate for related deaths from such ignorance.
The general public became scared of radiation in part because of the rapid flip flop from this stuff is safe and useful to holy shit no don’t do any of that.
I'm not sure that argument really works though.
When it comes to radiation, we understand the dangers of radiation a lot more now than Marie Curie did, and we can argue the merits of SMR's based on the knowledge that we've gained.
Furthermore, the argument is very overly general. Sure, it's true that people made a lot of mistakes because we didn't fully understand the dangers of radiation at first. But we're talking about SMR's to generate electricity here, and people didn't even fully understand the dangers of electricity at first, either. The same could be said about fossil fuels.
That leads us to a much different conclusion--don't invent fundamentally new things. Radiation and fission aren't fundamentally new. They're understood, and the risks are understood.
For context the Radium girls won their lawsuit from 1927. By 1950 the belief was all radiation exposure resulted in increased risks, yet these things where used into the 1970’s.
Hell, the nuclear industry continued to use known inherently unsafe designs. Fukushima wasn’t really a failure due to a tidal wave, it’s a failure due to requirements for active cooling. Inherently safe means turn the lights off and come back in a year and it’s fine, not everything is fine as long as you keep doing X.
For example respiratory diseases represent ~5% of all Chinese deaths or about 500,000 in 2020. Which is a horrific sign of air pollution except China also has 350 million smokers. Looking at the non smoker population you see air pollution as a major factor, but again not all air pollution is from fossil fuels.
Air pollution is also associated to strokes and heart attacks, but again other factors are involved.
[1] https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/02/deaths-fossil-fuel...
It’s easy to find flawed studies with silly results, the underlying reality is rarely so extreme.
The other things we humans are bad at, is implementing solutions that last decades. It is inevitable, that over a period of 30 or 50 years, there will be multiple lost small reactor installations. My case in point, is meant to be the aforementioned videos, where an extremely expensive radiotherapy machine can be neglected to the point of abandonment.
What I want to highlight, is the insidious nature of a potential loss of a radioactive source. A small amount of material can contaminate a very large area relative to it's size, and its not something that can be seen or detected without equipment.
And the type of damage isn't as immediate or jarring as say a runaway reaction/meltdown, it would be limited to people who unintentionally handle, or ingest particulate.
For example, if you don't realize that you've been exposed to a material like this, you can carry it around on your clothes, or in to your home, and that's the real issue. You're body would be exposed to radiation over a long period of time, eventually resulting in a higher than safe dose. Any cancers/diseases as a result of this may not even be attributed to exposure, since a person may not have even realized they came into contact with it.
> That is true. Another weakness humans have is our inability to intuit large numbers and probabilities.
I'm not sure if this is meant to be a jab at my comment, it's not my intent to be a scare monger, but I would like to point out these past incidents to highlight the unique nature of the danger inherent to these materials.
2) If your argument is "it's better than the worst alternative" then your argument is not very good. You should be comparing to power sources that are not fossil fuel-based, which is the real alternative we want to move toward
2) How about "it's better than other power sources that can consistently service base load"?
You are right about Cobalt, but it is already being reduced/removed.
It's not even comparable to fossil fuel mining (even though technically it is fossil fuel mining). Because it's recyclable, so we aren't "losing" any material, in the form of converting it to an unproductive/hazardous byproduct.
It's a situation where both intermittent renewable sources and nuclear plants would benefit from a way to store excess produced energy
It's my understanding that nuclear power performs very favorably in these metrics as well. Living near a coal-fired plant isn't very healthy, and probably exposes you to more radiation anyways[1].
I don't really follow the alternative power source news, but I don't think anybody's argument actually stops at "it's better than the worst." Most people seem to think that nuclear power makes a good choice because it's a consistent source of power and has a proven track record (see: France).
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
(Developing countries are still using it, and China is still acting as if it were a developing country. But coal simply isn't the alternative to nuclear any more in any developed country. Even natural gas is better for the environment than coal.)
I don't think anybody disagrees with that. The claim is only that there are lots of sufficient reasons for nuclear power that don't stop at "it's not the worst."
Granted, you would also need to do the same for whatever you're comparing it against. Fossil fuels have profound negative impact beyond fatalities, like pollution, supporting cruel regimes, environmental spills, and more. And also climate change.
Dams exacerbate water evaporation and disrupt ecosystems. Solar panels require vast amounts of land to generate significant power.
> 2) If your argument is "it's better than the worst alternative" then your argument is not very good. You should be comparing to power sources that are not fossil fuel-based, which is the real alternative we want to move toward
And what are those alternatives? Renewables need to be backed by a dispatchable source to deal with intermittency. If your country already gets 30-50% of its power from hydroelectricity that's great. But for most places, this means fossil fuels. The reality is that the alternatives like wind and solar are really wind and solar plus fossil fuels.
So, burning LNG continues for a while because the equipment is already in place, and nobody wants to invest immediately in what might not end up the cheapest storage, or anyway is not yet nearly so cheap as it will shortly be when volume balloons.
Underground compressed air is compatible with existing LNG turbines. Liquified-air storage has useful side products. Fuel you will make anyway is a good storage medium too.
We are going to be in this markedly temporary situation until we experience a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage that yields several orders-of-magnitude improvement. Breakthrough technology that's 10-20 years away often stays 10-20 years away for a lot longer than that.
There are plenty of known viable storage methods, which you oddly omit all of except compressed air. There are no impediments to their implementation beyond simply scaling up; no new materials science, no new physics or chemistry, or industrial process barriers need to be solved. It is just not clear which will end up cheapest in each use environment.
Other, less mature technologies, e.g. electrically synthesizing ammonia and hydrogen efficiently, need to be developed anyway, and once developed, will also be incidentally useful for storage. Their independent industrial demand will drive fast improvement, so they may come to displace the others.
Until one of those storage methods actually becomes viable at scale, rather than in laboratories, we'll be burning fossil fuels.
Will some technological breakthrough not only make these alternatives viable, but superior to existing storage by multiple orders of magnitude? Maybe, but a massive leap like that is not something we can depend on happening.
A GW-scale liquified air plant is now under construction in UK, after 100% successful pilot projects. Numerous underground compressed-air projects are running, successfully. Neither depends on even a single breakthrough.
Pumped hydro works, but only in certain places. Batteries work, but are expensive and compete with other uses. Alternatives cheaper than batteries are being fielded today. Until they are ready for full-scale use, NG generation is temporarily adequate. Its temporary use in no way invalidates wind-and-solar, backed by storage of a form to be determined, as a primary long-term energy source.
Multiple orders of magnitude is absolutely the norm for scale-up of mature technology, newly useful, like the examples cited. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous. Who do you imagine you are fooling?
What do you mean? I addressed the shortcomings of the alternatives you cited: Hydrogen has difficulties with large scale electrolysis. Ammonia is just the storage mechanisms for hydrogen, so it suffers from the same problem. You referenced hydrogen and ammonia here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696690), so accusing me of diverting attention is rather strange. Compressed air can only achieve good efficiency if the compressed air is not allowed to cool down, which needs good insulation. Can you provide a source for the GW-scale compressed air project? Because all of the ones I can find are in the hundreds of megawatt hours [1]. Again, we need tens of TWh.
I think you're making the grave mistake of assuming semiconductor scaling applies to large infrastructure projects. This is very rarely the case for machinery and big physical engineering projects. Are we able to build dams for 1/1,000th the price as in the 1930s? Are we able to build jet turbines for 1/1,000th the cost? Or cars? We've had plenty of time to optimize and achieve the vast gains we supposedly achieve. Cars did see a sharp decline in cost, but it took a breakthrough to achieve that: assembly line manufacturing. And even then it was more like a factor of 20x improvement, not 1,000x.
Ultimately, we fundamentally disagree on whether is safe to assume that technologies in either the prototyping or demonstrator phase will become 1,000 times cheaper than the present options. I think it's unsafe to assume they will become viable at all let alone orders of magnitude better than the present options. Clearly you think otherwise, and believe in it with such conviction you accuse those who say otherwise of acting in bad faith. I don't think there's anything more productive to say here other that time will tell.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-air_energy_storag...
I specifically cited ammonia and hydrogen as examples that may someday take over the storage load from the immediately viable alternatives I listed. (BTW, Ammonia is, in fact, not "just the storage mechanism for hydrogen", but is rather the heir apparent to bunker fuel for shipping. An industrial-scale electric ammonia plant is under construction in Norway. We will need just 1000 more of them to fuel all shipping.)
Underground compressed air does, in fact, get excellent insulation from the earth packed around it. Underwater compressed air does not, in fact, need insulation, because it may absorb heat from the water on its way out.
There is no need for air compression to become 1000x cheaper than at present. Air compression is mature technology. It only needs 1000x bigger capacity, achieved simply by scaling up well-understood technology. There is no need for air liquification to become 1000x cheaper. It is already mature, and efficient. It just needs to be scaled up, as we see occurring.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
He claimed, with this link as backing, that all nuclear waste would fit in a small space, when in fact the link overlooks the vast majority of nuclear waste and considers only a minuscule though important subset, the spent fuel. We don’t even know if the source article is playing more tricks with words, but the mistake with gullibility here is already bad enough.
To give some credit where (malicious) credit is due, I do believe that the creators of the web page may have been striving for the goal of fooling such gullible people in exactly this way on exactly this matter. While technically honest, the site is dishonest and disingenuous in spirit, because it’s promoting such a misunderstanding, with a clear agenda and a not-so-innocent reason for doing so.
That's kind of a false equivalency since fossil fuel plants are much more common than nuclear plants (nuclear generates ~10% of the world's electrical power), and they tend to be highly regulated and maintained, and run by first world nations. But if nuclear was as ubiquitous as fossil fuel plants, it would also be run by poorer nations with less ability to maintain them.
So you can't really compare nuclear plants that exist today with what we'd see if nuclear were as common as fossil fuel plants.
I agree that nuclear isn't currently a great solution for stuff like trucks and planes. However for baseline power generation it is one of the best low carbon energy solutions when taking into account storage costs to provide constant power from intermittent sources like wind and solar.
The "but nobody died" argument doesn't matter. You're still arguing with Jane Fonda in 1979. You need be arguing with economists in 2021.
The whole area for hundreds of kilometers around Chernobyl is now polluted, for decades and centuries to come.
This affects everyone in that area, don't let statistics fool you. EVERYONE.
This is a very interesting point. A grid of mostly renewables backed by a handful of centralized nuclear plants sounds robust to my layman's thinking. Both of these things already require a more robust distribution grid than we have now in the USA, but it would serve us well to do that regardless.
I think it would be nice if we could agree as a society that spending money on projects like this is invaluable to our worth as a nation. Is letting a few people be billionaires really that valuable to us as a society that it's worth puttering along and hoping future generations will pick up the tab? They have taken a disproportionate amount of wealth away from society and their taxes should reflect that. It's only going to get more expensive to fix problems like these and younger generations don't have the money.
Off topic, but: I often feel that problems related to hard-to-manage waste could be ameliorated by thinking of temporary solutions as "entropy-reducing storage". Especially with recycling — which is currently not cost effective [0] but perhaps could be in the future — we ought to keep the nicely sorted waste separated, and avoid mixing it in with other landfill trash. At a minimum, there's no point in actively increasing the entropy of trash and byproducts. That way, today's landfills could become tomorrow's mines with a lower bar for economic viability.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
Regarding nuclear waste disposal, this is the coolest solution I've seen so far:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy_WJ3mE50
CO2 causes the Earth to green. The future is only greener with more CO2. Of all the purported benefits of nuclear energy, this is not one of them.
Larger than dealing with an oil tanker spil or gas line explosion ?
The main problem with nuclear is potentially global consequences of an accident - small reactors don't have that and people are used to dealing with localised risks.
The reactors can't melt down, so you'd have to physically crack many of these particles and then distribute the results into the air.
Still, I'd imagine identification and cleanup would be much easier with something like this.
When people are deprived from basic necessities, their life revolves around survival instead of moving humanity forward. How many Elon Musks have died or lived a life in which they could not realize their potential because of no access to power? If there was cheap and abundant power everywhere, you could get rid of the whole class of environmental and societal issues altogether, not only saving lives, but greatly improving life quality.
Think of how many problems Internet brought up. And then how many it solved.
Or drones.
Probably the name is about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pele_(deity) - "the goddess of volcanoes and fire and the creator of the Hawaiian Islands"
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0931jtk/the-nuclear-lighthou...
The Soviet union built these transportable units for unmanned lighthouses
How can anybody justify that?
Same goes with the recent ESG investment trend. A corporation exists to make a profit, period. Suggesting otherwise is just emotional manipulation, albeit very profitable manipulation.
The corporation causes all these problems, and it does it for profit. The phrase "business ethics" makes zero sense, but it serves a PR purpose. Even the term "national defense" in this magazine is doublespeak for imperialism, looting and pillaging other nations for profit.
I have no interest in the neoliberal fantasy world of corporations solving our problems, because I am a pragmatist. Yet people continue to send billions into ESG companies to ease their guilt, while these companies actually profit from and exacerbate the very issues they promise to solve.
And I have no interest in this neoreactionary fantasy that governments are less corrupt than corporations. The data is overwhelming that free markets are less corrupt, less polluting, and less harmful.
What? Corporations as non-human legal entities was actually a monumental legal invention in medieval Europe.
This is wrong. A corporation is just an artificial person. Like a person, it can seek a profit or not - eg charitable not-for-profits. There is no legal obligation either way.
------------
In military history, a cliche is that 'amateurs talk tactics, experts talk logistics'. Logistics - boring old logistics - is arguably the most critical factor for winning wars. Napoleon was a master of logistics. Think of 100,000 people in the field (which isn't a lot): Multiply that by around 2 lbs of food per day: 200,000 pounds of food must be distributed daily. Think of parts for repairs, ammunition, medicine. Think of how much battery power they need, for example, just for night vision, handheld computers, etc etc - how much fuel is required, daily? Think then of their equipment, which consume enormous resources - how much fuel does one 70 ton tank need? A combat helicopter? With modern technology, electricity demand has exploded.
But delivering it isn't so easy. Unlike civilian uses, the location isn't chosen based on cost-effectiveness of supplies and access to infrastructure. And much more challenging, often there aren't centuries of infrastructure built, as with a city, and the infrastructure you use sometimes is destroyed.
------------
Also, the nature of warfare has changed dramatically recently. We're accustomed to war against low-tech guerilla fighters, not peers, and to WWII-style warfare (tanks, fighters, bombers, etc.), which will be as useful in the next peer war as mid-19th century warfare was in WWII - it was 75 years ago. The next war will be against a peer who uses sensors and precision munitions (e.g. guided missiles/drones), as the US began doing in the Gulf War. The combination enables you to hit targets accurately at great distances: If you can see the target (e.g. by flying a drone or satellite over it) within range of the missile (up to thousands of miles), you can fly a missile there. It greatly reduces the protection of distance - being far away from the 'front' isn't much protection - and it makes large objects, such as tank formations and bases, into a convenient collection of targets.
Among other tactics, the U.S. military is planning to have personnel operate in small, stealthy, highly mobile groups within range of the precision missiles; look up the new plans for the U.S. Marine Corps for example, which has already scrapped all its tanks. The huge generator and supply depots at the major base will be gone. Supplying a large base under precision munitions would be tough - how does the convoy or ship slip through? Supplying lots of dispersed, hidden, small, highly mobile units seems very difficult.
------------
Reducing those supply needs is critical, and if energy - one of the biggest requirements for modern logistics - could be removed from them because the personnel brought a nuclear reactor, then it could greatly reduce costs, reduce death, and increase effectiveness (because they have enough energy to operate).
I'm not saying it's worth the risks of having small nuclear reactors spread around a combat zone, but the benefits should be calculated in.
Only for long range cruise missiles that can cost $2 million each. You won’t be firing one at every technical you see on Satellite.
"Kuperman warns that if soldiers were forced to abandon a reactor under attack, an adversary could potentially come into possession of several hundred pounds of highly radioactive waste."
However, no controversy there....
I don't really see the need for controversy we already have mobile reactors they just are in ships and subs.
wind power is junk. is doesn't scale. google implicitly acknowledged this with it's google X project for taking windpower 100-200 meters up , using wind kits, to capture 'more' wind. it's not doable because 'more' is 'more destructive'. you cannot bottle hurricanes, let alone the jet stream.
wind power is a disgrace. the german's have numerous engineering reports about why the history of windpower and the future of it, are conclusively garbage and won't and cannot scale.
you may as well spend every last dollar of wind power funding on solar power. the wind can stop blowing far earlier than the sun will explode. windpower CANNOT scale. nuclear, solar , geothermal CAN . the technology behind wind power is fundamentally limited by wind sweep. that is all. there simply ISNT enough capturable energy in the wind. and thus, the only option is to go higher in the atmosphere well above the surface of the earth.
going 'offshore' changes nothing really. you must go well above the surface of the earth. that is simply not feasible.
sometimes the biggest gains from discarding your biggest losers.