ITT: Nuclear Energy

ITT: Nuclear Energy

I'm genuinely curious to see if any of you Sup Forumsros know anything about nuke shit.
What's your favorite reactor design?
What are your thoughts on current methods of storing/refining spent fuel?
How do you feel about current IAEA and Govt. controls for ionizing radiation exposure?

I'll answer general nuclear questions, but I will not share anything specific about my plant.

Other urls found in this thread:

dol.gov/owcp/energy/
youtube.com/watch?v=CfzrDd4m_TE
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synroc
twitter.com/AnonBabble

>not using LFTR yet

If your plant doesnt have a tokamak you are an amateur

Breeder Reactor lennyface.txt
I think we should harness uranium eating bacteria to deal with it.
I doubt the government is educated enough to know what to do with it. Guarantee it got watersheded when that legislation was passed.

How to get job at plant?

Just waiting for fusion to come out

oh my god. i designed so much of the tooling and machinery that makes the fuel for Westinghouse that you would shit your pants if you knew. ask me anything that i can answer without violating proprietary agreements.

I like the idea of Thorium reactors. I don't like how they have an unstable temperature coefficient of reactivity.
Current designs use graphite as moderators, like Chernobyl, with fuel injection rate controlling the amount of fissile material in the plant at a given time.
As the plant gets hotter, it gets more thermally efficient. More fission, more neutrons, even more fission. There's potential for an unstable reaction.
While in a commercial civillian power plant, this doesn't matter that much since they just go to 100% and stay there for power generation, there's the issue of emergency shutdowns.
I don't think the idea of "We dump the fuel into containment vessels and let it decay, hoping it doesn't melt them" isn't a safe strategy.

I do like the benifits though: It's a hotter plant, so it's more thermally efficient over PWR's.
You don't need a pressurizer, thus you don't need to design the plant for 2500 PSI.
Thorium's abundant and breeds Uranium.

Other than that though, Uranium reactors work well enough.

What plant? Are you a gardener? Im confused.

All these devices are stupid and complicated and serve no purpose other than to allow dorito eating cunts to post racist shit on the internet.

Take away all this energy and I'll still be just as happy with my life and trying to my a life for myself in the wilderness. it doesn't fucking matter to me. But take the average joe eating cheetoes unemployed doing shit with their lives and it's a catastrophe if these scientists can't provide unsustainable energy for them.

The entire energy system is unsustainable and based of chemical combustion. It's no wonder we haven't left earth and moved onto a new galaxy when we're still exploding shit for energy for the masses. Sure it's complicated but in my eyes all this technology is fucking stupid and let me not even begin to question where these fucks dump all this nuclear waste for fucks sake. "We're so smart and still dump nuclear waste in holes underground" I mean fucking humans are dumb as fuck. I'm done ranting.

Nice.
The roll-bonding they use for the fuel matrix always blew my mind to think about.
Same as the fuel/poison zoning they used to keep a Rx kicking for longer.

I think we don't need nuclear energy. For the cost of the by-product and how dangerous it is, we could easily get all our energy needs and more without nuclear or coal or oil.

thorconpower.com/features

Can't read image due to transparency of image on mobile, but what's the purpose of the secondary loop? Also, why are there pumps connected to the turbine shaft? Seems inefficient.

funny how you have all this nuclear energy and USA still relies on places like Niagara falls, coal combustion, and fossil fuel burning to rely on energy. just look outside your window and breathe in the delicious smell of combustion fueled energy. 2016 and still powering cars by burning shit. So advanced yet so fail. humans 4 president. kek sry OP humans still dumb af

So like, really though, who's fault is it for Fukushima? The guys who built it on a fault line, crumby 70's tech, or invisible death rays are just always going to kill people occasionally?

>Question 2

The plot of doom is people harnessing energy via 24 volt batteries charged by litteraly hell deamons, how would you try to charge a battery using current day tech in an eternal plane of suffering?

Kill yourself. I know nothing about energy so my comment is invalid and don't take it so hard. I'm in the process of killing myself as well.

>without nuclear or coal or oil.
what exactly then are you planing on using to charge your precious fucking cell phone? wind? solar? you clearly don't understand the concept of supply on demand

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You do realize that the nuclear material initially came from the ground, and has less of a Curie content than it did when they got it, right?
The only thing that was changed was the activity equilibrium and the half-life of the nucleides.
Realistically, a LOT of the radioactivity from nuclear waste is beta-minus radiation, followed by gammas as the nucleides get smaller.
That shit decays quickly, so all the long lived radioactivity remaining is mostly low energy gammas and alpha particles.
Sure, it would fuck you up if you went into an underground hole where the fuel was stored, but why the fuck would you want to?

>on demand
Comcast has you covered

Currently liquid-salt fuel reactors are the best design out there. They're very efficient and have passive cooling.

Breeder reactors consume nuclear waste and turn it into more energy.

I work in a lab that involves radioactive experiments. I wear a badge that tracks the amount of radiation I'm exposed to. The limit is 300 milli rads if I remember correctly, which is well under what is deemed safe. Besides no one even gets near that number.

>you have all this nuclear energy
that's the problem, we don't. the fucking enviros have kept us from building and upgrading nuke plants for decades. any fuckups that happen should be blamed on them because they have kept us married to 1970s technology

My favorite reactor design is all the new forms of MSR's

This argument is too large and complex to be conveyed effectively on an internet image board. Also I just can't be arsed.

But, I would happily charge my precious fucking cell phone with my own roof made entirely of solar panel roof tiles and 10,000Ah lithium phosphate storage battery.

what the fuck does that even mean? we are talking about generating electricity here

Nice

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I feel like Fukishima was a bad plant design.
They only had one pump per plant to remove decay heat, all of them relying on the same method (diesel) to operate.
Once the wave flooded out the engines to operate the pump, the reactors just cooked themselves.
At the very least, they could have maintained a steam-dump on the secondary side of the plant as a method of decay heat removal, or set up a natural circulation emergency cooling system that went out to sea.

if people could choose to live on an uninhabited un-privatized fresh new earth away from technology, i'm sure many would opt to build their lives just as our ancestors did. stop assuming everyone is a fat retard wanting to shove ipods up their asses taking selfies 24/7 fiending energy. not everyone is like you. open your eyes a bit for fucks sake you pleb. and before you start mouthing off "well then go live in a forest". fuck off with your straw man argument logic. we live in a society as it is and most of us have families we don't want to move away from to begin the conversation of plebbiness and common fucking sense. no one asked these companies to dump their fucking wires and technology all over earth. it's there so people use it of course. common sense.

I'd just like to throw out there that most coal plants produce as much if not more radioactive material than a nuclear power plant per KiloWatt/hour.

Not OP, but I can answer your first question.

It's the fault of those who decided to cut expenses and place the emergency diesel generators under the facility, and place the facility so close to sea level. If the generators weren't flooded, there wouldn't have been news about Fukushima Dai-ichi.

Fun fact: There was a sister plant named Fukushima Dai-ni that survived without a meltdown a few miles down the coast.

There's a documentary that explains the events of the Fukushima incident in chronological order. I'll see if I can find it.

I don't think this guy knows anything. He's either got a very specific opinion on how someone should live or more likely doesn't have a leg to stand on in this discussion so spouts contrarian anti-nuclear crap in lieu of knowing anything about it.

either you have way more money than me or you're full of it. solar is way too expensive and inefficient for prime time. real people have to live in the real world, and that means the power company generates electricity based on nuke, coal, hydro, or natural gas that is coming into it's own. solar and wind may be good for fill ins, but they won't run the country. solar may have a chance in the future, wind never will be a player. the wind don't always blow and we don't have 400 foot tall batteries to store the power

No one died or has died since from fukushima radiation.

Not necessarily. Commercial U-235/258 reactors produce roughly 6 Ci per Watt of power.
A fair amount of this decays over the life of the plant though, some decays while in storage, and the rest is long-lived and not a major environmental concern (The toxicity of the long lived shit will kill you and give you cancer FAR faster than the radiation they emit will).
With coal burning plants, all that shit goes straight into the sky. Anything gaseous decays in the air, so it isn't a concern, but all of the particulate contamination will fall out and decay in the environment.
All things considered, the smog and pollution caused by coal plants is worse than it's nuclear footprint.

Problem, molten salt. Try and find any containment that won't fuck a hole in.

Well doesn't that sorta depend on the coal though? I'm guessing cus this thread is bizarrely smart for Sup Forums, but I know that technically everything that sits under the sun for a million years gets cooked full of radiation, and coal exists in mix's of all sorts of nasty stuff like sulfur and phosphorus, but I'd think they skip over the urianium coal fields.

>Explain pls

Radiation and heavy metals cause illness. I'm here to help.

dol.gov/owcp/energy/

You're fucking retarded.
1. Nowhere in my post did I post a "nuclear power is bad/good" statement. I posted about how the current methods of spent fuel storage are adequate.
2. Grab a fission yield curve and the chart of nuclides and trace the decay chains out, you'll find that my post is true.
3. Stop projecting. If you don't have anything to contribute to the discussion, fuck off to a trap thread to shitpost.

yea don't tell that to the deniers. lets burn fuel for energy in our cars and breathe all that shit in. its so delicious. let me start my car so I can huff puff that residue in my life with my neighbors. is so goooood you gotta try it. sniff some gasoline man come join! im sure all this shit cars spew out make us so healthy :D. i cant wait to collect some gas on the local highways and tunnels and breathe it in. reminds of of this documentary I saw. video related if anyone is bored

youtube.com/watch?v=CfzrDd4m_TE

Yeah, but the inherent danger of radiation could just be something we have to deal with if we agree on using nuclear power, I don't know.

It's like how gas stations occasionally explode, or zoo animals sometimes stomp people to death. The fault could be placed at something logical and over looked, but we just have to accept that minor fuck ups can kill, like alot of people for a long time.

When you burn coal you release radioactive material, that was previously trapped in the coal, into the air. This could then harm living creatures that breath or ingest it.

But as the other user put it theres far worse things that coal plants do to the environment.

What about submarines? Can they run on coal too?

So it it just regular UV radiation trapped in the material?

I know that I've radiation builds up in clays and mud over time fairly evenly, it's a method of dating pottery and ceramic, fireing the pot realeses the built up UV and it resets.

>I think I just figured it out.

I wouldn't be surprised if the government tried. I know that they made a jet plane that ran of coal pellets. 2/3 rds efficient, but it worked.

If you look at the cause for most nuclear incidents, it's a fair blend between shitty plant design and human error.
Chernobyl was caused by letting junior reactor operators perform a relatively complicated test, while the plant itself had graphite moderators and used water as a poison.
They caused a loss of cooling by tripping their turbine, while the dumbfuck at the EOS pulled all but 6 control rods out.
As the water went bye-bye, the reactor went supercritical, the zircaloy-water reaction was accelerated, hydrogen gas was evolved, and the pressure vessel exploded.

Fukishima was caused by shit plant design.
They used diesel emergency cooling pumps, but put them below sea level. Even an inbred hick knows if you flood an engine it isn't going to work.
Similar to chernobyl, they had a loss of cooling. They were able to scram out their reactors, but the decay heat from operating near 100% reactor power melted them.

Three Mile Island was caused due to a loss of pressure control. Operators didn't really know how to operate the plant, didn't trust their indications of a stuck open relief valve, and ALSO secured their coolant pumps.

>I'm genuinely curious to see if any of you Sup Forumsros know anything about nuke shit.
Niggu, we're on Sup Forums. We don't know shit.

Nuclear submarines have backup diesel generators and an electric emergency propulsion motor.
With the reactor shutdown and the generators bled of all their steam, they've still got a good 6-8 hours before they're dead in the water.

Then you have diesel submarines. They snorkel, run the diesels to charge their battery, then submerge and operate on battery power again.

Pebble bed?

TRIGA reactor, fun and hands on

I think the fuel would be better off dumped in areas where Muslims live

The limits are very low and the standards are there, however not everyone has GM tubes and scintillators in their homes or businesses. I don't know if there's any public patrol for sources of radiation, like what if there was a lump of Co-60 lying in Oxford Street? How much damage will that cause before it's discovered? In fact I've gone out driving before with my scintillator and gamma spectrometer around the Muslim areas in town in case some currynigger is building a dirty bomb

ya know, i came in here thinking it might be an intelligent thread that i could contribute something to since i had worked in the nuke fuel industry for 30 years. turns out it's just another Sup Forums thread with a bunch of guys calling each other faggots. so disappointing.

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You never know, a lot of guys in the nuke community are the kind of guys you'd expect to browse Sup Forums.
Granted they may stick to /r9k/, /tg/, /x/ and /sci/

Those always seemed wasteful to me in that they create a large volume of not so dangerous waste.

I believe I'm right in saying that the reason the US government didn't go with thorium back in the day is that it cannot produce material for nuclear weapons?

I'm from Germany and my government decided to get rid of all the nuclear plants by 2022.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out
I'm not a big fan of it because not only will the lack of nuclear plants be substituted with coal but also it will be more expensive and also installing solar or wind reactors is a double edged sword.

In my layman's opinion there is a lot of potential in nuclear power and instead of reachering more efficient and cleaner ways of how to use nuclear power we shut ouerselves off from a major science field.

Thanks Obama, ähh.. Merkel!

But supposedly can't go critical?

Supposedly can't go critical is kind of silly when you know that because of that little feature we're going to be building the cities of the 2070s and later on top of landfill full of kinder gentler nuclear waste.

I did the math on Curies per Gram of Co-60 since it's the big nucleide of concern in the nuke community.
One gram is 11,000 Curies of radioactivity.
Using the CMR rule, that's 11,000 REM per hour at 1m away.
Assuming a "lump" is something the size of a charcoal briquette, we're talking 100g of Co-60.
So: at 1m, you're getting an exposure of ~1 million REM per hour. You die at 800+
As you move further away, the dose drops.
ER(2) = ER(1) x ( [Distance 1]^2 / [Distance 2]^2 )
So at 10m away, that's 1,100 REM/hr. Still a fatal dose within an hour.
At 100m away, it's down to 1.1 REM/hr. You'd exceed your Fedaral exposure limit of 5 REM per calender year in 5 hours, and you'd accumulate 100 REM (where you start seeing the effects of radiation sickness) in less than a week.
As the distance gets further, the impact gets lessened. However, as you maintain proximity to the Co-60, you're still getting a dose of ionizing radiation, thus increasing your probability of death by cancer.

>building cities in 2070
you actually believe the biosphere will be supporting society as we know it in half a century? Dream the fuck on user.

Please share something

You are correct sir

It looks like there's 2 of us that are actually from the nuke community. One a Westinghouse employee, myself the Navy.
The rest are faggots.
Once the thread dies, I'll see how it goes on /sci/ or Sup Forums.

Not exactly. UV radiation is Electromagnetic waves, similar to light. Radioactive radiation is an atom decaying and releasing small particles that can fuck with organic matter.

Carbon dating is when they use a sample of the material to see how much radioactive carbon is left in it. That tells us how long it was made ago. Similar with people. You stop aquiring radioactive carbon when you die because you stop eating and breathing.

The selling point is the half life of the thorium is not as dangerous for as long as traditional units and it would seem by investigation the traditional units though liquid salt methods where proposed way back when the atomic energy commission was created the knowledge was directed down from the people who worked in the department of defense so you see the more efficient design was killed before it could take hold for other reasons. Read up on it, the cake is a lie.

So the reason we're dealing with all this nuclear waste and shit is due to the USA having to have their weapons of mass destruction. Cheers Yanks!

I'm not from the community, but an interested user. Ignore the retards. They're everywhere.

Yeah, I do. We're headed to a pretty sizable war in the next 20-30 years, so when the 2070s roll around and humanity is back down to a more reasonable 8-9 billion people we'll be building new cities again.

Nuclear waste can't go critical.
1. Most of the fissile material is already expended.
2. Many of the long lived fission products are poisons, ergo they absorb a lot of neutrons without undergoing fission.
3. There are no moderators in the environment where we store spent fuel. What neutrons are emitted in the subcritical multiplication process don't get thermalized, thus don't contribute to fission readily.

So what was the fuss about the spent fuel pool at fukushima then? They were saying if it lost cooling......boom. Or am I wrong?

It's an entire new reactor design (which costs research, money, and LOTS of testing) vs a design we have, works, AND produces Pu-239/241 to boot.
Producing nukes isn't the only factor.

If any of the live fuel fell into the spent fuel somehow I bet some not so nice things would happen. Also, it's nuclear fucking waste. You better keep an eye on that shit or it will kill your citizens.

The heavy water they store it in is strictly shielding and accelerates the decay process for storage since it provides some moderation for what fuel remains.
The individual fuel rods are already subcritical before they're placed in the pool.
If the water went away, there'd be radioactivity concerns, but no explosive concerns.

How do you guys feel about Arnie Gunderson?

You're posting fear-mongering bullshit that you heard from the news, and you have no nuclear experience outside of playing Fallout I suspect.
Quit being a faggot.
Fuel cell loading, zoning, and the U-238/235 ration in civillian power plants is made so that reactors are physically incapable of creating a nuclear explosion.
At worst, you could have a chernobyl-like incident where you evolve hydrogen from the zircaloy-water reaction and cause a hydrogen explosion. The core, like fukishima, chernobyl, and TMI would just melt.

Disposal:
An Australian process called SYNROC. It's bad ass.

Got to touch a finished version of it when i visited Lucas Heights about 20 years ago, A piece the size of two packs of smokes was about 25 kilos, had less than background radiation and looked like glass in a flattened tin can.

Awesome process, too bad our fucked up government wont chase it and force it onto the world... it would work and solve a lot of issues.

Haven't looked into that yet. How's it work?
Do they cast the spent fuel in a ceramic/zirconium crystal?
We just use lead+concrete drums and more recently fuel pools here in the states.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synroc
Nevermind, starting to look into it myself.
Seems like a solid strategy, but how are the gaseous radionucleides handled? Do you guys wait until it decays to a particulate in a pool before you start the process?

You got me. My information is about 20 years old from an issue of popular science. It talked about the good and bad sides of that particular method. As an environmentalist I don't feel that a puddle of molten metal burning its way through a city's foundation for the foreseeable future is an acceptable possible outcome. Call me poorly informed all you want, but this is a fact that the two of us simply disagree on. Don't get me wrong though, I'm in this thread because the science involved interests the hell out of me, but for the most part I feel that nuclear power should be used on things like satellites and interplanetary missions because at least then we won't have to deal with that waste here on Earth.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I was just asking for more information on how it works.
It seems to work just the same as mixing the fuel with concrete and letting it harden though, but removes the possibility of some of the radionucleides from leaching out to the surrounding area.
Only negative I can see with it is it would be expensive as fuck.

That's one problem. Like I said though, the sheer volume of waste is the biggest problem IMO. These little encased pellets are the fuel itself. So when they run out the need to be stored like any other waste, but they take up shit tons more space.

from what i remember seeing, they are held in a pool before hand.

for those that have never seen spent rods in pool, it is a sight you will never forget.... that glow... so dangerous and so pretty at the same time.

The cost of nuclear, both environmental and financial, especially when you factor in the mining of the ore, is simply ludicrous. We've fucked the biosphere and the only way is down. In 30 years, about when I'll be popping my clogs, things are going to be past saving, if they're not already, and producing energy at all costs to keep the banal triviality of most people's lives going along as they always have is going to be the major factor in our downfall. I'm quite looking forward to it.

Cherenkov radiation's cool shit. That glow's caused by electrons being emitted as beta radiation moving faster than the speed of light in water.

That makes sense. Instead of a bigass storage facility, the storage facility can be significantly smaller.
Or for the same sized storage facility, significantly more spent fuel can be stored.

Scientist here. Something interesting:

Deinococcus radiodurans

Bacteria which are known to be able to survive in regions with large amounts of ionising radiation and repair their genome effectively to survive and replicate. Only bacteria to be isolated from inside a nuclear reactor.

Cool huh!

The generators are air dependant. Which sort of defeats the point of the hide and wait nuclear missile subs.

In all honesty, I think geothermal and hydroelectrical energy is the best we can do for now.
Solar's still too inefficient for commercial use, but water's always going to flow and the earth's mantle/core is going to remain hot for a very, very, very long time.

carbon nanotubes used in geothermal power plants would seem to be the go. Where is all the funding though? Fossil fuel industry is the death of us all

You are correct, but I am much more of an optimist. There are so many new green technologies being developed that nuclear will finally die because it will be a relic that is past its usefulness. Anyone who has even half a brain knows that large power plants are going the way of the dinosaur. One half of all power generated in the states is lost in transmission. Making every building and every road its own power station will cut the need to transmit power long distances. It's already happening. The local hospital where I live has its own biomass plant. This is progress. Biomass is not ideal, but it's a stepping stone to cleaner power. The true silver bullet will be algae based liquid fuels. The world is addicted to liquid fuel. This is a fact. Mass production of liquid fuel that is made from literal shit and refuse will take over.

Indeed.
With nuclear, the major limiting factor is food and stress on the crew. That's why the boomers have 2 crews, blue and gold, to operate a sub.
They go on a deployment, punch holes in the water for a while, then come back when the food runs out and swap crews.

Most likely, we're not going to start seeing major funding for alternative energy sources until the last drop of oil is mined.

work out a sewage fuel source and we'll be all set.

Don't they burn their shit over in India? Or is that just a rumor?

Australia has a few green groups on the asx that are gaining traction.

i thought the may do in one of those ionising plants but i have no idea on the complexities of how it would work.

Most of the 3rd world used to use dung of some sort for fuel.

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1965 was 50 years ago, and they had plenty of doom and gloom to predict, silent spring and all that. Yet here we are, way fewer humans starving, billions out of poverty, and we are still sailing along. Pretty sure in another 50 years we'll be alright.