9 ms·
That idea was totally crazy. In order to save on pouring lots of concrete for a containment dome, you dig one mile in bedrock. But one thing that everyone miss
by credit_guy 2y ago
That idea was totally crazy. In order to save on pouring lots of concrete for a containment dome, you dig one mile in bedrock.
But one thing that everyone missed when the story came out was what was so special about 1 mile. Why not half a mile or 1.5 miles? The neat thing (which they did not bother to publicize) was that the pressure in a pressurized water reactor is exactly the pressure at the bottom of a column of water one mile high. So you do not need pumps for your reactors. You just let your water fall to the reactor, the reactor heats it and sends it back. It's quite elegant. Of course, the remaining engineering details are left to the reader. For example, what happens if some valve breaks 1 mile deep underground?
- kragen 2y agodimensionally it's hugely advantageous. a 1600-meter-thick containment dome (to use modern units rather than medieval ones) would be 17 billion cubic meters of concrete, which would cost about 700 billion dollars, at the price of 40 dollars per cubic meter i happened to see in the newspaper today. but a 300-mm-diameter hole 1600 meters into the bedrock only requires breaking up 110 cubic meters of bedrock. all things being equal, that's about 150 million times easier (in practice people skimp on the containment instead of trying to build trillion-dollar containment domes) as for water pressure, you can design pwrs to work over a significant range of water pressures