Port-A-Nuke 791
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are designing a self-contained, tamper-resistant nuclear reactor that can be transported and installed anywhere in the world. In 'US plans portable nuclear power plants,' New Scientist writes that the sealed reactors would last 30 years and deliver between 10 and 100 megawatts. The largest version would be about 15 meters high and 3 meters wide, with a weight of about 500 tons, allowing for transportation by ships or very large trucks. The DOE thinks that this kind of nuclear reactor -- named SSTAR for 'small, sealed, transportable, autonomous reactor' -- would help to deliver nuclear energy to developing countries while significantly reducing the risk of nuclear proliferation associated with the use of nuclear power. What do you think of this idea? Is it a good one or a crazy one? Leaving a nuclear reactor in a developing country which can potentially become unstable during the 30 years of service of the reactor doesn't seem to be terribly safe.
Read more before deciding. Anyway, there will be no prototypes before 2015."
I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:4, Funny)
I'll take the 10 megawatts model for my house. I'm sure it's no bigger than an asteroid the size of a VW.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering my last power bill, these bigger and faster CPUs really need some juice and if you go multicore and such, you may not be exaggerating. All this bitching about nuclear power being safe, pollution from Coal and Gas plants, how ineffective Solar or Wind are -- doesn't anyone realize we're using more electrical power than ever before? Even when we have vaccum tube TV's?
Looking at the octopi at work and around home it seems my next house should have powerstrips along the walls, not just outlets.
On the next episode of Trading Spaces! (Score:4, Interesting)
Power Strip Wainscotting! I love it! I think I'm going to redo my home office with it!
Re:On the next episode of Trading Spaces! (Score:5, Funny)
Dog knows I could use it. I love the idea, and I love the word. Wainscotting ... Wainscotting ... Wainscotting ... sounds like a little Dorset village, doesn't it? Wainscotting.
(Cut to the village of Wains Cotting. A woman rushes out of a house.) Woman: We've been mentioned on the internet!
Re:On the next episode of Trading Spaces! (Score:3, Funny)
People who have watched Trading Spaces will agree, we hate Doug.
People in Portland, OR who had Doug redesign their living room into a home theater, complete with suspended TV stand that fell off the ceiling a week later and destroyed their TV set REALLY hate Doug.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:5, Insightful)
100+ watt CRT versus 30 watt LCD monitor; 100 watt incandescent light bulbs versus 25 watt compact fluorescent [doe.gov]. These technologies are readily available, are in many states are now economical alternatives. So use them!
The tech industry is also obsessed with high performance chips that have power consumption through the roof (most of it waste, of course). Where's the direction toward more energy efficient processing alternatives? Most applications do not need 1 GHz processors.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:4, Insightful)
It is the main short coming of "it's so simple" environmental/conservation arguments that they often ignore the costs which are less obvious.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:3, Funny)
Wait, you're telling me I don't need the 3.2Ghz P4 with "Hyper-Threading" to power my porno slideshow screensaver?!?
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:3, Informative)
The thing is that conservation is not worthwhile to the average American, from an economic perspective. Conservation and power efficiency in home devices and appliances often require a larger up-front cost, and only pay out their savings over an extended period of time. If energy became more expensive, things would change, but right now, it's worth it for average Joe to use his pow
RE: power consumption (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:5, Funny)
oh and thanks for reminding me to feed the lizard.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:3, Informative)
I replaced every light bulb in my house with these. They are more expensive up front but they last forever (4 years and counting) and my electric bill has dropped by about 40%.
DEFINITELY worthwhile.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not quite true, I have most of my apartment converted to the spiral flouresent bulbs, the one exception is the light in my bedroom. The reason I haven't converted my bedroom is that the compact floresent bulbs do have a 1 to 2 second startup delay, and I suffer from night-terrors. My fiance needs to be able to get a light on immediatly when I go into one of those, as its the only thing that snaps me out of them. Considering that I have been know to both do damage to the room, and to attack her during a night-terror, we both want to have no delay in getting that light on.
But, other than that one light, ya, compact floresent bulbs for the rest of the place, they are cheaper to run, and personally, I prefer the light they give out.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:3, Funny)
Greenpeace called, they made an exception for you for this one instance. Just don't let it happen again.
Excuse the sarcasm, but dear lord! I thought you were going to bring up the fact that it's near impossible to
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:3, Funny)
I can't remember the brand off the top of my head-- it's been six years since I bought them. I also have several dimmable ones.
What I haven't been able to find is dimmable G30 or G40 decorator globe replacements. I have a 10-bulb l
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:3, Informative)
The latest generation of florescents have no warm up delay. Much less annoying. Sylvania, among others, make such bulbs.
bulb info [colorado.edu]
Re:It's not the CRT (Score:5, Informative)
The power rating of the PSU is how much power it *can deliver*, not how much it will drain from the grid just because you plug it in.
And fans draw practically no power at all, maybe one or two watts, so I don't see why you drag them into the discussion...
Re:It's not the CRT (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the point is not that the fans themselves draw a lot of power, but the various system components are wasting a lot of power expressed by heat which necessitates all the fans.
The fans are symptoms, not the disease.
Re:It's not the CRT (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, really? Let me disect your arguments...
The power rating of the PSU is how much power it *can deliver*, not how much it will drain from the grid just because you plug it in.
Right, but if you could get by on 100 watts, or less, then why do you need 350, 400, 500, or larger PSU? Because you will need most of that and the remainder is a safety margin or room to expand. The fact remains your box draws more power than your monitor, by a large margin. It's power you didn't
Re:It's not the CRT (Score:3, Interesting)
And this is for a relatively power-hungry (Athlon 64, 15" screen) laptop. I'm sure you can get a Pentium-M model for $1500 that uses half the power of mine.
The power-saving tech is out there, but it's slow to find its way to desktop systems. Don't the desktop Athlon 6
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:4, Insightful)
Take a lightbulb-- the normal way to think about efficiency is "how much of the energy is made into light vs. heat." The original poster would seem to suggest that it all ends up as heat, because as soon as the light hits something, it's just going to warm it up. Just like the CPU-- it does some number crunching... but moving those electrons around in there just ends up making heat after we're done crunching, too. It's just that with the CPU, this step is done before we leave the CPU. The CPU is like a lightbulb in a box. The lightbulb does make light-- but from the view outside the box, all the energy you put in is becoming heat.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:3, Insightful)
You can hack anything. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You can hack anything. (Score:3, Interesting)
Please stop with the FUD.
We have satellites, we can also -track- anything. Put a transmitter inside them with a tamper switch. Transmitter goes offline, send in a special forces response team to find out what's happening. Besides, it's in the best interests of every government we give these to that they keep them safe. I'd imagine if they let someone screw with just one we wouldn't give them anymore.
And YES, I do want these things out and about. It's time to qui
Re:You can hack anything. (Score:3, Insightful)
Like, finding Osama perhaps.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:3, Interesting)
However, we are not draining our energy as fast as we once thought. First of all, many dry oil well have been refilling (in fact, it's causing some to reconsider what the process is for oil production in the earth actually is). Second of all, the calculation for "yea
Duplicate story.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Duplicate story.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure someone will come along and provide more details and insult me in a few moments.
it is critical, somewhat (Score:3, Informative)
The benefit of this is if for some reason the shield stops moving, the worse that would happen is fission would cease entirely at some point, rather than run away.
Or so my understanding goes.
You forgot to insult him. (Score:5, Funny)
At this rate we're going to see a complete lack of insults within...oh..
But still it's no excuse to go slacking man. Now get back on here, call him an asshat and straighten up your postings pronto.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:5, Funny)
Or is this some sort of demonostration of the fact that size is transitive? A=B, B=C Thus A=C?
You could have just as easily said "no bigger than a block of cheese the size of a pile of matchsticks the size of an asteroid the size of a VW".
Re:I've got mine on pre-order. (Score:4, Interesting)
because nuclear power is cheap and the utilities don't want their stock to go down when they annouce that they'll be adding nuclear to their system. check the history, any time anyone announces adding nukes, their stock goes down. i don't have time now to do the googling myself, but it's there.
plus you have all the brain dead americans that think nuke==bad and the "don't want that in my backyard" syndrome. give me a personal nuke plant, i'll put it in my basement, i don't care. they're safe. maybe we should come up with a new name for nuke plants, just like they chagned "nmr" to "mri" becuase "nuclear" (or nucular) was scary.
One Dirty Bomb (Score:5, Insightful)
Leaving a nuclear reactor in a developing country
I trust this means stable and reasonably secure developing country. Some of us have learned some things in the last few years. Some of us have learned a lot in the last 72 hours. :-(
Re:One Dirty Bomb - you siad it.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One Dirty Bomb - you siad it.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One Dirty Bomb - you siad it.. (Score:3, Insightful)
No boom, you will just scorch the paint (Score:5, Interesting)
Hard up for what, seeing paint scorched? The gov't is already pretty good at building reactors and transportation vessels that stand up to such attacks. The real threats are regrettably from the simple and common anti-armor weapons.
Re:No boom, you will just scorch the paint (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No boom, you will just scorch the paint (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. The concern isn't that attackers will toss a bomb at the reactor, but that they will seize the reactor, dismantle it, and use the radioactive fuel (which is otherwise difficult to obtain) as the payload for a dirty bomb.
Current nuclear reactors are unlikely to be seized by a handful of armed men, because they are either large complexes in civilized nations, or onboard military ships. The project will encourage the placement of reactors in poorer, less cont
Re:No boom, you will just scorch the paint (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No boom, you will just scorch the paint (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, yes I was being sarcastic... you know.. funny laugh? The point still holds that they can't easily move that reactor around. It's not like a big box with a lock you break of and grab the fissile material and run. To get to that they need big heavy equipment, specialized training and a good bit of time.
Irrelevant. These people have guns a
Re:No boom, you will just scorch the paint (Score:3, Interesting)
You can supply large amounts of force to small areas with enough explosives - there is no magic material with an infinite ultimate tensile strength. Make it out of tunsten carbide or diamond and you could still get in with enough black powder. With C4 you don't have to use as much. Plus there are other options like plasma cutters (not not star trek - really hot gas, real, cheap and in a third world country near you) or just serious amounts of
Re:One Dirty Bomb (Score:4, Funny)
Re:One Dirty Bomb (Score:3, Funny)
It's obvious this city ordinance is very effective, there haven't been any nuclear detonations there. They should put this law on the books in all cities, then everybody will be safe....
Followup Slashdot stories (Score:4, Funny)
Powering Laptop With a Port-A-Nuke
Building Your Own Port-A-Nuke
Now a Porn-A-Nuke?
Now a Porn-A-Nuke? (Score:5, Funny)
Also known as a very dirty bomb.
-Matt
PORN!!!! (Score:2, Funny)
I wonder if they require an armada of security on this thing (thing could mean slashcode or the Reactor
Tamper Resistant? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Tamper Resistant? (Score:2)
Saves us the bother of having to clean up after these countries that buy dual-use equipment from us for "development" then turn on us.
wow (Score:3, Funny)
Re:wow (Score:3, Funny)
Electricity IS Civilization (Score:2, Interesting)
After all. . . (Score:2)
Portable nuke? Cool! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sarcasm aside, "portable" may be stretching it for something that weight 500 metric tons. "Self-contained" would be a better term. Which would be an impressive feat if they can pull it off. Most of our existing reactors require quite a bit of supervision to ensure that they operate within expected tolerances. The safety systems should kick in if anything goes wrong, but the power going out is enough of a problem in of itself. Of course, most of our reactors are pretty old tech, so a self-contained reactor may be possible now. I think it would be kind of cool if every suburb could have one of these things.
Not sure about the whole third-world idea, though. All I can say is, it's better than letting them build their own reactors. At least with these, we'll 100% KNOW if plutonium is missing.
Re:Arrogance (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that has something to do with tenuous world affairs becoming even less stable when more countries have access to nuclear weapons.
Re:Arrogance (Score:5, Insightful)
Europe. Happened in WWII when the rest of the world proved that it couldn't keep from trying to destroy itself. So the Allied powers were given certain rights, and the rest of the world was divided up into little pieces. (Germany, the Middle East, etc.) Our then ally (Russia) then immediately did an about face and became a cold war enemy. They chose to begin taking over the various countries through use of their "Communist ideals".
They then proceeded to sap up all the countries that we hadn't broken into tiny pieces, in an effort to gain more world power. The remaining European allies lacked the necessary GDP to defend against any war that Russia might start, so it was left up to the US to be the "good guys". Don't like it? Too bad. Build your own damn supercarriers, neutron bombs, and space lasers instead of sitting on your thumbs.
As for countries like Iran, Hussein's Iraq, Pakistan, etc, they were broken up for a reason. Very simply: we can't trust them as far as we can kick them. September 11 only proves that. It doesn't stop us from being friendly and trying to help these countries out, but you can bet your ass that the US and UN are not looking to allow them nuclear weapons!
You want to stop nuclear proliferation? How about starting with the United States, Israel, England, France, India...
Leave the US and England out of this. Our nuclear weapons are pretty much at the "yeah, we have some" point. A large chunk of our arsenal has been destroyed, and many of their silos abandoned. I'd say leave France out of this too, but they've had dealings with the Middle East that puts them in the spotlight.
Everyone else in the Middle East is looking to point atomic weapons at each other. Why? None of their excuses make sense to us, so we just try to keep them from lobbing any of those nukes at us or any of our allies.
Re:Arrogance (Score:5, Interesting)
Odd. You don't mention either of the two countries that actually had anything to do with September 11: Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
Re:Arrogance (Score:5, Insightful)
Much of the animosity we see towards the US is because we are meddling in other affairs under the premise that it is for their good while it is actually for our (the USA's) own good or profit, and when we no longer see an profitable or nice political reason to be there we leave the area to fester (see Afghanistan, actually looks like we are ramping up to do nothing again and let rise more problems).
The USA has done many great things, but we are not infallible:we are very arrogant and can be quite greedy.
Pragmatism (Score:5, Insightful)
Why, pray tell, should the United States and the current nuclear club be the only countries to develop nuclear power?
How about because most of the nations outside of the club have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The US through the UN is only trying to hold them to what they have agreed too. If a country wants to withdraw from the treaty, they can. Look at North Korea. But they also become a pariah nation, and are subject to attack by nations whose security is threatened. Iran is headed down the same road. It is not fair or egalitarian for the countries without nukes. But it is stable.
Sounds familiar... (Score:5, Informative)
Mini nuclear reactor could power apartment blocks [newscientist.com]
With that said, I don't know how similar these two technologies are. But, smaller reactors seem to be an active area of research.
Re:Sounds familiar... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sounds familiar... (Score:3, Informative)
Little blurb on little reactors around the world. [uic.com.au]
Similarity to "porta potty" (Score:2)
But if it gets smashed, there's a hell of a mess to clean up.
Now my nuclear reactor is obsolete (Score:2)
As a former nuclear navy reactor operator (Score:5, Interesting)
So I think that is a good proof of concept for portable nuke power plants.
With the right type of manufacturing technology, one can make the fissionable material very hard to get at.
I fully support much more use of nuclear power everywhere in the world.
Re:As a former nuclear navy reactor operator (Score:3, Funny)
That's pretty funny. You know enough to know that you probably don't know everything you think you know, but don't want us to know that.
"I can tell you that...."
See! He's on the inside. He's a former nuclear operator with the Navy (so am I, btw). I can tell you that they don't tell us everything. There was a funny myth circulating at the Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando when I went thriou
glakes/Orlando/Ballston spa 1975-77 (Score:3, Informative)
My website url above gives some of my thoughts about the nuke boats.
Re:As a former nuclear navy reactor operator (Score:3, Informative)
USS Thresher and USS Scorpion were lost at sea. USS Guitarro sank alongside a pier during construction for reasons that can only be described as Really Dumb, but was refloated and repaired.
No US subs have been lost since the 1970s, though.
Will it be a USB plug and pray reactor? (Score:2)
(1) is it going to be safe similar to the claims of ? [pbmr.com]
(2). If at any point (including) end of life, some unsavory party can break into the reactor and steal the plutonium. Even if there are alarms, the thief would be long gone before the autorities could arrive (if it is not the government themselfs doing this).
This could be a good thing (Score:2)
We need to resume the serious development and deployment of fossil-fuel alternatives. I just wish somebody would create a commercial Energy Amplifier reactor [wikipedia.org] so we could use Thorium as an energy source and move away from enriched uranium, which is energy and environmentally costly to mine, refine, and dispose of.
Mars (Score:3, Interesting)
Ultimate UPS (Score:3, Funny)
Wonder if it has a sticker on the side that says: WARNING DO NOT DISPOSE IN TRASH.
We've been seeing a lot of this "safe" nukes stuff (Score:5, Informative)
This is a very serious accounting issue and a firm that tries to play this kind of accounting game deserves to be busted for fraud.
Re:We've been seeing a lot of this "safe" nukes st (Score:3, Funny)
Re:We've been seeing a lot of this "safe" nukes st (Score:4, Insightful)
You want rid of the spent fuel? Grind it up fine, mix it with coal, and it will blend in with the ash from a coal-fired power plant. Per megawatt-hour, coal plants put more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear plants produce.
Re:Concentration relevant- not background radiatio (Score:3, Insightful)
So much for $2/gallon gas (Score:3, Interesting)
Um, no. (Score:3, Informative)
The 250hp engine in my truck weighs about 450lbs. Thats 186,425 watts, or
I'm not sure why the post was moderated as Interesting, since I assume it was a joke, but a lot of people don't realize a modern car engine puts out a hundred or more kilowatts peak.
Re:Um, no. (Score:3, Insightful)
I want to see you stop a 200ton vehicle driving 70mph.
Whoah boy, watch out with that inertia, will ya ?
Great solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Add to this a good wireless communications hub that would provide voice and data and you can quickly restores some semblence of normal life to a post-war environment.
Now if they can get a water solution such as desalination or filtering then we would in great shape.
Breed Plutonium? Steam? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't believe that anything having to do with steam will survive 30 years without maintenance. Corrosion happens when you have water. High-pressure helium (or other unreactive noble gas) is a safer cooling solution.
Also this whole breeding plutonium thing is real proliferation risk. The article says the reactor is "tamper resistant," but I don't see why someone couldn't bore through the side of the thing and take out the fuel rods. I think a non-breeding solution would be safer.
The biggest issue with the "pebble bed" concept is the physical removal and addition of the pebbles, which is requires too many moving parts to be sealed.
Certainly you could work out some sealed solution to a long-term pebble bed only having a part of the core fissioning at any point, using some sort of neutron absorbing rods or liquid.
Steam? Well... (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps your confused about how the primary loop-the water that comes into contact with the fuel elements-works. That water is under pressure, and does not turn into steam. There is a secondary loop, which passes through a heat exchanger with the primary loop, and it is this secondary loop that is converted to steam to turn the turbine. The secondary loop is not radioactive.
Pebble-bed reactors are promising because they have a potential to solve a lot of the problems that a PWR reactor has. But both reactors require steam.
Re:Steam? Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Steam? Well... (Score:3, Informative)
Nope, high pressure gas turbines work fine [uic.com.au]:
JAERI is developing the Gas Turbine High Temperature Reactor (GTHTR) of up to 600 MW thermal per module. It uses improved HTTR fuel elements with 14% enriched uranium achieving high burn-up (112 GWd/t). Helium at 850C drives a horizontal turbine at 47% efficiency to produce up to 300 MWe. The core consists of 90 hexagonal fuel columns 8 metres high arranged in a ring, with reflectors. Each column consists of eigh
Re:Steam? Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading the article [pbmr.com] linked to from /. story about pebble bed reactors would show you that the turbines are driven by helium in the primary loop. There is no secondary loop. Water can be used as precooling before the helium is recompressed, but water or steam is not required.
Some issues (Score:4, Insightful)
Does the unit make electricity or just steam? Does it contain any computers? What are the odds of needing a software upgrade sometime in the next 30 years? If there's a path for software updates, could someone write a malicious control software that causes a meltdown or something?
If the US is smart, they'll incorporate some kind of cryptographic leash into this thing. It could require monthly "operating licenses" from the US to continue functioning.
I didn't understand how the unit protects against extraction of plutonium. The article mentions a "thicket of alarms", but what happens when the alarms go off? You have to assume the local government wants to extract the plutonium. Maybe a shaped charge blows the reactor core to smithereens if the housing is penetrated. That would frustrate (or rather kill) would-be bomb makers, but create an environmental disaster around the reactor.
The ultimate hardware hack (Score:3, Informative)
If a seemingly "unupgradable" and unassuming iMac can be overclocked, then the cask can be broken.
If a supposedly "rock-solid" DRM can be defeated by depressing the shift key, then the alarms can be neutralized.
If the entire east coast of North America's power can be shut off by a single local power outage, then the coolant can be blocked.
Why deploy these in "other countries" (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet the plants we do have, 103 of them in 31 states, produce 20% of our electricity requirements.
At Chernobyl, in the worst possible nuclear accident, in the worst possible place, with the worst possible safegauards, staffing, and reaction to the crisis:
31 people died (most of them heroically) on site at the time of the accident
after all this time, only 10 deaths from thyroid cancer can be attributed to this accident.
We should be producing these port-a-nukes and putting them 2500 feet underground with wires sticking out every 500sq miles in this country!
Or we could wait till gas hits 5 dollars per gallon like in Europe.
I bet if we had over 100% electrical capacity covered by non-oil, non-coal fired power plants, all of our lives would be better.
And our Middle East foreign policy would be greatly improved if they didn't have anything we wanted. Things aren't going well at the negotiating table? Screw house of Saud and walk away.
In that context, what Middle Eastern country would want to be a "state sponsor of terroism."
We shouldn't be giving this stuff away to countries until all of our needs are met here. At best, they will only hate us slightly less for patronizing them.
Are we somehow obligated to prop up their governmental "bad ideas" while we fail to deal with our own? Why, cause we have money? Tell Bill Gates that he is required to buy lemonade from my kid because, relative to him, my family is "disadvantged." AND he should do it till he is poor and I am not.
Mod me troll, I am still right.
I hope (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the pebble bed model wpould be safer, and lend itself less to the recycling of spent fuel rods into weapons grade isotopes, since the actual radioactive material is sealed inside a ball of some rediculosly hard metal i cant think of off the top of my head.
Word is... (Score:3, Funny)
Didn't Russia do something similar? (Score:3, Interesting)
If I recall right, the intention was to provide light (from a shoreline) for ships or to provide heat to stranded sailors in the wilderness, or something similar.
Unfortunately, the article I read this in was an article looking at how terrorists were/are able to readily find radioactive material throughout the world, but particularly in Russia.
These things were spread around during the cold war, and then forgot about after the fall of communism. Russia is now playing a "catch-up" game of having to locate and retrieve all these little powerplants, and at the time of this article, they were unable to locate several of them, and of the ones they'd found, several were missing the "vital pieces".
Similarly, of the ones that they had found, some had been tampered with, some had simply been broken open, probably by nature (with the contents located generally near the remains), and some were a little scarier: Some had been found by unsuspecting people in the area (local residents, hunters, etc), and these people of course became very ill, and in many cases passed away as a result of finding a cracked open, and mysterious case.
One that sticks with me was a guy talking about how he had found this unusual rod laying on the ground, with all the snow around it melted. He took it home to his family as an oddity...
Long story short, I think nuclear power is safe, when handled correctly, and safety is the #1 priority. I have problems believing that portable nuclear devices are held to the same high standards for safety. You simply can't guarantee that a device that's left alone, will always be left alone.
I'm melting!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
The US has not properly disposed of one ounce of high level nuclear reactor waste ever. We are storing it until a safe disposal facility is built. There are a lot of politics surrounding that with Nevada being the loser. Yucca mountain is really far from complete and may never be finished if the opponents win when they have their day in court.
If the US can not properly dispose of the waste, how can we expect a developing nation to do so?
The US has had Three Mile Island and Russia has had Chernobyl. Both of these countries have significant resources to bring to bear against the problem but have suffered the consiquences of accidents. How could Hati, Trinidad, or some other less sophisticated, resource poor nation deal? The answer is pretty obvious. If something goes wrong, they couldn't. And we probably couldn't get there in time.
Chernobyl was designed to be "accident proof" if anything went wrong, the pile would quench itself.
Three Mile Island was designed with multiple redundant safety systems and was manned by skilled engineers around the clock.
Can we really believe that these machines are so well engineered that they can withstand thirty years of use without an accident?
Portable Naquada Reactors (Score:3)
Looks like the government has been watching Stargate SG-1!!!
(except we don't have naquada yet, so we're forced to use nuclear until we figure out how to use the stargate)
nuke kiddies (Score:3, Interesting)
And now a word from Captain Obvious... (Score:4, Insightful)
When I learned about the reactors aboard submarines, how they're built and how they're run my next thought was that we should make civilian power plants the same way. I'm not exactly a cheerleader for the Navy but, from what I've seen, I do think that they are a good example of how to run a nuclear power program.
Small, standardized, modular, portable, self-contained plants that could be added easily to a power grid, refueled at one central location and disposed of in its own container seem to be the most obvious sway to proceed with nuclear energy. Yes, the front end cost may be higher but in the long run, its a better way to go.
Re:And now a word from Captain Obvious... (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, there is one advantage that subs have, but that land-based units would not have. The ultimate failsafe: the Frame 57 Explosive Bolts. I imagine 688s had them too, I
Re:Location, location (Score:3, Informative)
Re:wearable device (Score:4, Funny)