Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.
The 200 kilowatt Toshiba designed reactor is engineered to be fail-safe and totally automatic and will not overheat. Unlike traditional nuclear reactors the new micro reactor uses no control rods to initiate the reaction. The new revolutionary technology uses reservoirs of liquid lithium-6, an isotope that is effective at absorbing neutrons. The Lithium-6 reservoirs are connected to a vertical tube that fits into the reactor core. The whole whole process is self sustaining and can last for up to 40 years, producing electricity for only 5 cents per kilowatt hour, about half the cost of grid energy.
Toshiba expects to install the first reactor in Japan in 2008 and to begin marketing the new system in Europe and America in 2009.
Interesting technology - I'm sure there's going to be some regulatory hurdles to overcome though.
If the not in my back yard mentality encountered in the construction of standard nuclear power plants applies to these tings as well it's going to be tough to see them in wide spread use.
One question I have. Aren't the radioactive materials used to fuel reactors a non renewable resource? What happens when all the uranium is mined?
"A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." - Ronald Reagan 1987
Klast Brell wrote:If the not in my back yard mentality encountered in the construction of standard nuclear power plants applies to these tings as well it's going to be tough to see them in wide spread use.
One question I have. Aren't the radioactive materials used to fuel reactors a non renewable resource? What happens when all the uranium is mined?
Yes-and-no. We use Uranium as a fissile material because of convienence and effiency. Any radioactive material over a certain threshold of thermal output can be used to extract energy, right down till the reaction chain bottoms out at lead. It's just a pain in the ass, and may or may not be energy profitable at many steps. While it can run out, it's got a longer life span than say, oil, if we decide we really want it. But, in the end, it's all stop-gap until we hit sustainable hydrogen fusion. If by some ungodly happenstance, we make a significant impact on the earth's hydrogen supply, well, Jupiter isn't very far away.
Isn't France supposed to have second and third-generation fission reactors? They use a lot of nuclear power, and last I heard they were using the standard Uranium and then the Plutonium that results from it.
Already the world's second largest nuclear power producer - after it decided after the 1970s oil shocks to reduce its oil dependence by building a fleet of 58 nuclear reactors – France is now to pick up on the design of the so-called pebble-bed nuclear reactor, having one of these fourth generation reactor in use by 2020.
We have referred to these plants before. The design originated in Germany but was abandoned after opposition from the yoghurt knitters in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, but picked up by the South Africans and latterly the Chinese, who already have a prototype up and running.
The system is well worth the study, comprising a gas cooled reactor (see illustration above), which relies not on the traditional uranium pile, but graphite coated uranium oxide balls, the coating of sufficient thickness to allow critical mass when the balls (or pebbles) are stacked in a hopper. But the genius of the system is that, if the mass overheats – the cause of the potential “China syndrome” meltdown accident – the graphite coating expands and separates the uranium cores, whence critical mass is lost and the cooling takes place spontaneously, without no outside intervention.
In pebble bed technology, therefore, the human race has the prospect of the first truly fail-safe and therefore safe nuclear energy production. But, on top of this, because the system is gas-cooled (using helium gas for heat transfer) and is unpressurised, individual plants are smaller and can be massed produced, making them cheaper to provide and easier to locate.
Well, it’s the Super-Monroe Doctrine: “Get off our oil, people who dress funny!” - M. Bouffant
"You're a bad captain, Zarde. People like you only learn by being touched, and hard. And you will greatly disapprove of where these men put their hands." - M. Vanderbeam.
But the genius of the system is that, if the mass overheats – the cause of the potential “China syndrome” meltdown accident – the graphite coating expands and separates the uranium cores, whence critical mass is lost and the cooling takes place spontaneously, without no outside intervention.
Right, but what about the gamma ray flash that usually accompanies a supercritical event?
(I'm sure it's covered, but that line above sounds like junk science to me)
But the genius of the system is that, if the mass overheats – the cause of the potential “China syndrome” meltdown accident – the graphite coating expands and separates the uranium cores, whence critical mass is lost and the cooling takes place spontaneously, without no outside intervention.
Right, but what about the gamma ray flash that usually accompanies a supercritical event?
(I'm sure it's covered, but that line above sounds like junk science to me)
Dd
Thermal expansion is continual, it is not a step process. It is a simple matter of engineering to ensure that expansion of the material disallows critical density, meaning that supercriticality is simply never reached. These reactors, in the absence of a cooling gas, stabilize at a given design temperature, which is far beneath the critical points.
I'd buy one. I wonder how much they would cost. If they aren't retarded crazy I can see communities pooling together to get free energy for life and land developers putting them in and taking on 50k per house for the "free power for life" attribute.
Fallakin Kuvari wrote:Because laws that require voters to have an ID (Something they are required to have anyway) are bad....
Minute wrote:I'd buy one. I wonder how much they would cost. If they aren't retarded crazy I can see communities pooling together to get free energy for life and land developers putting them in and taking on 50k per house for the "free power for life" attribute.
Unfortunately, with a pellet bed reactor, it's -not- free energy for life. The same attributes that make them safe make them inefficient consumers of fuel. Roughly every day / every other day, you have to take out a portion of the pellets, fill it up, sort the pellets you took out into 'good' and 'dead' pellets, merge the good ones back into your fuel reserve (and you can't just have a big pile of pellets, or they'll start acting just like the ones in the reactor), and dispose of the old. And since the public won't be able to tell the difference between dumping it at ocean and dumping it in an active subduction zone, disposal will continue to be an expensive problem.
...
But it is probably still cheaper and cleaner than oil / coal, therefore, I am all for it.
Blarg, there's always some fine print. No fucking way am I handling some "pellets" that came out of a nuclear reactor. They need to make these the size of a AA battery and have it run my motorcycle for 40 years.
Fallakin Kuvari wrote:Because laws that require voters to have an ID (Something they are required to have anyway) are bad....
Minute wrote:Blarg, there's always some fine print. No fucking way am I handling some "pellets" that came out of a nuclear reactor. They need to make these the size of a AA battery and have it run my motorcycle for 40 years.
You want the Zero-Point Energy folks, then. Check aisle eleventeen, the shelf underneath the cold fusion generators. Can't miss it.
Voyager's not actually a nuclear reactor. It's just a lump of radioactive goo that produces a tiny bit of heat that they then use to make electricity - around 400W if I recall correctly.
