6 ms·

"The exact location of the new reactor is still up in the air." Yah? Good luck. Siting these things is hard. There are some papers about how experts are worse

"The exact location of the new reactor is still up in the air." Yah? Good luck. Siting these things is hard. There are some papers about how experts are worse at predicting the success of a nuclear reactor than members of the general public. I have the impression that project timelines don't give the socialization phase enough time and then, when it is constricted, the phase will sprawl. On one hand, there are a lot of folks who are quite sure they've settled on a set of good techniques to manage nuclear waste. On the other hand, individual communities that might host nuclear sites keep not being convinced that the selected techniques are 'safe.' The environment is such that the US has not been able to officially designate a site for waste[1] (or settled on a plan to reprocess waste or agree to a framework wherein it could participate in a coalition of nuclear states to...). You can't make all the people happy all of the time but our inability to keep anyone happy any of the time distresses me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

s1artibartfast 5y ago
for what it is worth, part of Terra Power's promise is to drastically reduce radioactive waste. They claim to reduce waste by 80% and consume different grades of uranium[1]. https://www.terrapower.com/a-solution-to-the-nuclear-waste-problem/ https://www.terrapower.com/a-solution-to-the-nuclear-waste-p...
- apendleton 5y ago
  I don't think this project will use the traveling wave technology that purports to do that. They seem to be separate initiatives.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Interesting, where did you see that? Edit: It looks like they make the same claims about their sodium reactor as well
    - apendleton 5y ago
      They're separate entries in the "our technology" dropdown on their website, and the "Natrium" section specifically calls out that it's the fastest-to-market option, with a design that sounds essentially done, while the TWR is described only having a "core concept design" (which sounds like marketing fluff for "not close to being practical yet" to me). The renderings of the inner workings also look totally different from one another. On their website I only see the claim about using depleted uranium for fuel on the TWR page. Where do you see those claims being made about this reactor?
nhooyr 5y ago
What is the socialization phase?
- aeturnum 5y ago
  It's what I'm calling the phase of the project where you find a particular place that you would like to put it and then go convince the various groups with influence over that place to let you put it there.
milkey_mouse 5y ago
> there are a lot of folks who are quite sure they've settled on a set of good techniques to manage nuclear waste. On the other hand, individual communities that might host nuclear sites keep not being convinced that the selected techniques are 'safe.' This reminds me of the "legibility" problem in voting. Perhaps in theory it's possible to hold a magic unhackable blockchain-based secret-ballot-preserving cryptographically-secure digital election, but the average voter cannot be convinced of its security without teaching them tons of CS concepts (can you imagine trying to explain trapdoor functions in a voters' pamphlet?). Meanwhile, paper ballots can go into a tamper-proof box with a big lock on it--which has "security" written all over it figuratively, if not literally--and you can record video of every time the box moves and invite observers as you count the ballots. Up until very recently, this was so obviously secure that anyone saying otherwise would be considered a lunatic.
- tzs 5y ago
  Or you can use a system with paper ballots where you fill in the bubble next to the candidate to vote and that can be quickly counted by simple, cheap, already widely used optical scan machine and can be hand audited, but by doing some clever things when you print the ballots get an end to end verifiable system that among other things: 1. Allows you to publish all the ballots afterwards so that any third party can do their own recount, 2. Allows voters to verify that their vote was counted correctly, but does not allow them to prove to a third party how they voted, 3. Allows voters to check before voting that the ballots have been correctly printed. 4. Looks and feels like a plain old fill in the bubble optical scan system to voters who don't want to take advantage of the extra security provided by the above measures. Here's a paper about this [1]. Wikipedia article [2]. Here's a paper on the coercion resistance of that system [3]. [1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/chaum/chaum_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity [3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf
  - milkey_mouse 5y ago
    That's a pretty clever system. I'm not at all against advancements in ballot technology, I just think their explainability should be considered.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
8note 5y ago
I thought the whole point of terra power is that their reactor is the site for nuclear waste
volkl48 5y ago
Wyoming is a place where in large parts of the state oil wells as far as the eye can see and giant open-pit coal mines are normal and acceptable. Look at Gillette, WY and scroll around a satellite view, you've got open pit mines stretching for 70 miles and and the endless checkerboard of pumpjacks and access paths across the plains. They're also a place with a erratic economy largely dependent on declining commodities and a past and present willingness to accept environmental damage and personal/community health risks for economic gain. I am not suggesting a nuclear plant should cause any substantial amount of such risks, just that I think the opposition in many places in WY would be a lot more muted than in most other places you could look to place a reactor in the country.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  Some admittedly unscientific looking at the local news FB pages that shared this (I live here) show the exact kind of ignorant, fear-based NIMBYism that you'd see anywhere else. Anyone trying to bring facts to that debate was haha-reacted and shouted down. Fukushima this and Chernobyl that.
- ip26 5y ago
  They also bitterly protest that windmills permanently defile Wyoming’s natural beauty.
  - matmatmatmat 5y ago
    Which is a shame, because the wind blowing across Wyoming is savage.
nickik 5y ago
> On one hand, there are a lot of folks who are quite sure they've settled on a set of good techniques to manage nuclear waste. Who in the world believes that? Nuclear waste management in the US has been the biggest shitshow ever. > The environment is such that the US has not been able to officially designate a site for waste[1] (or settled on a plan to reprocess waste or agree to a framework wherein it could participate in a coalition of nuclear states to...). To repeat, its a major shitshow. The US political system has totally deadlocked itself on this issue with contradictory laws that all make no sense what so ever in the first place. Yucca Mountain was a idiotic nonsense idea form the start. The US has been collecting billions of fees from nuclear operators that are all sitting an an account for 6 decades now and nothing productive has been done with that money. Its shameful. The right solution is perfectly clear, build nuclear reactors that can consume waste. But of course that would require any kind of progress on nuclear technology that is not made basically impossible by regulation and hostile political and social environment. We should be living in the nuclear age right now, but we don't. People in 100s of years will look back and say 'They discovered all the essential technologies in the 60s and they were still burning coal in 20202 what was wrong with them'.
- jfengel 5y ago
  Yucca Mountain was a idiotic nonsense idea form the start Can you elaborate on that? As far as I can tell, the main reason Yucca Mountain never moved forward was "Nevadans didn't want it". Which seems like a good enough reason, and that should suffice. But in terms of the basic idea, if you're going to store nuclear waste anywhere, Yucca Mountain was as good a place as any. That's a big "if", of course, but it's kind of independent of the idea of Yucca Mountain in particular being "idiotic nonsense". My understanding is cursory, so I'm hoping you can fill in some of the details.
  - nickik 5y ago
    It has been a long time since I have researched this topic and I don't have all the links to hand. First of all, nuclear waste are actually a future resource. It makes very little sense to put a resource under the ground. It kind of like creating a mine. In nuclear waste there is not just a huge potential energy resource, but also many other potential resources. The right approach for any technologically advanced society that is continually progressing from the early days of nuclear energy would simply continue to develop reactor technology that would consume this waste and potentially filter out the useful resources from it. If you actually do that correctly, the amount of waste left in the end is minimal and even much of that would not need 10000 years of storage. Now, to get to that point, it might take 50, 100 or maybe even 200 years. During this time however nuclear waste can be stored rather easily above ground just fine. Because of nuclear waste transport regulation, you can not transport it so some waste has been sitting around above ground for 50+ years and it has yet to be a actual problem. This could be improved by simply putting them into a reasonable place and in a storage area. However, there is some nuclear material that you might want to put away for a long time (most actually from nuclear weapons, not civilian fuel). There are better locations then Yucca Mountain but because of some congress insider baseball it was simply determined that it had to be Yucca and only that. Nothing else could be considered and fuel reprocessing was made illegal as well. Because of more politics and just to make double sure Yucca would never happen, there are now demands that Yucca should be built so it could be safe for 1 million years. Complete idiocy. And if humanity still exists in 500 years they are either living in the stone age and have much bigger problems then nuclear waste. If you simply accept no other solution then deep storage, then we should build a facility for 500 or 1000 years (that is actually technologically more feasible) and then reopen the issue again every 100 years to see if the state of the art has improved. To make it politically feasible you could by that people in that region an outrages amount of money, as it would still be far cheaper then what they are doing now. More money is being waste on these things then it would have actually cost to simply push forward the technology to consume most of the waste. This is not even a new concept, old soviet nuclear warheads actually powered a lot of American homes without CO2. But I guess its much better to pay billions to the plant operates to storage the waste and then spend more billions on endless research and building a hole in the ground that you must prove will not change for a million years.

s1artibartfast 5y ago

for what it is worth, part of Terra Power's promise is to drastically reduce radioactive waste. They claim to reduce waste by 80% and consume different grades of uranium[1]. https://www.terrapower.com/a-solution-to-the-nuclear-waste-problem/ https://www.terrapower.com/a-solution-to-the-nuclear-waste-p...

apendleton 5y ago
I don't think this project will use the traveling wave technology that purports to do that. They seem to be separate initiatives.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Interesting, where did you see that? Edit: It looks like they make the same claims about their sodium reactor as well
  - apendleton 5y ago
    They're separate entries in the "our technology" dropdown on their website, and the "Natrium" section specifically calls out that it's the fastest-to-market option, with a design that sounds essentially done, while the TWR is described only having a "core concept design" (which sounds like marketing fluff for "not close to being practical yet" to me). The renderings of the inner workings also look totally different from one another. On their website I only see the claim about using depleted uranium for fuel on the TWR page. Where do you see those claims being made about this reactor?

nhooyr 5y ago

What is the socialization phase?

aeturnum 5y ago
It's what I'm calling the phase of the project where you find a particular place that you would like to put it and then go convince the various groups with influence over that place to let you put it there.

milkey_mouse 5y ago

> there are a lot of folks who are quite sure they've settled on a set of good techniques to manage nuclear waste. On the other hand, individual communities that might host nuclear sites keep not being convinced that the selected techniques are 'safe.' This reminds me of the "legibility" problem in voting. Perhaps in theory it's possible to hold a magic unhackable blockchain-based secret-ballot-preserving cryptographically-secure digital election, but the average voter cannot be convinced of its security without teaching them tons of CS concepts (can you imagine trying to explain trapdoor functions in a voters' pamphlet?). Meanwhile, paper ballots can go into a tamper-proof box with a big lock on it--which has "security" written all over it figuratively, if not literally--and you can record video of every time the box moves and invite observers as you count the ballots. Up until very recently, this was so obviously secure that anyone saying otherwise would be considered a lunatic.

tzs 5y ago
Or you can use a system with paper ballots where you fill in the bubble next to the candidate to vote and that can be quickly counted by simple, cheap, already widely used optical scan machine and can be hand audited, but by doing some clever things when you print the ballots get an end to end verifiable system that among other things: 1. Allows you to publish all the ballots afterwards so that any third party can do their own recount, 2. Allows voters to verify that their vote was counted correctly, but does not allow them to prove to a third party how they voted, 3. Allows voters to check before voting that the ballots have been correctly printed. 4. Looks and feels like a plain old fill in the bubble optical scan system to voters who don't want to take advantage of the extra security provided by the above measures. Here's a paper about this [1]. Wikipedia article [2]. Here's a paper on the coercion resistance of that system [3]. [1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/chaum/chaum_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity [3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf
- milkey_mouse 5y ago
  That's a pretty clever system. I'm not at all against advancements in ballot technology, I just think their explainability should be considered.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

8note 5y ago

I thought the whole point of terra power is that their reactor is the site for nuclear waste

volkl48 5y ago

Wyoming is a place where in large parts of the state oil wells as far as the eye can see and giant open-pit coal mines are normal and acceptable. Look at Gillette, WY and scroll around a satellite view, you've got open pit mines stretching for 70 miles and and the endless checkerboard of pumpjacks and access paths across the plains. They're also a place with a erratic economy largely dependent on declining commodities and a past and present willingness to accept environmental damage and personal/community health risks for economic gain. I am not suggesting a nuclear plant should cause any substantial amount of such risks, just that I think the opposition in many places in WY would be a lot more muted than in most other places you could look to place a reactor in the country.

Karunamon 5y ago
Some admittedly unscientific looking at the local news FB pages that shared this (I live here) show the exact kind of ignorant, fear-based NIMBYism that you'd see anywhere else. Anyone trying to bring facts to that debate was haha-reacted and shouted down. Fukushima this and Chernobyl that.
ip26 5y ago
They also bitterly protest that windmills permanently defile Wyoming’s natural beauty.
- matmatmatmat 5y ago
  Which is a shame, because the wind blowing across Wyoming is savage.

nickik 5y ago

> On one hand, there are a lot of folks who are quite sure they've settled on a set of good techniques to manage nuclear waste. Who in the world believes that? Nuclear waste management in the US has been the biggest shitshow ever. > The environment is such that the US has not been able to officially designate a site for waste[1] (or settled on a plan to reprocess waste or agree to a framework wherein it could participate in a coalition of nuclear states to...). To repeat, its a major shitshow. The US political system has totally deadlocked itself on this issue with contradictory laws that all make no sense what so ever in the first place. Yucca Mountain was a idiotic nonsense idea form the start. The US has been collecting billions of fees from nuclear operators that are all sitting an an account for 6 decades now and nothing productive has been done with that money. Its shameful. The right solution is perfectly clear, build nuclear reactors that can consume waste. But of course that would require any kind of progress on nuclear technology that is not made basically impossible by regulation and hostile political and social environment. We should be living in the nuclear age right now, but we don't. People in 100s of years will look back and say 'They discovered all the essential technologies in the 60s and they were still burning coal in 20202 what was wrong with them'.

jfengel 5y ago
Yucca Mountain was a idiotic nonsense idea form the start Can you elaborate on that? As far as I can tell, the main reason Yucca Mountain never moved forward was "Nevadans didn't want it". Which seems like a good enough reason, and that should suffice. But in terms of the basic idea, if you're going to store nuclear waste anywhere, Yucca Mountain was as good a place as any. That's a big "if", of course, but it's kind of independent of the idea of Yucca Mountain in particular being "idiotic nonsense". My understanding is cursory, so I'm hoping you can fill in some of the details.
- nickik 5y ago
  It has been a long time since I have researched this topic and I don't have all the links to hand. First of all, nuclear waste are actually a future resource. It makes very little sense to put a resource under the ground. It kind of like creating a mine. In nuclear waste there is not just a huge potential energy resource, but also many other potential resources. The right approach for any technologically advanced society that is continually progressing from the early days of nuclear energy would simply continue to develop reactor technology that would consume this waste and potentially filter out the useful resources from it. If you actually do that correctly, the amount of waste left in the end is minimal and even much of that would not need 10000 years of storage. Now, to get to that point, it might take 50, 100 or maybe even 200 years. During this time however nuclear waste can be stored rather easily above ground just fine. Because of nuclear waste transport regulation, you can not transport it so some waste has been sitting around above ground for 50+ years and it has yet to be a actual problem. This could be improved by simply putting them into a reasonable place and in a storage area. However, there is some nuclear material that you might want to put away for a long time (most actually from nuclear weapons, not civilian fuel). There are better locations then Yucca Mountain but because of some congress insider baseball it was simply determined that it had to be Yucca and only that. Nothing else could be considered and fuel reprocessing was made illegal as well. Because of more politics and just to make double sure Yucca would never happen, there are now demands that Yucca should be built so it could be safe for 1 million years. Complete idiocy. And if humanity still exists in 500 years they are either living in the stone age and have much bigger problems then nuclear waste. If you simply accept no other solution then deep storage, then we should build a facility for 500 or 1000 years (that is actually technologically more feasible) and then reopen the issue again every 100 years to see if the state of the art has improved. To make it politically feasible you could by that people in that region an outrages amount of money, as it would still be far cheaper then what they are doing now. More money is being waste on these things then it would have actually cost to simply push forward the technology to consume most of the waste. This is not even a new concept, old soviet nuclear warheads actually powered a lot of American homes without CO2. But I guess its much better to pay billions to the plant operates to storage the waste and then spend more billions on endless research and building a hole in the ground that you must prove will not change for a million years.