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I'm sure Tesla is going to be in house recycling all the batteries returned under warranty.
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Nov 19, 2015 21:10
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The resource investment of the quantity of solar cells you need is greater then the resource requirement of an equivalent nuclear plant. Silicon refining is a high tech process and cell production also incorporates a number of rare earth metals. Solars environmental cost lies in material production elsewhere in the world.
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Nov 30, 2015 00:11
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 Photo voltaic cells are made of doped silicon. This takes a pure silicon base and deposits quantities (Depending on manufacturer and intended use) of Boron, Arsenic, Phosphorus, Gallium, Antimony, and Indium. For example Gallium and Indium are popular for thin cells. The cheapest mass produced cells often use Boron/Phosphorus combos. Many alternates like Cadmium Telluride cells are becoming more popular due to efficiency and ease of manufacture but Cadmium is toxic and Tellurium is comparable with platinum in scarcity. Over time the efficiency of cells decline. So for the rest of this post i'm going to make the following assumptions about the cells
This means that ideally 1GW of solar power generation requires $300 Million ( in cheep PV's and 2.5 square miles of real estate. This space can be on roofs or desert, that's a matter of land use value. Next storage must be considered. Currently Solar's biggest use is offsetting daytime air conditioning, so storage isn't as much of an issue as air conditioning isn't used much at night. Other power is supplied at that time. For a fully closed system you need to store your projected overnight useage plus some buffer and generate enough during daylight to both power all expected demand and fully charge up for the next night. American households average just above 900KWh per month, or 30KWh a day. Successfully generating that amount of power in 1/3 of a day is practical because as per current grid solar useage the majority of power consumption is also during that period. A Tesla power wall only holds 7.5KWh. And its a $7000, 200lb investment. Thats plenty of Lithium. Your other options are Lead Acid Batteries which have their own problems. But to the owner an ideal 4Kw system, "$4k", and 26m2 As for actual deployment the Topaz Solar Farm in southern california cost $2.5 Billion and generates 550MW with 9 million Cadmium Telluride panels on 9.5 square miles. I'll leave off on solar for a moment, I feel like i'm already meandering. Lets compare this with Indian Point reactors in NY. 2x 1GW continuous production. Each reactor has to shutdown for a month every 2 years for refueling. From what I can find refuels cost about $40 Million. Modern operations since 1974. The plant was originally constructed for $2.5 billion in 2010 adjusted price. Which is cheep. Certain 1GW reactors have ranged up to $8 Billion due to one off designs or construction delays.. As for the enviromental concerns of the building of a nuclear reactor.
Plant engineering is really beautiful. Its all based on steam engineering. We're great at making steam pipes and systems. High speed turbines, some of whom have magnetic bearings and don't even need oil lubricants. Containment is steel and concrete. Machinery is steel. Pipes are steel. Steam is made in steel containers. The thermal cycle is almost the same as it is in any other energy plant. The nuclear components have some more impact, but sadly most of that is due to NIMBY before and after use. Borrated Polyethelene is used for neutron radiation shielding. Hafnium can be used as neutron absorbers in control rods. The Uranium Oxide fuel is most often coated in a Zirconium Alloy cladding. So Uranium, Zirconium, and Hafnium are the major rare metals used. Luckily besides the initial mining the production process is so strictly controlled that almost no hazardous waste (In the metallic sense) is produced. Uranium fuel itself is very safe to be around prior to its activation is an operating reactor. Uranium primarily decays via alpha emission. An Alpha (effectively a high energy helium nucleus) is easily blocked by paper, skin, and clothing and poses no harm unless its source is inside of you. Don't eat the Uranium. Post use nuclear fuel is highly radioactive and is stored underwater in special containment's. Properly designed nuclear reactors also have a very cool physical phenomenon that helps keep them safe. A reactor will have a "Negative Temperature Coefficient of Reactivity". This means that as temperature goes up power output goes down. With proper design vetting this will be true for all conditions, steady-state, transient, or emergency. During a crisis the reactor will respond by naturally shutting down its own nuclear chain reaction. Once thats done the emergency cooling systems simply have to cope with the passive decay heat which follows a natural decay curve.
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Nov 30, 2015 02:46
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Phanatic posted:Look, I'm a huge nuclear power fan (and you made a really good post covering a lot of oft-overlooked issues), but even I've gotta say that that's really glossing over things. Fukushima (and all BWR/PWR designs) have a large negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, but the reactors there still melted down like a motherfuck because the residual decay heat is still sufficient to melt the fuel assembly and the primary containment. I'm not saying its a panacea. Its solid physics for which engineered safety systems can be designed. Fukushima suffered from a number of unauthorized modifications TEPCO made to the approved design for the emergency cooling systems. Decay heat is an engineering problem. Nuclear safety is an engineering problem. One we're becoming very well versed in. And much like solar any increase in production scale will drive the cost of building nuclear plants even lower. silence_kit posted:This is irrelevant to the earlier claim that solar cells require scarce elements. When people talk about doping silicon for solar cells or integrated circuits, usually they talk about volumetric concentrations of the dopants and not the fraction of atoms in the semi-conductors that are dopants, but it works out to be an average dopant concentration of ~parts per million in a typical silicon cell. The scarcity of these materials doesn't matter since so little of them are used. Of the more scarce dopants, you mentioned gallium, indium, and antimony. I don't think that gallium and indium are actually used much, and the reason why you'd use antimony over phosphorus as an n-type dopant in a silicon integrated circuit is irrelevant for solar cells. I'm not arguing for the specific types of dopants for Solar, thats not something i'm familiar with. The reason why the dopants are a concern is not the "parts per million" useage, but the fact that in some cases "parts per million" in ground water can be toxic. Proper industrial controls limit the risk during production. Mining these elements also creates enviromental hazards. Theres a limit to what you can do. Silicon and Steel production both have industrial waste. We've got a lot of experience dealing with the heavy metal hazards of steel. The PV industry will suffer growing pains dealing with some of the lighter toxic materials they work with. quote:I don't think that relatively newer cadmium indium gallium selenide (CIGS) cell companies are doing that well. First Solar is a relatively big solar company which makes cadmium telluride solar cells. Both technologies promise a lower manufacturing cost than silicon cells, but I don't think that the manufacturing cost of cells is the biggest cost of solar electricity. It doesn't make sense, at least to me, to be to be a new solar cell company where your competitive advantage is (potentially) lower manufacturing cost. In any case, CdTe or CIGS aren't really slam dunk technologies and I don't see them replacing silicon. Everything I've read about them places them at the same efficiency of polycrystaline cells. Being lighter weight this saves on shipping and installation costs for large projects. Equal or better lifetime efficiency retention helps. So reduced manufacturing cost really does make a dent in overall price. It may have a future depending on market forces. I think it has enough market share to be seen as continually viable going forward. quote:Regarding all of the stuff you posted about the cost of solar electricity, you have to realize that you are describing a moving target. The cost of solar electricity is still dropping, so talking about how much old projects cost isn't that interesting to me. If you actually have a good prediction for when the cost of solar electricity will stop dropping, I'd be interested in hearing. This is a matter of funding. I'd bet a nuclear plant will beat a solar plant for $/MW Given the same amount of research funding. Sadly all the money is in solar due to the N word. Money in "Nuclear" is a risky political bet. The only way to know would be to fund both going forward. So our only option now is to look back at historical data. Historical data has nuclear being similar to solar in price and price history.
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Nov 30, 2015 21:41
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Wouldn't "shuting the grid down" against a CME just be shutting down and tripping everything in a specific order? Just with calculated delays between to minimize the damage that will cause. The whole 12 hour warning thing that I hear a lot seems like a much bigger number then what you have to perform the shutdown. If you want a 60 second delay between each small breaker just to allow some modicum of stabilized shutdown but that would still take hours. It's going to take an hour or two just to make the high level determination to begin the shutdown. And more time past that to place critical infrastructure and hospitals in a state where it's safe to disconnect them.
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Dec 7, 2015 17:07
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I doubt the energy extracted is worthwhile or the true point of the system. From the sounds of it they're using "Green energy production" as a way to get funding. The real purpose and use would be to put the devices across lanes to get better traffic data.
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Dec 17, 2015 17:18
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I have to assume you're trolling. But, Like many things our research into the physics of fusion is far ahead of our ability to engineer a system which safely contains it. Engineering problems like this require a lot of practical R&D to create an end product. Fusion money being redirected into fission wouldn't solve either. Fission based nuclear energy has a lot of engineering experience and just needs political will and commercial money for a safe deployment.
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Dec 24, 2015 20:08
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computer parts posted:One common recurring example is the hoverboard from Back to the Future. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no Not on Christmas. Take that back. Not on Christmas. Before I die man will live on mars and there will be hoverboards. If you disagree we must duel to the death in the late 1700's. I'll fetch a time machine.
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Dec 26, 2015 05:59
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Yes, last I heard they were trying to establish a refueling station in lunar orbit using fuel processed on the moon. Then they'd use that to sell to other corporate space goers and use that money to recover our first asteroid. Come on over to the space thread if that interests you: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3580990
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Dec 29, 2015 20:38
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C.M. Kruger posted:The asteroid mining fanboys always tend to overlook recovery Yeah thats close to already a solved problem. If you've recovered the asteroid to LEO using In situ thrusters then the speeds at recovery are even lower then an apollo capsule. The handwaving you refer to is trying to shoot chucks from an asteroids native orbit strait into a reentry. Again, space megathread, check it out.
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Dec 30, 2015 18:26
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If I recall correctly the earth actually adds some thousands of tons per year in dust and micrometeorites. Its a much larger number then you'd ever expect.
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Jan 9, 2016 01:52
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What you have to look at is the build price differences, not the overall cost. Cars are a perfect example. Sure a rare metal based fuel cell is only a small fraction of the cost of the total vehicle, but in the same way a combustion engine is also only a fraction of the cost of a conventional vehicle. If the engineering, research, and manufacturing that go into things like the the body and drive train cost $20k per car, that $20k will be the same regardless if its gasoline or hydrogen run. If the price of the ecological version is $5k more than the gasoline one then the consumers will still prefer the carbon emmisions. Now if easy availability to platinum or another great catalyst drop that difference to only $2k the consumer is more likely to use the clean car. Just think of how many people drive Prius's and they're far more expensive.
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Jan 15, 2016 21:05
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DrSunshine posted:Is there a word for "methods of obtaining energy from heat or light that don't involve a steam engine"? Like, the way solar PV directly generates electricity. Or is heating water and using it to turn a turbine the absolute most efficient or practicable design we have? As far as I knew both KAPL and Los Alamos are working on solid state voltaics designed specifically to work like PV cells but tuned to capture gamma rays from nuclear reactions. This is more of an offshoot of studies of gamma ray interaction with various materials. Not on the horizon for any sort of commercial application.
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Apr 10, 2016 18:53
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Pander posted:The problem is geography. It's best to do this in wide-open, non-arable land with little environmental impact. The way it reads they don't nessisarily need a stait incline. There are plenty of places where you could fit in a smaller, slightly meandering (and likely a little less efficient) few miles of track on the east coast. Even offsetting 50MWh on a local scale has a big impact. As for steeper slopes I can see them getting this working on some extreme inclines. Rather than use electric motors on the cars the assembly would be lifted from the top by steel cables. The steep incline would allow you to pack enough power into a small area to make up for very short term surges. Say, 1MWh per rail but setup to allow for a 3MW discharge rate. Granted that much concrete falling all the way in 20 minutes would be a pretty dangerous sight. Around 15, 50 tonne cars lifted 500 meters will give you that.
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May 11, 2016 18:54
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Trabisnikof posted:However, rail generally has very limited incline tolerance. Someone start the funicular equivalent quick! As far as I understood it the incline tolerance wasn't so much the load bearing but the difficulty getting good traction for power transmission. On an inclined winch the cables do all the power transmission and the rails are there as guides and supports for the load cars. Maybe I need to poll a pro from the train thread though?
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May 11, 2016 20:33
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I have teabagged a subcritical reactor before. I have achieved super criticallity on the same reactor. In neither case have I died or gotten cancer. Engineers do not pander.
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May 23, 2016 18:44
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Trabisnikof posted:At 0638 EDT on 5/15/2016, a "huh" was declared on Millstone Unit 3 due to a Main Generator stinky fart into the Turbine Building. At 0645 EDT, operators manually put the reactor to bed. All sheets tucked in. All was well and sleepy as expected following putting the reactor to bed. Operators are currently venting the remaining stinky fart from the generator through the normal vent path. All the safety related equipment is awake. The plant is in a normal sleepy bedtime electrical line-up. All Sleepy Bedtime Generators are available. Trigger warning that! I have nightmares about bedtime turnover still.
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May 23, 2016 23:01
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Potato Salad posted:People taking part in the NPS program taking graduate classes in my institute's physics department are some of the most efficient and focused students I've met. They're doing something right. As a NPS grad once I got out I was regularly taking 20+ Credit semesters without straining myself. After going through the Memorize -> Test -> Hands on -> Test for Understanding -> Certify -> Operate pipeline university classes are almost insulting with their pace and scope.
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Aug 25, 2016 16:51
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The government wouldn't build the plants directly. Just as you said. They'd write Bechtel and Bechtel would propose them a standardized design for $3B a pop plus regional extras. Then they could pay Bechtel to build a dozen of them with taxpayer money. Because as it turns out Bectel is sort of the King of nuclear, and all nuclear anything leads back to them anyway.
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Aug 25, 2016 21:06
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I just came up with a great example! But I'm struggling to find better articles to back me up 'Big Goverment' is consistently buying Bechtel designed, GE built reactors at a rate of two a year, and the cost since the program got rolling has continued to decline. Not to mention the success of the past 60 years of American naval nuclear propulsion. (The best numbers I can find was it was $100M for a S6G reactor for a 688 and $400M for a S9G in a Virginia.) PDF warning Which, rounding up for both estimates and the ~wikipedia rated Power~ was $700/Kw in the 80's and $2,500/Kw today. So yeah, turns out the government has some pretty cost-effective nuclear reactor contractors. Plus the value of the fantastic safety record of the US Naval Nuclear program. M_Gargantua fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 00:52
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Pander posted:Question: Does the nuclear navy require NRC approval for its reactors? The NRC as a Department of Energy organization and Naval Reactors as a Department of Defense organization are theoretically separate entities. Naval Reactors also is a big part of the National Nuclear Security Administration. Naval Reactors does work closely with the NRC and shares a huge majority of the safety requirements. NR and the NRC tap a lot of the same folk at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, and Idaho National Labs. Which are all DoE sites run by Bechtel and Naval Reactors. So... Kinda. Naval Reactors has a review process that's not bogged down by NRC requirements and instead mired in sometimes more stringent NR requirements. But once the design is ready and approved its finalized. Any changes after that go back through the review process. If you took an S9G plant and wanted to make it a civilian plant it would take four general things to make it NRC compliant: Sufficient back up power sources, sufficient additional fire protection, a good concrete containment bunker to put it in, and huge sources of backup water. Part of that is because an S9G plant is an already compact and self contained setup, fitting in about 30'x30'x50' including all reactor, shielding, generators, and support equipment. The trade off is they use uranium of very high enrichment which yields proliferation risks, and each plant is low power in comparison to a GW scale civilian plant.
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Aug 26, 2016 01:36
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slorb posted:australian distribution grids are built to an almost european standard instead of being run on a shoestring like in america. Hey now, shoe string becomes conductive at 500kV.
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Sep 25, 2016 15:40
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NPR Journalizard posted:Yeah there was a *massive* storm that damaged big transmission lines. These politicians keep using so called "regulation" to force systems to do things they weren't designed for. Clear legislative overreach and they need to stop ruining my free markets.
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Sep 29, 2016 04:07
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silence_kit posted:You are going to have to expound on this one--on its face it sounds like a really bad idea. The U.S. military operates under much different constraints than the commercial world and is not really known for being a low-cost organization. The Nuclear Navy at this point almost certainly operates at a better cost ratio than most commercial plants. That's more that the process is streamlined and mass produced and while labor unions are still a thing (a good thing) they also know that the two navy shipyards balk none of the lazy poo poo you see in a lot of other construction processes. I don't think a single S9G reactor plant has been behind schedule. M_Gargantua fucked around with this message at 11:22 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 11:19
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Phanatic posted:Navy plants require HEU. Very HEU, enrichment is somewhere north of 90%. That's both vastly more expensive as fuel and also something you can build a bomb from directly if you get your hands on some. You don't need an HEU core to utilize the process's developed by the Naval Nuclear Lab. HEU just means the core can be pint sized for the power + endurance. silence_kit posted:I am not super familiar with the application of nuclear reactors for powering ships and subs, but I suspect that the Navy goes through the hassle and trouble of powering their vessels with nuclear reactors because they don't have a lot of other technical options. Being for a defense application, they are willing to pay whatever the cost to get the best functionality. Without getting into the actual power production figures an S9G comes as part of a $2.5B submarine. A lot of that is all the high tech military stuff and the equipment to make it a submarine and not a power plant. The propulsion plant itself costs in the ballpark of $800M, if you assume it would take an equivalent $2.5B to make a plant designed to the same standards, using commercial grade uranium, suitable for permanent installation, then you're still paying less then the rest of the proposals and construction attempts in the past three decades. M_Gargantua fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 19:27
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Phanatic posted:The R&D was pretty much a parallel effort considering how different the purposes were. The BORAX reactors were BWRs designed by Argonne and were delivering grid power in 1955. The Navy's design for the nautilus was a PWR. The plan would be to use the Naval Nuclear Laboratory to design and field modular nuclear reactors using commercially enriched Uranium. The NNL has been doing development, testing, and post-use analysis for 67 years. They 100% have a better handle on it than anyone else, the nuclear program has been solid that whole time. Its run by a whole different directorate and they really rigorously enforce their standards from materials intake to expended core disposal. For the submarine program they developed S5W in 1969, that was used in an entire class of submarines, and the S6G, S8G, and S9G are essentially incremental improvements since, and each were designed and tailored for the class of submarine's they were being designed for. Navy Pressurized water reactors are all very very similar to one another, you're wildly over-inflating the difficulty there has been in making so many designs, most of which were cold war one offs. Using the same systems to design land based cores would reduce complexity and costs further. If you nationalize the reactor program the US government can site and construct 50 land based reactors without having 50 different licenses and the BANANA crowd is an issue that can be dealt with (by ignoring it). You'd then slowly integrate civilian operators while maintaining navy oversight until you have a civilian oversight program that can actually keep its poo poo together and plants that aren't cutting corners for profit margins.
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Aug 7, 2017 19:44
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Potato Salad posted:There's some numbers. What kind of power output can an S9G push, though? Are you paying that $800M for tens, hundreds, or thousands of kilowatts? A quick google of open source reporting gives an S9G at 210 MWt. That's close enough for this purpose. Submarine engines aren't designed for excellent efficiency. They're optimized to operate over a very wide range of rpms and power. Pick a steam cycle efficiency of your choice and get your MW/$. So that's analytical answer I can give you. The rest of this comes because I've previously worked for the Navy and the NNL so I'm going to speak in broad strokes: Phanatic posted:You're wildly overstating the commonality between naval propulsion reactors and civilian power reactors, which don't have much in common other aside from being light water reactors using uranium as fuel, and a civilian plant has a whole lot of design considerations that just don't apply for a nuclear propulsion plant. The notion that because the Navy has a handle on designing the former that if you put them in charge of designing and building the latter they'll be experts at that too and you'll save a shitload of money is utterly baseless. The fact that it's become so disproportionately expensive to build civilian plants doesn't have anything to do with the *design* of the reactor, so using a Navy process to design land based cores does nothing to reduce how disproportionately expensive building civilian plants are. What major differences would you care to cite that would make a civilian reactor more expensive? The physics don't change. The chemistry doesn't change. Building bigger pipes and bigger pressure vessels is a well known, practical engineering problem. -A submarine reactor, all support systems, all turbines, everything, must be stuffed in a 30' diameter steel tube, a civilian plant gets to spread out when its convienient. -A submarine reactor has far more demanding nuclear safety requirements due to the rate of power change, the range it must operate over, and how often power levels must change. From a physics standpoint the tolerances to moderate and control 30 years of continuous fuel burn is hugely more challenging to model and account for. -The entire propulsion plant is already designed to continue safe operations through flooding and explosion, far overbuilt to meet civilian regulatory requirements for natural disasters. -The navy has a huge oversight operation, and they've been extremely effective, you can't rebuild that level of competence in the civilian industry without a decade of experience. This to me would be one of the biggest cost savers to the program compared to a commercially led attempt. -A navy reactor is made with beggeringly expensive HEU. Using commercial grade fuel is much much cheaper. The cost of the reactor does benefit from the fact that the core never needs to be refueled. Lump sum up front, rather than the continuing cost of refueling. quote:Your last paragraph handwaves away a shitload of regulatory issues that wouldn't go away just because you start using the Navy's process to design the physical plant. If you can handwave those things away with the Navy, you could just as easily handwave them away with GE. Except GE is a corporation and they don't have the best track record. The Navy is actively operating, around the clock, more Wattage than anyone else. You can pretty safely let the certification process that exists handle it. NNL is a DoE contract and has a day to day working relationship with the regulators. NNL research was the basis for 30 years of civilian plant regulation to begin with. quote:At that cost:power ratio, Palo Verde would have cost over 100 billion dollars (actual cost: $6 billion). The Navy has basically zero experience in designing reactors for the purpose of economically generating electricity. The physics of the economics of scale really aide the cost analysis. The construction cost does not rise linearly with reactor power. The experience directly translates to planning and constructing reactors for power production alone. Phanatic posted:The issue isn't being unable to secure capital, the issue is this disproportionate and continuing *increase* in capital costs. A lot of that is due to regulatory ratcheting and construction delays. Hiring naval experts doesn't address either issue in the slightest. Where do you think the experts the navy trains and employs go when they retire from the navy? They're not lifers. Most of them, anyway. The best way I can put this is that the level of design quality already present in naval designs effectively pass muster for all civilian applications. You can add whatever bits you need in the design phase to makeup for whichever shortcomings the safety engineers worry about. And once the risk assessment is set, you can have NR and the NRC sign off on the program, independent of civilian regulatory ratcheting and licencing cost bullshit. Your remaining details are the external cooling system (cooling towers etc), containment, pure water storage, and emergency cooling. Things like siting backup diesels so they're not susceptible to flooding is site specific. Designing a standard containment building that can withstand all your 100 year projected natural disasters is hardly impossible. More concrete and steel is cheep. They've been doing this continually for 57 years. There hasn't been a slump, there hasn't been layoffs or brain drain. That's the biggest reason I can give for why it would be done better. Building them and running them as a DoE program would work, its turning them over to civilian operators over the years that I would worry about.
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Aug 8, 2017 03:14
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I'm all for huge investment in Thorium Breeders, and fuel reprocessing.
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Aug 8, 2017 22:42
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The distributed solar debate sides are based on the two separate starting points: Either A, bottom up) When most people have solar power and rudimentary storage they cover the majority of their own power needs and the needs of their neighbors on each substation grid, and can pass excess in the neighborhood up into distribution to supply commercial and industrial customers. Or B, top down) A utility needs to control the means to produce enough to meet peak demand, or the ability to get supplied by larger utilities once local centralized supply is exceeded. In case A the grid supply's the means for distributed balancing, which it isn't designed for right now. The utility then must be the intermediator between all the parties involved (Which should just be autonomous billing, most of the time) and have a means for handling commercial and industrial demand fluctuations. In case B each home that has solar puts financial burden on the utility because the business model has been top down for decades, and that swings in clouds have a noticeable effect on the big customers of strip malls and industrial facilities. I think a good compromise policy decision would be that everyone needs to pay a minimum fee to be grid connected, and the utility capital infrastructure cost is subsidized by the taxes of the community while the utility gets the excess solar of each household for 'free'. The upfront cost for each homes solar is amortized over a few years by splitting the purchase cost between the homeowner and the utility by a negotiable fraction based on homeowner income, and over a few years the cost of the panels to the homeowner is paid back by the power they 'sell' back to the grid. That process may be tax credits, it may be subsidies given to the utility to pay the homeowner for their power. Each of these homes would need to meet basic safety requirements like having low voltage cutouts and transient protection so they can island themselves from the grid when needed. (As an aside I was reading a research paper where they talked about encoding a command into the 60Hz baseband on the HV side that could be picked up by the metering gear on the homes LV side to issue a command to disconnect from the grid until power was restored and the command was issued to reconnect. It was essentially a few bytes of 'command + MAC + error correction' that was passed at an incredibly low baud rate) I'm of the opinion that utilities need to adapt to the distributed grid system. There's a business model there and they just need to stop dragging rear end and get on it, its not like the grid infrastructure hasn't been hurting for upgrades for a decade anyway, use this as impetuous. The major utilities will still be needed to power cities and industrial centers that draw MW/acre, and centrallized solar/nuclear/NG peaker plants will be needed there. Another possibility is to combine those with centralized storage at the same sites so that the peaking is covered by storage that has been built up by distributed solar or constant running generators.
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Aug 10, 2017 16:55
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DrSunshine posted:Are there any good quick nuclear talking points? I need to convince some fellow leftists who haven’t left the old anti nuclear weapons stance inherited from the Cold War Green Day’s. I’m looking for points on: renewables not being sufficient for baseline load, nuclear waste being a tiny amount physically, and something that could argue a case for nationalization/ deprivatization of the nuclear industry. Thanks! A single person's entire lifetime energy consumption, including all the secondary consumption as a side effect of the production of the goods they consume, is about a 1" cube of uranium. That's the sum total of the per person lifetime high level waste.
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Apr 30, 2022 18:27
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CommieGIR posted:The other part is framing it as purely waste ignores that most high level spent fuel CAN be re-used, recycled, or even bred into new fuel. Its not just...trash or waste. Its future potential fuel. Do you happen to have a radionuclide flowchart of fuel -> waste -> fuel -> waste with the percentages? I can do the molar mass calculations for how much net high level waste you get if you burn it twice or thrice
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Apr 30, 2022 18:51
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Electric Wrigglies posted:Is a good watch, surprised at the argument for CCS as I had it written off as a pipe dream (even more than nuclear) but they say it will be necessary. I will have to look into it more. I got the feeling they said it was necessary because everyone knows we're not going to ween off natural gas in the next 20 years no matter what. You can drag industry kicking and screaming into carbon capture but trying to decommission plants to switch to solar + nuclear is a non-starter.
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Aug 25, 2022 21:17
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silence_kit posted:No that’s not the case, sorry. Try again. Having a simplified and functional model at the macro level does not in any way remove the underlying quantum physics. Being able to model something like a MOSFET or PV at the macro level is very different from all the work that needs to happen to make that manufacturable, let alone to miniaturize and improve efficiency
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Aug 27, 2022 13:43
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Turns out "out-of-date pro-nuclear" sources were underestimating how important building a reliable nuclear energy grid would be to not loving up the planet.
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Aug 28, 2022 14:00
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LeastActionHero posted:District heating, for example, is typically run at about 80C. Increasing the condenser temperature from 30C, and assuming a hot side of 433C, drops you from a Carnot efficiency of ~57%, to 50%, which on a real plant might mean you drop from 40% to 35% efficiency. Industrial processes might well want even hotter, which drives the efficiency down more. If you can use it all without losses, it's probably a bit more efficient than a heat pump, but you'd better be right next to the power plant and have a plan to use a lot of heat on a completely constant basis. Its easy to use it as a preheat or as a better source for a heat pump than ambient. But you are correct in that waste heat is often not hot enough for direct use.
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Oct 4, 2022 03:47
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Yes the problem with "easy" D-T fusion is that most of the energy is released in the neutrons. But water is a great way to suck the thermal energy out of fast neutrons. Water is also a great way to store and transport heat. Even if you have to bury the entire inner wall of a reactor vessel every 5 years thats still a huge reduction in high level waste compared to fission, which itself produces little enough high level waste that it isn't a problem. There is also the future possibly of Aneutronic B-p fusion, which is well beyond the current goals of plasma research but is a physical possibility, but only 10x more difficult. In the meantime we have math for many different blends of He3/Li/D fuels that at least minimize neutron production. In fission 2.4% of the thermal energy starts as neutrons. Its not an unachievable feat of materials science to account for them.
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Nov 5, 2022 04:51
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InAndOutBrennan posted:When it comes to waste. Keep it as tightly, or even more regulated as today. An American's lifetime energy usage, residential, commercial, and industrial, including 2nd order usage in manufacturing and transport, adds up to 1.3cuin of high level nuclear waste per lifetime. That can be further reduced with reprocessing. Your entire life is a little larger than a sugar cube worth of nuclear power.
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Nov 22, 2022 22:48
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You can dial down your reactors at night, your daily costs don't change. You just have to do the math for what your revenue is if you operate at 60% for 1/4 of the day. Going from 100% to 90% of your potential daily revenue doesn't suddenly make it unprofitable over the course of years.
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Nov 27, 2022 23:34
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If we were building as much nuclear capacity as we were solar capacity, the cost per installed MW would also be low and falling. If you neglect a supply chain as soundly as we have shunned nuclear then the costs will rise. If you federally support that supply chain and prime it for large mass production then costs drop substantially as we're seeing with solar.
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Nov 30, 2022 01:13
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 11:49 |
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There are dozens of different approaches and each one has the goal of collecting enough data to build a few more and better prototypes to collect more data. None of these designs will produce a net power, because that's not the immediate goal.
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Dec 14, 2022 01:36
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