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Pentagon awards contracts to design mobile nuclear reactor
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoThis looks like a potentially great product, especially if it fits in a 40' shipping container. It'd enable isolated and remote sites to significantly reduce their dependence on diesel generators. And I'd guess the defence angle enables increased use of hybrid vehicles.
- deftnerd 7y agoNot just decreased usage of diesel, but it'll make those remote units less vulnerable to supply route attacks. Presumably, if the reactor generates enough power, it could also be used to supply power to the surrounding community and hopefully earn some goodwill.
- castratikron 7y agoHow many times could you charge a Tesla with a nuclear reactor the size of a 40' shipping container before you needed more fuel?
- davidu 7y agoThere are a few startups pitching a "nuclear power station in a shipping container" idea -- and having heard them and done a bunch of reading about the state of nuclear, it's hard to not come away with a complete and strong belief that: 1) It's a really good idea. 2) Nuclear power, more broadly, is probably our best bet to quickly the tide against climate change.
- option 7y agoOf course it is. But it is for domain experts to decide what’s best and more promising, not you and me. So beware of populist politicians banning this and that or trying to revive X. We need those who will set targets (CO2 emissions, costs, etc) and achieve them with the help of professionals.
- willis936 7y agoThis way of thinking is so idealist it comes back around on itself. Policymakers do not listen to professionals. Policy is based entirely around fashion. There’s no reason to push against good solutions becoming fashionable.
- creddit 7y agoI think one of the important things I've learned since leaving higher education is that over the past ~50yrs a deep culture of gatekeeping and credentialism has developed which does far more harm than good. People are capable of thinking through problems themselves and are often able to take in high level parameters about a concept and come to a conclusion without a degree or some other signal that they are an "expert". This type of gatekeeping thinking essentially asserts the world as fixed. It asserts a world in which all possible domains of knowledge are known and only those with some set of credentials in that domain are allowed to speak to that domain. This both limits the possible benefits of multi-disciplinary pursuits but also asserts that there are no and can be no new domains of knowledge. It's very static thinking.
- ben_w 7y agoI do not deny the existence of harmful gatekeeping — one of my lecturers at university in 2005-06 insisted that “several megabytes” was too much data to record while I was recording the lecture as non-compressed 44k@16-bit. That said, my experience is that most people don’t put in the effort required to understand problems like this. I include myself in this, despite being a poly-nerd with an interest in nuclear power.
- akiselev 7y ago
- entee 7y agoThe military may not have this problem but for civilian use I’d ask: how do you secure this? For example: how do you ensure someone with a semi truck doesn’t ram into it and spill massively radioactive stuff all over the place?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoIs there any answer that would satisfy this question?
- acidburnNSA 7y agoMine above does. Just overlapped you in the thread.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoThanks
- acidburnNSA 7y agoThe nuclear fuel in these is almost always solid. It doesn't spill. All you have to do is ensure it is coolable in all geometries. To do that in this kind of scenario you generally down-rate it to powers that can be carried off by natural circulation of air flowing by it while it lays in the ditch. It's a tradeoff though because you generally want to get as much power as possible out of your equipment. If you want to trade lower power for a longer lasting core with more accident resilience you can do that. The x-energy gas cooled reactor behind this particular concept has astoundingly robust fuel pebbles called triso. They conduct their heat to the vessel and it passes it to passive airflow in all accidents.
- gmueckl 7y agoThere is a fundamental misconception in your post: radioactive material can spill no matter whether it is in solid, liquid or gaseous aggregate state. What matters is the mechanical integrity of the surrounding shielding. If that is intentionally damaged or destroyed, you have a pretty bad nuclear accident on your hands.
- dear 7y agoIf we can miniaturize nuclear reactors to the point that they can be drop-in replacements for batteries, then we can potentially run our electronics, appliances, machinery, vehicles standalone for decades without refuel/recharge.
- wmf 7y agoRTGs and betavoltaic cells scale down to that size but the powers that be don't want nuclear material so widely distributed.
- cryptonector 7y agoRTGs powered by plutonium, widely available? No thanks.
- fsh 7y agoBetavoltaic cells get outperformed by coin cells and RTGs by solar panels in most applications. There are some niche space applications, but not much else.
- muzika 7y agoIf that happens, our power needs will raise accordingly.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoNuclear reactors can't generally be scaled down too far. The shielding requirements are about 4 ft of concrete on all sides, basically as a minimum. You can use pure-alpha decay radioactive isotopes as long lasting heat sources with a thermionic to make a 100W battery that last ~100 years. These are used in space probes like Voyager 1/2, Cassini, and Mars rovers like Curiosity and (soon) Perseverance. It used to also be used in pacemakers and soviet arctic light-houses. The material is expensive (though it could be made much cheaper if a big market showed up), but more seriously it's a radiological hazard. Someone could disassemble such a thing and blow it up on a busy street with conventional explosives and cause a massive radiophobia-induced panic. You don't want to inhale a strong alpha-emitter.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dfox 7y agoIn fact US Army did design nuclear reactor that can be shipped in two 4TEU intermodal containers (design of the thing is highly RBMK-ish) and then managed to deploy that and cause nuclear accident with casualties(in the sense of personnel being pinned to the roof by reactor control rods that were somehow ejected out of the reactor)...
- King-Aaron 7y agoIs that the Three Mile Island incident you're talking about? I'm genuinely curious, though thought that was a full scale reactor
- LaMarseillaise 7y agoI believe dfox is referring to this incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1#Accident_and_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1#Accident_and_response
- acidburnNSA 7y agoPretty sure the ML-1 was the shippable one. It was gas-cooled and portable. The SL-1 that had the accident was a BWR intended to power arctic radar stations above the DEW line. Too big to ship easily. These two reactors were part of the same Army program. https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html#the-army-nuclear-power-program https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html#the-army-nucl... M meant mobile. S meant stationary. L means low-power.
- cryptonector 7y agoThe personnel-pinned-to-the-roof accident was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 and the accident was 59 years ago. While I'm not sure that nuclear power from Uranium or Plutonium fission will ever be safe enough, I wouldn't assume or imply that an accident 59 years ago dooms the project.
- lebuffon 7y agoIs it pre-requisite that it use uranium? Are these Thorium ideas you find on the web real?
- acidburnNSA 7y agoThorium requires breeder reactors. Breeder reactors are more complicated. That's why we don't have thorium reactors today. https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html
- lebuffon 7y agoGreat material. Thanks
- andrewpk 7y agoWonder if they’ll finally start looking into thorium salt reactors again (which were originally designed for civilian use).
- chadcmulligan 7y agoIt seems thorium isn't quite up to the hype - https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html
- 6nf 7y agoHow would these reactors compare to nuclear submarine reactors for example? I imagine those are fairly compact but probably not really suitable for general user power supply?
- battery_cowboy 7y agoA submarine reactor uses very, very highly enriched uranium not suitable for keeping outside a military installation and onboard a moving tank (with several inches of steel wall) due to security concerns, and the design of the reactor is pretty safe, but it's still using 60's reactor designs running 80's electrical control systems with 2000's PCs running those controls. Lesser enrichment would require a much larger reactor to get the same power, and we have newer gen reactors that are much safer, too.
- lwansbrough 7y agoIs there a theoretical minimum size for a nuclear reactor (based on current or viable near-future technology)? If so, what kind of dimensions are we talking?
- satanspastaroll 7y agoI'd imagine the limit being how densely you can packrods together and sufficiently cool them. What I'd be much more interested in is what's the _minimum_ size they can be made in safe and relatively efficiently
- amelius 7y agoI guess the problem is mostly weight, which you need to shield the thing off from its environment.
- ggm 7y agoPortable nuclear generators exist in many navies worldwide. Russia has ones on barges. It feels like this is a design imperative we know works because we have many working examples. I never understood why the same people who make submarines cannot make commercially viable seaborne reactors for power. Probably the cost benefit didn't pan out but does the tech work? There is no question. The whole "safe at any speed" thing is the problem, not the underlying physics.
- p_l 7y agoRussians have, in development, an upscaled version of the reactor tech from Project 705 submarines. Design goals include ability to just put a power/heating station reactor block on single flat rail car and ship it to and back. Lead/bismuth coolant, passive safeties, if the reactor fails it essentially entombs itself in lead preventing fissile material leak and making it easy to cleanup. And since it's a fast reactor, it burns fuel that typical light water reactors treat as waste. Remember containerized DCs? It's that, just for nuclear power plants. With possibility to mass produce airliftable 100MW nuclear power plants.
- siliconunit 7y agoI would rather spend some pennies to make sure the fellas at General Fusion complete the first full scale demo MTF reactor...fission is an extremely appealing tech for many reasons, the problem seems to always boil down to the general population reaction when a massive disposal factory and relative multi-millennia deep cave gets built next door...GF MTF tech looks like a very good compromise between fully fledged self sustaining plasma tokamaks a la ITER, and experimental pulsed solutions that still do not produce valuable output..
- ttul 7y agoFellas and ladies... just saying.
- anovikov 7y agoIt's a good idea because it will greatly cut the amount of fuel to be carried and thus speed up deployment of large scale expeditionary forces. Think of days when electricity-to-fuel will be able to also produce liquid fuel for tanks, jets etc. to operate, then moving large masses of armor deeply into the enemy territory will become a no-brainer to such a point that territorial depth will cease to be a viable protection!
- pjc50 7y agoUntil someone brings the other kind of nuclear to the battlefield.
- anovikov 7y agoLogistic chain suffers a lot under the threat of WMD, because many things it depends on such as ports, airfields, and bridges, are stationary and a no-brainer to be nuked. If enemy starts using nukes, not having to carry too much liquid fuel all the way will help a lot. And it makes the most of the supplies army has to transport, with proportion increasing because say, need for ammunition decreases as shells get smarter, but better protected tanks and APCs weight more and thus need more fuel.
- perfunctory 7y agoAwarding military contracts is how fundamental R&D is being funded in the US. Because direct R&D funding is not popular with the general public you have to go in a roundabout way and pretend it’s for military use. There is no guarantee anything practical will come out of this.
- gandalfian 7y agoWell in 2014 I read here that Lockheed will have a prototype fusion reactor on a truck within five years. And its now 2020 sooooo....
- IXxXI 7y agoWhere's that clean thorium reactor that never appears to manifest itself beyond vaporware.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoMakes sense - half of the Trillion-dollar budgets for middle-east wars was 'fuel to air-condition tents'.
- intpx 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1