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1MW Molten-Salt Test Reactor by Copenhagen Atomic for €88k [video]
- socialdemocrat 6y agoAre any other Molten Salt Reactor builders doing anything similar? If SpaceX had taught me anything then it is that rapid iterations on prototypes is the way to go.
- TKnab 6y agoA prototyping failure on a fission reactor is a little different than a rocket exploding on the launchpad...
- wlesieutre 6y agoSpaceX blowing up a Crew Dragon capsule wouldn't be good either, but can you do the fast development testing and expect some failures, and don't go near nuclear material until much later in the process.
- Someone 6y agoEven ignoring the radiation, how do you test that it keeps working with a 100 MW heat source inside it without putting nuclear material in? Edit: where did I get the idea it’s 100MW from? Title talks of 1MW. That makes it a lot easier.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bob1029 6y agoIf 1MW is the actual design limit, it should be possible to test the loop with a mock heat source. At this scale, you could pay for grid power ($40-60/hr). 100MW would be a lot trickier to test due to infrastructure limitations, but you could probably figure something out with natural gas or propane burners.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoBy putting enough resistors inside, and pumping 100 MW of electricity in? If you're a utility trying this out, you can probably handle that (for some hours, maybe not for weeks).
- BlueTemplar 6y agoAre there any resistors that would not melt under this situation?
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoGood question. There are two issues, the power and the temperature. The power is easy(ish) - just put enough resistors in there, and you're good. (If you physically can put enough resistors in that space, which... I don't know.) But you also want to run it at reactor temperatures. I don't know what that is, but finding resistors that won't melt may be anywhere from difficult to impossible.
- socialdemocrat 6y agoThese prototypes don’t contain radioactive material though.
- nickik 6y agoUnfortunately there are only two ways get a nuclear reactor working, one is for research, the other full on production. In the US regulatory system there is no in-between. That is why all the reactor companies go for a fully functional production design with the first try. Without such a plan and reactor built, you do not get access to fissile material. Since you have to build many of them to ever have a hope of making money fast iteration is gone be difficult. In general they all want to use the same basic design with different fuel and different operations to create a different type of reactor. Uranium fast burners are the easiest, thorium breeders are much further away. For Molten Salt Reactors, the most advanced in development is probably IMSR by Terrestrial Energy, after that SSR by Moltex Energy are both currently in Canadian regulatory process. Flibe energy is trying in the US but that is longer term, there is not even a regulatory process in the US yet. Flibe is by Kirk Sorensen the guy who basically restarted Thorium hype.
- njarboe 6y agoIf the US government was serious about wanting to let nuclear power development happen in the US, they should set up a location where companies could work with live nuclear material while developing reactors. Workers could be required to have some type of security clearance and each company could have its own building(s) to avoid "mistakes" at one company from effecting other companies people and worksites. OSHA rules could be relaxed to allow quicker development, as everyone working there will be well informed of the radiation risks. The former nuclear test site in Nevada would seem to be a great location for this.
- nickik 6y agoThe list of things the government could do, even without a huge investment, to make nuclear happen is incredibly long. Sadly non of it is gone happen. In my opinion, humanity should have long been living in the nuclear age and its kind of crazy that we are not.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoIf you can fund them.
- Gravityloss 6y agoThere are many!
- juancampa 6y agoTo clarify, this reactor doesn't have any thorium or any other radioactive elements in its core. It's for testing before they get to "the nuclear part".
- jbverschoor 6y agoDon’t forget to sign the petition at https://start.thorium.today https://start.thorium.today
- deeviant 6y agoPass on that. Solar and wind are already clapping nuclear in LCOE, and before you can rip out the nuclear battlecry, "But BASELOAD", storage costs are in freefall too.
- the8472 6y ago> storage cost is in freefall too That's short-term storage. No seasonal storage technology is at a point where we could just point at a learning curve chart, draw a circle around some future intersection point and say "problem solved here".
- maxerickson 6y agoChemical storage (as methane or whatever) would work fine and the operational side would be more or less carbon neutral. The cost is high compared to burning fossil fuels, but we could do it as a society (have an excess of solar to meet household winter electrical needs and synthesize methane in the summer to use as household heat fuel in the winter). Just pulling numbers out of the darkness, the upfront cost here in a cold region would be ~¼ to ½ the cost of a house. High, but also clearly workable.
- deeviant 6y agoSeasonal storage? That's not a thing. You just scale your solar/wind installations to the part of the season with the least resource (solar and wind do not often have the same low point, either), which is economically feasible because it is cheaper than nuclear (and coal).
- koeng 6y agoI'm wondering what kind of safety these would have. A 100 MW reactor in a single shipping container is crazy efficient - just curious what infrastructure around that would have to be built
- hairytrog 6y agoYou mean crazy dangerous. At that power density, everything has to work for this thing to not meltdown.
- jbverschoor 6y agoSo actually that’s the whole design of these things. You have to work to keep them running. In case of a meltdown, the fuel is passively drained by a plug.
- quasse 6y agoIn case anyone else was wondering how having the molten fuel pour out of the reactor is safe - it is designed to pour into a container with criticality safe geometry to stop fission: "in an emergency situation [the fuel] can be quickly drained out of the reactor into a passively cooled dump tank. MSRs designs have a freeze plug at the bottom of the core—a plug of salt, cooled by a fan to keep it at a temperature below the freezing point of the salt. If temperature rises beyond a critical point, the plug melts, and the liquid fuel in the core is immediately evacuated, pouring into a sub-critical geometry in a catch basin. This formidable safety tactic is only possible if the fuel is a liquid." [1] [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1687850713000101 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S168785071...
- joncrane 6y agoI would love to see what a sub-critical geometry looks like. I also wonder what kind of math and engineering they did to come up with the shape they ended up with.
- stevespang 6y agoThe Guy says $88K at 1:21 minutes in the video - - but he does not state 1 MW for $88K, probably a LOT smaller. Molten salt reactors STILL require a source of uranium isotope as a neutron source to get the thorium hopping.
- andy_ppp 6y agoLove this, but why are the timescales so long?
- bra-ket 6y agoregulation
- jbverschoor 6y agoUber, Airbnb etc. circumvent regulation ;)
- wmf 6y agoPlease do not invent Uber for nuclear.
- bcrosby95 6y agoMove fast and irradiate things.
- maeln 6y agoTo be fair, it was basically the history of early military nuclear technology. US, France and USSR irradiated many of their own people to develop their first nuclear bombs. Civil nuclear heavily benefited from those advances. Still, I rather not be irradiated to make science go faster.
- mywittyname 6y agoMushroom Cloud. IaaS for all thing nuclear.
- andy_ppp 6y agoIf you think about it nuclear does force the vast majority onto someone else so maybe it already is...
- 6y ago
- tln 6y agoI didn't see €88k in the video... but I did find it on Amazon! https://www.amazon.com/Molten-Salt-Loop-40-Liter/dp/B077782YD6/ref=olp_product_details https://www.amazon.com/Molten-Salt-Loop-40-Liter/dp/B077782Y... $88,000 + $4.49 shipping.
- jbverschoor 6y agoAt 80 seconds in the video he states they sell it for 88k
- tln 6y agoThanks https://youtu.be/A9zfYTWjZqk?t=80 https://youtu.be/A9zfYTWjZqk?t=80 "That's a bargain" :)
- jbverschoor 6y agoTbh. That looks badass to have in your garage
- discreditable 6y ago> Cloud Data Acquisition Is this the most expensive IoT?
- genericacct 6y agoIf you look at the brochure pictures you'll see that that they wrote "two layers of contaminant" instead of "two layers of containment", which is unsettling to me.
- lambdatronics 6y agoMy guess is English is not their first language + autocorrect.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoI like that Amazon says, "People also buy 'Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt' when buying this product." AI recommendation fail.
- ortusdux 6y agoTo the best of my understanding, one of the main reason that MSRs have not gone to market is that the salts are so corrosive that containment over the long term is not currently possible. Note the questions about materials, alloys, and flow sensors in the video. ORNL had fully functional reactors in the 60's, but those reactors were only safe to operate for a few years, and they were at lower temperatures than what we are targeting today. Liquid fluoride thorium salts at 700+ C will readily dissolve chromium, which makes working with stainless very difficult. Other common alloying agents are susceptible to radiation (Co & Ni transmute when irradiated) which further shortens the lifespan. There is also the issue of tritium, which can permeate stainless steels, cause embrittlement, and escape into the environment. ORNL developed Hastelloy N to help address these issues, and there is an effort to certify other structural steels to for use in reactors (316H, 800H, inco 617). None of the studies that I have seen indicate that any of these metals will survive for more that 5 years or so.
- jbverschoor 6y agoWhy not use a stone type of material. Like a furnace?
- fennecfoxen 6y agoFurnaces use stone because it is not very sensitive to heat. Stone generally remains sensitive to acid.
- echelon 6y agoPlastics would be great to withstand the acid, but they're sensitive to heat.
- mywittyname 6y agoUltra-high-temperature polymers might get there. There are polymers used in specialized industrial applications that can handle ~500° C.
- 6y ago
- usrusr 6y agoApparently unrelated to Copenhagen Suborbitals. As much as I love Copenhagen Suborbitals, I'd rather not want to see them growing an atomics subdivision..
- ChuckMcM 6y agoThat is the future merged company :-)
- dave333 6y agoNuclear is obsolete now that there are working prototypes producing 250KW for 100 hours+ from the reaction of hydrogen to hydrino (dark matter): https://brilliantlightpower.com/the-suncell-at-the-100-hour-mark-of-a-100-hour-trial/ https://brilliantlightpower.com/the-suncell-at-the-100-hour-...
- BlueTemplar 6y ago"dark matter" ??
- dave333 6y agohttps://brilliantlightpower.com/hydrino-dark-matter/ https://brilliantlightpower.com/hydrino-dark-matter/
- lambdatronics 6y agoIn case you hadn't figured it out already, it's a scam. They claim to reduce hydrogen to an energy state below the ground state using some kind of quantum voodoo.
- dave333 6y agoThe theory is all classical ie electric and magnetic fields and while there are quantum states in the sense of electron orbitals including previously unrecognised ones below the traditional ground state, there is no quantum math ie wavefunctions. No entanglement, no dead and live cats etc. Electron orbit is modeled as an infinitessemally thin fluid shell with charge elements spinning around the nucleus along all great circle orbits. However, while spinning, the orbital does not change - it's like a standing wave, and thus it does not radiate.
- dave333 6y agopublic demonstrations coming soon: https://brilliantlightpower.com/station-6a-december-10-2020/ https://brilliantlightpower.com/station-6a-december-10-2020/
- Havoc 6y agoI hope this makes more waves. Anything atomic for <100k deserve attention. ...but molten salt for <100k. WOW
- thomas3d 6y agoThis is a false title. Copenhagen Atomics sell a portable molten salt test loop, which universities, etc. use for research in molten salt technology. Copenhagen Atomics also plan to build a 1 MW test reactor, to demonstrate the technology. The two are not the same thing and not the same price :-)