3D printed nuclear reactor

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THRESHIN

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seems that oak ridge labs is 3D printing with stainless steel to build a micro reactor. not sure how far this will go, but interesting none the less. there's a video of the printing process in the link.

"The US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed a 3D-printed nuclear reactor core prototype, with the ultimate goal of the Transformational Challenge Reactor (TCR) Demonstration Program being to create an advanced, full-sized, 3D-printed reactor with integrated sensors and controls from fewer components by 2023. "

https://newatlas.com/science/oak-ridge-3d-printed-nuclear-reactor-core/
 
Mini reactors for nuclear powered aircraft and tanks. Where can I get my nuclear car with near infinite range? :D

What we need is fast reactors to deplete our nuclear waste and weaponized plutonium.
 
Mini reactors for nuclear powered aircraft and tanks. Where can I get my nuclear car with near infinite range? :D

What we need is fast reactors to deplete our nuclear waste and weaponized plutonium.

Unfortunately we have a policy of not reprocessing spent nuclear fuel :(
 
Unfortunately we have a policy of not reprocessing spent nuclear fuel :(

it's not so much policy as it is the cost. it costs a lot more to reprocess used fuel than it does to get new fuel. many countries have and continue to reprocess used fuel. france and china come to mind.

fortunately, small modular fast reactors are making good progress. although more research is needed, in theory used fuel could be burned up in one of these with minimal to no reprocessing provided the reactor physics is right.
 
it's not so much policy as it is the cost. it costs a lot more to reprocess used fuel than it does to get new fuel. many countries have and continue to reprocess used fuel. france and china come to mind.

fortunately, small modular fast reactors are making good progress. although more research is needed, in theory used fuel could be burned up in one of these with minimal to no reprocessing provided the reactor physics is right.

The cost is because we failed to invest. In 77 Carter banned it outright. Reagen lifted it and then Clinton basically looked to reinstate it. Obama then flat out cut off at the knees any study of improving the tech.

So the costs is directly related to the failure of our administrations to consider it outside of fear mongering that it might end up as weapons...plus we have all these NIMBY folks who don't want to have nuclear power plants anywhere near them. Never mind modern nuclear power plant designs are incapable of catastrophic failure...
 
The cost is because we failed to invest. In 77 Carter banned it outright. Reagen lifted it and then Clinton basically looked to reinstate it. Obama then flat out cut off at the knees any study of improving the tech.

So the costs is directly related to the failure of our administrations to consider it outside of fear mongering that it might end up as weapons...plus we have all these NIMBY folks who don't want to have nuclear power plants anywhere near them. Never mind modern nuclear power plant designs are incapable of catastrophic failure...

you are very correct in that there has been very little investment. developing technology makes is cheaper every time. this is a world wide problem and is driven by fear more than anything. i won't pretend to understand the politics since i live a bit further north :)

and yes you are quite correct in how a lot of the fears are baseless. i actually work in the nuclear industry - that's why i stumbled on the article. for safety, the only real problem we have is to deal with decay heat in a disaster as what happened with fukishima. older designs require a power source to remove the decay heat - an obvious problem in a major disaster. the small modular designs don't have these problems. no external cooling is required for removal of decay heat. recovery of weapons material such as plutonium isn't possible due to the reactor physics and how it burns up the fuel. cheaper we've all heard before as they can be built in a factory and put on the back of a truck for delivery. i also think that most don't realize that this is a proven technology - it's basically the same as past experimental fast breeder reactors. fermi in the US, phenix in france, and there's one in japan that i can't remember the name of right now. sure they had problems. they're also prototypes - newer designs fix these problems.

coming back to the article, the 3d printing is interesting. i wouldn't have thought that stainless steel could be run through a 3d printer let alone be strong enough for an application like this. i'm quite curious to see how this turns out. maybe that's why they're building one so small to start with? research reactors far larger than this don't typically have any containment. not saying i agree with it, but the idea is that there's so little fuel that even in a meltdown there's no significant risk to the surrounding environment. workers might not be too happy though.
 
you are very correct in that there has been very little investment. developing technology makes is cheaper every time. this is a world wide problem and is driven by fear more than anything. i won't pretend to understand the politics since i live a bit further north :)

and yes you are quite correct in how a lot of the fears are baseless. i actually work in the nuclear industry - that's why i stumbled on the article. for safety, the only real problem we have is to deal with decay heat in a disaster as what happened with fukishima. older designs require a power source to remove the decay heat - an obvious problem in a major disaster. the small modular designs don't have these problems. no external cooling is required for removal of decay heat. recovery of weapons material such as plutonium isn't possible due to the reactor physics and how it burns up the fuel. cheaper we've all heard before as they can be built in a factory and put on the back of a truck for delivery. i also think that most don't realize that this is a proven technology - it's basically the same as past experimental fast breeder reactors. fermi in the US, phenix in france, and there's one in japan that i can't remember the name of right now. sure they had problems. they're also prototypes - newer designs fix these problems.

coming back to the article, the 3d printing is interesting. i wouldn't have thought that stainless steel could be run through a 3d printer let alone be strong enough for an application like this. i'm quite curious to see how this turns out. maybe that's why they're building one so small to start with? research reactors far larger than this don't typically have any containment. not saying i agree with it, but the idea is that there's so little fuel that even in a meltdown there's no significant risk to the surrounding environment. workers might not be too happy though.

Honestly I would love one of these for my house. It wouldn't be too hard to put it somewhere with sensors and such around it that I could limit the "damage" if something happened. Also would love to see these get small enough I could put one on my plane and convert it to electric engines.
 
Honestly I would love one of these for my house. It wouldn't be too hard to put it somewhere with sensors and such around it that I could limit the "damage" if something happened. Also would love to see these get small enough I could put one on my plane and convert it to electric engines.

that would be something, wouldn't it? just have to figure out the shielding problem. even with the small size, radiation is still an issue. at home you'd be trusting the average joe not to mess with it....and on a plane the weight would be a big problem. maybe it would work for large planes? not sure.
 
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That stainless deposit printing is amazing, thank you for the article!
 
that would be something, wouldn't it? just have to figure out the shielding problem. even with the small size, radiation is still an issue. at home you'd be trusting the average joe not to mess with it....and on a plane the weight would be a big problem. maybe it would work for large planes? not sure.

Id imagine for a home based one you could encase it in something and ensure there are tamper proof seals (i.e. alarms go off if they are broken kinda thing). But yeah given the current fear of nuclear I don't see this one happening anytime soon even if it becomes super cheap.

As far as a plane youre right that weight is a major consideration. I don't know how much this thing weighs but the fuel I carry weighs about 450lbs. An electric motor would also be a bit smaller and probably lighter than the frighten 300hp iron monster hanging off the front today. We are looking at getting a Saratoga soon and I think that the engine on those weighs around 400lbs.

I dunno how much one of these beauties would weigh though.
 
that would be something, wouldn't it? just have to figure out the shielding problem. even with the small size, radiation is still an issue. at home you'd be trusting the average joe not to mess with it....and on a plane the weight would be a big problem. maybe it would work for large planes? not sure.
Weight and the horrible pollution you could cause if the plane went down. Could you imagine a nuclear powered Boeing 737 MAX?

But they did try nuclear planes in the 60s, both the US (no live reactors I think) and USSR. The US concluded it was not practical because of the neccessary lead shielding, the USSR were as usual not too concerned with crew safety, but it still didn't venture past experimental status. And of course you have the horrible Project Pluto/SLAM project, where nuclear fallout was a key part of the concept. :eek:
 
Weight and the horrible pollution you could cause if the plane went down. Could you imagine a nuclear powered Boeing 737 MAX?

But they did try nuclear planes in the 60s, both the US (no live reactors I think) and USSR. The US concluded it was not practical because of the neccessary lead shielding, the USSR were as usual not too concerned with crew safety, but it still didn't venture past experimental status. And of course you have the horrible Project Pluto/SLAM project, where nuclear fallout was a key part of the concept. :eek:

Catashropic plane crashes are much rarer than you'd think. For the airliners worldwide there was one fatal accident per 2 million flights. Thats 2019 data.
 
Weight and the horrible pollution you could cause if the plane went down. Could you imagine a nuclear powered Boeing 737 MAX?

But they did try nuclear planes in the 60s, both the US (no live reactors I think) and USSR. The US concluded it was not practical because of the neccessary lead shielding, the USSR were as usual not too concerned with crew safety, but it still didn't venture past experimental status. And of course you have the horrible Project Pluto/SLAM project, where nuclear fallout was a key part of the concept. :eek:

The problem is weight. In a plane crash, it would not be that hard to build a containment for the small reactor that would survive just about anything. In fact, we already do that with spent fuel. The problem is the weight of it. It could easily double as shielding, but again the weight.

The old nuclear plane idea was to heat air with the reactor to create thrust. Well air moving over uranium fuel tends to spread the nastiest sort of contamination everywhere....and yeah without shielding the people on the plane get irradiated.

Maybe if we came up with a small fusion reactor one day?

Although I like the idea, I don't think we will see tiny nuclear reactors in plane, civilian vehicles or otherwise or our homes within our lifetime. It's just too difficult to make it safe.
 
Yeah, the only kind of nuclear plane that would make sense is one where the energy is converted to electricity and used to drive propellers/fans, but the weight of it all will most likely make it impractical. A nuclear powered airship would be cool though.
 
If you can 3D print a rocket engine, you can pretty much 3D print anything.
 
and yes you are quite correct in how a lot of the fears are baseless. i actually work in the nuclear industry - that's why i stumbled on the article. for safety, the only real problem we have is to deal with decay heat in a disaster as what happened with fukishima. older designs require a power source to remove the decay heat - an obvious problem in a major disaster. the small modular designs don't have these problems. no external cooling is required for removal of decay heat. recovery of weapons material such as plutonium isn't possible due to the reactor physics and how it burns up the fuel. cheaper we've all heard before as they can be built in a factory and put on the back of a truck for delivery. i also think that most don't realize that this is a proven technology - it's basically the same as past experimental fast breeder reactors. fermi in the US, phenix in france, and there's one in japan that i can't remember the name of right now. sure they had problems. they're also prototypes - newer designs fix these problems.

Here in lies the problem with nuclear anything: It's always experimental, there's never an end to end solution for the waste other than to bury it, it's always at least partially funded by taxpayers and it's always left to future generations for currently unsolvable problems. And pro-nuclear people are always angry with anti-nuclear people for having some common sense. Wishful thinking and "BUT MUH THORIUM" are not arguments for it. If you want nuclear tech, entirely fund it yourself and do it on the moon where it doesn't matter if experiments turn into smoldering craters, and we aren't forced to pay for it.

If a coal or gas power plant detonates, it can be razed and rebuilt without too much issue. If a nuclear power plant detonates, it makes an entire region uninhabitable for thousands of years and requires billions of dollars in cleanup, and billions more in economic devastation. Of course people don't want a nuclear reactor of any sort around them. We don't need another three mile island, Chernobyl or Fukushima.

Catashropic plane crashes are much rarer than you'd think. For the airliners worldwide there was one fatal accident per 2 million flights. Thats 2019 data.

It only takes one plane crash for an environmental disaster. There are thirty two publicly known broken arrow incidents, fortunately most of them were in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, a few were near populated areas and released spicy material.
 
Let me know when this is available:
1589461169325.png
 
Here in lies the problem with nuclear anything: It's always experimental, there's never an end to end solution for the waste other than to bury it, it's always at least partially funded by taxpayers and it's always left to future generations for currently unsolvable problems. And pro-nuclear people are always angry with anti-nuclear people for having some common sense. Wishful thinking and "BUT MUH THORIUM" are not arguments for it. If you want nuclear tech, entirely fund it yourself and do it on the moon where it doesn't matter if experiments turn into smoldering craters, and we aren't forced to pay for it.

If a coal or gas power plant detonates, it can be razed and rebuilt without too much issue. If a nuclear power plant detonates, it makes an entire region uninhabitable for thousands of years and requires billions of dollars in cleanup, and billions more in economic devastation. Of course people don't want a nuclear reactor of any sort around them. We don't need another three mile island, Chernobyl or Fukushima.



It only takes one plane crash for an environmental disaster. There are thirty two publicly known broken arrow incidents, fortunately most of them were in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, a few were near populated areas and released spicy material.

why would you think that nuclear is 'experimental'? we left the experimental stages decades ago. is this because we research and build new prototype designs? hate to break it to you, but that's how every industry works. want a new car? at some point that was a prototype and maybe a design flaw caused a few deaths along the way. no complaints there though.

i will be the first to admit that nuclear power has its drawbacks. i see these first hand all the time. the biggest problem is not the used fuel. i'd say its the low and intermediate level waste. that is to say disposable items such as protective gear, worn out contaminated parts, cloths used to decontaminate, etc. these items really have no future use and must be stored as radioactive waste - even if they just sit there and are not a danger to anyone. nobody in the industry calls used fuel nuclear waste. we call it spent or irradiated fuel. the reason is we know that it is not used up - we just haven't figured out how to burn it up further commercially. this is what fast reactors and fuel reprocessing aim to solve. the further you burn up the fuel, the less hazardous it becomes. that means less time it needs to stabilize.

what to do with old decommissioned plants is another problem. no, they don't have to sit there for hundreds of years before demolition. more like 50 give or take.

the pro-nuclear people are not angry with anti-nuclear for having common sense - they're angry at the lack of it. it usually amounts to fear mongering. much like you're doing now. talking about a reactor becoming a 'smoldering crater' or 'detonating' is misleading at best. a reactor is not capable of exploding like a nuclear bomb. so, let's look at some facts.

three mile island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
total deaths was zero. not a single one. there was no significant release of contamination and the surrounding land and people still live there to this day. no statistically significant increase in rate of cancer.

chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
offical body count was 134. however, it is suspected that up to 4000 may have or will have cancer due to the accident. this is of course very difficult to determine in the long run. we all know that the soviets downplayed the number that died, so i'm not going to get into that one. the thing to know above all with this one is that the soviet RBMK design was a joke. there was no containment and that design was notoriously unstable at low power levels. in short, it should have never been built. it is the exception, not the norm. using chernobyl as an example of why we should not have nuclear power is like using the ford pinto to argue that we should not have cars. by the way, saying and accident makes "an entire region uninhabitable for thousands of years" is completely false. the spent fuel is radioactive for thousands of years, but even that only mildly so within less than 100 years. although not many, people are living within the exclusion zone of chernobyl right now. animal life is doing just fine thanks.

fukishima: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster
so far there has been a single death attributed to radiation exposure. this disaster was over 9 years ago now by the way.

in comparison to coal and natural gas we all know about the environmental angle. if you want to believe that this is an irrelevant argument because you choose to deny climate change in the face of mountains of evidence, well i can't help you there so i'll just move on. coal mining is notoriously dirty and destroys surrounding bodies of water quite effectively. no, uranium mining isn't so great either but still far better. then take into account that the fuel can be reprocessed or used in a molten salt fast reactor and the mining problem changes entirely. this is existing and proven technology, we simply need to start using it.

how about normal radiation emissions? coal has you covered there. loads of natural uranium in coal and emits lots of alpha particles. once those get in your body they do some impressive damage - especailly to your lungs. same as tobacco by the way. roughly 2/3 of long cancers caused by smoking is believed to be caused by alpha radiation. people dying of coal emissions is a very real thing and something as a society we tend to downplay badly.

how about number of deaths for each type of power production?
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh_v1_850x600.svg


https://www.energy-reporters.com/opinion/the-most-dangerous-nuclear-power-plant/
Fatalies-Rauli.png

now finally, we come to cost. yes this is a real problem. nuclear is big dollars and has only gotten worse over the years due to increased safety measures. constructing a nuclear plant is insanely expensive but the cost of fuel for the amount of energy generated is actually very low. this is also something that newer designs are aiming to tackle. by making the small modular reactors in a factory with the same design and also simplifying them drops the cost on a huge scale.

so to summarize the real concerns are what to do with waste and the cost. like any technology it is imperfect and costly in the beginning. computers were much the same compared to what we have now. the difference is that there has been a lot of money invested into electronics and not a lot into nuclear. mostly out of fear. it's very hard for any politician to make that investment and get re-elected even if the fears are silly. a new coal mine is very easy since it uses already established old technology and creates immediate jobs. as i said, we tend to ignore the dark side of coal.

if oak ridge wants to test a tiny 3D printed reactor, i say go right ahead. as far as this goes that's one cheap project. maybe it won't result in anything, but if it does we could drop cost of these things in a big way.
 
Here in lies the problem with nuclear anything: It's always experimental, there's never an end to end solution for the waste other than to bury it, it's always at least partially funded by taxpayers and it's always left to future generations for currently unsolvable problems. And pro-nuclear people are always angry with anti-nuclear people for having some common sense. Wishful thinking and "BUT MUH THORIUM" are not arguments for it. If you want nuclear tech, entirely fund it yourself and do it on the moon where it doesn't matter if experiments turn into smoldering craters, and we aren't forced to pay for it.

Fund its yourself hah! Nice...you cant. Governments highly regulate this. And do it on the moon? LOL that the height of the NIMBY attitude right there. You don't like being forced to "pay" for something you don't agree with? Welcome to taxes and governments. I don't like some of the things my government pays for either...its the price we pay for living in a society. Deal with it.

If a coal or gas power plant detonates, it can be razed and rebuilt without too much issue. If a nuclear power plant detonates, it makes an entire region uninhabitable for thousands of years and requires billions of dollars in cleanup, and billions more in economic devastation. Of course people don't want a nuclear reactor of any sort around them. We don't need another three mile island, Chernobyl or Fukushima.

If a goal power plant detonates it takes out a hell of a lot of the area around it and spreads a lot of shit into the air also. Not to mention the massive coal fires that are burning underground today or how dangerous coal mining is. Or you know the massive amounts of pollutants its puts into the air on a daily basis killing more people than a nuclear power plant ever has.

All of your examples were already debunked. But I will say this: I would gladly live right next door to a modern nuclear power plant. Because the design of a modern nuclear power plant precludes it exploding or even having the problems that TMI or Chernobyl had. I also would bet against having a Fukushima happen again because modern designs don't rely on external power...which was already stated above.

So I would rephrase your statement to say "those who are uneducated about nuclear power don't want it anywhere near them...because they are afraid." Their fears, much like anti-vaxxers are unfounded and if they would take 20 minutes to do some REAL research (i.e. not listening to some hack on YouTube or the hype in the news) they would know better.

It only takes one plane crash for an environmental disaster. There are thirty two publicly known broken arrow incidents, fortunately most of them were in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, a few were near populated areas and released spicy material.

You've disproved your own argument. Thirty two crashes and not a single massive "disaster" that cost billions and rendered a region uninhabitable for generations. In fact I am aware of only one in which radioactive material was released near a populated area (Thule) and that was in the bay. Cite some sources. And these were all containing WEAPONS. Items DESIGNED to explode. Imagine how much safer it would've been if we had designed them NOT to explode under any circumstances....
 
Here in lies the problem with nuclear anything: It's always experimental, there's never an end to end solution for the waste other than to bury it, it's always at least partially funded by taxpayers and it's always left to future generations for currently unsolvable problems. And pro-nuclear people are always angry with anti-nuclear people for having some common sense. Wishful thinking and "BUT MUH THORIUM" are not arguments for it. If you want nuclear tech, entirely fund it yourself and do it on the moon where it doesn't matter if experiments turn into smoldering craters, and we aren't forced to pay for it.

There is an end solution to the "waste," and it's called fast reactors. Those have existed since nearly the beginning of nuclear technology. The waste from fast reactors are highly radioactive for decades, not hundreds of thousands of years, making storage relatively short term. They're also theoretically able to extract 100 times more energy from the same fuel as compared to regular reactors due to the fact that U-235 is typically less than 1% of naturally mined uranium. Our current depleted uranium stock can provide a huge amount of power for a long time in fast reactors without the need for additional mining. But because of people like you, fast reactor technology has stalled and wasn't made to be commercially viable.
 
why would you think that nuclear is 'experimental'? we left the experimental stages decades ago. is this because we research and build new prototype designs? hate to break it to you, but that's how every industry works. want a new car? at some point that was a prototype and maybe a design flaw caused a few deaths along the way. no complaints there though.

Risks are orders of magnitude different. New car prototype catches on fire? Put it out. New nuclear technology burps radioactive emissions into atmosphere? That is never going away. It's also funny that you immediately go to deaths of different power generation types when it was not even mentioned before. I sense a boiler plate argument.

the pro-nuclear people are not angry with anti-nuclear for having common sense - they're angry at the lack of it. it usually amounts to fear mongering. much like you're doing now. talking about a reactor becoming a 'smoldering crater' or 'detonating' is misleading at best. a reactor is not capable of exploding like a nuclear bomb. so, let's look at some facts.

You're great at creating straw man arguments, you create this fallacy that I said nuclear anything going off = nuclear explosion.

So according to you, Chernobyl #4 didn't blow its 1000 ton lid off the reactor, didn't blow the roof clean off and didn't launch 700+ pound fuel rods into the air, and totally didn't have a smoldering crater where the reactor used to be that burned for months and is still super spicy today? OK. So all of that video footage and pictures the Soviets made was fake.

So Fukushima also didn't explode either? Despite there being plenty of video footage of reactor buildings cooking off? OK.

You should work for the Communist party of China, you'd make a great PR guy :)

three mile island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
total deaths was zero. not a single one. there was no significant release of contamination and the surrounding land and people still live there to this day. no statistically significant increase in rate of cancer.

What data are you reading? A significant amount of radioactive gas was released. There was also an increased incidence of cancer, irregardless if you think it wasn't statistically significant. And remember that billion dollar figure I mentioned? TMI was ~$976 million for the cleanup and much more for the long term monitoring and decommissioning, funded by we the taxpayer.

chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
offical body count was 134. however, it is suspected that up to 4000 may have or will have cancer due to the accident. this is of course very difficult to determine in the long run. we all know that the soviets downplayed the number that died, so i'm not going to get into that one. the thing to know above all with this one is that the soviet RBMK design was a joke. there was no containment and that design was notoriously unstable at low power levels. in short, it should have never been built. it is the exception, not the norm. using chernobyl as an example of why we should not have nuclear power is like using the ford pinto to argue that we should not have cars. by the way, saying and accident makes "an entire region uninhabitable for thousands of years" is completely false. the spent fuel is radioactive for thousands of years, but even that only mildly so within less than 100 years. although not many, people are living within the exclusion zone of chernobyl right now. animal life is doing just fine thanks.

Again with the body count, probably to distract from the fact that it blanketed much of Europe and Eurasia with radioactive fallout, two key isotopes being Cesium-137 and Strontium-90. Many studies have shown increased incidences of many types of cancers in northern European countries. Human suffering and economic cost is a bit more relevant than death count. Your car analogy is hilarious, because it's stupid. You don't get to invalidate a nuclear accident because you think it was built and managed improperly, let alone saying it's an exception and not the norm. Take a look at publicly known nuclear accidents, you can fill books with them. Management incompetence, crew incompetence, mechanical failure, instrumental failure, the list goes on. Some cases were just one failure away from burping radiological emissions into the atmosphere. This doesn't take into account military accidents, many of which are still not known about due to secrecy. The western US doesn't have spicy areas for no reason.

If you think animal life is doing great in Chernobyl, how about you live there if you think it's safe. I definitely know you can't put your money where your mouth is. Just because the animals and flora exist there, doesn't mean they are thriving. Sure there are more animals there than before the disaster, but the thing is that many of them have natural lifespans of less than 15 years, and most even less than that, like rodents and birds of 2-5 years. Radioactive isotope poisoning doesn't have enough time to significantly affect them before they die naturally, but there has been testing to show that many of the animals have genetic mutations from the radiation.

fukishima: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster
so far there has been a single death attributed to radiation exposure. this disaster was over 9 years ago now by the way.

in comparison to coal and natural gas we all know about the environmental angle. if you want to believe that this is an irrelevant argument because you choose to deny climate change in the face of mountains of evidence, well i can't help you there so i'll just move on. coal mining is notoriously dirty and destroys surrounding bodies of water quite effectively. no, uranium mining isn't so great either but still far better. then take into account that the fuel can be reprocessed or used in a molten salt fast reactor and the mining problem changes entirely. this is existing and proven technology, we simply need to start using it.

Who said anything about climate change? Climate change will happen, and has happened regardless if humans exist or not. Also, uranium mining is just as destructive to the surrounding environment as coal mining is. In fact most types of mineral mining are very destructive to the environment, they used to raze entire mountains to the ground with hydraulic mining for gold back before environmental laws came to exist.

how about number of deaths for each type of power production?
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

The chart is ambiguous because it lumps miners in with deaths from pollution, and the sources are behind paywalls. Deaths for pollution and deaths due to occupational accidents need to be separated because mining in general is hazardous. Miners die all the time from non-mineral related causes, usually machinery related accidents.

now finally, we come to cost. yes this is a real problem. nuclear is big dollars and has only gotten worse over the years due to increased safety measures. constructing a nuclear plant is insanely expensive but the cost of fuel for the amount of energy generated is actually very low. this is also something that newer designs are aiming to tackle. by making the small modular reactors in a factory with the same design and also simplifying them drops the cost on a huge scale.

It doesn't matter if the fuel is cheap if the power plant is insanely expensive to build and maintain, I don't think there's a single solvent nuclear plant in the country. If we look at R.E. Ginna as an example, it provided 4689440 MWh of energy in 2018, and even with the highest electricity cost of 21 cents per KWh, that's only just above 9 million dollars in revenue for that year. The plant was ~$346 million dollars and even in 13 years of operation, it still has not even come close to paying for itself. The literal only reason it still exists is because it's being funded by the taxpayer via subsidies.

I also hear the same argument every time "but future reactor designs are more efficient and will solve our current problems!" They were saying this stuff back in the 1950s, and it's just another example of what I said earlier, leaving current problems to future generations. The sweet sounding words of clean reactors that produce zero waste is a pipe dream, else Yucca mountain wouldn't exist.

so to summarize the real concerns are what to do with waste and the cost. like any technology it is imperfect and costly in the beginning. computers were much the same compared to what we have now. the difference is that there has been a lot of money invested into electronics and not a lot into nuclear. mostly out of fear. it's very hard for any politician to make that investment and get re-elected even if the fears are silly. a new coal mine is very easy since it uses already established old technology and creates immediate jobs. as i said, we tend to ignore the dark side of coal.

What on earth are you smoking because I want some. Electronics was more researched than nuclear? The cold war was ~50 years of unlimited slush funds for nuclear research in the USA and the USSR. In fact both nuclear and electronics benefited greatly because one relied on the other and they were developed in tandem. Both countries spent crippling amounts of money on nuclear research, the USSR so much that it threatened to bankrupt their economy at certain points.

The downsides to coal is it pollutes more if not sequestered properly. It's just as bad to mine it as uranium or other ores.
 
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Fund its yourself hah! Nice...you cant. Governments highly regulate this. And do it on the moon? LOL that the height of the NIMBY attitude right there.

Government regulation doesn't preclude you paying the entire cost of a nuclear powerplant. Government regulation tells you what you can and can't do, not how you pay for it.

You don't like being forced to "pay" for something you don't agree with? Welcome to taxes and governments. I don't like some of the things my government pays for either...its the price we pay for living in a society Deal with it.

The last time I checked, we live in a republic and we the people have a say on what the government spends its money on. I guess if you live in Communist China, you can deal with it.

If a goal power plant detonates it takes out a hell of a lot of the area around it and spreads a lot of shit into the air also. Not to mention the massive coal fires that are burning underground today or how dangerous coal mining is. Or you know the massive amounts of pollutants its puts into the air on a daily basis killing more people than a nuclear power plant ever has.

I don't really know why you bothered typing this, because it's like a dumpster fire compared to Chernobyl cooking off. A dumpster fire will burn out, or can be put out and things return to normal within a few years. Chernobyl required evacuation of two entire cities and an exclusion zone of 1000 square miles.

All of your examples were already debunked. But I will say this: I would gladly live right next door to a modern nuclear power plant. Because the design of a modern nuclear power plant precludes it exploding or even having the problems that TMI or Chernobyl had. I also would bet against having a Fukushima happen again because modern designs don't rely on external power...which was already stated above.

But you wouldn't live in the exclusion zone or near Fukushima. You also probably wouldn't live on Bikini Atoll either. I'd bet we're going to see more Fukushimas and Chernobyls in our lifetime. Which idiot decided to build a reactor on the coast of one of the most geologically active locations on the planet that regularly experiences tsunamis? You may as well build in the caldera of an active volcano.

So I would rephrase your statement to say "those who are uneducated about nuclear power don't want it anywhere near them...because they are afraid." Their fears, much like anti-vaxxers are unfounded and if they would take 20 minutes to do some REAL research (i.e. not listening to some hack on YouTube or the hype in the news) they would know better.

I'm against it because I have done real research on the subject. The negligence, gross mismanagement, oversights and sheer stupidity of past nuclear experiments is terrifying. Who needs YT hacks when you have government sources for the relevant information.

You've disproved your own argument. Thirty two crashes and not a single massive "disaster" that cost billions and rendered a region uninhabitable for generations. In fact I am aware of only one in which radioactive material was released near a populated area (Thule) and that was in the bay. Cite some sources. And these were all containing WEAPONS. Items DESIGNED to explode. Imagine how much safer it would've been if we had designed them NOT to explode under any circumstances....

The average cost of the nukes lost and the planes flying them easily surpasses a billion dollars, not to mention the human cost of the crew. The bombs that were found were usually heavily damaged and had spread radioactive debris around. I'd definitely consider those regions uninhabitable. The real problem is the unaccounted for nukes that were never found, those are on borrowed time, mother nature will eventually degrade them to the point they start leaking radiation.
 
The Navy has shown modern reactors can be plenty safe, I'm not going to pick nits but all power generation causes harm, further research is always welcome. I'm hoping for more fast reastor research to break down the current waste and make electricity in the process would be cool. But emotions get in the way of progress all too often.
 
have to say, i'm impressed. you've managed to avoid an actual intelligent debate and simply deny everything without providing a shred of evidence of your own. additionally, you've displayed to everyone here your utter lack of knowledge in the topic. i have attempted to provide information in a non-hostile manner with the purpose of learning. it's obvious that you don't care. you simply want to be right.

Risks are orders of magnitude different. New car prototype catches on fire? Put it out. New nuclear technology burps radioactive emissions into atmosphere? That is never going away. It's also funny that you immediately go to deaths of different power generation types when it was not even mentioned before. I sense a boiler plate argument.

a risk is a risk, the car example was only used as an analogy. a rather relevant one considering that older designs were indeed very unsafe compared to what we have now. the same is with nuclear. the point that you've missed here is this is how technological development works. mistakes happen and people die. in comparison, nuclear has killed very few.

the radioactive emissions indeed do go away. it's called half-life. i'm not talking about the game either. most of the emissions are short lived such as activated noble gasses.

i got into deaths in different power generation for one reason. your initial comments are about SAFETY. this is a comparison of safety with regards to other types of electrical generation.

You're great at creating straw man arguments, you create this fallacy that I said nuclear anything going off = nuclear explosion.

So according to you, Chernobyl #4 didn't blow its 1000 ton lid off the reactor, didn't blow the roof clean off and didn't launch 700+ pound fuel rods into the air, and totally didn't have a smoldering crater where the reactor used to be that burned for months and is still super spicy today? OK. So all of that video footage and pictures the Soviets made was fake.

So Fukushima also didn't explode either? Despite there being plenty of video footage of reactor buildings cooking off? OK.

You should work for the Communist party of China, you'd make a great PR guy :)

did i at any time state that chernobyl or fukishima did not explode? no. let's see here...

a reactor is not capable of exploding like a nuclear bomb.

chernobyl #4 experienced a massive power excursion. this caused a very sudden increase in steam production. what happened was a steam explosion. that also caused voiding in the fuel channels to further compound the problem.

fukishima reactor buildings were heavily damaged by hydrogen explosions. hydrogen is created by radiolosys of water. normally, this is removed by ventilation or when that is unavailable by hydrogen igniters. the hydrogen is simply burned off before it reaches anywhere near a dangerous concentration. without power, those were unavailable as well. funny story, that could have been avoided. the plant operators wanted to vent this hydrogen buildup before it reached explosive levels. japan has this unusual law where in that situation the mayor of the town must give his or her blessing. the mayor also didn't understand what was going on and delayed until it was too late. since then, much of the industry has installed passive hydrogen recombiners that do not require power in addition to the igniters that are already there.

What data are you reading? A significant amount of radioactive gas was released. There was also an increased incidence of cancer, irregardless if you think it wasn't statistically significant. And remember that billion dollar figure I mentioned? TMI was ~$976 million for the cleanup and much more for the long term monitoring and decommissioning, funded by we the taxpayer.

actually i'm reading the wikipedia article i posted that you obviously did not. much like the rest of what i posted. here, let me do it for you:

"Within hours of the accident, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began daily sampling of the environment at the three stations closest to the plant. Continuous monitoring at 11 stations was not established until April 1, and was expanded to 31 stations on April 3. An inter-agency analysis concluded that the accident did not raise radioactivity far enough above background levels to cause even one additional cancer death among the people in the area, but measures of beta radiation were not included. The EPA found no contamination in water, soil, sediment, or plant samples. "

that's also cited by the way. yes i noticed about beta radiation before you go there. beta is very short ranged and dissipates in air very effectively. it is also always accompanied by gamma radiation unless from a pure source - which reactor fuel obviously is not.

furthermore: "According to the Rogovin report, the vast majority of the radioisotopes released were the noble gases xenon and krypton."
remember those noble gasses i was talking about? yeah that's them. they decay quite fast. xenon within days.

as i have said, the money is definately an issue. i'm not arguing that. what i'm arguing is that newer designs are cheaper and also pretty well incapable of a meltdown scenario. molten salt reactors don't even require shutdown cooling. that solves the cleanup cost you're complaining about.

Again with the body count, probably to distract from the fact that it blanketed much of Europe and Eurasia with radioactive fallout, two key isotopes being Cesium-137 and Strontium-90. Many studies have shown increased incidences of many types of cancers in northern European countries. Human suffering and economic cost is a bit more relevant than death count. Your car analogy is hilarious, because it's stupid. You don't get to invalidate a nuclear accident because you think it was built and managed improperly, let alone saying it's an exception and not the norm. Take a look at publicly known nuclear accidents, you can fill books with them. Management incompetence, crew incompetence, mechanical failure, instrumental failure, the list goes on. Some cases were just one failure away from burping radiological emissions into the atmosphere. This doesn't take into account military accidents, many of which are still not known about due to secrecy. The western US doesn't have spicy areas for no reason.

yes chernobyl spread contamination in a horrible way. why would you think i'm trying to distract from that? my point is that people fear radiation because they don't understand it. small amounts are not proven to do much of anything. airline pilots receive higher doses than nuclear workers. is there a huge increase in cancer in pilots? nope. did people beyond the exclusion zone get cancer from this accident? absolutely. did people get cancer from countless other chemical spills and various pollutants? absolutely. so your point is semantics? i'm not sure.

i have not and will not 'invalidate' the chernobyl disaster. i will however state again that this was a very terrible design exclusive to the soviet union. it was built as cheaply as possible to produce as much power as possible with no regards for safety. in the industry, it is often said that at a well designed plant you work your ass off to keep it running - at a badly designed plant like chernobyl, you work your ass off to keep it under control.

yes there has been other accidents both civillian and military. yes there have been emissions and in fact every nuclear plant in the world is constantly emitting small amounts of radiation. small insignificant amounts...if its killing people, please i'd love to see some real evidence. the question here is what came out of all of these accidents, incompetence and equipment failures? safer designs. better administrative controls. redundant equipment to better handle failures. in any nuclear plant, the oversight from supervisors and management would make your head spin. if i were to go into all the improvements that have been put in place since that accident, i would fill pages. WANO was formed due to chernobyl which introduced operational experience or OPEX for short. when even small things go wrong at any plant around the world that works with WANO, that experience is shared. besides maybe the medical world, i can't think of any other industry that actively shares their experience and what they learn with other plants who are their competition.

If you think animal life is doing great in Chernobyl, how about you live there if you think it's safe. I definitely know you can't put your money where your mouth is. Just because the animals and flora exist there, doesn't mean they are thriving. Sure there are more animals there than before the disaster, but the thing is that many of them have natural lifespans of less than 15 years, and most even less than that, like rodents and birds of 2-5 years. Radioactive isotope poisoning doesn't have enough time to significantly affect them before they die naturally, but there has been testing to show that many of the animals have genetic mutations from the radiation.

i'd love to live there. if it had any infrastructure and a job for me, i'd be happy to move there. what was the point of this? another excuse to mouth off?

Who said anything about climate change? Climate change will happen, and has happened regardless if humans exist or not. Also, uranium mining is just as destructive to the surrounding environment as coal mining is. In fact most types of mineral mining are very destructive to the environment, they used to raze entire mountains to the ground with hydraulic mining for gold back before environmental laws came to exist.

i mentioned climate change since it always comes up when discussing nuclear energy. i also feel that it is getting wildly off topic so i was simply stating that i don't see it appropriate to discuss it here. please try to read between the lines.


https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

The chart is ambiguous because it lumps miners in with deaths from pollution, and the sources are behind paywalls. Deaths for pollution and deaths due to occupational accidents need to be separated because mining in general is hazardous. Miners die all the time from non-mineral related causes, usually machinery related accidents.

last i checked uranium is mined and i believe you also stated that as well. nowhere does it say that the chart excludes deaths due to uranium mining. deaths from pollution are significant because that's what all this is about - radiation is a form of pollution. not sure how you figure this is ambiguous? if you don't like the paywall, you're welcome to look for this information yourself from other sources. there's a lot out there with this one.

It doesn't matter if the fuel is cheap if the power plant is insanely expensive to build and maintain, I don't think there's a single solvent nuclear plant in the country. If we look at R.E. Ginna as an example, it provided 4689440 MWh of energy in 2018, and even with the highest electricity cost of 21 cents per KWh, that's only just above 9 million dollars in revenue for that year. The plant was ~$346 million dollars and even in 13 years of operation, it still has not even come close to paying for itself. The literal only reason it still exists is because it's being funded by the taxpayer via subsidies.

yes the cost is an issue. i think i said that a few times?

I also hear the same argument every time "but future reactor designs are more efficient and will solve our current problems!" They were saying this stuff back in the 1950s, and it's just another example of what I said earlier, leaving current problems to future generations. The sweet sounding words of clean reactors that produce zero waste is a pipe dream, else Yucca mountain wouldn't exist.

yucca mountain exists because we have not yet developed the commercial technology to burn waste fuel. this is one of the goals of all gen 4 reactors. you know, what the whole point of the original article is! i can't help you understand that technology can and will develop, sorry.

What on earth are you smoking because I want some. Electronics was more researched than nuclear? The cold war was ~50 years of unlimited slush funds for nuclear research in the USA and the USSR. In fact both nuclear and electronics benefited greatly because one relied on the other and they were developed in tandem. Both countries spent crippling amounts of money on nuclear research, the USSR so much that it threatened to bankrupt their economy at certain points.

the US and USSR invested heavily in research for nuclear weapons as well as plutonium breeding reactors to support that project. nuclear power was always a byproduct of this research. very little has been done to create a reactor made completely for power production and nothing else. this is exactly why we use uranium and water. after TMI and chernobyl pretty much all projects for power were halted.

The downsides to coal is it pollutes more if not sequestered properly. It's just as bad to mine it as uranium or other ores.

nobody is denying that. my point was that with better tech comes better fuel burn up. current designs only use about 2% of the fuel (give or take a little depending on the type). if that number was raised to say 10%, the fuel lasts 5x as long. that means less mining for uranium...or whatever fuel they want to use.

so i'm not sure what your mission was here. i'm guessing trolling with how you've ignored pretty well all real information and resorted to abusing both myself and kju1. nobody thinks you're smart for it.

m5EaMTvLLxG06k4l0leDxFEcCmc9vdUHKt_Ju-Jxhb9g3dmvMw.png
 
have to say, i'm impressed. you've managed to avoid an actual intelligent debate and simply deny everything without providing a shred of evidence of your own. additionally, you've displayed to everyone here your utter lack of knowledge in the topic. i have attempted to provide information in a non-hostile manner with the purpose of learning. it's obvious that you don't care. you simply want to be right.


I'm more impressed by your passive-aggressive self important attitude. You keep making ridiculous assumptions and ad hominem attacks on me instead of my position. I don't care? I want to be right? No, you're attacking a fictitious straw man. If I wanted to be right in the debate, I wouldn't have bothered with your arrogant attitude.

But in regards to my evidence, I'll use the same excuse as you, use google. The general knowledge I used came from keywords in google, and you can definitely do the same if you expect the same from me. I mean you can't be bothered to find a non-paywalled source for the statistics and want me to do the work for you. Wikipedia is also not a source, Wikipedia even tells you not to use them as a source.

did i at any time state that chernobyl or fukishima did not explode? no. let's see here...

No, you just misrepresented my original statement that nuclear accidents are nuclear bombs going off.

chernobyl #4 experienced a massive power excursion. this caused a very sudden increase in steam production. what happened was a steam explosion. that also caused voiding in the fuel channels to further compound the problem.

fukishima reactor buildings were heavily damaged by hydrogen explosions. hydrogen is created by radiolosys of water. normally, this is removed by ventilation or when that is unavailable by hydrogen igniters. the hydrogen is simply burned off before it reaches anywhere near a dangerous concentration. without power, those were unavailable as well. funny story, that could have been avoided. the plant operators wanted to vent this hydrogen buildup before it reached explosive levels. japan has this unusual law where in that situation the mayor of the town must give his or her blessing. the mayor also didn't understand what was going on and delayed until it was too late. since then, much of the industry has installed passive hydrogen recombiners that do not require power in addition to the igniters that are already there.

I'm not really sure what your issue is here? I said it exploded, you said it exploded, but you seem to be really angry that the reason why it exploded wasn't given? It is general knowledge why it exploded, every single detail does not have to be relayed every time it is mentioned. Do I need to write a novella of every historical event that happened before a specific historical event that is mentioned?

actually i'm reading the wikipedia article i posted that you obviously did not. much like the rest of what i posted. here, let me do it for you:

You really have no idea what I do or do not read, you should stop making such outlandish assumptions.

furthermore: "According to the Rogovin report, the vast majority of the radioisotopes released were the noble gases xenon and krypton."
remember those noble gasses i was talking about? yeah that's them. they decay quite fast. xenon within days.

Which specific isotopes of Krypton and Xenon are you referring to? There are dozens of them for each element, and some have half-lives of years. The ones that have much shorter decay periods decay into other elements which stick around for far longer. Radioactivity is the gift that keeps on giving.

so i'm not sure what your mission was here. i'm guessing trolling with how you've ignored pretty well all real information and resorted to abusing both myself and kju1. nobody thinks you're smart for it.

View attachment 245531

Yes, we should stop feeding you, the troll. You're quite literally the definition of a troll.
 
Government regulation doesn't preclude you paying the entire cost of a nuclear powerplant. Government regulation tells you what you can and can't do, not how you pay for it.



The last time I checked, we live in a republic and we the people have a say on what the government spends its money on. I guess if you live in Communist China, you can deal with it.



I don't really know why you bothered typing this, because it's like a dumpster fire compared to Chernobyl cooking off. A dumpster fire will burn out, or can be put out and things return to normal within a few years. Chernobyl required evacuation of two entire cities and an exclusion zone of 1000 square miles.



But you wouldn't live in the exclusion zone or near Fukushima. You also probably wouldn't live on Bikini Atoll either. I'd bet we're going to see more Fukushimas and Chernobyls in our lifetime. Which idiot decided to build a reactor on the coast of one of the most geologically active locations on the planet that regularly experiences tsunamis? You may as well build in the caldera of an active volcano.



I'm against it because I have done real research on the subject. The negligence, gross mismanagement, oversights and sheer stupidity of past nuclear experiments is terrifying. Who needs YT hacks when you have government sources for the relevant information.



The average cost of the nukes lost and the planes flying them easily surpasses a billion dollars, not to mention the human cost of the crew. The bombs that were found were usually heavily damaged and had spread radioactive debris around. I'd definitely consider those regions uninhabitable. The real problem is the unaccounted for nukes that were never found, those are on borrowed time, mother nature will eventually degrade them to the point they start leaking radiation.

You obviously don't understand government. So I am not even going to address that. Also yes I would LOVE to live on Bikini Atoll TODAY if they had high speed internet and an airport I could fly my plane out of. You know why? Because its 100% habitable now! In 2010 I think it was they told the former residents they could move back because the radiation had subsided to background levels. and thats after the area around the island got nuked a few times...ON PURPOSE.

Also did you know Chernyobl continued to operate until around 2000? Nope bet you didn't because you thought the whole thing "blew up".

Heres the problem "you'd consider" well guess what you aren't the expert and they say its NOT what you say. I trust the experts. Do you?
 
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