Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

Re: Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

The problem of dealing with spent radioactive fuel still exists. Storage and disposal of radioactive material is still one of the biggest stumbling blocks to wide scale use of nuclear power. I could see the problem getting even worse with the decentralization of nuclear sources that something like this would engender. At least with a centralized plant, you know what kind of procedures are in place to safely dispose of spent fuel.

On the other hand, it definitely would be attractive to be able to have a self contained 40 year power source for your house, and be able to tell the power company to piss off. I would dearly like to be able to tell BC Hydro to kiss my ass and get off their grid: not that I'm actually expecting such units to be affordable or available to average consumers.

Re: Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

Small-scale nuclear is a fun concept, but for most applications it isn't terribly practical. It's ideal for very remote areas, because it requires almost no maintenance, service, fuel supply, &c. In general, though, nuclear is preferable for central-station purposes, because a large number of small plants need much more fuel than a small number of large plants with the same total output.

The main application would be for places which aren't big enough to support a central station system, or where (for one reason or another) it doesn't make sense to install a large-scale power grid, or places which have so far effectively been embargoed from having nuclear plants under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The NPT has been an insanely bad deal, holding up the development of civilian nuclear technology because "it could have military applications" — just the same as the "Missile Control Regime" & American arms-export regulations have been a major obstacle to the development of the space industry.

Re: Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

I know France is very big on nuclear energy (something like 60% of their power supply is nuclear). How have they managed with their spent fuel?

Re: Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

For one thing, they're reprocessing. See, the majority of spent nuclear fuel is leftover U-235 and U-238, which can be used again, and plutonium. The highly radioactive dangerous stuff is the fission products, which physically cannot be a larger fraction of the mass than the U-235 was to begin with, usually less than 5%. That stuff can be separated out chemically, and it decays very rapidly (much of it is gone within the first month, and almost all of it within five years). Then the plutonium and uranium can be combined with new uranium to make new reactor fuel, which both the French and the Japanese do. The major problem is that the grade of plutonium produced (which cannot be used for bombs) has a high rate of "spontaneous fission", which makes it difficult to adjust the power level by "throttling" the reactors.

Here in the USA we stopped reprocessing spent fuel during the 1970s, partly because orders for new nuclear power plants stopped (paradoxically) about the time of the first energy crisis, and we had plenty of capacity for manufacturing new fuel. Since the 1990s, we have been burning uranium from decommissioned Soviet nuclear bombs purchased under the terms of the Baker-Nunn amendment. If we wanted to expand our base of nuclear power plants substantially, though, we would need to start reprocessing, which would reduce the quantity of high-level nuclear waste we need to handle by a factor of about 20.

Re: Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

So how long until they make a small enough one so that it fits in my iPod and cell phone so I never need to recharge it?

Re: Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

And this had nothing to do at all with Three Mile Island?

Re: Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

No, the shortsigted and foolish decision to not reprocess fuel in the USA was made before the Three Mile Island accident happened. Proliferation was the nonsensical reason. The only worse decision made in the USA regarding nuclear technologies was the cancelling of the Integral Fast Reactor program.

Re: Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

The good news is that all the spent fuel we will eventually need for that reprocessing hasn't been buried yet; it sits in above ground casks and cooling pools.

Re: Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

The French have an advantage over us: they count nuke plants as a "renewable source of energy" with respect to treaties like Kyoto.

Re: Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

I believe Alaska is one of the states where micro reactor technology will be tested in the USA. Isolated communities with hyper expensive energy requirements, they're the perfect test candidate for the new technology.

France and Japan are the biggest nuclear reactor nations in the world. And it has worked out extremely well for them. Granted, they do have the occasional incident at times, but they're no where near the blatant incompetence and total disregard for safety that caused the Chernobyl reactor explosion.

Re: Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

I've never understood why people get so exercised about Three Mile Island. That was essentially the maximum credible accident for a light-water reactor in a containment vessel, of the type used in the West, and nothing happened. The reactor itself was rendered inoperable, but the quantity of radioactive material released was negligible, & the other units at the site remain servicable. If that's the worst nuclear can do, I'm not worried. (Chernobyl was a totally different design, which was deliberately operated in a fashion forbidden in the manual because it could cause an explosion. Even then, nothing important would have happened if the Soviets had believed in putting their nuclear reactors inside containment buildings, rather than in lightweight steel structures resembling warehouses.)

I'm not going to argue the relative merits of the IFTR versus the molten-salt breeder reactor (which offered an easy way into the thorium cycle). I will say, though, that "detente" and other political considerations to one side, I don't believe the virtual shutdown of American nuclear development would have happened if the energy-production interests hadn't been eager to abandon it. I blame public opinion, to an extent ; now that "climate change" is the big concern, a surprising number of old Greens are coming out and saying "I opposed civilian nuclear energy in the past because I was unable to separate it in my mind from the nuclear weapons that threaten our lives, and I was wrong in that". There have been persistent reports of links between the anti-nuclear groups and the coal interests (remember that coal burning dumps a surprisingly large amount of radioactive material directly into the air). On the other hand, the long hiatus has let the old spent fuel cool down quite a bit, so it will be easier to reprocess when we finally get around to it.

When little package reactors were first introduced in the late 1950s, they were used for powering several very remote installations, including a missile early-warning radar site, McMurdo and Amundsen-Scott stations in Antarctica, and "Camp Century", an Army research base buried under the Greenland ice cap. Power for these sites had previously been produced by generators burning fuel oil, and the savings (mostly in transportation costs, since oil was cheap then) from going nuclear were enormous.


Of course, I continue to advocate the development of space solar power (which can also serve isolated users via spot beams, an important consideration in the recent National Security Space Office report), but increased use of nuclear is an important part of our near-future energy picture. Other things like ground-based solar at the user end and secondary biofuels (not primary biofuels, which displace either food crops or wild land) can help, but in the end there's no substitute for baseload power.

Re: Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

My ex designed one of these for space. Its applications could be terestrial, as is described above.

Re: Mini Nuclear goes Real.. wow.

Was that the SP-100? Beautiful little unit. It's a crying shame it never got built, but it was predicated on our having a space program that actually… you know… did something. These days it's next to impossible to launch so much as an RTG, though. NASA talks about solar-powered probes to the outer planets, & I just have to shake my head.