5 ms·
Interesting concept. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is how to protect these units from the bad guys.
by NIL8 13y ago
Interesting concept. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is how to protect these units from the bad guys.
- argumentum 13y agoI'd hope the first thing to come to mind is how to build the technology. Once it's built, we can start worrying about how to protect it .. why protect something that doesn't exist?
- hga 13y agoWhy build something if you can determine you can't adequately protect it?
- argumentum 13y agoWhy build 3d printers if they could be used to make guns? Why invent bitcoin if it could be used to fund terrorism? You make things because they are interesting to make, and could have a positive impact in the world. Protecting yourself from "the bad guys" is a secondary (or even tertiary) concern, unless the very purpose of the thing is to protect people from bad guys (for example a military fort).
- Questioneer 13y agoWhy live when you could die suddenly?
- kintamanimatt 13y agoThis is the kind of ethos that prods people to bolt on security rather than bake it into their code.
- hga 13y agoThere are two issues here, one of which strongly cuts against distributing nuclear power that broadly: If you have a lot of units, the loss of one or a few has limited effects, vs. taking out a few big baseline power plants and/or major transmission nodes. What's the local/regional cost if someone takes out a node with a sufficiently big shaped charge?
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoIf inter-connectivity is maintained at local power system boundaries, then adjacent nodes can pick up the slack. Another good argument for a power grid of peers is that nodes can be taken offline for maintenance without causing a disruption.
- Tcepsa 13y agoIf you mean "protect these units from bad guys so they don't threaten our electrical system," that's kind of the point of having a decentralized system of smaller reactors: if one or two get sabotaged, others in the system can easily pick up the slack. If you mean "protect these units from bad guys so they don't steal the thorium and weaponize it," that's one of the great things about thorium reactors: thorium and its byproducts are very hard to weaponize. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor#Safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...
- hga 13y agoTo which I say BS, at least for the reason cited. Sure, the U-232 contaminated U-233 is nasty, but as long as it doesn't make it impractical to make a nuclear warhead it's quantitatively different from the uranium cycle, where after a few months at most plutonium is impossibly contaminated with two even more undesirable isotopes (one is very hot, I've seen estimates of 100kW for a bomb sized quantity (it's used for RTGs in deep space probes), the other precludes much of a bang and required the Manhattan Project to go with an implosion design). Despite the gamma ray emission drawbacks, it could still be the easiest way to get lots of weapons grade fissionables from civilian power plants.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoThese folks seem to think the problem is solvable by adding U-238 http://www.coal2nuclear.com/MSR%20-%20Denatured%20-%20CNSLeBlanc2010revised.pdf http://www.coal2nuclear.com/MSR%20-%20Denatured%20-%20CNSLeB...
- hga 13y agoYeah, that solves it neatly. Reduces to a protoactinium problem, it decays to U-233 with a half-life of 27 days. The article claims there's so little protoactinium in the total mass of salt and stuff that it's not practical to isolate it, at least not without detection, and failing that, not quickly. This gets into fine details beyond my level of expertise, but I agree the problem is much reduced. Although very possibly still greater than for current LEU designs.