9 ms·

There 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

by davidu 7y ago

There 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 ago
Of 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 ago
  This 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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
Can you explain how you came to the first conclusion wrt shipping container nuclear reactors? Having studied light bulb nuclear reactors and a few legacy designs, I can't imagine a nuclear reactor cooling system pump fitting into a single 40ft container, let alone the "important" parts like the containment chamber. Based on this article, they're talking about forward deployments to permanent military bases. That implies that they have a ton of infrastructure already in place to support a shipping container reactor.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Stupid question: why do you want to cool a reactor anyway? Isn’t their raison d'être to be hot to generate steam and run a turbine?
  - blake1 7y ago
    Increasing temperatures increase steam pressure until a rupture occurs, and the water boils away. The steel reactor vessel and structural elements will then inevitably melt, and the reaction will continue until the molten fuel can spread out enough to lose criticality. This is called a meltdown.
    - exrook 7y ago
      This is why many new reactor designs do not use water as coolant but instead molten salt[0] or inert gas[1], to avoid the risk of steam explosion. This alone does not make those reactors inherently safe but it can help keep radioactive material from being violently spread outside the reactor in the event of catastrophic failure. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-cooled_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-cooled_reactor
    - hwillis 7y ago
      > Increasing temperatures increase steam pressure until a rupture occurs, and the water boils away. Generally, no. Chernobyl is the biggest example of this happening, but it only happened because the reactor itself was basically exploding anyway. Steam pressure doesn't build up gradually, generally. Relief valves -even just burst points- are just too simple and robust. The much more common issue is that hot reactor fuel causes water to break down and release hydrogen which accumulates at the top of the reactor and eventually explodes, and then the water boils off.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
Agreed. Actually it has always been a good idea but the costs associated with unlimited liability pushed the industry away from any commercial implementation. Some of the modern ideas, like the traveling wave reactor, have quite a bit going for them. In a different political climate one could imagine a small reactor feeding a community rather than a substation. I don't think it is politically possible for civilian use but military use of small reactors is well documented in the Navy.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- petre 7y ago
  It can and should be done by the military first because of less red tape involving civillian reactors. If it workd for the military it will also work for civillian operations. One just needs to modularise the reactors and their safety systems and be able to build a scalable solution with up to two dozen modules. NuScale Power is on a similar path to deliver a working modular reactor by 2025. It uses 65x9 ft, 60 MWe modules. Not quite container sized but still transportable by bardge, train or truck.
MichaelMoser123 7y ago
maybe they could get the thorium cycle going for a small scale reactor; that would have the potential to make a big change if the cycle could be adopted to large power stations as well as small ones.
- petre 7y ago
  More complicated and still years away. It's the military we're talking about so little non-proliferation concerns there.
  - MichaelMoser123 7y ago
    - i wonder if they will be evaluating this piece of information. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-02/tpu-trd021420.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-02/tpu-trd02142... https://news.tpu.ru/en/news/2020/02/13/35856/ https://news.tpu.ru/en/news/2020/02/13/35856/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0029549320300194 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002954932...
jasoncartwright 7y ago
Nuclear is much more expensive than wind in the UK, and plants take 10yrs+ to build. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle... "Nuclear energy too slow, too expensive to save climate: report" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41220948 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41220948 "Two firms said they were willing to build offshore wind farms for a guaranteed price of £57.50 per megawatt hour for 2022-23. This compares with the new Hinkley Point C nuclear plant securing subsidies of £92.50 per megawatt hour." Perhaps reply addressing my point rather than blindly downvoting :(
- londons_explore 7y ago
  The UK has a problem with massive costs for infrastructure projects. Somehow projects that one would imagine would take a few guys with a bulldozer and a few loads of concrete end up costing millions. Hinckley Point is just a larger example of that. Portable nuclear bypasses that by being able to build in other countries without such extreme costs and import the result.
  - jasoncartwright 7y ago
    Large infrastructure projects with massive costs is hardly a UK-specific problem. I guess instead of waiting a decade or more for a nuclear plant we'll wait a decade or two for these portable nuclear plants to be maybe (if ever) be commercialised. In the meantime, we've already built the largest wind farms in the world which are proving valuable as the primary source of UK electricity https://electricityproduction.uk https://electricityproduction.uk
- onion2k 7y ago
  We're not going to resolve climate change with one or the other; we need a combination of every clean, non-fossil burning energy tech available.
  - hannob 7y ago
austincheney 7y ago
Imagine a nuclear reactor for a car engine, always on energy that requires refueling only once about 2.5 years.
- ben_w 7y ago
  On the other hand, imagine a car crash. 30 J/kg absorbed radiation won’t just kill you in <48 hours, it’ll give you seizures and diarrhoea first.
  - onion2k 7y ago
    That would make people drive more safely.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      I met someone who tried to kill themselves by driving into a wall. The only way I’d be comfortable living in the same city as a nuclear powered car is when it’s an electric car and the grid it charges from is nuclear powered.
- ailideex 7y ago
  There were designs for this but AFAIU the amount of mass needed for shielding the reactor would make it impractical. Not sure if technology has changed much but presumably the only way to get around this is to reduce radiation as the mass of shielding has more to do with fundamental physics I think.
  - dcolkitt 7y ago
    My understanding (as a lay person) is that metal foams have revolutionized the area of shielding. I would imagine that many designs that were once impractical, may no longer be so given the new light-weight shielding technology.
    - ailideex 7y ago
stankypickle 7y ago
Did we read the same article? To quote: "Lyman believes that the department’s past efforts have “consistently underestimated”the “spectrum of mission risks posed by these microreactors," mostly around the technical challenges of keeping the radioactive fuel safe and operational in battlefield conditions. “Fielding these reactors without commanders fully understanding the radiological consequences and developing robust response plans to cope with the aftermath could prove to be a disastrous miscalculation,” warned Lyman."
- luckylion 7y ago
  That might be different for civilian use though. I don't know exactly what "battlefield conditions" means (airdropping it in? bullets hitting it?), but that's likely different if you're just aiming for decentral power generation but have safe ways to deploy and maintain.
  - stankypickle 7y ago
    It is being funded by the pentagon. It isn't for civilian use. When considering "battlefield conditions" think along the lines of people with heat seeking missiles and infrared goggles who can easily spot a hot nuclear reactor, and who really want to bring down a base. Not to mention how complicated it is to operate and maintain a nuclear reactor even if conditions are ideal. The additional training and personnel required to support one of these things... would it really be worthwhile in the end?
    - pjc50 7y ago
      "Battlefield conditions" means they need it to run the air conditioning in forward bases in occupied countries. At the moment, this is astonishingly expensive, because it has to be done with fuel trucked in across dangerous supply lines. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8601975/US-spends-12.5-billion-a-year-on-air-con-in-Iraq-and-Afghanistan.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/... : every joule of energy spent on aircon in Afghansitan came from fuel trucked a thousand miles across the Khyber pass, getting shot at along the way. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/dec/08/afghanistan-taliban-nato-raid-pakistan https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/dec/08/afghanistan-ta...
pjc50 7y ago
3) The more of these I read the worse the vapourware to actual shipped devices gets, and the less likely I believe any of them are to ship. Wind is our best bet against climate change in the medium term. Turbines built today will just be starting to be obsolete by the time these new nuclear ideas has scaled up. Oh, and we need to take advantage of the spectacular fall in oil price to put in place a moratorium on new drilling, fracking and shale extraction.

by davidu 7y ago

option 7y ago

Of 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 ago
This 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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

Can you explain how you came to the first conclusion wrt shipping container nuclear reactors? Having studied light bulb nuclear reactors and a few legacy designs, I can't imagine a nuclear reactor cooling system pump fitting into a single 40ft container, let alone the "important" parts like the containment chamber. Based on this article, they're talking about forward deployments to permanent military bases. That implies that they have a ton of infrastructure already in place to support a shipping container reactor.

chrisseaton 7y ago
Stupid question: why do you want to cool a reactor anyway? Isn’t their raison d'être to be hot to generate steam and run a turbine?
- blake1 7y ago
  Increasing temperatures increase steam pressure until a rupture occurs, and the water boils away. The steel reactor vessel and structural elements will then inevitably melt, and the reaction will continue until the molten fuel can spread out enough to lose criticality. This is called a meltdown.
  - exrook 7y ago
    This is why many new reactor designs do not use water as coolant but instead molten salt[0] or inert gas[1], to avoid the risk of steam explosion. This alone does not make those reactors inherently safe but it can help keep radioactive material from being violently spread outside the reactor in the event of catastrophic failure. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-cooled_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-cooled_reactor
  - hwillis 7y ago
    > Increasing temperatures increase steam pressure until a rupture occurs, and the water boils away. Generally, no. Chernobyl is the biggest example of this happening, but it only happened because the reactor itself was basically exploding anyway. Steam pressure doesn't build up gradually, generally. Relief valves -even just burst points- are just too simple and robust. The much more common issue is that hot reactor fuel causes water to break down and release hydrogen which accumulates at the top of the reactor and eventually explodes, and then the water boils off.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

Agreed. Actually it has always been a good idea but the costs associated with unlimited liability pushed the industry away from any commercial implementation. Some of the modern ideas, like the traveling wave reactor, have quite a bit going for them. In a different political climate one could imagine a small reactor feeding a community rather than a substation. I don't think it is politically possible for civilian use but military use of small reactors is well documented in the Navy.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
petre 7y ago
It can and should be done by the military first because of less red tape involving civillian reactors. If it workd for the military it will also work for civillian operations. One just needs to modularise the reactors and their safety systems and be able to build a scalable solution with up to two dozen modules. NuScale Power is on a similar path to deliver a working modular reactor by 2025. It uses 65x9 ft, 60 MWe modules. Not quite container sized but still transportable by bardge, train or truck.

MichaelMoser123 7y ago

maybe they could get the thorium cycle going for a small scale reactor; that would have the potential to make a big change if the cycle could be adopted to large power stations as well as small ones.

petre 7y ago
More complicated and still years away. It's the military we're talking about so little non-proliferation concerns there.
- MichaelMoser123 7y ago
  - i wonder if they will be evaluating this piece of information. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-02/tpu-trd021420.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-02/tpu-trd02142... https://news.tpu.ru/en/news/2020/02/13/35856/ https://news.tpu.ru/en/news/2020/02/13/35856/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0029549320300194 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002954932...

jasoncartwright 7y ago

Nuclear is much more expensive than wind in the UK, and plants take 10yrs+ to build. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle... "Nuclear energy too slow, too expensive to save climate: report" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41220948 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41220948 "Two firms said they were willing to build offshore wind farms for a guaranteed price of £57.50 per megawatt hour for 2022-23. This compares with the new Hinkley Point C nuclear plant securing subsidies of £92.50 per megawatt hour." Perhaps reply addressing my point rather than blindly downvoting :(

londons_explore 7y ago
The UK has a problem with massive costs for infrastructure projects. Somehow projects that one would imagine would take a few guys with a bulldozer and a few loads of concrete end up costing millions. Hinckley Point is just a larger example of that. Portable nuclear bypasses that by being able to build in other countries without such extreme costs and import the result.
- jasoncartwright 7y ago
  Large infrastructure projects with massive costs is hardly a UK-specific problem. I guess instead of waiting a decade or more for a nuclear plant we'll wait a decade or two for these portable nuclear plants to be maybe (if ever) be commercialised. In the meantime, we've already built the largest wind farms in the world which are proving valuable as the primary source of UK electricity https://electricityproduction.uk https://electricityproduction.uk
onion2k 7y ago
We're not going to resolve climate change with one or the other; we need a combination of every clean, non-fossil burning energy tech available.
- hannob 7y ago

austincheney 7y ago

Imagine a nuclear reactor for a car engine, always on energy that requires refueling only once about 2.5 years.

ben_w 7y ago
On the other hand, imagine a car crash. 30 J/kg absorbed radiation won’t just kill you in <48 hours, it’ll give you seizures and diarrhoea first.
- onion2k 7y ago
  That would make people drive more safely.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    I met someone who tried to kill themselves by driving into a wall. The only way I’d be comfortable living in the same city as a nuclear powered car is when it’s an electric car and the grid it charges from is nuclear powered.
ailideex 7y ago
There were designs for this but AFAIU the amount of mass needed for shielding the reactor would make it impractical. Not sure if technology has changed much but presumably the only way to get around this is to reduce radiation as the mass of shielding has more to do with fundamental physics I think.
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  My understanding (as a lay person) is that metal foams have revolutionized the area of shielding. I would imagine that many designs that were once impractical, may no longer be so given the new light-weight shielding technology.
  - ailideex 7y ago

stankypickle 7y ago

Did we read the same article? To quote: "Lyman believes that the department’s past efforts have “consistently underestimated”the “spectrum of mission risks posed by these microreactors," mostly around the technical challenges of keeping the radioactive fuel safe and operational in battlefield conditions. “Fielding these reactors without commanders fully understanding the radiological consequences and developing robust response plans to cope with the aftermath could prove to be a disastrous miscalculation,” warned Lyman."

luckylion 7y ago
That might be different for civilian use though. I don't know exactly what "battlefield conditions" means (airdropping it in? bullets hitting it?), but that's likely different if you're just aiming for decentral power generation but have safe ways to deploy and maintain.
- stankypickle 7y ago
  It is being funded by the pentagon. It isn't for civilian use. When considering "battlefield conditions" think along the lines of people with heat seeking missiles and infrared goggles who can easily spot a hot nuclear reactor, and who really want to bring down a base. Not to mention how complicated it is to operate and maintain a nuclear reactor even if conditions are ideal. The additional training and personnel required to support one of these things... would it really be worthwhile in the end?
  - pjc50 7y ago
    "Battlefield conditions" means they need it to run the air conditioning in forward bases in occupied countries. At the moment, this is astonishingly expensive, because it has to be done with fuel trucked in across dangerous supply lines. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8601975/US-spends-12.5-billion-a-year-on-air-con-in-Iraq-and-Afghanistan.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/... : every joule of energy spent on aircon in Afghansitan came from fuel trucked a thousand miles across the Khyber pass, getting shot at along the way. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/dec/08/afghanistan-taliban-nato-raid-pakistan https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/dec/08/afghanistan-ta...

pjc50 7y ago

3) The more of these I read the worse the vapourware to actual shipped devices gets, and the less likely I believe any of them are to ship. Wind is our best bet against climate change in the medium term. Turbines built today will just be starting to be obsolete by the time these new nuclear ideas has scaled up. Oh, and we need to take advantage of the spectacular fall in oil price to put in place a moratorium on new drilling, fracking and shale extraction.