2 ms·

Now why can’t we build nuclear plants underground? Seems like that would be pretty safe. Or build them in a depression and flood it with water if there’s a ma

• acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Indeed! And this was a fundamental pillar of Edward Teller's quest for socially-acceptable forms of nuclear energy. Nuclear legend Alvin Weinberg towards the end of his career favored the PIUS passively-safe BWR, undergrounded [1]. I think the biggest practical concern is that underground construction is more expensive that above-ground construction, and nuclear's active constraint today is cost. There may be opportunities for step changes if people make fully autonomous, maintenance-free, factory fab reactors that can slide into easily-constructed holes. Unfortunately, all of this is hard, and so far economies of scale have dwarfed gains from economies of mass production. The small reactors of the past have all been crazy expensive. The truck-mounted ML-1 military reactor, for example, was 10x too expensive for the Army back in the early 1960s. As for floating, this is my single favorite idea ever, as expressed elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817497 [1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6332659-process-inherent-ultimate-safety-boiling-water-reactor-pius-bwr https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6332659-process-inherent-ultimat...