4 ms·
I always wondered if the future was something even smaller scale than that. Something the size of a chest freezer and rated maybe 100kW-- enough to run a few n
by hakfoo 6y ago
I always wondered if the future was something even smaller scale than that.
Something the size of a chest freezer and rated maybe 100kW-- enough to run a few neigbouring homes, or a small office campus. Maybe it's a heat-decay product rather than a steam system, to reduce moving parts and breakdown risk. It's designed as a sealed, maintenance free unit that you dock in someone's shed, it runs for 5 years or whatever, the green "Change Reactor" light comes on, and you call the manufacturer to take it away and drop another one in place. (It could be properly deconstructed and refurbished by the manufacturer, like the old "disposable" cameras). It would probably output something like 240 or 480v natively to integrate in a similar way to rooftop solar.
I figure this can achieve a couple of goals:
* By keeping the scale small, we might be able to get the "worst case" risk profile to something people find palatable (they're okay with some medical facilities with X-ray and radioisotope therapy machines in their neighbourhood, but nobody wants to live next to Palo Verde)
* Transmission losses are minimized and putting much of the generation near demand reduces load on the grid itself if the demand estimates are faulty and we still need to pull peak power from elsewhere.
- hairytrog 6y ago100 kW may make sense but as part of a large facility with maybe a few hundred of them. Distributing nuclear material so widely would be imprudent. The materials themselves are dangerous, there's no getting around that and there's real value in a minimum of centralization and control of the reactors in one place. A turbine generating half a gigawatt is also much more efficient (orders of magnitude) than 5000 turbines generating 100kw.
- dehrmann 6y agoI wouldn't get hung up on transmission and distribution losses--they're something like 6%--and you're missing out on economies of scale with larger installations. That's what was always so weird about rooftop solar: if solar is so great, why is there more interest in rooftop than large-scale farms? Especially when you look at the installation cost and sub-par location and orientation, rooftop solar is significantly worse than a farm. Transmission from a farm will be less than inefficiencies because of roof angle.
- hakfoo 6y agoTBH, I'm astounded. I always went off a discussion we had in a 100-level physics class that basically boiled down to "We're considering deregulating the electrical market here, but any claims of choosing your electrical supplier is nonsense-- if you wanted to get electricity from one state over, you'd need to buy 6 units to get 1 at the point of consumption." I suspect it may be a combination of figures off by a few orders of magnitude and a worst-case of sending power 500km instead of 50. OTOH, I am still interested in the grid-fragility aspect-- if the main grid is only carrying relatively low peak power needs, instead of the entire base load, won't we be able to better handle failures? Wouldn't extra redundancy be cheaper and easier to build?
- dehrmann 6y ago> if you wanted to get electricity from one state over, you'd need to buy 6 units to get 1 at the point of consumption. There's a chance you were talking about transmission of household voltage. What Ohm's Law does for long-distance energy transmission is amazing Found this: > For example, a 100 mi (160 km) span at 765 kV carrying 1000 MW of power can have losses of 1.1% to 0.5%. And also > As of 1980, the longest cost-effective distance for direct-current transmission was determined to be 7,000 kilometres (4,300 miles). For alternating current it was 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Losses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo...