3 ms·

> Small reactors have lower power density than large ones, but the question of cost is far removed from that. The question of cost is the one most closely rela

> Small reactors have lower power density than large ones, but the question of cost is far removed from that. The question of cost is the one most closely related to the powerplant size! It's beyond my imagination how anybody in power engineering can babble something like that. > have a standard decommissioning process. And yes, you will have 10x*n times the commissionings, and decommissionings, and refuelings, and inspecions, and road closures, and building permits, and nuisance permits, and grid hookups, and turbines, and generators, and transformators, and fuel shipments... > if you've found something in just 10 minutes with a highschool level education that proves they're all wasting their time and money, I'm sure they'ed love to hear it. If somebody with highschool level education, and a pocket calculator busts the math of "thousands of experts working on and hundreds of millions of dollars" in a few minutes, then, those are very lousy experts not worth their millions of dollars.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Just want to preface this that nuclear is not competitive with solar/wind and won't be for decades until solar/wind complete their "main sequence" descent of economies of scale. LFTR/MSR's prototype fit in a closet. LFTR breeds its fuel and "burns" almost all of it, none of that solid fuel rod crap where only a small fraction is used and then you have "spent fuel rods". Fuel shipments would be Thorium, not hyper-radioactive dirty bomb materials. No chance of meltdown. No high pressure containers. As for the pace of research, from what I understand nuclear is WEIRD. The permitting process is controlled by government forces that: 1) don't want you researching it due to proliferation risk 2) are military so if you are permitted want access to weapons grade isotopes 3) are the spent fuel rod lobbyists trying to keep their bacon rolling in 4) NIMBY to the nth power So everything is almost impossible to get going. The replaceable shipping container sized LFTR has great potential.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

Just want to preface this that nuclear is not competitive with solar/wind and won't be for decades until solar/wind complete their "main sequence" descent of economies of scale. LFTR/MSR's prototype fit in a closet. LFTR breeds its fuel and "burns" almost all of it, none of that solid fuel rod crap where only a small fraction is used and then you have "spent fuel rods". Fuel shipments would be Thorium, not hyper-radioactive dirty bomb materials. No chance of meltdown. No high pressure containers. As for the pace of research, from what I understand nuclear is WEIRD. The permitting process is controlled by government forces that: 1) don't want you researching it due to proliferation risk 2) are military so if you are permitted want access to weapons grade isotopes 3) are the spent fuel rod lobbyists trying to keep their bacon rolling in 4) NIMBY to the nth power So everything is almost impossible to get going. The replaceable shipping container sized LFTR has great potential.