4 ms·
What's fascinating about nuclear reactors is that you can do them in so many ways that are very different. If you think of combustion engines, there's only a f
by Gravityloss 6y ago
What's fascinating about nuclear reactors is that you can do them in so many ways that are very different.
If you think of combustion engines, there's only a few viable cycles or configurations: otto, diesel, brayton. Some small variations on these with supercharging and valve timing etc. Wankel engine as one different configuration.
But for nuclear power there's hundreds or thousands potential ways to produce energy. Different nuclei to start with, different fuel cycle, breeding. Neutron speeds, moderated and unmoderated. Fuel can be solid, dissolved, molten, gas. As can moderator. Pebble bed.
As far as I understand, even traditional reactor rod scheduling is a hard computational problem that a lot of resources is used on even by today's massive computing standards.
There's so much "blue ocean" left in fission reactors.
- acidburnNSA 6y agoI've thought a lot about this as well. In fact, I made a random reactor concept generator [1] that is a Python script making combinations. There are 1.3 million different options possible and that is still not all of them. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/random https://whatisnuclear.com/random More info including the full list here [2]. [2] https://whatisnuclear.com/random_info.html https://whatisnuclear.com/random_info.html
- Gravityloss 6y agoHah, that's awesome! As they say, old airplanes were designed entirely by hand. At some point computers could do some calculations. In the nineties, the computers could analyze CAD designs. Later, the computer could iterate through designs and do dimensioning. Maybe currently, generative design of parts. In the future they will be able to do configuration.