4 ms·

Hear hear! I think the nuclear industry struggles with finding a balance between sunk costs (e.g. TRISO fuel development under NGNP, the TREAT reactor, ATR, the

Hear hear! I think the nuclear industry struggles with finding a balance between sunk costs (e.g. TRISO fuel development under NGNP, the TREAT reactor, ATR, the BISON fuel performance code), and what advances the nuclear industry really needs to survive and thrive. At a NRC meeting a while ago, one of the members of the ACRS asked pointedly what regulatory relief they expect to get from ATF. No one knew. Is the NRC going to relax a bunch of regs when we have ATF and somehow allow nuclear to be cheaper without compromising safety? No way. We need ways to minimize financing costs during construction, and get the number of staff required at operating plants way down to decrease O&M. My favorite solution? Shipyard-constructed nukes on floating platforms, tugged to locations for power and tugged back to port for maintenance. Solves almost all problems assuming you can get them to operate largely autonomously. In attacks or ship collisions, design it to sink safely and cool itself with seawater. Build in a recovery operation to the design. Also, the nuclear industry really needs to find ways to consolidate effort. There are literally 50+ SMR designs in work right now, and dozens more larger reactors. The industry is wayyy to small to be fighting over limited investor and government money to develop that many reactors in isolation.

adamsea 7y ago
Because nuclear power such a charged issue (pun intended), transparency and trust is especially important. The nuclear struggles with genuine transparency, which, imho, would go further than anything else to shifting the public's feelings on nuclear power.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Totally agree. Nuclear technology was born in secrecy but civilian nuclear energy stands to benefit from much more openness now. I've been hearing people talking about finding ways around institutional friction via various open-source inspired collaboration and design practices. Could be hopeful.
erentz 7y ago
> Shipyard-constructed nukes on floating platforms, tugged to locations for power and tugged back to port for maintenance. What’s your opinion on Thorcon? Also I’m wondering if you have some thoughts on this: I’ve been wondering what holds us back from taking a scale out approach rather than a scale up approach we have now (e.g. with EPR design now producing 1.6GW). Instead couldn’t we pump out naval sized nuclear plants in mass production style since we can apparently still build those and my limited understanding is their smaller size and output makes them safer (less decay heat etc). Ship those around as needed for refueling. And just have a couple dozen on each site to produce the equivalent power. It would combine a national strategic need that we have to do anyway (naval nuclear power), with another need that we seem to be failing to do (getting back on the horse with producing reliable clean power).
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Thorcon is awesome. I love their style and logic. They're pretty open-door, they have the boldest low-ball cost estimate I've ever seen, and they have a solid set of reasoning for why it's going to be that cheap (e.g. The Tale of Two Ships [1]). I don't really like that it's fluid fuel though. As I said in another comment, the unknown remote maintenance implications of that are very far from hashed out, and will very likely be terribly expensive for a fairly long shakedown/learning period. Fluid fuel is a good end goal. But don't get me talking about fluid fuel in a near-term first-of-a-kind plant with a low-ball operation/maintenance cost estimate. I also don't like that if they succeed, they have a very large waste stream of super radioactive large-scale components (that get swapped out ever ~5 years and put... where? That's gonna be a problem). Also, working primarily with a country with inexperienced/non-existant nuclear institutions for a very advanced reactor (Indoensia) is probably not going to work. I get the logic though, bootstrap a new nuclear regime without the old regulations. Problem is, fluid fuel reactors have a variety of postulated novel ways to increase source term. That will take work to license. A lot of work. Experimental work, in neutron irradiation. I just wish they'd try a small light-water reactor with their shipyard construction experience first and take it from there. I also freaking love that they use LaTeX. [1] http://thorconpower.com/docs/two_ships.pdf http://thorconpower.com/docs/two_ships.pdf
sdenton4 7y ago
"Shipyard-constructed nukes on floating platforms..." Hmmmm... This reminds me of the nuclear armed b52s discussed in "command and control". Are all of the failure modes actually safe? And is building a movable platform contributing to the risk of failure? Feel like for nuclear, KISS is particularly important.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  There is a great deal of experience with putting reactors on ships. On the other hand real world experience for putting reactors on planes is very limited, and what little experience there is suggests that shielding would be minimal (shadow shielding for the pilot/copilot only) or nonexistent.
SpaceRaccoon 7y ago
> Shipyard-constructed nukes on floating platforms, tugged to locations for power and tugged back to port for maintenance. Such as Akademik Lomonosov?
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Precisely. Hopefully larger though, to really get that economy of scale. You can put up to 2 large GW-class LWRs on something much smaller than the Prelude.

adamsea 7y ago

Because nuclear power such a charged issue (pun intended), transparency and trust is especially important. The nuclear struggles with genuine transparency, which, imho, would go further than anything else to shifting the public's feelings on nuclear power.

acidburnNSA 7y ago
Totally agree. Nuclear technology was born in secrecy but civilian nuclear energy stands to benefit from much more openness now. I've been hearing people talking about finding ways around institutional friction via various open-source inspired collaboration and design practices. Could be hopeful.

erentz 7y ago

> Shipyard-constructed nukes on floating platforms, tugged to locations for power and tugged back to port for maintenance. What’s your opinion on Thorcon? Also I’m wondering if you have some thoughts on this: I’ve been wondering what holds us back from taking a scale out approach rather than a scale up approach we have now (e.g. with EPR design now producing 1.6GW). Instead couldn’t we pump out naval sized nuclear plants in mass production style since we can apparently still build those and my limited understanding is their smaller size and output makes them safer (less decay heat etc). Ship those around as needed for refueling. And just have a couple dozen on each site to produce the equivalent power. It would combine a national strategic need that we have to do anyway (naval nuclear power), with another need that we seem to be failing to do (getting back on the horse with producing reliable clean power).

acidburnNSA 7y ago
Thorcon is awesome. I love their style and logic. They're pretty open-door, they have the boldest low-ball cost estimate I've ever seen, and they have a solid set of reasoning for why it's going to be that cheap (e.g. The Tale of Two Ships [1]). I don't really like that it's fluid fuel though. As I said in another comment, the unknown remote maintenance implications of that are very far from hashed out, and will very likely be terribly expensive for a fairly long shakedown/learning period. Fluid fuel is a good end goal. But don't get me talking about fluid fuel in a near-term first-of-a-kind plant with a low-ball operation/maintenance cost estimate. I also don't like that if they succeed, they have a very large waste stream of super radioactive large-scale components (that get swapped out ever ~5 years and put... where? That's gonna be a problem). Also, working primarily with a country with inexperienced/non-existant nuclear institutions for a very advanced reactor (Indoensia) is probably not going to work. I get the logic though, bootstrap a new nuclear regime without the old regulations. Problem is, fluid fuel reactors have a variety of postulated novel ways to increase source term. That will take work to license. A lot of work. Experimental work, in neutron irradiation. I just wish they'd try a small light-water reactor with their shipyard construction experience first and take it from there. I also freaking love that they use LaTeX. [1] http://thorconpower.com/docs/two_ships.pdf http://thorconpower.com/docs/two_ships.pdf

sdenton4 7y ago

"Shipyard-constructed nukes on floating platforms..." Hmmmm... This reminds me of the nuclear armed b52s discussed in "command and control". Are all of the failure modes actually safe? And is building a movable platform contributing to the risk of failure? Feel like for nuclear, KISS is particularly important.

darkpuma 7y ago
There is a great deal of experience with putting reactors on ships. On the other hand real world experience for putting reactors on planes is very limited, and what little experience there is suggests that shielding would be minimal (shadow shielding for the pilot/copilot only) or nonexistent.

SpaceRaccoon 7y ago

> Shipyard-constructed nukes on floating platforms, tugged to locations for power and tugged back to port for maintenance. Such as Akademik Lomonosov?

acidburnNSA 7y ago
Precisely. Hopefully larger though, to really get that economy of scale. You can put up to 2 large GW-class LWRs on something much smaller than the Prelude.