Took long enough

[Pyrate Jim]

Why aren't we? Fear and politics. The not-unwarranted fear of radiation, and the politics of NIMBY.

So we burn just 2% of what we have, and dump the rest in a poor excuse for storage in the hopes that someday, somebody else can do something with it.

Doc.

I'm hoping that this start up is that somebody else doing something with it.
While fear of radiation is warranted in large doses, it's heavily exasperated by Hollywood's influence on NIMBY politics.
For most folks, their perception of radiation comes either from films like Godzilla, or the Amazing Colossal Man, or nuclear test footage. Nothing in between.
I do have fears, and hope.

My fears concern maintenance, people trained to handle problems.
People get electrocuted if they don't know wiring. Airplanes fall out of the sky due to lack of competently trained mechanics or pilots.
And much of our education system is not geared toward blue collar employment. No amount of computer code is going to turn a torque wrench.

My hope is that We are learning.
Back in the 1920's, even before we had the Bomb, we figured out that putting Radium in women's cosmetics was bad.
In 1945 we found out just how bad concentrated radioactive elements could be.
In 1956 we discovered that fallout from atomic tests in New Mexico were showing up in Pittsburg and Chicago.
Even globally, modern forensics can determine the age of a carcass by the amount and type of radioactive residue.

Stone age, Bronze age, Iron age, the Dark ages, the Industrial age, the Modern age, the Space age.
The Atomic age. We know how destructive it can be. We can learn to harness it to be constructive as well. I hope.

[SignOfZeta]

The issue isn’t radiation as a thing or risk as a thing. Those are obviously everywhere in nature. So much so that we can stop bringing that up over and over like it’s a relevant observation.

The issue is creating the greatest risk possible and then using it to put as many people at risk as possible. Nuclear power is Russian roulette but with every one in the area playing with their guns in sync. Total success or total failure for everyone at once. If a plant takes out a city fans of nukes will only say, “That’s life. We had to do it. Pray for the families.” They have no answers to the colossal risk they have dreamed up except “be tough”. Tough guys.

If Fukushima can melt down then ANY plant ANYWHERE can melt down. There is nothing tighter and more safety obsessed than Japanese industry. If you put 1000 nuclear plants in the USA or China the things will be melting down once a week. Americans don’t even went to drive anymore. You’re going to give them a job at a nuke plant? Anyone who can see problems with this is a coward. There are all sorts of tough guy macho things to say about nuclear plants from people who no answers to the risk questions. Thankfully those guys are rarely in charge of anything when it comes to safety since they don’t believe it as a concept.

People who promote nuclear power simply don’t care about human risk. At all. It’s like putting all your eggs in one basket and then storing the basket in the powder room of Yosemite Sam’s pirate ship.

It’s not about the technology. It’s about how the technology works in the human world. And this stuff doesn’t.

[Pyrate Jim]

It’s not about the technology. It’s about how the technology works in the human world. And this stuff doesn’t.

So, what does? Work, I mean.
Oil and coal work, but it's a limited resource and a very dirty one.
Wind and solar sound good but hardly produce enough to support itself much less a Nation.
Water driven turbines are effective. However, dams across the Mississippi would stop a lot of river traffic.

Of course, there's always a horse and buggy. We know that works. Well, some of us.
Technology is exclusively the domain of humanity. It has never stopped advancing despite having caused major disasters. Not all nuclear. Union Carbide?
It's always about the technology. (Unless you're Amish.) Created by humans, exploited by humans for the use of humans.

Pick your poison. Whether slowly by pollution of the air and plastics in the oceans, or by strip mining the landscape for those solar panels. Perhaps by radiation.
There are Sailors who spend years living in a metal shell with one of these smaller, portable atomic units.
Which is why I'll give you a like for the Yosemite Sam reference.

[Pyrate Jim]

Something extra.
Small Modular Reactors: Could They Be the Future of Nuclear Energy? | Watch

[Trbo323]

So I have to ask… how bad is it when there is a catastrophic failure (meltdown)? What level of radiation is there? What is the worse case scenario? I'm not against this at all. But until there is zero possibility of radiation/contamination beyond unsafe/normal background levels in any possible failure situation, this is questionable at best. I'm excited to hear this is being worked on and making good progress. I'm all for energy independence, either personal or national, but I certainly have my concerns about safety of a commercial micro-reactor if it's not truly 110% safe.

There's designs out there that have failsafes already, the problem is most nuclear regulatory commissions (especially the US which basically sets the momentum for the rest of the world) are too scared to actually try something new they won't approve them thats why we really haven't built new reactors in 40 years.

There was a test reactor built in the 90s that had a completely automated failsafe system. If the reactor started going critical, all the humans could, and did for a test, take their hands off the controls and the system automatically shut itself down.

Did it get built as a full scale? Hell no. Chernobyl was too fresh on everyone's mind and it apparently didn't matter that that reactor didn't have any kind of containment dome and was a poor design that was mismanaged. It had the word "nuclear" in it and so does this new reactor so they are the same thing in the public and politicians eyes. It didn't matter that this reactor was also built as a way for the US to say "hey look what we can build, it shuts itself down". Fear made the decision at the end of the day

More recently, and this is all mathematically proven territory but nobody can get the authority to build any of these there's some designs that rely on physics instead of control rods and computers.

The two I saw the most promise in both used liquid fuel, basically you have the fuel as a liquid with the control rods dipped into it. But the reactor is built in such a way that the bottom of the reactor has a plug in it. If the fuel liquid ever gets too hot it melts the plug and drains into a wide cavern. When the fuel spreads out in the cavern it physically can't react as much because the atoms become too far apart so just by physics it shuts itself down.

The other was along the same lines but the liquid fuel, when it got hot enough would expand enough that the atoms became too far apart to react. It was basically a self regulating system that couldn't go critical unless you forced it into a contained space. If you let it expand it's safe.

Hell, we were all set to have yuka mountain be the national nuclear waste disposal site, so instead of having nuclear waste at each reactor spread out all over the nation it would all be trucked to yuka mountain and held in one spot and it was also going to be studied there. From what I remember it was mostly built and ready to go and then people got cold feet and the plug got pulled so now we still have nuclear waste just sitting at most reactor sites being guarded by chain link fences rather than a mountain with a single entrance

As for the article above, mass production of nuclear reactors has been done and I'm pretty sure the first people to do it was France. They standardized their reactor design and started pumping them out in the 60s or 70s I think At one point France was something like 70-80% powered by those reactors im not sure what it is today. Ever heard of a nuclear incident in France? Me either. They could train you on one design and then plug you in anywhere. It made training, troubleshooting, running etc way easier. Even if you had a freak accident and all of a single plants operators died in a tour bus accident you could pull one operator from a handful of other plants and assemble an already trained crew. Really smart way to do it.





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[DocsMachine]

The issue isn’t radiation as a thing or risk as a thing. Those are obviously everywhere in nature. So much so that we can stop bringing that up over and over like it’s a relevant observation.

-Says the guy about to go on saying the risk is everything.

The issue is creating the greatest risk possible and then using it to put as many people at risk as possible.

-How blatantly ignorant.

There's over four hundred operating nuclear reactors worldwide, and I'm not sure that number includes ships or subs. When's the last time you heard of an accident?

If Fukushima can melt down then ANY plant ANYWHERE can melt down.

-More willful ignorance. The Fukushima plant operated almost entirely without incident from when it was commissioned in 1971. It only failed after being flooded by a monster tsunami caused by a once-in-a-lifetime 9.1 earthquake.

And even then it survived. The ultimate failure was caused when electrical power to cooling pumps was lost. Grid power was damaged and the on-site generators flooded.

AND... that's an obsolete 1960s design, which required active monitoring and feedback. Again, modern designs, as noted, can be and are self-regulating in a number of different ways.

It’s not about the technology. It’s about how the technology works in the human world. And this stuff doesn’t.

-Sorry, that's just your rather surprisingly ignorant opinion. The technology does work, and works well- and is by several orders of magnitude, the absolute most powerful energy source on this planet. And, if such things concern you, entirely "carbon neutral".

There are no other choices.

Doc.

[Trbo323]

There's really only been 4 nuclear incidents in history

1) Chernobyl, a poor design WITHOUT a containment dome that was managed by people more concerned about their position than public safety. While the nearby town of prypyat was never inhabited again most people don't realize that the other reactors at Chernobyl were operated until 2000

2) three mile island, a faulty valve and signal sent to the control room combined to release some radiation. The radiation release was fairly minimal as no isotopes were dispersed like Chernobyl. The reactor here had a containment dome and the result was a partial meltdown

3) Fukushima, as stated above the real problem was the loss of cooling water to the reactors, the design problem was placing the backup generators below ground basically guaranteeing them to flood. The containment domes did their jobs and radiation levels at the site returned to background levels in 2011.

4) I forget it's name but it was a military test reactor. Fairly small, only had 2 operators on site. Alarms went off, large spike in radiation and no communication told the military nearby that there was a problem. They go to investigate and find one of the operators dead at the site, apparently from radiation poisoning. The second they can't find. His car is there but I think it was a whole day later that someone finally looked up in the reactor room and found him skewered into the ceiling by a control rod. He had apparently been trying to insert a control rod into the reactor when it went hot and flash boiled enough water to shoot the control rod out like a missile. I believe there was a meltdown here but the reactor was so small and was somewhere like the middle of a desert that there really wasn't danger to anyone outside of it. (That's all from memory, I researched this back in college, pieces could easily be wrong)


But that's it. Chernobyl obviously being the worst the lack of a containment dome really made a huge difference in the scale of fallout after the event. Even with these 4 events added together nuclear is by far the safest form of mass power generation.

I feel like a good comparison is flight. In the 1980s flying was still safe compared to cars but much more dangerous compared to flying today. I feel like that's where nuclear power was. All the reactor designs from the 60s are like jets from the 80s. There were flaws and we have learned from them, the difference is aircraft continued to be built with the new safer designs in mind and it's way safer today than it ever was. Nuclear, we learned the lessons but have not had the opportunity to implement them because everyone is so scared


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[Pyrate Jim]

4) I forget it's name but it was a military test reactor. Fairly small, only had 2 operators on site. Alarms went off, large spike in radiation and no communication told the military nearby that there was a problem. They go to investigate and find one of the operators dead at the site, apparently from radiation poisoning. The second they can't find. His car is there but I think it was a whole day later that someone finally looked up in the reactor room and found him skewered into the ceiling by a control rod. He had apparently been trying to insert a control rod into the reactor when it went hot and flash boiled enough water to shoot the control rod out like a missile. I believe there was a meltdown here but the reactor was so small and was somewhere like the middle of a desert that there really wasn't danger to anyone outside of it. (That's all from memory, I researched this back in college, pieces could easily be wrong)

The SL-1 salt reactor in 1961.
SL-1 Reactor Explosion: The Nuclear Disaster Nobody Talks About | Watch

Also.
Molten salt reactors were trouble in the 1960s—and they remain trouble today - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

[DocsMachine]

There were flaws and we have learned from them, the difference is aircraft continued to be built with the new safer designs in mind and it's way safer today than it ever was. Nuclear, we learned the lessons but have not had the opportunity to implement them because everyone is so scared

-This. Right here.

What happened was Three Mile Island came right on the heels of the movie The China Syndrome, which was about a nuke plant having a major safety issue and it being covered up.

At the time, "global warming" wasn't a thing (indeed, only a few years before, there were fears of an oncoming ice age ) and coal was cheap, plentiful and seen as a LOT safer. Whenever somebody wanted to put in a nuke plant, after the movie, the lawsuits started up- nobody wanted such a 'deathtrap' in their backyard.

It got to the point where it cost billions just to clear the paperwork and fight five to ten years worth of lawsuits, before the first shovelful of dirt was dug up. I seem to recall reading that a utility wanted to re-start construction on a plant that had been mothballed in the concrete-foundation stage back in the 70s or 80s. I think President Obama got involved, and helped things along- but supposedly they had ten billion dollars tied up in suits and paperwork before the first workman arrived on site to start doing the actual work.

So naturally, no new reactors were made for some forty years. We kept using coal and gas for all that time. If carbon emissions are a concern of yours, think about that for a bit. Where would we be today if, say, thirty percent of the last forty years worth of carbon emissions had been offset- that is, not emitted- thanks to carbon-neutral nuke plants? Where would reactor technology be, today, with an additional forty years of research and development?

And it's only now that behemoth companies like Google and Microsoft need monstrous amounts of electricity to power their AI datacenters- power that cannot be obtained in any other way on earth- that the tide is starting to turn.

Doc.

[DocsMachine]

The SL-1 salt reactor in 1961.

-Just as an anecdote, the Soviets had sub reactors cooled by molten lead.

Doc.

[Trbo323]

-Just as an anecdote, the Soviets had sub reactors cooled by molten lead.

Doc.

Seems like a fine choice. I see no health hazard to the plant workers at all

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[Pyrate Jim]

We may need these small reactors sooner than you think.
United Nations | World Court Warns: Climate Change Is an ‘Existential Threat’ to Humanity | N18G

ICJ states burning coal is a ‘wrongful act’ which requires reparations to be paid

[Sneak Miester]

After eating my wife’s chili my asshole feels like a nuclear reactor.

[Pyrate Jim]

Still interested?

Federal regulators clear pathway for shuttered Michigan nuclear plant to restart

Energy company strikes deal to deliver next-gen nuclear power to critical US military base: 'We are honored'

[Pyrate Jim]

How about fusion?
Wisconsin's Clean Energy Future: The Rise of Fusion Reactors | Watch