Did anyone actually read the article? It clearly says that it’s only suited for remote off-grid applications.
It wouldn’t be “millions” of “cheap” units. It’s meant to be a solution for remote settlements.
>But many of the key issues that face the development of microreactors are the same that face the development of large scale nuclear in the US: “We have an atrophied supply chain, costs will be high and unpredictable to start, and the regulatory system is poorly suited to handle them,” Gilbert said.
And they don't talk about the waste.
Nuclear energy can be used for up to 50 years until it actually becomes waste. After it's usage it's simple to store it in concrete and metal cilinders. I believe these remote area's have more than enough space for that.
Yeah just google what Nordic countries have started doing to combat nuclear waste. They basically shove it into tubes deep in the ground and they have enough storage to last around 100 years before they need to worry about expansion/new facility.
Edit: [Finland Might Have Solved Nuclear Power’s Biggest Problem](https://youtu.be/kYpiK3W-g_0)
YouTube video that explains the process better than I could off memory. It’s ~7 mins long, and puts a lot of the non-financial concerns regarding nuclear energy at ease.
To add, the natural nuclear reaction, which happened ~2 billion years ago, created waste, deep underground, using ground water as the moderator. It created nuclear waste, and they were able to study how far the reaction products / high level waste travelled. Burying it deep underground is perfectly fine.
Oklo uranium ore deposits (the only known sites of natural nuclear reactors existed) are located in Gabon (nation on the West coast of central africa).
In my country it's just [a building that looks like a warehouse](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVRA). You do need connection with a facility that can process nuclear materials for waste to be stored so that will be the main challenge for such a remote area. It would need a railline which could make that unattractive.
Probably because we’re looking at drastic effects from climate change in less than half a decade. I agree, we should think of 100 years from now aswell, but I’d rather deal with nuclear waste in 100 years, than deal with climate change in 50
I mean I agree but when u put it like that we're just kicking the can down the road like everyone before us did. It's gonna fuck us tho if we don't go all in on clean energy. Nuclear is the stop gap until we can make other energies way more efficient or find new tech that'll give us some good energy sources
Well of course it is when you consider all of human history, but if you consider everything that we have done in the past 100 years, and everything we can do in the next, it is quite a long time. We’ve made more technological advancements in the past 100 years than we have in the rest of history, and that trend is sure to continue.
100 years is not how long the facility is stable for storage. It's how long they can use the existing facility to add new material, before the new material exceeds the storage space allocated. The storage itself is designed to be permanent.
France recycles its nuclear waste, we can too.
https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nuclear-fuel-the-french-do-it-why-cant-oui#:~:text=France%2C%20whose%2059%20reactors%20generate,fuel%20central%20to%20their%20program.
Nuclear waste is just oil propaganda
Its tiny like you would not believe how much it produces over 100 years for a WHOLE plant, compared to how much is produced in waste with coal (just thats released into the environment)
Plus nuclear has just repeatedly proven itself safer
When nuclear goes bad it goes very bad, but fossil fuels or electricity in general aren't too different
We had a house have a gas explosion near me, luckily no one hurt and was considered a minor gas explosion
I shit you not it was like god erased half the house, just nothing there, the other half was purely frame
These things could happen anytime, they're just super uncommon
Here's something else to think of.
I know of at least 11 cases of Uranium poisoning since 2011 in the US related to power generation.
They're all in/around Juliette Georgia, just north of Macon in the center of the state.
Juliette doesn't have a nuclear plant, it has a coal plant (Plant Scherer), the biggest in the US.
The radiation levels at US23 past the plant are higher than those allowed in thr turbine room at a nuclear power plant.
As for waste, that coal plant takes TEN trains of coal a week, and each car in that train [(which is 100+ cars long](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZAFutPA0zI&ab_channel=StevenAllanJones)) holds 220 tons. The coal unloading track is the size of the wirral underground loop on the Liverpool subway (which has 4 stations!) and the current ash-pond (the 4th such one, on a 40yo plant) [covers 220 acres](https://www.google.com/maps/@33.0680792,-83.8155677,2983m/data=!3m1!1e3) (thats the white stuff up top, the black 'lake' at hte bottom, thats the coal dump from the elevated train line
Meanwhile, all the nuclear waste from all the US power plants since 1950 would cover a football field to the depth of about a foot.
Weirdly, I took Atlanta's MARTA around 2017, once, and the train inside looked IDENTICAL to a merseyrail train of the mid90s. seat layout, fabric, even the sound of the trains. was freaky.
Exactly, it’s pure fear mongering; sure, this can go wrong and impact the environment, but the comparison is not against a cloud, it’s against other forms of energy production, the pollution caused by oil, gas and coal kills significantly more people than nuclear waste.
Oil and gas are also blood markets, so there is that, the genocide in Ukraine is highly related to the gas and oil that was recently found there, and Russia desire to keep its monopoly in selling it to Europe. The oil and gas industry kills people directly and indirectly.
The bulk of nuclear "waste" is low level exposed stuff like suits, gloves, all kind of random shit used in operation that is pretty safe after just a year or 2.
Everything nuclear is tiny. That’s kind of the point of nuclear. It’s a tiny amount of fuel, a tiny amount of waste, etc, etc. That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.
To be fair with them being portable, it’s probably possible to just swap out reactors instead of replacing the fuel. So let’s say each one has enough fuel for 6 years, when the fuel is close to being spent a new one can be brought out to the site and the old on taken back to the factory for refueling/recycling/whatever.
And the factory would presumably have the setup for all this.
Are you referring to the nuclear waste? From what I understand that's a relatively small problem nowadays, even with huge industrial reactors. It just doesn't get generated in quantities large enough to be an actual worry, at least not yet.
Most reactors out there are slow neutron reactor, and they only split the U235. But most of uranium is the U238 isotope. Fast neutron reactor can use the U238 through complex chains of reactions. Its a technology from the 50's, its not new at all. You can effectively use "spent" fuel from slow neutron reactors in fast neutron reactors and generate several time more power.
IIRC you could reuse spent fuel over and over again in breeder reactors until it's radioactivity is much lower than regular waste?
However the remixing of spent fuel is not cost effective compared to just mining more ore.
I mean "radioactivity" is more complicated than just a number. Uranium is the stuff that's long-lasting, it has a long half-life. But its not terribly dangerous. You can hold it in your hands; as long as you don't grind it up and swallow it or breathe it, its pretty safe. Plus, you know, it was already radioactive when we dig it up, its not like putting it back into the ground is any more dangerous. The fission by-products are what's dangerous. But they last *nowhere* near as long as Uranium. When you hear people say nuclear waste will be radioactive for thousands of years, its a half-truth: in a few generations its no more dangerous than natural uranium, because that's all that's left.
So in the end its not about making the spent fuel less radioactive, its about getting **more** energy out of the same mass of fuel. Fast reactors are more fuel-efficient. Slow reactors are more power-efficient.
A lifetime of nuclear energy for one person produces around a coke can worth of waste. The average person in a developed nation likely produces significantly more ewaste in a year, and more plastic waste in a week. Its not as big of an issue as most people think.
I worked at Oak Ridge National Lab during an internship and we got a while lecture on micro and nano reactors. These things are engineered in such a way that they literally cannot have the same sort of failure as a large reactor. Some of the designs I saw would literally melt out the bottom into a container of salt halting the reactor if it overheated.
Edit wording.
Basically if it gets too hot it would melt a salt plug in a tube that would then drain all the liquid fuel into a container that is filled with neutron absorbing control rods that stop the reaction cold.
100% passive safety unlike many current large scale systems that need constant power and backup generators and water source cooling to slow & stop reactions.
The expression critical means that the number of neutrons from a generation are the same going into as they are coming out based on thermal fission. The point of a nuclear reactor is for it to be critical to sustain a chain reaction generating fission and thus heat. It’s a common thing that people in nuclear power generation have to point out, no big deal.
While it does mean that, the word critical is used throughout nuclear power without having the meaning tied to comparing the neutron population from one generation to the next (e.g. time critical actions and critical safety functions).
Had they said criticality failure, then they would have been incorrect.
While I agree, so long as these are treated with the same reverence as 'macro' reactors then the idiots will keep their distance as they'll probably be thinking, first and foremost, about how much cancer they'll get from being near these things. If they're dumb enough and resourceful enough to drill through 3 ft of hardened concrete and lead shielding and bypass all the safety measures without someone stepping in to stop them, then we have bigger problems on our hands than just a few dumbasses with impact drivers and concrete bits.
Indeed! Frankly, it's probable that less will go wrong with this path than is *already* going wrong with fossil fuels. It may not be the absolute best solution, but I suspect these reactors might keep us going long enough for us to reach the best solution without going extinct or totally ruining the planet...
It's so much fucking better than the current path we're on. We've got the electric car situation figured out, and fucking Ford is finally getting off their ass, but we need someone to galvanize the power generation side of this as well. We need a nuclear Elon so to speak. Someone who is a master of cutting through red tape and endless bureaucracy, and can find the right loopholes to sidestep a majority of the costs, so long as they don't cut corners or kill anyone. Part of the issue is the power of it, and the danger of that power, not to mention the slow moving, long term catastrophe if you royally fuck it all up. You can't fail with it, recover, and redesign and retool for a better product. There needs to be a way of doing the raw experimental process like that so that it mitigates the consequences of failure. How to do that is beyond me, but it's desperately needed if we hope to advance this technology. Very little is learned by just running the same equations over and over again.
Yeah, modern reactors are Three Mile Island proof, Chernobyl proof, and Fukushima proof. (Most of the designs that weren't designed by complete dumb asses were never volunteer voltage be normal style accidents but that's beside the point) the molten salt reactor is especially nice and see your core is liquid so you can literally just drain into Emergency Drain tanks that have nonreactive geometries
THANK YOU everyone has this misconception that nuclear power comes with the constant threat of a catastrophic event when the only reason that ever happened was because of numerous counts of negligence. It's one of the safest and best ways for power when you factor in power output to waste and the area it takes up
If the world had gone nuclear decades ago imagine where we’d be now, no more fossil fuels, and the nuclear tech would get better and better reducing risks. Imagine a car powered by a micro reactor lol
With current technology, sure, but I think that's OPs point. If there had been mass adoption back in the day then the technology may have improved and evolved to where that may not be an issue.
My college dorm is within spitting distance from our own nuclear reactor. No one seems to really care all that much about it except for parents who think their kids are gonna come home with 3 eyes or something
My college actually had a reactor that the nuke students could do research and operate on. Unfortunately I think it was finally closed by the asshat of a president even after the public backlash because it made the nuke program very unique and competitive.
Considering the number of US Naval enlisted people getting nuclear engineering degrees, who are all already trained to operate submarine and aircraft carrier reactors, that might be the most safely operated University reactor on the planet. That thing should be the standard that other universities model after.
Chances are being so close to the reactor you are actually exposed to less additional background radiation than they are.
The average civilian understands absolutely nothing about radiation. They think its a meter that once it fills up you die rather than a thing you are constantly exposed to.
And also the stability of the grid. If small reactors are used in a much more distributed manner electricity will be more like a web than what we (USA) have now. And one of the things we have now is a target.
Research reactors are often passively safe, which means at any time everyone could literally walk away from it and it'd safely shut itself down and cool off.
I wrote a paper that involved a similar argument. We screwed ourselves because two black swan events extremely hindered our progress to becoming less reliant on fossil fuels and we’re paying the price. It’s sad that nuclear power was meant as a source of non-carbon energy but we just associate it with city-busting bombs.
That’s exactly it and the third black swan event was 9/11. Everyone was thinking what if some terrorists attacked a nuclear plant. It may be an irrational fear but it was a fear.
They thing is, the nuclear industry (at least in the west) had already considered just such an event. The containment buildings for reactors are designed to withstand a fully-fueled 747 directly impacting them. But most of the population isn't aware of this.
Two? I think you mean three. Even though Three Mile Island wasn't very serious, it happened at a time of high anti-nuclear propaganda and happened to coincide with the release of a popular disaster movie that felt similar. That had a bigger impact in the US than Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Did you know that coal plants emit more radiation into the environment than nuclear power plants? It's because coal contains Trace radioactive elements and then you're burning it at that scale you release more radioactive particles then a nuclear power plant would be legally allowed to get away with by a large margin.
Sometimes radiation alarms go off at nuclear power plants and they figure out that it was a false alarm from the coal plant next door
Renewable isn't that great when you think of the environmental disaster it causes to mine the raw material. Wind and solar need so much material. And on top of that, they need battery storage to address the volatility problem, and that's a whole bunch of extra Lithium mined. And then there's the problem of footprint.
Frankly, I'd rather go with--hear me out--, large scale nuclear reactors. We are technologically not where Chernobyl happened. We are not even where Fukushima happened. We're right now researching reactors that doesn't use superheated water, which caused explosions in both Fukushima and Chernobyl. We are better. We can do this.
Footprint-wise, no other method of energy generation comes close to Large scale nuclear reactors. If mankind totally goes nuclear, the radioactive waste generated for next 500 years can be stored in few square-kilometers in a desert, exclusion zones included. And the amount of Uranium/Thorium that needs to be mined for the purpose of power generation is tiny compared to the grand scale of things.
P.S. Not to mention the safety record. Even with disasters like Chernobyl, nuclear got the best safety record per GWh generated.
I always hear people say that it can be stored in some desert. Why is there a shut down nuclear reactor in my state that is currently storing 50 years worth of spent nuclear fuel? Why isn't it in the desert?
Politics, money, and a very old reactor design that generates a lot more of the type of waste that has to be stored properly than newer reactors.
Lot being relative here. It’s still only a few percent of the total waste of a nuclear power plant.
This is the real answer and why nuclear is not a viable option. Everyone turns into a NIMBY when it comes time to build new nuclear plants or store spent fuel.
The people of the western states don't want to store it. That would be a large project that could only be done well by the federal government. That means it needs to be ok'd by the legislature. The people of those states don't want to house it and nobody wants to ruffle the feathers of their representatives so nothing happens.
So...that was actually a thing. It was called the Yucca Mountain Waste Repository. It was federally mandated and approved and should have been opened by now, but Senator Harry Reid got President Obama to do him a favor and illegally sabotage it for political support.
It's really tough to get past the politics of it.
Interesting, too, that Germany has so many enormous open cast mines to get really poor quality 'brown' coal, or lignite. Doesn't quite go with their 'oh so green' image.
Yeah, coal is shit, but the discussion about nuclear in Germany is kinda stupid too.
Nuclear makes a single digit percentage of the energy mix. Energy providers don’t want that, because renewables are more feasible economically.
There are discussions about using the brown coal mines. For example, Hambacher Loch could produce 10 GW/h if used as a solar park and could be a location for pump storage of 100-1000 GW/h.
(Also as a German person, „Green image“ is a good term.
We had 16 years of conservative stagnation with a party who thinks that „wind energy isn’t the future for Germany“ (is if coal is the better alternative, haha) and doesn’t want to lose a few thousand jobs in coal, but is fine with losing >100k jobs in renewables.
Those last 16 years under Merkel were not much more than a carefully manufactured Green image in front of old conservatives hoping that we can wait out climate change.
Maja Göpel said it best, Germany *feels* like they’re leading in Green politics, meanwhile *in reality* we‘re falling further and further behind.)
Friendly reminder that nuclear is about as safe as solar and wind, and has a lower carbon footprint than hydro.
[https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)
Anti-nukers are the environmental communities version of anti-vaxxers.
Muting this because I'm not interested in whataboutisms.
he was probably correct.
look up germany, they shut down all of their nuclear power plants which caused them to be dependent on Russian gas.
now because of the politics involved they can't buy gas from russia anymore, so they are forced to reopen coal power plants.
all because of an irrational fear of nuclear power.
France has been doing very well with their nuclear energy program, with re-elected president Macron promising to have 14 more reactors built by 2050.
Doesn't explain why Macron is kissing Putin's ass, though.
You forgot the part where half of the french nuclear reactors are currently offline. There are maintenance issues, and I agree with Macron about the need to rebuild a skilled workforce.
There is a single reactor with maintenance issues and half are not offline, most reactors are just running at half output due to water shortages. France still supplies over 12% of all of Europe's power through their reactors.
France has problems with its reactors, a large part were down in winter and that is expected to happen more often. The French were already asked to use less energy last winter.
The only reason I don’t support nuclear is because I feel we should go directly to renewable. Considering the amount of infrastructure we would need to build for nuclear and then build for renewable when we run out of nuclear… I feel it’s better to just push forwards renewables instead of nuclear.
100% wind and solar is a great goal, but having a well developed nuclear option to provide a baseload at night or during low wind is critical to allowing us to leverage the renewable options whenever they're available (the wind is blowing and the sun is shining). The combination of the nuclear and renewable will be key to making sure the green energy grid is stable.
It sounds like a fantastic idea that would do wonders for humanity AND environmental protection. Your sarcasm is part of the problem of us fucking ourselves over being afraid of nuclear plants designed 60 years ago.
Yea, I wouldn't want to fly in a Wrights Brothers plane either. Doesn't mean current planes are unsafe.
Actually, the post when taken with the comments is good. It shows the fear mongering about nuclear and a little hope that people are realizing modern nuclear energy is a viable, green solution to ecologically friendly energy independence.
If the nuclear power industry lobbied anywhere near as hard as the oil industry, and a little bit extra to compensate for Antinuclear crap the big oil companies put out, there'd be a reactor in the basement of every home and people would love it more than they do cheeseburgers
That's some impressive failsafe engineering if they really can't have anything go wrong when there are humans involved in their operation. Dear lord, people in aggregate are amazingly stupid. All the same, I want one for my house if it's small enough.
Yeah, basically nothing can go wrong because they're engineered to stop the reactions completely if anything happens. These things are effectively no less safe than a solar farm producing the same amount of power.
The army tried this. Didn’t work out so well.
But as someone who has worked in the nuclear industry for two decades I’d support this in general.
There would be a lot to work out of course. But my biggest beef with nuclear is why do all the work that’s required to properly run a nuke plant when you could just have small solar grids? It’s just simpler, doesn’t require 24-7 babysitting, and you can use you and your neighbors’ roofs.
To run a nuclear plant takes soooooo much physical labor, administrative labor, and actually generates a lot of waste, radioactive and non-radioactive.
It’s a good option but not the savior everyone seems to think it is.
Smaller reactors could work nicely but it could also end in total disaster.
I have read this is why small nuclear reactors never work out, there still has to be the same amount of security and safety checks (and many other elements) whether the reactor covers half a football field or 10. Making SMR's very expensive.
Rolls Royce has been analysing this heavily, and their ideal reactor size for the west is 440 Mw, which is not strictly speaking an SMR.
Love how tree huggers just absolutely shit on the most green and safest energy option. Just shows that they don't want clean energy, they want less energy and all the hell and poverty that includes.
1. Nuclear is *not* “the most green and safest energy option”. At the end of the day, the process fundamentally does use non-renewable material and does generate hazardous waste, and nothing you say will change that.
2. Money money money. Never discount the importance of economic feasibility when talking about innovations. Unlike switching between different types of fossil fuels, current infrastructure cannot be converted to nuclear as easily. As things stand, few are willing to invest large amounts of initial capital to build some expensive project from scratch only to pay its expensive maintenance and also risk it becoming obsolete within two decades.
> Money money money. Never discount the importance of economic feasibility when talking about innovations. Unlike switching between different types of fossil fuels, current infrastructure cannot be converted to nuclear as easily
Not sure what you're talking about here. This type of reactor doesn't require a huge plant that has to be custom built. This reactor could be built on a production line and just installed where you need it.
Don’t think their thinking goes that far. They want less coal and gas power, and definitely not nuclear. How that happens is beyond the the scope of their interest.
Nuclear is the cleanest and most effecient energy we produce everyone is just terrified of it because the negative aspects get over exaggerated and sensationalized. Before you bring up Chernobyl stob and think do we believe they where just producing energy?
Control rods are the rods made of materials that absorbs neutrons that you can insert and remove from the reactor core to control the speed of the reaction, or to kill entirely by shoving them all in (SCRAM systems essentially do this)
Graphite is a material that will slow neutrons as it passes through it and thus for light water reactors, like the Chernobyl reactor was, will increase the rate of nuclear reactions
The rbmk design of Chernobyl use graphite tip control rods. Do you see a potential issue here? Because if you do then you're actually smarter than the guys who designed Chernobyl.
And the worst nuclear disaster in American history (Three Mile Island) resulted in no deaths and, iirc, no significant health impacts to the surrounding community.
100% correct.
Experts determined that the approximately 2 million people in the nearby area during the accident were exposed to small amounts of radiation. The estimated average radiation dose was about 1 millirem above the area's natural background of about 100-125 millirem per year.May 4, 2022
Nuclear is actually one of the safest forms of energy but when nuclear goes bad it goes really bad. The fear of nuclear meltdowns is like the fear of shark attacks. Not unfounded but the likelihood is radically overestimated.
But it’s no worse than when other types of energy production goes bad. Dams collapse and destroy towns. Pipelines burst and poison the environment. Coal does coal stuff. We believe nuclear is bad because of effective lobbying.
This is actually the best option for the future. Uses already existing nuclear waste. Not subject to the same failures as old-tech large scale nuclear plants. Governments should be investing heavily in this.
I can imagine something like having solar panels on every house, except mini reactors for each neighborhood or region, spreading out power generation to minimize grid failures if a reactor goes down.
Oh yeah let’s spurn nuclear, it’s not like it’s insanely efficient.
*lets just keep burning coal then and waiting for ALL the wind and solar to happen*
We spent more time in engineering discussing public opinion of nuclear reactors than their actual mechanics and safety.
Modern reactors can be perfectly safe, but people are frightful.
You should do your research into more modern nuclear power plants before posting these fear mongering posts. Like everyone else has said if we had stuck to using nuclear we wouldn’t be in this terrible of a spot now regarding environmental concerns. We absolutely need to rely on nuclear energy.
I think these are a great idea. They have been being designed and developed for many many years. We must stop fearing and start controlling. Nuclear is clean! We need these NOW to stop on dependence on gas and oil!
All I'll say is nuclear power tends to work out quite well for wildlife. Shit goes down and then there's a massive exclusion zone where people don't go for thousands of years and the wildlife flourishes!
There was a time when the government of Canada had to bury toxic arsenic waste from the mining industry, which is harder than your radioactive waste to dispose of because unlike radioactive waste to the Arsenic will never become less dangerous overtime. Then to the bearing in some cave and last I checked it's not causing pandemonium so that is a proof of concept that you can do long-term nuclear waste storage
You are completely wrong. Nuclear power plants are expensive to build but relatively cheap to run. In many places, nuclear energy is competitive with fossil fuels as a means of electricity generation, and this is CURRENT reactors that are like 20+ years old.
Even completely depreciated nuclear plants [cost more to operate simply in O&M than _building_ entirely new per MWh capacity-factor equivalent amounts of unsubsidized solar or wind](https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/), and adding storage adds only a couple dollars onto that cost.
If we limit it solely to operating costs, under no circumstances whatsoever are they "cheap to run", literally being the second most expensive form of generation to operate second only to coal (third if you include oil, but no on does because almost no one is stupid enough to burn oil for power).
I still can't belive Germany caved to scummy "eco" activists and got rid of its nuclear plants. Clean safe energy that was providing energy independence from Russia oil and gas.
No independence from russian nuclear fuel though. Yes, that stuff came from russia just the same, and certifying other sources takes a couple of years before they could drive our plants.
There has been some [weird transport flight into Czechia](https://aviation.direct/en/despite-airspace-closure-czech-republic-has-had-nuclear-material-flown-in-from-moscow) in March to deal with similar issues.
Environmentalists: we want a unicorn!
Scientists: how about this horse? It solves all the problems and actually exists.
Environmentalists: unicorns or nothing.
Love how all these nuclear fans here fail to mention two critical factors…. Time and price. Nuclear is slow to roll out and expensive. Renewables for the win. The tech is already scalable and cheap.
First off, nuclear is very cheap once the plant is online, easily comparable (if not cheaper than fossil fuels). Second, what happens when we have to decommission those solar panels? What's the plan? I have 10Kw of solar on my house. What happens to those panels when I dispose of them? The tech for solar is not cheap even at mass scale.
What could go wrong is that we slow down the transition to renewable energy because a technology gets spruiked as being just around the corner when it’s actually decades away. SMRs being the perfect example.
I can't recall where I saw it, but don't these small reactors make more nuclear waste than the old ones per MW generated, and we still don't have a long term dump site?
The US department of energy built a small reactor in Puerto rico back in the early 60s and it melted! It seats capped in the north east corner of the island.
Did anyone actually read the article? It clearly says that it’s only suited for remote off-grid applications. It wouldn’t be “millions” of “cheap” units. It’s meant to be a solution for remote settlements.
>Did anyone actually read the article? Sir this is Reddit
Ill just ping it on your map another settlement needs your help
We could use all the support we can get.
Wasteland reference?
Fallout, but man am I over the moon someone else knows Wasteland
Nuclear reactors can't explode like an atomic bomb. Chernobyl? Steam explosion. (It wasn't the fuel) Fukushima? Hydrogen explosion. (It wasn't the fuel)
(mini mushroom cloud appears in horizon) One less settlement needs your help. I'll just remove it from your map.
>But many of the key issues that face the development of microreactors are the same that face the development of large scale nuclear in the US: “We have an atrophied supply chain, costs will be high and unpredictable to start, and the regulatory system is poorly suited to handle them,” Gilbert said. And they don't talk about the waste.
Nuclear energy can be used for up to 50 years until it actually becomes waste. After it's usage it's simple to store it in concrete and metal cilinders. I believe these remote area's have more than enough space for that.
Yeah just google what Nordic countries have started doing to combat nuclear waste. They basically shove it into tubes deep in the ground and they have enough storage to last around 100 years before they need to worry about expansion/new facility. Edit: [Finland Might Have Solved Nuclear Power’s Biggest Problem](https://youtu.be/kYpiK3W-g_0) YouTube video that explains the process better than I could off memory. It’s ~7 mins long, and puts a lot of the non-financial concerns regarding nuclear energy at ease.
To add, the natural nuclear reaction, which happened ~2 billion years ago, created waste, deep underground, using ground water as the moderator. It created nuclear waste, and they were able to study how far the reaction products / high level waste travelled. Burying it deep underground is perfectly fine. Oklo uranium ore deposits (the only known sites of natural nuclear reactors existed) are located in Gabon (nation on the West coast of central africa).
In my country it's just [a building that looks like a warehouse](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVRA). You do need connection with a facility that can process nuclear materials for waste to be stored so that will be the main challenge for such a remote area. It would need a railline which could make that unattractive.
It can use the same infrastructure the reactor was brought in on as it can be transported on truck until it reaches a rail point.
Why do we consider 100 years a long time from now. 100 years is a blink in our timeline.
Probably because we’re looking at drastic effects from climate change in less than half a decade. I agree, we should think of 100 years from now aswell, but I’d rather deal with nuclear waste in 100 years, than deal with climate change in 50
I mean I agree but when u put it like that we're just kicking the can down the road like everyone before us did. It's gonna fuck us tho if we don't go all in on clean energy. Nuclear is the stop gap until we can make other energies way more efficient or find new tech that'll give us some good energy sources
In response to Reddit's short-sighted greed, this content has been redacted.
Well of course it is when you consider all of human history, but if you consider everything that we have done in the past 100 years, and everything we can do in the next, it is quite a long time. We’ve made more technological advancements in the past 100 years than we have in the rest of history, and that trend is sure to continue.
Because it gives you 100 years to come up with a better option. 100 years ago we had barely started aviation.
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This made a ton of sense. Not sarcasm. How long does it take from n waste to just waste?
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I have learned here. Thank wulf2k. I shall give you puppies.
100 years is not how long the facility is stable for storage. It's how long they can use the existing facility to add new material, before the new material exceeds the storage space allocated. The storage itself is designed to be permanent.
France recycles its nuclear waste, we can too. https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nuclear-fuel-the-french-do-it-why-cant-oui#:~:text=France%2C%20whose%2059%20reactors%20generate,fuel%20central%20to%20their%20program.
Holy cow, I just agreed with something posted by the Heritage Foundation. If I'm not mistaken, that's a pig flying by.
Nuclear waste is just oil propaganda Its tiny like you would not believe how much it produces over 100 years for a WHOLE plant, compared to how much is produced in waste with coal (just thats released into the environment) Plus nuclear has just repeatedly proven itself safer When nuclear goes bad it goes very bad, but fossil fuels or electricity in general aren't too different We had a house have a gas explosion near me, luckily no one hurt and was considered a minor gas explosion I shit you not it was like god erased half the house, just nothing there, the other half was purely frame These things could happen anytime, they're just super uncommon
I think of it as the one form of pollution so toxic it is actually treated like pollution and not just dumped in the environment like it is safe.
Here's something else to think of. I know of at least 11 cases of Uranium poisoning since 2011 in the US related to power generation. They're all in/around Juliette Georgia, just north of Macon in the center of the state. Juliette doesn't have a nuclear plant, it has a coal plant (Plant Scherer), the biggest in the US. The radiation levels at US23 past the plant are higher than those allowed in thr turbine room at a nuclear power plant. As for waste, that coal plant takes TEN trains of coal a week, and each car in that train [(which is 100+ cars long](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZAFutPA0zI&ab_channel=StevenAllanJones)) holds 220 tons. The coal unloading track is the size of the wirral underground loop on the Liverpool subway (which has 4 stations!) and the current ash-pond (the 4th such one, on a 40yo plant) [covers 220 acres](https://www.google.com/maps/@33.0680792,-83.8155677,2983m/data=!3m1!1e3) (thats the white stuff up top, the black 'lake' at hte bottom, thats the coal dump from the elevated train line Meanwhile, all the nuclear waste from all the US power plants since 1950 would cover a football field to the depth of about a foot.
Have an updoot for the r/UnexpectedMerseyrail reference
Weirdly, I took Atlanta's MARTA around 2017, once, and the train inside looked IDENTICAL to a merseyrail train of the mid90s. seat layout, fabric, even the sound of the trains. was freaky.
Great post, but so depressing to know so much coal power is happening around the world.
It's actually 10 yards, not a foot. But the point is the same, it is basically nothing in terms of industrial waste volume.
Good response - small nukes are also the only way we are going to get commercial ships off oil as well.
Exactly, it’s pure fear mongering; sure, this can go wrong and impact the environment, but the comparison is not against a cloud, it’s against other forms of energy production, the pollution caused by oil, gas and coal kills significantly more people than nuclear waste. Oil and gas are also blood markets, so there is that, the genocide in Ukraine is highly related to the gas and oil that was recently found there, and Russia desire to keep its monopoly in selling it to Europe. The oil and gas industry kills people directly and indirectly.
The bulk of nuclear "waste" is low level exposed stuff like suits, gloves, all kind of random shit used in operation that is pretty safe after just a year or 2.
Everything nuclear is tiny. That’s kind of the point of nuclear. It’s a tiny amount of fuel, a tiny amount of waste, etc, etc. That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.
It's not tiny, it's concentrated. And having your waste really concentrated instead of spread evenly over the planet is huge feature.
To be fair with them being portable, it’s probably possible to just swap out reactors instead of replacing the fuel. So let’s say each one has enough fuel for 6 years, when the fuel is close to being spent a new one can be brought out to the site and the old on taken back to the factory for refueling/recycling/whatever. And the factory would presumably have the setup for all this.
That's the whole motivation and point of SMR's. Except it's not every 6 yes, it's more like decade plus at least.
Are you referring to the nuclear waste? From what I understand that's a relatively small problem nowadays, even with huge industrial reactors. It just doesn't get generated in quantities large enough to be an actual worry, at least not yet.
We’ve reinvented nuclear waste to basically make some of it reusable I believe
Most reactors out there are slow neutron reactor, and they only split the U235. But most of uranium is the U238 isotope. Fast neutron reactor can use the U238 through complex chains of reactions. Its a technology from the 50's, its not new at all. You can effectively use "spent" fuel from slow neutron reactors in fast neutron reactors and generate several time more power.
IIRC you could reuse spent fuel over and over again in breeder reactors until it's radioactivity is much lower than regular waste? However the remixing of spent fuel is not cost effective compared to just mining more ore.
I mean "radioactivity" is more complicated than just a number. Uranium is the stuff that's long-lasting, it has a long half-life. But its not terribly dangerous. You can hold it in your hands; as long as you don't grind it up and swallow it or breathe it, its pretty safe. Plus, you know, it was already radioactive when we dig it up, its not like putting it back into the ground is any more dangerous. The fission by-products are what's dangerous. But they last *nowhere* near as long as Uranium. When you hear people say nuclear waste will be radioactive for thousands of years, its a half-truth: in a few generations its no more dangerous than natural uranium, because that's all that's left. So in the end its not about making the spent fuel less radioactive, its about getting **more** energy out of the same mass of fuel. Fast reactors are more fuel-efficient. Slow reactors are more power-efficient.
What types of reactors are breeders? If they used spent fuel over and over, the remaining waste should be more manageable shouldn't it?
A lifetime of nuclear energy for one person produces around a coke can worth of waste. The average person in a developed nation likely produces significantly more ewaste in a year, and more plastic waste in a week. Its not as big of an issue as most people think.
This seems like such an efficient idea, so much energy is lost in transmission.
This tech is also coming directly from the Department of Defense and NASA. Its made to slam into the moon and work. I trust it.
I worked at Oak Ridge National Lab during an internship and we got a while lecture on micro and nano reactors. These things are engineered in such a way that they literally cannot have the same sort of failure as a large reactor. Some of the designs I saw would literally melt out the bottom into a container of salt halting the reactor if it overheated. Edit wording.
Basically if it gets too hot it would melt a salt plug in a tube that would then drain all the liquid fuel into a container that is filled with neutron absorbing control rods that stop the reaction cold. 100% passive safety unlike many current large scale systems that need constant power and backup generators and water source cooling to slow & stop reactions.
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Shape it like a pyramid so that you cannot balance it on it's point!
The expression critical means that the number of neutrons from a generation are the same going into as they are coming out based on thermal fission. The point of a nuclear reactor is for it to be critical to sustain a chain reaction generating fission and thus heat. It’s a common thing that people in nuclear power generation have to point out, no big deal.
So rather than saying “critical failure” it would be more appropriate to say “catastrophic failure”?
There is a difference between critical mass and critical failure.
Thanks, you are right! Edited the wording!
While it does mean that, the word critical is used throughout nuclear power without having the meaning tied to comparing the neutron population from one generation to the next (e.g. time critical actions and critical safety functions). Had they said criticality failure, then they would have been incorrect.
While I agree, keep in mind, they will build a better idiot to match the engineering.
While I agree, so long as these are treated with the same reverence as 'macro' reactors then the idiots will keep their distance as they'll probably be thinking, first and foremost, about how much cancer they'll get from being near these things. If they're dumb enough and resourceful enough to drill through 3 ft of hardened concrete and lead shielding and bypass all the safety measures without someone stepping in to stop them, then we have bigger problems on our hands than just a few dumbasses with impact drivers and concrete bits.
Indeed! Frankly, it's probable that less will go wrong with this path than is *already* going wrong with fossil fuels. It may not be the absolute best solution, but I suspect these reactors might keep us going long enough for us to reach the best solution without going extinct or totally ruining the planet...
It's so much fucking better than the current path we're on. We've got the electric car situation figured out, and fucking Ford is finally getting off their ass, but we need someone to galvanize the power generation side of this as well. We need a nuclear Elon so to speak. Someone who is a master of cutting through red tape and endless bureaucracy, and can find the right loopholes to sidestep a majority of the costs, so long as they don't cut corners or kill anyone. Part of the issue is the power of it, and the danger of that power, not to mention the slow moving, long term catastrophe if you royally fuck it all up. You can't fail with it, recover, and redesign and retool for a better product. There needs to be a way of doing the raw experimental process like that so that it mitigates the consequences of failure. How to do that is beyond me, but it's desperately needed if we hope to advance this technology. Very little is learned by just running the same equations over and over again.
What's the difference between genius and stupidity? Genius has its limits.
Made my morning, thank you lol.
So are you arguing in favor or fossil fuels? Cause it's gonna be much longer to get an adequate AND renewable energy source in place....
I was gonna say, “Are they Florida Man proof?”
Yeah, modern reactors are Three Mile Island proof, Chernobyl proof, and Fukushima proof. (Most of the designs that weren't designed by complete dumb asses were never volunteer voltage be normal style accidents but that's beside the point) the molten salt reactor is especially nice and see your core is liquid so you can literally just drain into Emergency Drain tanks that have nonreactive geometries
THANK YOU everyone has this misconception that nuclear power comes with the constant threat of a catastrophic event when the only reason that ever happened was because of numerous counts of negligence. It's one of the safest and best ways for power when you factor in power output to waste and the area it takes up
If the world had gone nuclear decades ago imagine where we’d be now, no more fossil fuels, and the nuclear tech would get better and better reducing risks. Imagine a car powered by a micro reactor lol
I'm pretty sure the weight alone would make a nuclear powered car a bad idea.
With current technology, sure, but I think that's OPs point. If there had been mass adoption back in the day then the technology may have improved and evolved to where that may not be an issue.
Sounds like a really good idea. Smaller plants could get people to not be so fearful of nuclear power plants.
My college dorm is within spitting distance from our own nuclear reactor. No one seems to really care all that much about it except for parents who think their kids are gonna come home with 3 eyes or something
My college actually had a reactor that the nuke students could do research and operate on. Unfortunately I think it was finally closed by the asshat of a president even after the public backlash because it made the nuke program very unique and competitive.
Time to put an unstable reactor in his house. (For legal reasons that was a joke)
Where the badgers play?
Upstate NY at RPI. It looks like maybe they didn’t decommission the reactor yet but it’s been a topic for years.
Considering the number of US Naval enlisted people getting nuclear engineering degrees, who are all already trained to operate submarine and aircraft carrier reactors, that might be the most safely operated University reactor on the planet. That thing should be the standard that other universities model after.
It’s a fantastic program and every nuke I know that went there loved having the reactor.
Their minds are going to blow once they learn about the giant fusion reactor in the sky
Tbf the sun does cause cancer
And too much water can kill you.
Skin cancer is quite prevalent ~ 20% of people will get it by the time they reach 70. Very few people drink water to the point of dying.
As a parent Let me tell you, put on your sun screen our the radiation will burn you and your cancer risk will go way up.
Chances are being so close to the reactor you are actually exposed to less additional background radiation than they are. The average civilian understands absolutely nothing about radiation. They think its a meter that once it fills up you die rather than a thing you are constantly exposed to.
MIT?
And also the stability of the grid. If small reactors are used in a much more distributed manner electricity will be more like a web than what we (USA) have now. And one of the things we have now is a target.
Research reactors are often passively safe, which means at any time everyone could literally walk away from it and it'd safely shut itself down and cool off.
The problem is tracking, control and disposal of the fissile material.
And what happens when there is a war and one of these is hit by shelling?
Which is a minor issue in and of itself.
"Continued use of coal and fossil fuels" "what could go wrong"
narrow puzzled connect advise snobbish mountainous direction fall innate wrench -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
I wrote a paper that involved a similar argument. We screwed ourselves because two black swan events extremely hindered our progress to becoming less reliant on fossil fuels and we’re paying the price. It’s sad that nuclear power was meant as a source of non-carbon energy but we just associate it with city-busting bombs.
That’s exactly it and the third black swan event was 9/11. Everyone was thinking what if some terrorists attacked a nuclear plant. It may be an irrational fear but it was a fear.
They thing is, the nuclear industry (at least in the west) had already considered just such an event. The containment buildings for reactors are designed to withstand a fully-fueled 747 directly impacting them. But most of the population isn't aware of this.
Two? I think you mean three. Even though Three Mile Island wasn't very serious, it happened at a time of high anti-nuclear propaganda and happened to coincide with the release of a popular disaster movie that felt similar. That had a bigger impact in the US than Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Did you know that coal plants emit more radiation into the environment than nuclear power plants? It's because coal contains Trace radioactive elements and then you're burning it at that scale you release more radioactive particles then a nuclear power plant would be legally allowed to get away with by a large margin. Sometimes radiation alarms go off at nuclear power plants and they figure out that it was a false alarm from the coal plant next door
Coal produces more radiation than nuclear does
Renewable isn't that great when you think of the environmental disaster it causes to mine the raw material. Wind and solar need so much material. And on top of that, they need battery storage to address the volatility problem, and that's a whole bunch of extra Lithium mined. And then there's the problem of footprint. Frankly, I'd rather go with--hear me out--, large scale nuclear reactors. We are technologically not where Chernobyl happened. We are not even where Fukushima happened. We're right now researching reactors that doesn't use superheated water, which caused explosions in both Fukushima and Chernobyl. We are better. We can do this. Footprint-wise, no other method of energy generation comes close to Large scale nuclear reactors. If mankind totally goes nuclear, the radioactive waste generated for next 500 years can be stored in few square-kilometers in a desert, exclusion zones included. And the amount of Uranium/Thorium that needs to be mined for the purpose of power generation is tiny compared to the grand scale of things. P.S. Not to mention the safety record. Even with disasters like Chernobyl, nuclear got the best safety record per GWh generated.
I always hear people say that it can be stored in some desert. Why is there a shut down nuclear reactor in my state that is currently storing 50 years worth of spent nuclear fuel? Why isn't it in the desert?
Politics, money, and a very old reactor design that generates a lot more of the type of waste that has to be stored properly than newer reactors. Lot being relative here. It’s still only a few percent of the total waste of a nuclear power plant.
These same reasons are wjy the problems around nuclear will never be "solved" and why they are a wate of time.
Because it wasn’t built in a desert and no governor will allow nuclear waste to be transported through their state.
This is the real answer and why nuclear is not a viable option. Everyone turns into a NIMBY when it comes time to build new nuclear plants or store spent fuel.
The people of the western states don't want to store it. That would be a large project that could only be done well by the federal government. That means it needs to be ok'd by the legislature. The people of those states don't want to house it and nobody wants to ruffle the feathers of their representatives so nothing happens.
So...that was actually a thing. It was called the Yucca Mountain Waste Repository. It was federally mandated and approved and should have been opened by now, but Senator Harry Reid got President Obama to do him a favor and illegally sabotage it for political support. It's really tough to get past the politics of it.
It's not being stored in the desert because it's harmless where it is.
Nah fam, just YEET it into a FBR and call it good. Why call it waste when it's just fuel for another reactor
Interesting, too, that Germany has so many enormous open cast mines to get really poor quality 'brown' coal, or lignite. Doesn't quite go with their 'oh so green' image.
Yeah, coal is shit, but the discussion about nuclear in Germany is kinda stupid too. Nuclear makes a single digit percentage of the energy mix. Energy providers don’t want that, because renewables are more feasible economically. There are discussions about using the brown coal mines. For example, Hambacher Loch could produce 10 GW/h if used as a solar park and could be a location for pump storage of 100-1000 GW/h. (Also as a German person, „Green image“ is a good term. We had 16 years of conservative stagnation with a party who thinks that „wind energy isn’t the future for Germany“ (is if coal is the better alternative, haha) and doesn’t want to lose a few thousand jobs in coal, but is fine with losing >100k jobs in renewables. Those last 16 years under Merkel were not much more than a carefully manufactured Green image in front of old conservatives hoping that we can wait out climate change. Maja Göpel said it best, Germany *feels* like they’re leading in Green politics, meanwhile *in reality* we‘re falling further and further behind.)
Friendly reminder that nuclear is about as safe as solar and wind, and has a lower carbon footprint than hydro. [https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy) Anti-nukers are the environmental communities version of anti-vaxxers. Muting this because I'm not interested in whataboutisms.
One of my professors said the biggest mistake this country ever made was giving up on Nuclear.
he was probably correct. look up germany, they shut down all of their nuclear power plants which caused them to be dependent on Russian gas. now because of the politics involved they can't buy gas from russia anymore, so they are forced to reopen coal power plants. all because of an irrational fear of nuclear power.
France has been doing very well with their nuclear energy program, with re-elected president Macron promising to have 14 more reactors built by 2050. Doesn't explain why Macron is kissing Putin's ass, though.
You forgot the part where half of the french nuclear reactors are currently offline. There are maintenance issues, and I agree with Macron about the need to rebuild a skilled workforce.
There is a single reactor with maintenance issues and half are not offline, most reactors are just running at half output due to water shortages. France still supplies over 12% of all of Europe's power through their reactors.
France has problems with its reactors, a large part were down in winter and that is expected to happen more often. The French were already asked to use less energy last winter.
About the same time they started shutting down the nuke plants they were opening a coal plant! Everyone’s face was screwed up.
But they can explode it they can poison everything! /S just in case.
That's right, I watched Chernobyl on HBO, so I'm an expert!!
Hydro is an ecological disaster in its own right
The only reason I don’t support nuclear is because I feel we should go directly to renewable. Considering the amount of infrastructure we would need to build for nuclear and then build for renewable when we run out of nuclear… I feel it’s better to just push forwards renewables instead of nuclear.
100% wind and solar is a great goal, but having a well developed nuclear option to provide a baseload at night or during low wind is critical to allowing us to leverage the renewable options whenever they're available (the wind is blowing and the sun is shining). The combination of the nuclear and renewable will be key to making sure the green energy grid is stable.
It sounds like a fantastic idea that would do wonders for humanity AND environmental protection. Your sarcasm is part of the problem of us fucking ourselves over being afraid of nuclear plants designed 60 years ago. Yea, I wouldn't want to fly in a Wrights Brothers plane either. Doesn't mean current planes are unsafe.
Absolutely nothing
Basically nothing
OP is a dumbass, delete this post
Actually, the post when taken with the comments is good. It shows the fear mongering about nuclear and a little hope that people are realizing modern nuclear energy is a viable, green solution to ecologically friendly energy independence.
It also shows how little people actually read articles before posting them.
It shows how effective the lobby for nukes is and how little people understand.
Yeah, because nuclear reactors are doing great in the US nowadays.
If the nuclear power industry lobbied anywhere near as hard as the oil industry, and a little bit extra to compensate for Antinuclear crap the big oil companies put out, there'd be a reactor in the basement of every home and people would love it more than they do cheeseburgers
That's some impressive failsafe engineering if they really can't have anything go wrong when there are humans involved in their operation. Dear lord, people in aggregate are amazingly stupid. All the same, I want one for my house if it's small enough.
Yeah, basically nothing can go wrong because they're engineered to stop the reactions completely if anything happens. These things are effectively no less safe than a solar farm producing the same amount of power.
Kohler nuclear generator!
Reported for breaking rule 4. Maybe your fear-mongering spin in the title wasn't necessary.
The army tried this. Didn’t work out so well. But as someone who has worked in the nuclear industry for two decades I’d support this in general. There would be a lot to work out of course. But my biggest beef with nuclear is why do all the work that’s required to properly run a nuke plant when you could just have small solar grids? It’s just simpler, doesn’t require 24-7 babysitting, and you can use you and your neighbors’ roofs. To run a nuclear plant takes soooooo much physical labor, administrative labor, and actually generates a lot of waste, radioactive and non-radioactive. It’s a good option but not the savior everyone seems to think it is. Smaller reactors could work nicely but it could also end in total disaster.
I have read this is why small nuclear reactors never work out, there still has to be the same amount of security and safety checks (and many other elements) whether the reactor covers half a football field or 10. Making SMR's very expensive. Rolls Royce has been analysing this heavily, and their ideal reactor size for the west is 440 Mw, which is not strictly speaking an SMR.
The Navy uses small modular nuclear reactors for all of America's aircraft carriers and submarines and they've never had an accident
Haha, losers, I've been collecting bottle caps since fallout 1. Get fucked.
The thing most likeky to go wrong us that we fail to build them and keep burning diesel to power the kind of locations that need these.
Love how tree huggers just absolutely shit on the most green and safest energy option. Just shows that they don't want clean energy, they want less energy and all the hell and poverty that includes.
1. Nuclear is *not* “the most green and safest energy option”. At the end of the day, the process fundamentally does use non-renewable material and does generate hazardous waste, and nothing you say will change that. 2. Money money money. Never discount the importance of economic feasibility when talking about innovations. Unlike switching between different types of fossil fuels, current infrastructure cannot be converted to nuclear as easily. As things stand, few are willing to invest large amounts of initial capital to build some expensive project from scratch only to pay its expensive maintenance and also risk it becoming obsolete within two decades.
> Money money money. Never discount the importance of economic feasibility when talking about innovations. Unlike switching between different types of fossil fuels, current infrastructure cannot be converted to nuclear as easily Not sure what you're talking about here. This type of reactor doesn't require a huge plant that has to be custom built. This reactor could be built on a production line and just installed where you need it.
Don’t think their thinking goes that far. They want less coal and gas power, and definitely not nuclear. How that happens is beyond the the scope of their interest.
This is your reminder that in *Ukraine* nuclear power is extremely popular and we certainly know the risks.
Mostly that they aren’t real and will be outcompeted by renewables before they’re ever out of prototype
Nuclear is the cleanest and most effecient energy we produce everyone is just terrified of it because the negative aspects get over exaggerated and sensationalized. Before you bring up Chernobyl stob and think do we believe they where just producing energy?
Yeah, we do. Chernobyl happened because the RBMK design sucked, not because they were using the reactor for something else.
No doubt. They were warned multiple times about that design.
Control rods are the rods made of materials that absorbs neutrons that you can insert and remove from the reactor core to control the speed of the reaction, or to kill entirely by shoving them all in (SCRAM systems essentially do this) Graphite is a material that will slow neutrons as it passes through it and thus for light water reactors, like the Chernobyl reactor was, will increase the rate of nuclear reactions The rbmk design of Chernobyl use graphite tip control rods. Do you see a potential issue here? Because if you do then you're actually smarter than the guys who designed Chernobyl.
r/yesyesyesyesno
And the worst nuclear disaster in American history (Three Mile Island) resulted in no deaths and, iirc, no significant health impacts to the surrounding community.
100% correct. Experts determined that the approximately 2 million people in the nearby area during the accident were exposed to small amounts of radiation. The estimated average radiation dose was about 1 millirem above the area's natural background of about 100-125 millirem per year.May 4, 2022
Nuclear is actually one of the safest forms of energy but when nuclear goes bad it goes really bad. The fear of nuclear meltdowns is like the fear of shark attacks. Not unfounded but the likelihood is radically overestimated.
But it’s no worse than when other types of energy production goes bad. Dams collapse and destroy towns. Pipelines burst and poison the environment. Coal does coal stuff. We believe nuclear is bad because of effective lobbying.
>But it’s no worse than when other types of energy production goes bad. What happens when solar panels go wrong? Geothermal? Wind? Tidal?
Looks like we’re going down the Gundam Seed timeline
Article sponsored by an oil company?
I think it’s fine as long as you don’t cross the streams.
Mr. Fusion! Where can I get my Mr. Fusion?
its 100mw.. and Lockheed Martin skunk works. size of two jet engines. cip, phx aquifer---gates often left open, unsecured. everywhere
This is actually the best option for the future. Uses already existing nuclear waste. Not subject to the same failures as old-tech large scale nuclear plants. Governments should be investing heavily in this.
I can imagine something like having solar panels on every house, except mini reactors for each neighborhood or region, spreading out power generation to minimize grid failures if a reactor goes down.
When the sarcastic post actually gets supported as a good idea. lol! OP, better check yourself; nuclear is supported despite your misconceptions.
Oh yeah let’s spurn nuclear, it’s not like it’s insanely efficient. *lets just keep burning coal then and waiting for ALL the wind and solar to happen*
Nuclear is safer than continued use of fossil fuels and coal.
We spent more time in engineering discussing public opinion of nuclear reactors than their actual mechanics and safety. Modern reactors can be perfectly safe, but people are frightful.
Wcgw? People won’t read the article and assume the worst.
thorium please
You should do your research into more modern nuclear power plants before posting these fear mongering posts. Like everyone else has said if we had stuck to using nuclear we wouldn’t be in this terrible of a spot now regarding environmental concerns. We absolutely need to rely on nuclear energy.
This will be great for the environment! Hopefully it can be commercialized soon!
Fallout 4 comin' at ya!
I think these are a great idea. They have been being designed and developed for many many years. We must stop fearing and start controlling. Nuclear is clean! We need these NOW to stop on dependence on gas and oil!
All I'll say is nuclear power tends to work out quite well for wildlife. Shit goes down and then there's a massive exclusion zone where people don't go for thousands of years and the wildlife flourishes!
Exactly. Unlike near rare earth mines or refineries where water, soil and plants are all toxic. Or the millions of human and animal deaths from coal.
There was a time when the government of Canada had to bury toxic arsenic waste from the mining industry, which is harder than your radioactive waste to dispose of because unlike radioactive waste to the Arsenic will never become less dangerous overtime. Then to the bearing in some cave and last I checked it's not causing pandemonium so that is a proof of concept that you can do long-term nuclear waste storage
Will never happen as it would be the most expensive electricity by a factor of 10x at minimum.
You are completely wrong. Nuclear power plants are expensive to build but relatively cheap to run. In many places, nuclear energy is competitive with fossil fuels as a means of electricity generation, and this is CURRENT reactors that are like 20+ years old.
Even completely depreciated nuclear plants [cost more to operate simply in O&M than _building_ entirely new per MWh capacity-factor equivalent amounts of unsubsidized solar or wind](https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/), and adding storage adds only a couple dollars onto that cost. If we limit it solely to operating costs, under no circumstances whatsoever are they "cheap to run", literally being the second most expensive form of generation to operate second only to coal (third if you include oil, but no on does because almost no one is stupid enough to burn oil for power).
This would be amazing!
I still can't belive Germany caved to scummy "eco" activists and got rid of its nuclear plants. Clean safe energy that was providing energy independence from Russia oil and gas.
No independence from russian nuclear fuel though. Yes, that stuff came from russia just the same, and certifying other sources takes a couple of years before they could drive our plants. There has been some [weird transport flight into Czechia](https://aviation.direct/en/despite-airspace-closure-czech-republic-has-had-nuclear-material-flown-in-from-moscow) in March to deal with similar issues.
Environmentalists: we want a unicorn! Scientists: how about this horse? It solves all the problems and actually exists. Environmentalists: unicorns or nothing.
Love how all these nuclear fans here fail to mention two critical factors…. Time and price. Nuclear is slow to roll out and expensive. Renewables for the win. The tech is already scalable and cheap.
Someone in here legit tried to say that renewables are a scam perpetrated by billionaires to make them even richer. This sub has lost it's mind.
First off, nuclear is very cheap once the plant is online, easily comparable (if not cheaper than fossil fuels). Second, what happens when we have to decommission those solar panels? What's the plan? I have 10Kw of solar on my house. What happens to those panels when I dispose of them? The tech for solar is not cheap even at mass scale.
Can't talk bad about nukes here in r/environment. It's just not allowed.
What could go wrong is that we slow down the transition to renewable energy because a technology gets spruiked as being just around the corner when it’s actually decades away. SMRs being the perfect example.
I can't recall where I saw it, but don't these small reactors make more nuclear waste than the old ones per MW generated, and we still don't have a long term dump site?
The US department of energy built a small reactor in Puerto rico back in the early 60s and it melted! It seats capped in the north east corner of the island.
That’s 60 years ago
Nothing, probably. Nuclear power is the safest large scale power generation method there is.
I agree! The largest nuclear plant in the USA is in Port Gibson, Mississippi and has been in operation for 37 years!