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BYU profs create new nuclear reactor to produce nuclear energy more safely
- sergiotapia 4y ago>A typical nuclear power plant is built with a little over one square mile to operate to reduce radiation risk, with the core itself being 30 ft x 30 ft. Memmott’s molten salt nuclear reactor is 4 ft x 7ft, and because there is no risk of a meltdown there is no need for a similar large zone surrounding it. This small reactor can produce enough energy to power 1000 American homes. The research team said everything needed to run this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck bed; meaning this reactor can make power accessible to even very remote places. Sounds too good to be true! Wonderful news
- gh02t 4y agoWorth noting that this is not really unique to this reactor, and the technology has been around for a while (including multiple basically fully functional demonstration reactors that were actually built, though they weren't without their technical issues). NuScale's design for example, which is a very different design and also much closer to commercial rollout, has a similar greatly reduced need for a large exclusion zone (https://www.nei.org/news/2018/nrc-staff-agrees-smrs-wont-need-large-epzs https://www.nei.org/news/2018/nrc-staff-agrees-smrs-wont-nee...). This article is reporting on what amounts to a paper reactor design, which is really only like 0.1% of the effort required to actually build. There are plenty of good design concepts for new and fancy reactors, but the business, regulatory, and PR side is where the challenges really lie. But this general technology is a big deal in the nuclear industry right now and it seems increasingly likely that they might finally build some fully functional plants. Strictly speaking they are actively building some MSR plants, but given the not great track record of actually completing new nuclear plants I will remain pessimistic until they are ready to go critical.
- hairytrog 4y agoNot sure it's a justified reduction in exclusion zone. Yes they use natural circulation to get rid of decay heat if they lose power to run the pumps. BUT - they can't tolerate multiple reactors failing at once, they can't tolerate more than a few control rod withdrawals, and they can't tolerate clogging of the flow channels - Which to me, seem like reasonable accidents. The reduction in exclusion zone for NuScale is not really justified. If they get a reduction, you can expect the big ass reactors to also get a reduction...
- gh02t 4y agoI don't really have an opinion on the matter and I think it's a fair question to consider, but I'll note that the NRC obviously disagrees. At least for now, they could always change their mind. I seriously doubt that they would ever significantly reduce the exclusion zone requirement for any of the currently operating reactors, however.
- hairytrog 4y agoI think that's fair. I bet new large power plants will get the NuScale treatment and reduced exclusion zone though.
- jbverschoor 4y agoWhat’s different in the actual design of the tractor compared to other MSRs/LFTR? No talk about any of this
- moffkalast 4y agoMSRs can do everything except leave the impossibly heat and corrosion resistant lab. Maybe we should just build them in orbit without containment and let the surface tension hold it together or something.
- jbverschoor 4y agoBut the article is talking about MSR
- moffkalast 4y agoOnly mentions something about making them smaller, not sure how that would solve the core (pun intended) issues.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y agoIf you look for the actual design, you will come across a newly published patent in the name of the mentioned researcher.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y agoIf you read the article, you would see that the MSR design would allow for recycling of the salt and the extraction of the valuable byproducts. Also, this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck for transport to remote areas and can power up to 1000 homes.
- moffkalast 4y agoNot sure how that helps if it melts through the floor, the truck, and then the ground when you turn it on. Those are nice improvements, but adding a red paint job to a wingless plane won't make it fly. Suppose you could use some kind of ablative material, but that would mean short runtimes and constant expensive refits. Sort of like taking that wingless plane and launching it with a trebuchet. Technically makes it fly but not in any way that matters.
- eecc 4y agoMolten salt reactors are nothing new. It would be truly wonderful if these folks solved the corrosion issues associated to circulating high-temperature molten salts, and the ever-recurring military-grade fuel proliferation risk associated with spent fuel reprocessing.
- spencercwood 4y agoI found another article that talked about corrosion: > While the DoE is still investigating ways to get around these showstopping corrosion issues, Prof Memmott said that his team, along with Alpha Tech Research Corp (the commercializing partner for the BYU MSR, and of which Memmott is director and senior technical advisor), believe they have solved the problem by removing water and oxygen from the salt, massively reducing the corrosion issue. https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/05/micro_molten_salt_reactor/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/05/micro_molten_salt_rea...
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago> Memmott said the micro-design doesn't require salt to flow through the reactor, which means it eliminates components such as pumps and valves, as well as solving operational problems, like having to tightly control flow and temperature. This is a much more informative article, thanks.
- cryptonector 4y agoUsing thorium alleviates the proliferation risk somewhat because the fissile isotopes you get in the waste of a thorium reactor are hard to work with.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoGood thing no-one who has incentive to build an A bomb or dirty bomb had any U238 shot into their house and/or children or anything. There's absolutely no risk of anyone being able to get their hands on some to make plutonium if there were hundreds of breeder reactors in every country. And you definitely can't just buy it as a private citizen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGw6fXprV9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGw6fXprV9U
- idiotsecant 4y agoThe basic problem for molten salt reactors is that the various reactor components are exposed to hot salts that are chemically corrosive, while being bombarded by radioactive particles. This is of course quite problematic when your goal is a machine that makes electricity consistently for decades. Equipment failures are an inevitability because we don't know of a material that has the properties needed to survive this kind of application. Curious how (or whether) the authors of this design approached this problem.
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- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y agoThe newly published patent is for something described as a “salt wall” if that helps your imagination.
- m0llusk 4y agoIt will be interesting to see how well it holds up to prolonged testing. There have been numerous previous attempts at this sort of thing and they have all failed. It turns out to be highly significant because the added cost of preparing, testing, inspecting, and then replacing any damaged parts in contact with the liquid sodium adds up to a considerable expense that challenges the business case for the reactor in the first place. Good that this is being worked on, but bad they seem not to be aware of the serious problems other molten sodium reactors have faced.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y agoFrom what I’ve read so far (see other links in discussion), the researchers believe that they have likely solved the corrosion issue by removing hydrogen and oxygen from the salt equations.
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- jakedata 4y agoTypical university press release doesn't provide any actually useful information. They have not created anything yet. They have a theoretical design. Good for them I guess.
- SeanLuke 4y agoWell they still might build it I imagine. Back in the 1960s BYU had a working nuclear reactor right on campus which produced a few watts of energy. The underground facility was standing at least as recently as the early 1990s.
- themodelplumber 4y agoI remember hearing about that, and related rumors from coworkers at BYU. They'd point out the guesstimated location as we drove around campus in our work vehicle. This always dovetailed really nicely, in our opinion, with the plain-as fact that Zion and her people would eventually become the envy of the world and could already easily out-engineer the best engineers that any first-world nation could muster. The same sentiments were shared in classrooms with the topic of internet backbones "coincidentally passing right through" Utah. Why was it so? Well because the Lord would insist upon only the finest internet for his finest priesthood-engineers in the latter days, of course. Do your home teaching! There were lots of lovely little cultural side-alley discussions like these.
- throwaway0asd 4y agoEarly internet backbone certainly did pass though Utah because University of Utah was one of the original four implementation points (IMP) of ARPANET
- dendrite9 4y agoU of U also has a small, 100 kilowatt reactor. The BYU one is news to me but I didn't have much connection to that school. https://www.civil.utah.edu/graduate-nuclear-engineering/ https://www.civil.utah.edu/graduate-nuclear-engineering/ https://www.deseret.com/2011/3/16/20370414/university-of-utah-has-own-nuclear-reactor-tucked-away https://www.deseret.com/2011/3/16/20370414/university-of-uta...
- fatcat500 4y ago> If there is not enough of a flow of cooling water, the rods can overheat, and the entire facility is at risk for a nuclear meltdown. This is not true. Water is the moderator in a light-water reactor. Without water the reaction will stop. Water is both the coolant and the moderator, unlike the Chernobyl reactors, which used graphite as the moderator.
- gh02t 4y agoWhat you say is technically true but you're forgetting decay heat. The fission chain reaction stops if you remove the moderator in any sane LWR design, but the fission products in the fuel will continue to generate a very large amount of heat for quite a while. This is exactly what happened at Fukushima and TMI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat#Power_reactors_in_shutdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat#Power_reactors_in_s... Some reactor designs can dissipate this decay heat with passive circulation, while most require active pumps to circulate for a while after shutdown. But a total loss of coolant is probably going to result in fuel melt to some extent.
- hairytrog 4y agoWhich is equally a problem for a molten salt cooled reactor. If molten salt leaks or pumping stops, you're gonna get a melt down in your molten salt reactor. That is unless it's running at super low power density - like these guys: https://www.usnc.com/mmr/ https://www.usnc.com/mmr/, in which case no cooling fluid or pumps or even natural circulation apparently are needed to keep it from melting.
- gh02t 4y agoMSRs have an advantage though, which is that a) fuel melt is obviously not a problem and b) if something goes out of control you can pull the drain plug and drain the entire core into multiple crit-safe storage pools. Dividing the core up makes it easier to handle the decay heat, though I'm not sure exactly what any of the current designs do in detail. Fission product gasses are also not soluble in most of the fuels for MSRs which makes it easy to filter them out, which reduces the decay heat to an extent and also mitigates the reactivity feedback effect from xenon that caused the Chernobyl disaster. Not that it's all sunshine and roses, hot salts are awfully corrosive and that's been the primary engineering challenge on every MSR design I'm aware of.
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- hairytrog 4y agoMolten-salt-fuel reactors, as described in this article, are so lame... "It's already melted, so you can't have a meltdown." lol. More seriously, molten-salt-cooled reactors have some promise. They use solid fuel, usually TRISO particles, and are cooled by molten salts, which we now have lots of experience with from solar salt power systems. If you are interested in molten-salt-cooled reactors outside of this lame press release - check out Kairos Power. Their website sucks butt. But they are the main player in molten salt-cooled reactors - funded by Henry Laufer of Renaissance Technologies. They actually have the engineering and financing to get one built, and are reportedly doing very well with NRC (unlike OKLO - lolz).
- billiam 4y agoNot an expert but I believe the problem with molten salt cooling for reactor designs is that nuclear reactors are supposed to just run for decades without replacing major parts that are really really radioactive. We just can't make parts that will resist corrosion for that long, unlike those towers in the solar arrays, which are really simple to replace. That's leaving aside the high level waste recovery, disposal, and storage issues.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago1.25MW on a truck isn't really a particularly compelling power density for abundant and too cheap to meter energy of the future, especially for claims that aren't at all grounded in reality or anything that will pass safety. That's a 25' trailer sized deisel generator. Or one 1.5-3MW wind turbine. Or 3 truckloads of regular solar panels. Or one truckload of glassless solar panels. Storage for such a system is one or two truckloads more of batteries. These other options also have the benefit of existing.
- nafizh 4y agoIf I have learnt anything from being in Academia, never bother reading a press release from a university describing their own work.
- Manuel_D 4y agoCertainly a safer reactor is strictly better. But keep in mind that nuclear power is already one of the safest, and by many metrics the safest forms of power generation [1] [2]. Like shark attacks, people's attention gravitates towards the exotic ways people meet their ends. 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... 2. https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#what-are-the-safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#what-are-the-safes...
- devoutsalsa 4y agoOne day we're going to learn that the Fukushima nuclear disaster happened because there was a shark in that tsunami who attacked the power plant.
- notart666 4y agoDon't give them new idea for a new Sharknado Spinoff Sharknado: The Rising Shark
- taneq 4y agoSharkzilla.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoThat would be when Sharknado will have truly jumped the shark.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- godelski 4y agoGodzilla vs Sharknado!
- mkoubaa 4y agoVery important point. Calling new designs safer is buying into the narrative that older designs are unsafe, which is simply untrue. It's like saying new t-shirts are more wearable.
- barney54 4y agoWhen was the last time that one of these university PR press releases turned into a real product?
- yalogin 4y agoTIL, We are allowed to do nuclear related research at universities.
- ncmncm 4y agoLots of universities have their own reactor. They are used for a variety of research activities almost all wholly unrelated to generating power. Sometimes you need samples irradiated, other times you need to synthesize custom radioactive isotopes. These reactors pose no risk. The radioisotopes produced could in principle be misused, but are in any case very small amounts.
- base3 4y ago
- rgmerk 4y agoWake me when they have a working prototype. There are approximately a squillion conceptual designs floating around for next-generation nuclear reactors and a distinct shortage of actually existing examples of next-generation nuclear reactors.
- mattmaroon 4y agoHonestly the fact that the very opening line is “ A nuclear power plant produces 8000 times more power than fossil fuels” tells you the author doesn’t understand what they’re writing about. That’s gibberish. What does that even mean? Are they saying the average nuclear plant produces about as much electricity as the average 8,000 fossil fuel plants? (A cursory Google search tells me they’re actually both pretty close to a gigawatt.) Are they saying that a given amount of nuclear fuel produces 8,000 times as much energy as the same amount of natural gas, and thus just comparing energy density of fuel? That seems entirely worthless to know without dozens of other factors (fuel cost, disposal, environmental concerns, etc.). When your lead in is gibberish (that would be obvious to anyone with half a brain) it’s hard to take the rest seriously.
- mrits 4y agoIt's an odd point but I believe they referring to energy density of fission vs fossil.
- mattmaroon 4y agoI would guess that too but that’s also entirely pointless to know. It doesn’t tell you anything of use. Even if nuclear fuel were the same energy density as fossil fuels it might not change the calculus much at all. It just shows that the author is incapable of meaningful thinking about the topic.
- hebrox 4y agoMaybe his next article will be about antimatter?
- bell-cot 4y agoThe article is from a major university's Communications (aka Marketing) Dept. Expecting to read anything better than technobabble rah-rah from such a source is kinda like expecting a milk cow to give you 20-year single-malt whisky.
- acidburnNSA 4y agoI have some introductory material on the concept of molten salt reactors here: https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html
- jillesvangurp 4y agoThe trick is going to be doing this cheaply. The cost gap with renewables is close 2 orders of magnitude already and actually widening. Reducing the safety cost is nice of course. Which is what this does. But is it enough? I don't think so. There are a lot of hidden cost with nuclear. One of them is security. You say micro reactor, I say dirty bomb waiting to happen. Nuclear reactors of any kind need expensive security. The most cost effective way to do that is to locate them in a handful of places that are easy to keep secured. So, the notion of distributing tens, or hundreds, of thousands of micro reactors all over the place kind of goes against that. It would be a security nightmare. From a cost point of view this is disastrous. And it only takes 1 incident for this whole industry to grind to a halt and get bogged down in lengthy and expensive security related bureaucracy and hassle. So, the more like scenario is that they start replacing conventional reactors as a somewhat cheaper alternative. Instead of hosting 1 or 2 of those, we'll have dozens/hundreds of them on a single site. But that site will still be a nuclear plant with all the security and safety procedures that come with those. And those won't be free. So, it will make building those sites more cost effective than they are right now. But it will still be expensive. It's very hard to compete with wind, solar, and batteries on cost. They need very little security and you can just install them wherever. Like in your house. There are now consumer grade products that allow you to more or less go off grid. It's cheap enough that people are starting to do this to reduce their overall cost. And cost keeps on dropping. Cheaper panels, cheaper batteries, less exotic materials, easier mass production, etc.
- hinkley 4y ago> Instead of hosting 1 or 2 of those, we'll have dozens/hundreds of them on a single site. I struggle to find people who properly scale statistical models up from “a handful” to “hundreds”. It always seems to catch people by surprise when they end up spending time every week or two dealing with failures instead of a couple a year. Odds multiply, and .99^100 is a lot smaller than your brain thinks it is.
- GlenTheMachine 4y agoTrue story: I was once almost kicked out of BYU for attempting to sneak into one of the tunnels under the campus. A couple of years later, a professor actually invited me through the door I had tried to enter. It turned out that what was inside was a gymnasium-sized physics lab that was directly under one of the larger quads on campus. The major feature of which was a particle accelerator. That fact might have been known among the physics majors, I don't know, but it certainly was not common knowledge among the student body at large. There was another "secret" door on campus, this one into the hill that the Honors Department main building sat on. That door led to the nuclear reactor. Nobody ever tried to get in there. For a private, mostly undergraduate university, it had a surprisingly active nuclear physics research group.
- matthoiland 4y agoBYU Scientists Convert Matter Into Mormonism [1] 1. https://www.theonion.com/byu-scientists-convert-matter-into-mormonism-1819563980 https://www.theonion.com/byu-scientists-convert-matter-into-...
- User23 4y agoThat reminds me of my time at Harvard when I was a high schooler. Me and my buddy were wandering around campus when we saw a door propped slightly open that said "Warning: Cyclotron." Naturally we thought that sounds awesome so we wandered in to see what a cyclotron was. After a bit of explanation we ended up getting an unofficial tour. It was really neat!
- McKayDavis 4y agoI doubt the veracity of your claims because according to multiple sources [1][2] the only nuclear reactor in the state of Utah is located on the bottom floor of the Merrill Engineering Building on the University of Utah campus. If a reactor were located on the BYU campus, I would expect it to be public knowledge and tracked by the IAEA. I used to work on the top floor of MEB for many years and had the opportunity to see the glow of the core in the pool of water on multiple occasions. Tangentially, the UofU reactor made national headlines last week when a student made a threat to blow it up if the football team lost [3]. 1. https://www.deseret.com/2011/3/16/20370414/university-of-utah-has-own-nuclear-reactor-tucked-away https://www.deseret.com/2011/3/16/20370414/university-of-uta... 2. https://dailyutahchronicle.com/2016/11/04/sole-nuclear-reactor-utah-housed-u/ https://dailyutahchronicle.com/2016/11/04/sole-nuclear-react... 3. https://www.sbnation.com/platform/amp/college-football/2022/9/22/23366670/student-utah-nuclear-reactor-if-the-utes-lost-and-there-are-so-many-questions https://www.sbnation.com/platform/amp/college-football/2022/...
- karambyt 4y agoYeah but they can't let you look inside of it, you just have to have faith that it generates energy as they say it does. Dum dum dum dum dum!
- grej 4y agoWhen we have rolling blackouts with regularity and the realization of a years long deindustrialization process sets in, the public attitude towards nuclear power will shift. Until then, I’m afraid it’s been sufficiently demonized that no amount of logic or will overcome the emotional fear of it.
- magwa101 4y ago
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoIt's a MSR reactor. 4' x 7', so again close to the "closet sized" ORNL original MSR reactor. Yes, liquid fuel can be used to separate valuable fission products, and the reactor can be used to breed new fuel or other substances. Should be able to reprocess/consume solid fuel rod waste. These designs are meltdown-proof as well. Because the fuel is fluid, you place a "plug" underneath it that is cooled to keep it solid. If the reactor starts to get out of control, the plug melts. The liquid fuel then flows into a shallow pool, which if you understand the basic concept of neutron economy/chain reactions, drops the criticality beneath a sustainable chain reaction. I believe some designs also self-regulate temperature in other ways because hotter salts expand, which reduces criticality as well, so there is a secondary mechanism of regulation, but I'm hazy on that. Anyway, all that is 1960s knowledge/facts on MSR that is well known. I applaud this because it means MSRs are getting back to the square zero, but there isn't anything on costs, materials innovations, or other design enhancements to the ORNL design. And I just see YET ANOTHER MSR reactor coming online in academia, just as China boots up their prototype scaled-up reactor. And yet, 60 years of previous academia didn't boot a single one. This is the third I believe, in addition to new projects at the national laboratories. Maybe there actually was a policy against approving any MSR reactor for the last 60 years, which is what Kirk Sorensen of one of the LFTR companies contends, but all the mainstream nuclear folks say there wasn't institutional bias against this design. I'm a huge MSR stan, I'm glad this project is starting at the "closet sized" scale which I think is key to an economical nuclear reactor.