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Tiny reactors could one day power towns, campuses; community input will be key
- arghandugh 1y agoNo, they won’t.
- greenie_beans 1y agowhy not?
- arghandugh 1y ago[flagged]
- greenie_beans 1y agovery unconvincing argument and not helpful at all
- arghandugh 1y agoWhich means I’m adding exactly as much to the world as “there will be a semi-truck sized semi-portable nuclear reactor that will somehow work, be politically viable outside of totalitarian regimes, and provide meaningful amounts of localized grid power within our lifetimes” Zip fucking zero percent chance, forever. Move on.
- greenie_beans 1y agoseems you're adding much, much less to the world, except a cargo ship full of toxic behavior
- arghandugh 1y agoThere’s only one fix for that! Do it.
- dwood_dev 1y agoAs much as I am a proponent of nuclear, it's time has past. It's already non-competitive with solar + battery for any new start builds. I doubt a single commercial installation would exist of these microreactors before battery and solar/battery costs drop another 50-80%. Even hydro will have issues competing in 20 years.
- mrheosuper 1y agoWhy not both, you don't want to put all egg in 1 basket.
- homeonthemtn 1y agoAs some one with a long winter, I assure you solar is not a cure-all, especially if you receive significant snow or low altitude cloud cover. Batteries, as well, are impacted by the cold in their own ways. Is a tiny reactor the answer? Probably not. But energy at a constant rate all year round that also self warms? That sounds pretty good to me.
- sudoshred 1y agoNuclear has advantages, but no one will vote in favor of a small chance of nearby catastrophe… given the choice.
- kjs3 1y agoThat's an utterly ridiculous assertion (at least in the US). All one needs to do is claim "job creation" and "increase the tax base" and there will be thousands of small/mid sized town desperately courting your investment dollars, even if you're up front about "this will probably poison your town for centuries and turn your kids into zombies".
- toast0 1y agoIf that were enough, I think we'd have a lot more nuclear plants in construction. The problem with this theory is it takes too long between the step where the boosters sell the town with job creation and when the plant can't be cancelled. If you get a city on board today, chances are you won't have a permit in 10 years, and you need to keep them on board the whole time until the permit is issued or they'll derail the permit. It's better to keep them on board at least until the reactor is fueled... but once it's fueled, the jobs engine will probably sustain itself.
- rogerb 1y agoNo discussion of shielding in this article :(
- barney54 1y agoCommunity input is nice, but we first need working small reactors. Until we see that there is no need to talk about community input. And so far small reactors keep taking longer to get built than estimates.
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoMy god, if there is one thing we need less of in America it’s community fucking input. Reactors in towns are dumb. They make sense in remote locations where solar doesn’t work, e.g. West Australian or seabed mining, or on the Moon.
- cool_dude85 1y agoThe biggest risk of these kind of micro reactors is what happens when they are abandoned and / or receive no investment, maintenance, repairs, etc. for years or decades. What is a catastrophic failure like in that case? For example, a water and sewer utility near me, serving a similar scale customer base as one of these reactors (a few hundred to a thousand or so), just had to get put into receivership. All the infrastructure has been falling apart for years and the utility had not been investing anything into upkeep, putting its own customers in danger. What if they had owned one of these reactors?
- b_e_n_t_o_n 1y agoWhy don't we just put a bunch of reactors on the moon? Seems safer than putting them on earth.
- slowmovintarget 1y agoWhen we need to power things on the moon, we'll put them there, too. For now, we need to generate the power near (within a few tens of miles) where it must be used. The reason for this is that as we transmit power, we lose some as heat. The further we transmit, the more we lose.
- b_e_n_t_o_n 1y agoWhy can't we just connect a really long cable from the moon back to earth and wrap it in insulation??
- slau 1y agoThere’s a 50k km difference between the shortest and longest answer to “how far is the moon?”, depending on orbit and phase. The distance can change by about 75m per second. I don’t know of a reel that can spool up a cable at 270 km/h. Our current longest power cable is 5376 m long. So we’re only 406k km short of bridging the gap (our longest is only 0.0013% the length required).
- b_e_n_t_o_n 1y agoif we can split an atom we can make a really long cable surely
- patapong 1y agoMaybe we can offload all bitcoin mining to the moon instead, and just transmit the winning blocks to the earth via radio instead. That way, we can outsource the tremendous emissions caused by bitcoin mining, and use the extra capacity on earth to cut down on fossil fuels. Half /s
- metalman 1y agoDear Public We need cheerfull support for something you will pay for but never see.The military just gave us that tiny little head shake that means NO, and just wont share there nukes, and the accountants said trill something, so we are reaching out for your involvement. Glad you can help! Your Billionairs