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Teenager Designs Safer Nuclear Power Plants

37 points by rexreed 13y ago

brianbreslin 13y ago
Is there a link to this kids Ted talk video anywhere?
- wickedOne 13y ago
  http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_small_nuclear_fission_reactors.html http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_s...
- tod222 13y ago
  You may also be interested to read his Wikipedia entry [1] as he's quite accomplished for his age. He's been awarded a Thiel Fellowship. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson
deckar01 13y ago
A similar idea was presented at a TED talk by a NASA engineer a while back. He was in charge of planning a nuclear reactor on the moon, and he said he got the idea from a really old book. http://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternative_nuclear_fuel.html http://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternativ...
- vxNsr 13y ago
  This was the first thing I thought of when I saw this. Kirk was the first guy who introduced me to the idea that our current electrical generating plants are incredibly inefficient. Sadly, it seems no one (who is in a position to do anything about it) really cares. That could be because they know things we don't, or it could be because they're paid (as in they have no incentive) not to care.
- VLM 13y ago
  Thorium sucks as a fuel. There are a couple issues: 1) People use fuel type as the identifier but exclusively talk about reactor design WRT safety and economics and efficiency and all that. A 1960s uranium BWR will, in fact, suck, compared to a 2000s thorium exotic design. Both will also suck compared to a 2000s era uranium exotic design. There's a hilarious stack exchange on this topic WRT whenever you hear someone talk about fuel choice you can assume they know nothing about chemistry or physics and are actually talking about reactor design. There is some linkage of course. You need a fast reactor to breed U which pretty much means sodium coolant but you can breed Th with thermals which means a more controllable reactor, etc. 2) See #1 now WRT big scale system design issues. Existing system in the US is to not reprocess. Hmm if we switch fuel to Th we'll have to reprocess to do it at all. Well if we use Th we'll therefore have less waste. So what. If we reprocessed U we'd also have less waste. But we don't reprocess. So either Th isn't happening as an executive decision, or if it does happen the only way it can "win" if executive decision not to allow U reprocessing, so that the .gov (instead of .com) can select the winners and losers. 3) Lots of optimization of trees at the expense of the forest. So the cheapest part of running a reactor is the fuel, and you'd like to save fuel why switching to Th. Uh... OK. Well Th neutron economy in the core is awful, you don't get as many n as from U, so you have to "make up for losses". No problemo, if too many n are eaten by structure, just use less structure, make it weaker, thinner, shorter lifespan, not as strong. Whoops you've now optimized the cheapest part, the fuel, to be a bit cheaper, at the cost of ballooning the four most expensive parts of running a reactor, that being building costs, design/approval, maintenance, and disaster recovery. Doomed. Just doomed. 4) There are proliferation issues with Th that are "somewhat" worse than the U system. Not insurmountable, just twice the work and headache. In this way its like switching from imperial measurements to metric. In theory as small long term gain, but the short to medium term PITA makes it never happen. Slow evolution, maybe, maybe not. Revolutionary leap forward, um, no, not gonna happen.
  - DennisP 13y ago
    As David LeBlanc says, come for the thorium, stay for the reactor. There are a few solid-fuel thorium reactors and they're nothing special. What Sorenson is really talking about is a liquid-fueled reactor, which has a number of advantages. You can also build a liquid-fueled uranium reactor, which is exactly what LeBlanc is attempting in Canada. Regarding your second point, there's no traditional reprocessing with this reactor when using thorium. You start it with fissile fuel, then simply keep adding thorium, which is converted to U233 inside the reactor.
cbhl 13y ago
When I was in elementary school, it seemed "obvious" to me that nuclear fission based plants were the way that all of the world's electricity should be generated. And that entire cities should be underground, so that the surface could be one big green park/forest thing. As I grew older, I later learned that the inability to "turn off and on" a nuclear fission power plant is a big problem for jurisdictions (like Ontario) where nuclear power is a major source of power. It's not uncommon for the price of power to turn negative in decentralized power markets during periods of low utilization. (It's easier to pay someone to shut off a coal/hydro/gas reactor than to shut down the reactor and then have it down for weeks before you can turn it back on again.) Regarding the kid's idea, building things underground is, in and of itself, a tricky task that I'd want well-trained engineers working on. There's the risk of tunnel/shaft collapse causing death. There's also the issue of the water table and figuring out where to build it such that it doesn't contaminate the groundwater. I suspect this'll increase the cost more than he expects. Then again, I also grew up being taught that CANDU reactors are way safer than most reactors in the US, which use carbon control rods (think giant thick rods of pencil lead that could catch fire), and that nobody in the US builds them simply because of cost reasons. I have no idea whether that reasoning is true or not, though. :/
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > most reactors in the US, which use carbon control rods (think giant thick rods of pencil lead that could catch fire) This is in no way an area of expertise for me, so somebody please correct me if I am wrong, but I am under the impression that graphite moderated reactors are not, and never really have been, popular in the US; graphite moderated is more of a Russian thing. Most reactors in the US are water moderated (besides whatever the military is operating perhaps?). Also I don't think graphite or any other form of carbon has ever been used as control rods.
  - cbhl 13y ago
    Nor is it an area of expertise for me -- it's possible that I mis-remember; it's also possible that my teacher was wrong (they are human too, and make mistakes).
  - 13y ago
leeoniya 13y ago
what's different about his reactor compared to traditional molten salt reactors? most of the article restates the benefits of MSRs. the one differentiator is, "Instead of finding a new way to boil water, Wilson's compact, molten salt reactor found a way to heat up gas. That is, really heat it up." ...and then what?
- marshray 13y ago
  TED needs to go back to predicting trends in transhumanism and stay out of nuclear reactor design. Did they seriously think that putting reactors underground is a new idea?
- DennisP 13y ago
  Even that isn't different. MSR people have been talking about supercritical CO2 for turbines for quite a while, and they're not the only ones: http://www.sco2powercyclesymposium.org/resource_center/development_priorities/supercritical-co2-brayton-cycle-the-doe-program http://www.sco2powercyclesymposium.org/resource_center/devel...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
peterpathname 13y ago
I can't really follow how this reactor reduces the risk of (further) proliferation of the materials and technologies for weapons? I notice the article doesn't reference waste. That's because its a non issue ever since we here in australia came up with a state of the art solution that finally puts the matter to rest: we're building a dirt road out to a small, remote, economically disempowered and politicially disenfranchised community of traditional land owners. At the end of the road, we're building a barbed wire fence, that surrounds a shed. Problem solved.
- emp_zealoth 13y ago
  I believe it is because MSR designs don't produce nuclear waste like traditional designs.
  - peterpathname 13y ago
    some theoretical msr designs promise to produce less waste, but msr does not necessarily lead to a different waste profile
- VLM 13y ago
  5 hours and no one provided the answer yet? Its cat and mouse or white hat vs black hat. The existing worldwide system uses U to make Pu to go boom, more or less. Th doesn't make Pu so existing experience and practice means no boom, at this time. The problem is it does make an alternative U isotope that can eventually go boom although not much research has been done on that because it sucks as a fuel compared to U so no one has bothered to use it yet on a wide scale. I figure if you deploy Th reactors "widely" you've got about a decade or two of semi-guaranteed non-proliferation before the reprocessing / industrial base builds to make boom. Not sure if thats really worth anything as we still have the existing U infrastructure so we're not going to save any money. In the long run the situation is probably worse because now there's two channels to watch. Its also a WWII German "big lie". As the USA shows, you can do U as a fuel without reprocessing, where stuff that goes "boom" can be diverted / stolen / skimmed. In other words implementing fuel reprocessing (presumably of U) means opportunity / costs WRT "boom". On the other hand Th more or less requires reprocessing. So overall world safety will decrease if you do Th because you have to implement a reprocessing plant. Its a false dilemma. You can cut off your leg or your arm, with different lifestyle changes, which is worse? Hmm, why not cut off neither? Well we're not going to talk about that option because, um... just because.
skore 13y ago
"But we're not going to contaminate large quantities of land," Except when we dig out all the fuel necessary for this (I know, this plan wants to use existing material, so this has already happened - but still, contamination is contamination). That part is always conveniently glanced over. Or when we need to store the waste, a problem that is still unsolved (I did not see anything mentioning that this will produce non-radioactive waste). Yeah, apart from that, clean as anything. "In other words, all the highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium collecting dust since the Cold War could be put to use for peaceful purposes." So take the stuff that we are struggling to deal with now and distribute it far and wide across the land, underground. Got it. "...this could be the source of energy that provides carbon-free electricity." Well thank god it doesn't produce carbon emissions, one of the easiest to manage climate problems we have. "So I really think that in the, say, 20 years it's going to take us to get fusion and make fusion a reality..." Oh wow, it's like the six degrees of pipe dreams. Look - I'm really all for fusion. If it ends up working - great. Throw out billions to get there? Be my guest. But how about, in the meantime, we invest money in technology that only produces pollution that we know we can manage. Because then, if our pipe dream fails, we are left with stuff that actually works. Not thousands of waste nightmares buried deep across the soils of our childrens' future.
- Filligree 13y ago
  Digging out uranium contaminates the land around the dig? You bet your ass it does. I wouldn't want to live within a hundred miles, but at least we only really need one such dig site for the planet. Economics being what it is, there are more, but not a lot. Now go look at a coal mine, and multiply the damage that does by the number of mines. We can't eliminate all damage. We can minimize it, for which nuclear power is helpful.
  - Ras_ 13y ago
    You don't always have to specifically dig uranium. Plenty of other mining products produce a side stream of uranium, which can be utilized. In larger picture these side streams don't matter much. What happens in Kazakhstan's (36% of all U production), Canada's and Australia's uranium mines does. They account for 64% of global uranium production. Australia has 23% of the world's uranium deposits, CAN 12%, KAZ 10%. About 85% of current needs are met with digging, 15% comes from secondary sources. It's interesting that two of the biggest producers of uranium do not utilize nuclear energy themselves. Even Canada produces only 12% of their electricity with nukes (France 78%). Good business even if you don't personally believe in it?
InclinedPlane 13y ago
I don't understand how even a 19 year old can make such a huge error as to believe that weapons grade material is not currently being used. This material is very much not "collecting dust on shelves". Under the "Megatons to Megawatts" program the US has spent a considerable amount of money to acquire highly enriched Uranium from Russia, from decommissioned warheads, and has reformulated it into fuel rods. The US does the same thing with its own decommissioned weapons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
- peterpathname 13y ago
  ... and then they build new ones.
- orik 13y ago
  I think he was just being a good salesman.
guard-of-terra 13y ago
How is this proposal different from Gas Cooled Reactors that UK use for decades now? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnox UPD: Switz tried to make underground reactors and got what is now the most contaminated cave in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor
- vladtaltos 13y ago
  kid says his reactor cannot meltdown. swiss one had a meltdown. don't know if it is true though... also, the underground thing worked - no ? it contained the radioactivity - wikipedia says no pollution occurred... in the case of a ground level one, I'd guess the Vaud canton would be pretty f-up
  - VLM 13y ago
    "don't know if it is true though" Well you see there's design, like I designed a giant spacecraft when I was a kid, all on one piece of paper, and then I talked to people about it because I thought it was cool, and there's "really design" like handling mfgr issues, clearance/fit/wear issues, failure tolerance, etc. Thats how my spacecraft only took one side of one piece of paper but the Cessna I took lessons in had about six linear feet of shelf space for the A+P manuals for all the different parts and subsystems thats just enduser maintenance stuff, not actual design docs. I haven't watched the video, but my guess is the kid doesn't have a design of his own. If a design of a real reactor takes 1000 engineer-years from the best minds in the field, and the kid is not that old yet... I've had kind of a nuclear interest for quite a bit longer than the kid's been alive. Its an interesting hobby, seeing how much you can learn. As a hobby its no weirder than seeing how much you can learn about the phone system, or the internet. The fundamental problem we're discussing is balancing optimum nuclear characteristics (neutron activation, long life, capture cross section, etc), mechanical/chemical/safety/lifespan properties, and mfgr/supply issues, can never really optimize all three at the same time. The Lucens reactor local optimization maxima for fuel cladding (the tube/shell the fuel sits in) ended up as Magnesium. Get it hot enough and it burns spectacular in pretty much anything, CO2, air, water... Also it corrodes pretty well underwater, or heck even in air. So burying a super flammable fuel underground and heating it up isn't so wise in retrospect although I'm sure as a local maxima it looked like a good idea. If we lived on an oxygen free planet then Magnesium would be quite a handy general purpose metal. Unfortunately on the earth... Other popular fuel cladding over the years for gas reactors has been stuff like beryllium (WTF were they thinking?) and stainless steel. I suppose the guys who selected Mg for cladding did pat themselves on their backs for not using a Be based cladding, which is probably the only way it could have turned out worse. Needless to say, stainless steel in CO2 doesn't burn very well. Maybe that's the kids design, its certainly off the shelf and fairly conventional. Lifespan might be shorter, ruinous cost, and the worst part is stainless eats neutrons for dinner which aside from making a short life means huge waste of fuel and heating issues, its kind of like storing your fuel inside shielding crazy as that sounds. But as a local optimization its not bad for mfgr safety as stainless is pretty harmless (Your cafeteria is contaminated with stainless steel, oh noes!) and the flammability rating of stainless steel in CO2 atmosphere is as you'd guess pretty excellent. Why all this fooling with cladding? Fundamentally nuke fuel seems to be awful structurally so you shove it into a pipe. Engineers are pretty cool with making heat exchangers outta pipes so a magic pipe that generates its own heat is pretty well understood. Its an object oriented encapsulation idea, sorta. If you made an indestructible fuel that didn't need cladding, then you'd either have wear issues on whatever it touches and/or processing/reprocessing would be terribly difficult dangerous and expensive and contamination issues so you'd just be moving the location of the accident, not reducing the rate of accidents.
primitur 13y ago
I think nuclear power has a long way to go before it will ever become non-useful to the species, which is to say I'm pro nuclear-power, generally. I think its better for the Earth that we localize massive power generation around a relatively small area, rather than systemetize energy transfer into, almost, everything we do with Oil, for example. Transferring energy instead of making it and using it where its needed, seems to be one way we can reduce the overall footprint as quickly as possible. Nuclear power requires not nearly as much massive support infrastructure as coal and oil, I feel. Sure: quite some, but with micro-reactors on the horizon, this may also miniaturize. But what I really think is we should be focussing the effort on local energy need, far more seriously. Like, establish real neighborhood energy systems that use the energy that is in the neighborhood - if its solar, solar. If it is thermal: thermal. If it is wind: wind. If there are none of the above sources available for your house: MOVE! All of the tech exists for an average house-hold to step off the grid, and it really is mostly a matter of minds being changed about the 'culturally acceptable reality' of how we manage our energy-driven lifestyles. I, for one, welcome the day when I can compute without having to ever once plug my laptop in, because its case is in fact no longer a dull grey oil-debt, but rather instead a highly efficient solar panel, and I look forward to using a 'slow system' if the CPU itself has evolved into an extremely lean - yet fully functional - current sink that gets along with whatever sunshine is available. I yearn for a complete dirth of chemical-derived power for my computing needs. Hopefully, the day will come when stepping off the Grid is as easy as, once, the revolution that occurred when millions of us were suddenly able to carry around 20,000 songs in our pocket, access any knowledge, anywhere, and talk to anyone we chose to, any time, at a flick of a swish ..
- LordIllidan 13y ago
  Wouldn't you still need a battery for the times when sunlight isn't shining on your laptop? And - does anyone really use their computers in the sun? Other than that, I do agree with you that neighbourhoods should use local energy - but can we rely on purely natural energy? The wind doesn't blow all the time, the sun doesn't shine at night, and thermal energy isn't always available.
  - 13y ago
drucken 13y ago
This is just an ORNL technology uranium-plutonium fuel cycle MSR. It has been known of since the 60's. It is also inferior to the thorium fuel cycle based Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), a prototype of which ORNL did actually create and which has been widely espoused by Kirk Sorensen, formely of NASA, for seven years already. Yet Kirk Sorensen gets a TEDx talk and a 14-year old gets a TED talk...
DennisP 13y ago
I've watched this kid's TED talk, and he didn't say anything that couldn't have been presented by anyone who watched a couple Kirk Sorenson videos. I gave a shorter version of the same talk in 2011, to small groups at the U.N. and Congress. Somehow the kid is getting away with repackaging molten salt reactors as his own idea, without giving credit to the many actual nuclear engineers working on it. Aside from Oak Ridge's pioneering efforts fifty years ago, there are several startups in the U.S, one in Canada, a billion-dollar effort in China, and additional work in several other countries.
- dpcx 13y ago
  Isn't even more publicity on a ground-breaking topic a good thing, whether he created it or not?
coldcode 13y ago
Just about anyone could design a better power plant. Building one in this highly regulated politicized environment where no one wants such a plant nearby is a different story. Dealing with the mining of the fuel and storing the remnants after it is spent is even harder. Design is easy on paper; implementation is the only way to see how many things you actually got right or wrong.
- DennisP 13y ago
  Thorium is a troublesome waste product of rare earth mines. It would actually be pretty helpful to have something to do with it. Reactors like this produce far less waste (for reasons I've detailed in another comment here), and you can also use them to burn up most of the waste we have right now. No argument on political difficulties though.

37 points by rexreed 13y ago

brianbreslin 13y ago

Is there a link to this kids Ted talk video anywhere?

wickedOne 13y ago
http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_small_nuclear_fission_reactors.html http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_s...
tod222 13y ago
You may also be interested to read his Wikipedia entry [1] as he's quite accomplished for his age. He's been awarded a Thiel Fellowship. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson

deckar01 13y ago

A similar idea was presented at a TED talk by a NASA engineer a while back. He was in charge of planning a nuclear reactor on the moon, and he said he got the idea from a really old book. http://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternative_nuclear_fuel.html http://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternativ...

vxNsr 13y ago
This was the first thing I thought of when I saw this. Kirk was the first guy who introduced me to the idea that our current electrical generating plants are incredibly inefficient. Sadly, it seems no one (who is in a position to do anything about it) really cares. That could be because they know things we don't, or it could be because they're paid (as in they have no incentive) not to care.
VLM 13y ago
Thorium sucks as a fuel. There are a couple issues: 1) People use fuel type as the identifier but exclusively talk about reactor design WRT safety and economics and efficiency and all that. A 1960s uranium BWR will, in fact, suck, compared to a 2000s thorium exotic design. Both will also suck compared to a 2000s era uranium exotic design. There's a hilarious stack exchange on this topic WRT whenever you hear someone talk about fuel choice you can assume they know nothing about chemistry or physics and are actually talking about reactor design. There is some linkage of course. You need a fast reactor to breed U which pretty much means sodium coolant but you can breed Th with thermals which means a more controllable reactor, etc. 2) See #1 now WRT big scale system design issues. Existing system in the US is to not reprocess. Hmm if we switch fuel to Th we'll have to reprocess to do it at all. Well if we use Th we'll therefore have less waste. So what. If we reprocessed U we'd also have less waste. But we don't reprocess. So either Th isn't happening as an executive decision, or if it does happen the only way it can "win" if executive decision not to allow U reprocessing, so that the .gov (instead of .com) can select the winners and losers. 3) Lots of optimization of trees at the expense of the forest. So the cheapest part of running a reactor is the fuel, and you'd like to save fuel why switching to Th. Uh... OK. Well Th neutron economy in the core is awful, you don't get as many n as from U, so you have to "make up for losses". No problemo, if too many n are eaten by structure, just use less structure, make it weaker, thinner, shorter lifespan, not as strong. Whoops you've now optimized the cheapest part, the fuel, to be a bit cheaper, at the cost of ballooning the four most expensive parts of running a reactor, that being building costs, design/approval, maintenance, and disaster recovery. Doomed. Just doomed. 4) There are proliferation issues with Th that are "somewhat" worse than the U system. Not insurmountable, just twice the work and headache. In this way its like switching from imperial measurements to metric. In theory as small long term gain, but the short to medium term PITA makes it never happen. Slow evolution, maybe, maybe not. Revolutionary leap forward, um, no, not gonna happen.
- DennisP 13y ago
  As David LeBlanc says, come for the thorium, stay for the reactor. There are a few solid-fuel thorium reactors and they're nothing special. What Sorenson is really talking about is a liquid-fueled reactor, which has a number of advantages. You can also build a liquid-fueled uranium reactor, which is exactly what LeBlanc is attempting in Canada. Regarding your second point, there's no traditional reprocessing with this reactor when using thorium. You start it with fissile fuel, then simply keep adding thorium, which is converted to U233 inside the reactor.

cbhl 13y ago

When I was in elementary school, it seemed "obvious" to me that nuclear fission based plants were the way that all of the world's electricity should be generated. And that entire cities should be underground, so that the surface could be one big green park/forest thing. As I grew older, I later learned that the inability to "turn off and on" a nuclear fission power plant is a big problem for jurisdictions (like Ontario) where nuclear power is a major source of power. It's not uncommon for the price of power to turn negative in decentralized power markets during periods of low utilization. (It's easier to pay someone to shut off a coal/hydro/gas reactor than to shut down the reactor and then have it down for weeks before you can turn it back on again.) Regarding the kid's idea, building things underground is, in and of itself, a tricky task that I'd want well-trained engineers working on. There's the risk of tunnel/shaft collapse causing death. There's also the issue of the water table and figuring out where to build it such that it doesn't contaminate the groundwater. I suspect this'll increase the cost more than he expects. Then again, I also grew up being taught that CANDU reactors are way safer than most reactors in the US, which use carbon control rods (think giant thick rods of pencil lead that could catch fire), and that nobody in the US builds them simply because of cost reasons. I have no idea whether that reasoning is true or not, though. :/

jlgreco 13y ago
> most reactors in the US, which use carbon control rods (think giant thick rods of pencil lead that could catch fire) This is in no way an area of expertise for me, so somebody please correct me if I am wrong, but I am under the impression that graphite moderated reactors are not, and never really have been, popular in the US; graphite moderated is more of a Russian thing. Most reactors in the US are water moderated (besides whatever the military is operating perhaps?). Also I don't think graphite or any other form of carbon has ever been used as control rods.
- cbhl 13y ago
  Nor is it an area of expertise for me -- it's possible that I mis-remember; it's also possible that my teacher was wrong (they are human too, and make mistakes).
- 13y ago

leeoniya 13y ago

what's different about his reactor compared to traditional molten salt reactors? most of the article restates the benefits of MSRs. the one differentiator is, "Instead of finding a new way to boil water, Wilson's compact, molten salt reactor found a way to heat up gas. That is, really heat it up." ...and then what?

marshray 13y ago
TED needs to go back to predicting trends in transhumanism and stay out of nuclear reactor design. Did they seriously think that putting reactors underground is a new idea?
DennisP 13y ago
Even that isn't different. MSR people have been talking about supercritical CO2 for turbines for quite a while, and they're not the only ones: http://www.sco2powercyclesymposium.org/resource_center/development_priorities/supercritical-co2-brayton-cycle-the-doe-program http://www.sco2powercyclesymposium.org/resource_center/devel...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

peterpathname 13y ago

I can't really follow how this reactor reduces the risk of (further) proliferation of the materials and technologies for weapons? I notice the article doesn't reference waste. That's because its a non issue ever since we here in australia came up with a state of the art solution that finally puts the matter to rest: we're building a dirt road out to a small, remote, economically disempowered and politicially disenfranchised community of traditional land owners. At the end of the road, we're building a barbed wire fence, that surrounds a shed. Problem solved.

emp_zealoth 13y ago
I believe it is because MSR designs don't produce nuclear waste like traditional designs.
- peterpathname 13y ago
  some theoretical msr designs promise to produce less waste, but msr does not necessarily lead to a different waste profile
VLM 13y ago
5 hours and no one provided the answer yet? Its cat and mouse or white hat vs black hat. The existing worldwide system uses U to make Pu to go boom, more or less. Th doesn't make Pu so existing experience and practice means no boom, at this time. The problem is it does make an alternative U isotope that can eventually go boom although not much research has been done on that because it sucks as a fuel compared to U so no one has bothered to use it yet on a wide scale. I figure if you deploy Th reactors "widely" you've got about a decade or two of semi-guaranteed non-proliferation before the reprocessing / industrial base builds to make boom. Not sure if thats really worth anything as we still have the existing U infrastructure so we're not going to save any money. In the long run the situation is probably worse because now there's two channels to watch. Its also a WWII German "big lie". As the USA shows, you can do U as a fuel without reprocessing, where stuff that goes "boom" can be diverted / stolen / skimmed. In other words implementing fuel reprocessing (presumably of U) means opportunity / costs WRT "boom". On the other hand Th more or less requires reprocessing. So overall world safety will decrease if you do Th because you have to implement a reprocessing plant. Its a false dilemma. You can cut off your leg or your arm, with different lifestyle changes, which is worse? Hmm, why not cut off neither? Well we're not going to talk about that option because, um... just because.

skore 13y ago

"But we're not going to contaminate large quantities of land," Except when we dig out all the fuel necessary for this (I know, this plan wants to use existing material, so this has already happened - but still, contamination is contamination). That part is always conveniently glanced over. Or when we need to store the waste, a problem that is still unsolved (I did not see anything mentioning that this will produce non-radioactive waste). Yeah, apart from that, clean as anything. "In other words, all the highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium collecting dust since the Cold War could be put to use for peaceful purposes." So take the stuff that we are struggling to deal with now and distribute it far and wide across the land, underground. Got it. "...this could be the source of energy that provides carbon-free electricity." Well thank god it doesn't produce carbon emissions, one of the easiest to manage climate problems we have. "So I really think that in the, say, 20 years it's going to take us to get fusion and make fusion a reality..." Oh wow, it's like the six degrees of pipe dreams. Look - I'm really all for fusion. If it ends up working - great. Throw out billions to get there? Be my guest. But how about, in the meantime, we invest money in technology that only produces pollution that we know we can manage. Because then, if our pipe dream fails, we are left with stuff that actually works. Not thousands of waste nightmares buried deep across the soils of our childrens' future.

Filligree 13y ago
Digging out uranium contaminates the land around the dig? You bet your ass it does. I wouldn't want to live within a hundred miles, but at least we only really need one such dig site for the planet. Economics being what it is, there are more, but not a lot. Now go look at a coal mine, and multiply the damage that does by the number of mines. We can't eliminate all damage. We can minimize it, for which nuclear power is helpful.
- Ras_ 13y ago
  You don't always have to specifically dig uranium. Plenty of other mining products produce a side stream of uranium, which can be utilized. In larger picture these side streams don't matter much. What happens in Kazakhstan's (36% of all U production), Canada's and Australia's uranium mines does. They account for 64% of global uranium production. Australia has 23% of the world's uranium deposits, CAN 12%, KAZ 10%. About 85% of current needs are met with digging, 15% comes from secondary sources. It's interesting that two of the biggest producers of uranium do not utilize nuclear energy themselves. Even Canada produces only 12% of their electricity with nukes (France 78%). Good business even if you don't personally believe in it?

InclinedPlane 13y ago

I don't understand how even a 19 year old can make such a huge error as to believe that weapons grade material is not currently being used. This material is very much not "collecting dust on shelves". Under the "Megatons to Megawatts" program the US has spent a considerable amount of money to acquire highly enriched Uranium from Russia, from decommissioned warheads, and has reformulated it into fuel rods. The US does the same thing with its own decommissioned weapons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program

peterpathname 13y ago
... and then they build new ones.
orik 13y ago
I think he was just being a good salesman.

guard-of-terra 13y ago

How is this proposal different from Gas Cooled Reactors that UK use for decades now? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnox UPD: Switz tried to make underground reactors and got what is now the most contaminated cave in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor

vladtaltos 13y ago
kid says his reactor cannot meltdown. swiss one had a meltdown. don't know if it is true though... also, the underground thing worked - no ? it contained the radioactivity - wikipedia says no pollution occurred... in the case of a ground level one, I'd guess the Vaud canton would be pretty f-up
- VLM 13y ago
  "don't know if it is true though" Well you see there's design, like I designed a giant spacecraft when I was a kid, all on one piece of paper, and then I talked to people about it because I thought it was cool, and there's "really design" like handling mfgr issues, clearance/fit/wear issues, failure tolerance, etc. Thats how my spacecraft only took one side of one piece of paper but the Cessna I took lessons in had about six linear feet of shelf space for the A+P manuals for all the different parts and subsystems thats just enduser maintenance stuff, not actual design docs. I haven't watched the video, but my guess is the kid doesn't have a design of his own. If a design of a real reactor takes 1000 engineer-years from the best minds in the field, and the kid is not that old yet... I've had kind of a nuclear interest for quite a bit longer than the kid's been alive. Its an interesting hobby, seeing how much you can learn. As a hobby its no weirder than seeing how much you can learn about the phone system, or the internet. The fundamental problem we're discussing is balancing optimum nuclear characteristics (neutron activation, long life, capture cross section, etc), mechanical/chemical/safety/lifespan properties, and mfgr/supply issues, can never really optimize all three at the same time. The Lucens reactor local optimization maxima for fuel cladding (the tube/shell the fuel sits in) ended up as Magnesium. Get it hot enough and it burns spectacular in pretty much anything, CO2, air, water... Also it corrodes pretty well underwater, or heck even in air. So burying a super flammable fuel underground and heating it up isn't so wise in retrospect although I'm sure as a local maxima it looked like a good idea. If we lived on an oxygen free planet then Magnesium would be quite a handy general purpose metal. Unfortunately on the earth... Other popular fuel cladding over the years for gas reactors has been stuff like beryllium (WTF were they thinking?) and stainless steel. I suppose the guys who selected Mg for cladding did pat themselves on their backs for not using a Be based cladding, which is probably the only way it could have turned out worse. Needless to say, stainless steel in CO2 doesn't burn very well. Maybe that's the kids design, its certainly off the shelf and fairly conventional. Lifespan might be shorter, ruinous cost, and the worst part is stainless eats neutrons for dinner which aside from making a short life means huge waste of fuel and heating issues, its kind of like storing your fuel inside shielding crazy as that sounds. But as a local optimization its not bad for mfgr safety as stainless is pretty harmless (Your cafeteria is contaminated with stainless steel, oh noes!) and the flammability rating of stainless steel in CO2 atmosphere is as you'd guess pretty excellent. Why all this fooling with cladding? Fundamentally nuke fuel seems to be awful structurally so you shove it into a pipe. Engineers are pretty cool with making heat exchangers outta pipes so a magic pipe that generates its own heat is pretty well understood. Its an object oriented encapsulation idea, sorta. If you made an indestructible fuel that didn't need cladding, then you'd either have wear issues on whatever it touches and/or processing/reprocessing would be terribly difficult dangerous and expensive and contamination issues so you'd just be moving the location of the accident, not reducing the rate of accidents.

primitur 13y ago

I think nuclear power has a long way to go before it will ever become non-useful to the species, which is to say I'm pro nuclear-power, generally. I think its better for the Earth that we localize massive power generation around a relatively small area, rather than systemetize energy transfer into, almost, everything we do with Oil, for example. Transferring energy instead of making it and using it where its needed, seems to be one way we can reduce the overall footprint as quickly as possible. Nuclear power requires not nearly as much massive support infrastructure as coal and oil, I feel. Sure: quite some, but with micro-reactors on the horizon, this may also miniaturize. But what I really think is we should be focussing the effort on local energy need, far more seriously. Like, establish real neighborhood energy systems that use the energy that is in the neighborhood - if its solar, solar. If it is thermal: thermal. If it is wind: wind. If there are none of the above sources available for your house: MOVE! All of the tech exists for an average house-hold to step off the grid, and it really is mostly a matter of minds being changed about the 'culturally acceptable reality' of how we manage our energy-driven lifestyles. I, for one, welcome the day when I can compute without having to ever once plug my laptop in, because its case is in fact no longer a dull grey oil-debt, but rather instead a highly efficient solar panel, and I look forward to using a 'slow system' if the CPU itself has evolved into an extremely lean - yet fully functional - current sink that gets along with whatever sunshine is available. I yearn for a complete dirth of chemical-derived power for my computing needs. Hopefully, the day will come when stepping off the Grid is as easy as, once, the revolution that occurred when millions of us were suddenly able to carry around 20,000 songs in our pocket, access any knowledge, anywhere, and talk to anyone we chose to, any time, at a flick of a swish ..

LordIllidan 13y ago
Wouldn't you still need a battery for the times when sunlight isn't shining on your laptop? And - does anyone really use their computers in the sun? Other than that, I do agree with you that neighbourhoods should use local energy - but can we rely on purely natural energy? The wind doesn't blow all the time, the sun doesn't shine at night, and thermal energy isn't always available.
- 13y ago

drucken 13y ago

This is just an ORNL technology uranium-plutonium fuel cycle MSR. It has been known of since the 60's. It is also inferior to the thorium fuel cycle based Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), a prototype of which ORNL did actually create and which has been widely espoused by Kirk Sorensen, formely of NASA, for seven years already. Yet Kirk Sorensen gets a TEDx talk and a 14-year old gets a TED talk...

DennisP 13y ago

I've watched this kid's TED talk, and he didn't say anything that couldn't have been presented by anyone who watched a couple Kirk Sorenson videos. I gave a shorter version of the same talk in 2011, to small groups at the U.N. and Congress. Somehow the kid is getting away with repackaging molten salt reactors as his own idea, without giving credit to the many actual nuclear engineers working on it. Aside from Oak Ridge's pioneering efforts fifty years ago, there are several startups in the U.S, one in Canada, a billion-dollar effort in China, and additional work in several other countries.

dpcx 13y ago
Isn't even more publicity on a ground-breaking topic a good thing, whether he created it or not?

coldcode 13y ago

Just about anyone could design a better power plant. Building one in this highly regulated politicized environment where no one wants such a plant nearby is a different story. Dealing with the mining of the fuel and storing the remnants after it is spent is even harder. Design is easy on paper; implementation is the only way to see how many things you actually got right or wrong.

DennisP 13y ago
Thorium is a troublesome waste product of rare earth mines. It would actually be pretty helpful to have something to do with it. Reactors like this produce far less waste (for reasons I've detailed in another comment here), and you can also use them to burn up most of the waste we have right now. No argument on political difficulties though.