MIT Designs Tsunami Proof Floating Nuclear Reactor 218
First time accepted submitter Amtrak (2430376) writes "MIT has created designs for a nuclear plant that would avoid the downfall of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The new design calls for the nuclear plant to be placed on a floating platform modeled after the platforms used for offshore oil drilling. A floating platform several miles offshore, moored in about 100 meters of water, would be unaffected by the motions of a tsunami; earthquakes would have no direct effect at all. Meanwhile, the biggest issue that faces most nuclear plants under emergency conditions — overheating and potential meltdown, as happened at Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island — would be virtually impossible at sea."
We have them already. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Those are tiny next to land based nuke plants.
Re:We have them already. (Score:5, Interesting)
More to it than that. The overwhelming majority of the power for a nuclear sub/icebreaker/etc is used to make the props go roundy-roundy.
Only a very small part of that power goes to drive the generators (note that nuclear powered ships/subs HAVE been used to provide emergency power to shore installations, by the by).
And since the generators are sized for the amount of power needed by the boat/ship, you can't just push more steam through them to get more power.
Re:We have them already. (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, it's a reasonable proof-of-concept in many ways. Scaling it up and using a tethered platform instead of a mobile isn't a trivial engineering exercise, but we already know how to produce multi-GW nuclear plants. This gives us a good, safe place to put them. It also means they don't have to go sucking up precious river water for their heat exchangers and cooling towers; the ocean is as big a heat sink as we could hope for on Earth.
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Those also sink. As do oil drilling platforms. Sure the tsunami or earthquake won't destroy them but that doesn't necessarily make them safer than if they were on land.
Those also sink (Score:2)
Subs are designed to sink.
Its part of their mission.
There was a british nuclear sub involved in the search for MH370
I don't know if its still on the case, given that no more pings have been heard, and they expect the batteries of the black boxes to have run out by now. A nuclear attack sub has good passive sonar, great for detecting other sound, but not useful at looking at the ocean bottom for wreakage.
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Don't be a dolt. Submarines are designed to dive, not sink. Sinking is, more or less, a one-way trip, whereas diving is reversible. If subs sink, they and their entire crew are lost.
Since you've never been in a submarine (your post makes that obvious), I'll bet you've at least seen a movie or two with a submarine in it. When it's time for the boat to go under the water, the captain says "Diving Stations!" "Make ready to dive!" or simply "Dive
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? (Score:5, Informative)
It's perfect! Unsinkable? Unthinkable!
No Homer will ever be allowed, and all the regulators will be objective and unbowed!
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No Homers but we can still have one.
Can't wait for nuclear sharknado to come out
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It's perfect! Unsinkable? Unthinkable!
No Homer will ever be allowed, and all the regulators will be objective and unbowed!
Plus its SO much easier to deal with disasters at sea [al.com] and we have such a good track record in doing so.
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Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
Objects floating in the ocean are EXPOSED, they are easily damaged by weather, can be attacked easily, are hard to secure, and VERY expensive to operate.
On top of all this the article is silly. Nobody at MIT has 'designed' a reactor, they just made a proposal that is barely more than just saying "build it on an oil rig!" with a few pictures. They talk about reactors anywhere from 50MW up to 1000MW which means basically "Gosh, you could float almost any nuclear reactor!". However it is not AT ALL clear that a 1,000 MW reactor would be made safe by passive seawater cooling in the event of say the whole thing sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Consider the effects of Fukushima COMBINED with the McCondo well blow-out... Its not a pretty picture to imagine a meltdown in 100 meters of water not too far offshore. Yes, the ocean would probably make this less totally disasterous than on land, but it might also be IMPOSSIBLE to quell or clean up. Statements on the lines of "it must be safe in the ocean" are exactly what goeth before a fall in engineering.
Anyway, it will seriously have to be studied, though I suspect others have done so already. As they said, the Russians have been working on this concept for years. That's one of the interesting things about it though, working on it for years, but where's the beef? Its probably not quite so easy as it sounds.
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Titanic ran into an iceberg, the iceberg didn't chase after the Titanic. There hasn't been any record of icebergs coming into port and sinking ships.
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No current designs being manufactured address the problems that affected Fukushima. Okay, you have a limited amount of passive cooling, but eventually you still need power. Worse still the passive coming is only rated for earthquakes orders of magnitude smaller than the Tohoku one. Confusion on the ground can still lead to the same kinds of mistake, like closing the wrong valve or not venting hydrogen properly.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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> Fukushima Daiichi comes close to a "man-made disaster".
Not close, entirely. Every one of those reactors could have been safely shut down except for man-made decisions that added to the problems.
Reactor 1, for instance, would almost certainly not have melted down if the isolation condenser had been turned on and left on through the entire event. But the operators started second guessing themselves, and turned it off thinking it was out of water. Not that running out of water was a bad thing, you see the
There is a bigger problem (Score:2)
The bigger problem is that ALL REACTORS ARE RUN BY HUMANS and the track record for their response to major disasters is not great. Sometimes people do the right thing, in fact most of the time, but many opportunities exist for disaster, and a statistically significant amount of the time responses fail. Furthermore there will always be greedy and unmotivated operators cutting costs like TEPCO. I have no reason to believe that Entergy for instance (a major US operator of nuclear power plants) is any better th
Should or maybe not (Score:2)
I actually like the concept a lot. But I agree that there is some potential for fallout here:
Having a replacement for Fukushima is one thing, but a world of these going wrong could be a real problem. A majority of the world's oxygen comes from phytoplankton in the ocean: killing them in mass via radioactive leaks might actually create a credible climate disaster.
Not likely that all of the world's reactors would start spilling simultaneously, but the only thing about this that gives me pause. Otherwise, t
nice (Score:3)
then a huge rogue wave hits it. aw shiiiiiiiiiiit
One Word: Hurricanes (Score:2)
While it might be moored out at sea, it would have to be built in a much different way to avoid the possible dangers from a hurricane tipping it over or making it unstable.
Does the name 'Titanic' ring any bells? (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, it might save a couple hundred square miles of land from being contaminated - but contaminating thousands of square miles of ocean doesn't seem preferable to me.
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We can make unsinkable objects. The problems with the Titanic were mostly because the designers were incapable of modeling the behavior correctly because they had no computers and human calculations powering a finite element method is expensive to say the least. It had been done for at least one project, the Afsluitdijk in the Netherlands, but against extreme cost.
Nowadays we have computers that can model such a problem with an accuracy those designers could only dream of.
Also, we learned that watertight bu
Hey, I've got an even crazier idea . . . (Score:2)
Just spitballing here. Feel free to flame away and tell me all the reasons why this can't ever be made to work. IANANE.
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subsurface water carries the contamination away, contaminating water supplies forever and at an ever increasing distance. yucca mountain was one of the rare places where that was not true.
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Damnit, you're right. Oh well.
No, the AC is wrong. Yucca mountain has ground water issues that affect the storage of the material. CSIRO research showed that groundwater issues are mitigated by granite storage which can capture the isotope in its structure. DOE itself called for 'defence in depth' and it's own report judged Yucca to be unsuitable as groundwater penetrated the facility in as little as 50 years.
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How about we build nuclear reactors underground? The thing may get buried, but even that should help to contain rather than spread the contamination.
Just spitballing here. Feel free to flame away and tell me all the reasons why this can't ever be made to work. IANANE.
It's not that crazy. A lot of the new small reactor designs call for burying them.
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How about we build nuclear reactors underground? The thing may get buried, but even that should help to contain rather than spread the contamination.
Just spitballing here. Feel free to flame away and tell me all the reasons why this can't ever be made to work. IANANE.
This was one of the main recommendations (amongst 30 or so) from a Nuclear industry panel (Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy, Northern States Power and Commonwealth Edison) commissioned by the NRC. These should have been included in standardised Nuclear power station designs like the AP-1000, however they made the plants more expensive.
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How about we use the nuclear reactor that is already undergound (in the center of the earth.) That natural reactor has kept the mGM molten for more than 6 bi;;ion years, we are not going top run out of that energy any time soon.
NIMBO! (Score:4, Funny)
Not in my back ocean!
If I was this plant's GM, I'd strut around saying: (Score:2)
Really, Mr Bond?
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With 2 tails, just to mess with the environmentalists.
Virtually impossible (Score:2)
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and we can one so bad it an China Syndrome
TMI (Score:2)
we've solved the over heaqting issue (Score:2)
with modern design.
What about the issue of getting the electricity to shore.
Remember, when these reactors were design. plate tectonics was new.
Couple problems (Score:5, Informative)
Simply being at sea doesn't prevent the cooling problem. Remember, Fukushima was right on the ocean. The problem is that the cooling system has to have at least two loops. An internal loop of coolant (usually water, though salt has also been used) actually travels inside the reactor. Consequently it picks up some residual radioactivity from being exposed to all those neutrons flying around. You cannot just use this single loop for cooling, or else you're releasing this radioactive coolant into the environment.
A second external loop of coolant cools the internal loop via a heat exchanger. This external loop picks up nowhere near as much radioactivity, and the coolant (water) is safe to dump back into the environment.
If it were just one loop, you could come up with a clever design using thermal expansion to make the water flow through it to provide passive cooling in the event of a pump failure. But with two loops (and the inner loop being closed), you're pretty much reliant on active pumping to remove heat from the reactor core. The problem at Fukushima was that power to these pumps failed, and backup generators designed specifically to supply power in that scenario were flooded and their fuel source contaminated.
I don't see how putting the plant on a floating platform helps in this scenario, unless you're willing to open up the primary cooling loop to the environment and just dump water straight into the reactor (with the resulting steam carrying both heat and radioactivity out). Which was pretty much what they ended up doing at Fukushima. If they'd done it before the cladding on the fuel rods melted, we'd only be dealing with a small amount of radioactive water (deuterium, tritium, etc) being released into the environment as steam, instead of fission byproducts being directly released. So I don't see how being by vs on the ocean makes any difference for this scenario.
Maybe you could design the steel containment sphere to act as a heat sink, allowing sufficient cooling when submerged? But the containment's primary job is to contain what happens inside. That's why it's a sphere - it encloses the largest volume for the least amount of material and surface area, and its mechanical behavior under stress are very easy to predict. This is precisely the opposite of what you want from a heat sink. You want the most surface area for a given enclosed volume. Which makes me suspect that the steel containment could only operate as a heat sink if you're willing to compromise its protective strength somewhat.
The other problem I see is that putting it out at sea hinders accessibility. Meaning more mundane events like a fire, which are trivial to handle on land, become much more problematic at sea.
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Well, duh, anyone with a sim can see that. (Score:2)
Everything I need to know about energy logistics I learned from Sim City 2000.
You put the plants / reactors away from the city, out in the water, so that pollution doesn't bother folks and if there's an explosion, nothing else catches on fire. The cost of maintaining the power lines is far less than additional rebuilding costs after a disaster strikes and the plant blows. I guess next they'll discover it's fucking egregiously foolish to zone schools and residential next to industrial plants. [wikipedia.org] In this case
Barnacles, etc.? (Score:2)
Considering how badly infested stationary ocean objects can become with various types of sea life, and how much maintenance it takes to keep a small sailboat from corroding and suffering general mechanical failures due to both of the above, I wonder at the amount of maintenance required to keep one of these in operation.
Floating Nuclear Reactor (Score:2)
What could possibly go wrong?
http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/24/... [cnn.com]
Rat-infested nuclear Cherynobyl.
Rock From Outer Space (Score:2)
So what about Tsunamis? What if a giant rock or snowball from outerspace hits it at upwards of 17000 miles per hour?
Better not worry too much, just chill out to some smooth, rolling basslines from the 1970s [youtube.com], man.
I think it's going ro be a long, long time...
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Indeed. There hasn't been a single death attributable to the Fukashima meltdown, and thousands were killed by the Tsunami, yet somehow some people still think that the reactor is the big problem...
If Fuckupshima had not been designed by idiots... (Score:4, Insightful)
Like, say, placing the emergency generators on the hills right next to it, nothing bad would have happened. Of if they had spend the extra $100.000 that would have cost for hydrogen valves, the buildings would not have exploded.
The problem is not that nuclear cannot be made safe. The problem is that the people doing nuclear cannot make it safe. And as these are also the people doing waste storage, this will remain a serious issue for the next, say, 1 million years or so. The combination of greed and stupidity found in nuclear planners is absolutely staggering.
It became a magnet for the greedy (Score:2)
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Why? (Score:2)
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Prototype to be built ... (Score:2)
Research news now hitting senationalism (Score:2)
"would be virtually impossible at sea."
Ah, use of those famous last words I see......
Safe behind the deepwater horizon? (Score:2)
Putting something out at sea and sacrificing containment for the sake of reliable cooling water seems to be ignoring that there is more than one possible mode of failure. It also means that the thing can never be mothballed but instead needs to be actively dismantled at the end of it's life - not a trivial task when there would be a great deal of radiation involved in many parts being demolished.
However wh
Floating Reactors could be mobile (Score:2)
Chernobyl was not a meltdown (Score:2)
Chernobyl would not have been prevented by putting the reactor in water. It was the only accident which had a "nuclear power excursion" as the reason. TMI and Fukushima were a failure of the classical cooling.
In Chernobyl the operators ignored the normal precautions. They operated the fuel in a state where xenon (see http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g... [gsu.edu]) was present. Due to this the system was far away from the assumed stable oprtion point assumed in the controls.
The power which you would have needed to dissi
This is a new idea? (Score:2)
Back in the 1970s, General Electric created a company called Offshore Power Systems that was intended to build floating nuclear plants. I knew some of the people who worked there.
No such plants were ever built, though, and OPS is long gone.
Corrosion headaches (Score:2)
Using seawater in the secondary cooling loop makes maintaining the cooling system a nightmare because seawater's rather corrosive.
Re:Step 2. (Score:5, Insightful)
Convince the career politicians. Step 3. Convince the tax payers. There is no step 4.
Convincing the taxpayers gets rather easy when it is career politicians ensuring alternative (or traditional) fuel costs continue to rise by placating lobbyists. They sure as hell aren't getting cheaper over time as resources continue to be depleted and we refuse (for whatever illogical or corrupt reason) to accept nuclear power in its place.
wonder bout... (Score:2, Troll)
Rouge waves, typhoons, collisions with tankers, vulnerability to warships, aircraft, submarines.
But hey. It's cool that a tsunami won't screw it up.
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Rouge waves, typhoons, collisions with tankers, vulnerability to warships, aircraft, submarines.
But hey. It's cool that a tsunami won't screw it up.
Wouldn't it be better on the sea bed? Also tsunami-proof...but also rogue-wave, aircraft and tanker proof.
Even better. Don't build any more reactors than can go into meltdown.
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Even better, situate it just a bit deeper and allow that pressure differential to assist in moving fresh coolant into the reactor.
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Rouge waves
I don't think Aunt Flo is a significant danger for nuclear power plants.
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I think the point is that off-shore platforms don't sink when the weather changes, tsunami or not.
Neither do the onshore ones...
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I can make a computer hack proof. It has to be feasible and usable too. Besides, it's not like oil rigs sink or anything...
Re:Step 2. (Score:5, Informative)
This is why we need to switch to LFTRs [youtube.com]
No pressure vessel to worry about.
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melt downs like Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island — would be virtually impossible at sea."
And the Titanic was an unsinkable ship.
Fundamental inescapable facts:
(1) Anything fragile can break, no matter how many backup systems and safeties you install, because
(2) Everything that can fail will eventually fail, and,
(3) When you have multiple things that can fail, eventually, they will all fail at the same time or the least opportune moment, and
(4) At sea, there is no such thing as
Re:Step 2. (Score:5, Informative)
We already have very advanced containment systems. There's nothing about them that would be unsuitable for oceanic use, aside from requiring a whole lot of floatation. The containment system at Fukushima wasn't even close to modern, yet it did a pretty good job anyhow. Hell, the system at Three Mile Island contained nearly all the radioactive material, and that was 35 years ago.
With even the Mark 1 containment building found at Fukushima (which was 40 years old; the same age as TMI), an incident like Chernobyl (which had *no* containment building) wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Compared to modern containment buildings though, Mark 1 isn't even *last* generation; it's outright obsolete.
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The containment system at Fukushima wasn't even close to modern, yet it did a pretty good job anyhow.
Are we talking about the same Fukushima where one core is still missing and radioactive seawater is believed to be flowing out of the site on an ongoing basis?
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The containment system at Fukushima wasn't even close to modern, yet it did a pretty good job anyhow.
Are we talking about the same Fukushima where one core is still missing and radioactive seawater is believed to be flowing out of the site on an ongoing basis?
Missing core? Please cite your source.
Honestly, I think you've been drinking the anti-nuke koolaid that the scaremongers have been doling out.
Re:Step 2. (Score:4, Insightful)
People are so terrified of previous generation nuclear technology that they're not willing to even look at what an actual modern reactor would offer. It's like dragging up the combat specs of a Sopwith Camel and claiming that there's no place for aircraft in modern warfare.
Re:Step 2. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Step 2. (Score:5, Interesting)
Make them finance the decommissioning at build time. I believe they did this in the 70s with Vermont Yankee, though clearly they screwed up. Presumably we can do better with the actuarial stuff now that some of these older plants are shutting down.
The main problem is that no one can justify building one right now. Hell, it is hard to justify the _operation_ of one. Natural gas is cheap, and even coal plants are shutting down because they cannot compete.
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Make them finance the decommissioning at build time. I believe they did this in the 70s with Vermont Yankee, though clearly they screwed up. Presumably we can do better with the actuarial stuff now that some of these older plants are shutting down.
The main problem is that no one can justify building one right now. Hell, it is hard to justify the _operation_ of one. Natural gas is cheap, and even coal plants are shutting down because they cannot compete.
As far as I know, it's been standard procedure in the US for decades. From what I'm told, though the costs have gone up due to bureaucratic and political interference, (adding extra things to do, forcing the use of particular *relatively expensive* contractors, methods & procedures all of which was of rather spurious benefit to the wider world) the amount of money in the pots has stayed mostly at the original levels.
Gas is cheap for now. There was a glut which will vanish when demand grows again due
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Or, instead of spouting off in ignorance, you could read the article.
"Meanwhile, the biggest issue that faces most nuclear plants under emergency conditions â" overheating and potential meltdown, as happened at Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island â" would be virtually impossible at sea, Buongiorno says: âoeItâ(TM)s very close to the ocean, which is essentially an infinite heat sink, so itâ(TM)s possible to do cooling passively, with no intervention. The reactor containment i
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When it comes to nuclear power, we can't afford to think in terms of probability. We have to think in terms of possibility. There will always be unacceptable consequ
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I'm just picturing what happens when you mix the best parts of Deepwater Horizon with the best parts of Fukushima... It doesn't conjure a great image. This would definitely face an uphill PR battle, at the very least.
Re:Waste? (Score:4, Interesting)
You missed it. Reprocessing.
Re:Waste? (Score:5, Informative)
We could stop wasting the fuel you call waste, and using it completely instead. What we do now is like bringing in oil, burning off the diesel and ignoring the gasoline, kerosene, and all the other fuels it contains.
http://www.nei.org/Issues-Poli... [nei.org]
On the other hand, thorium reactors are even more efficient, and the leftover is nearly inert.
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It's called "reprocessing".
"Spent" nuclear fuel can be reused many, many MANY times if it is reprocessed properly.
At that point, spent fuel "waste" becomes a non-issue.
Except that it's not been done. When Dixie Lee Ray was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission he proclaimed that the disposal of nuclear fuel would be “the greatest non-problem in history” and would be accomplished by 1985, yet here we are almost thirty years past that date and still there is no High level waste disposal site anywhere. The closest anyone has come is the Swiss and even there project is a multi-decade test project and extremely expensive.
As for burner reactor technology, such
Re:Waste? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Really? You actually prefer this: http://www.google.com/images?q=coal+ash [google.com]
Over this? http://www.google.com/images?q=dry+cask [google.com]
All of the spent fuel ever generated by a nuclear plant for 30+ years, inertly stored in an area smaller than the parking lot.
Re:Waste? (Score:4, Informative)
Reprocessing has not been done because Peanuthead declared it to be illegal. Meanwhile there is no rush to reprocess because new fuels is so cheap from bot mined supply and recycled from Cold War weapons through the Megatons to Megawatts program. While we wait for reprocessing to get cheaper and fuel to get more expensive, there's storage at Yucca Mountain, which is finished and waiting to be opened.
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That's just it. Yucca Mountain was never finished and will never be opened.
It was a pork project and a boondoggle from the word go.
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You're assuming that no Republican will ever be elected again and that Harry Reid will live forever?
Economics is the problem (Score:2)
Reprocessing and breeding are dirty and VERY VERY EXPENSIVE technologies. They will never compete with mining natural uranium out of the ground until most of that uranium is gone, at which point only if we have a LOT of reactors will it even then be worth it. Sadly by that point we will have HAD to get rid of most of the waste we could reprocess since it will simply be insane to keep that much of it around on the off chance we decide to do it. What this means is that ironically it will never be cost-effecti
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Exactly how dirty and expensive is it? The French have been doing it for how long now?
That's why their waste containment facility FOR THEIR WHOLE COUNTRY is a small room with a vaulted floor.
As for "competing with solar and wind".
You're right, they're not going to be competitive.
You know why?
BECAUSE THERE'S NO COMPETITION!
Again, you CANNOT (and I will repeat for emphasis) CANNOT use solar OR wind power as your baseline power source. They aren't dependable sources. Anyone telling you they are is selling n
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Right, it hasn't been done because a bunch of environmentalist morons have forestalled any reasonable measures of fuel reprocessing by invoking the "proliferation" boogeyman.
Yeah. Disposal is a non-starter. And should never have been pursued the way it was. Why? Because NOBODY wants that stuff in their back yard. They don't care HOW safe it is.
But, again, the dueling environmental agendas have basically left the fuel with no place to go. So it basically sits in containment casks out in back parking lo
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How do the Strontium and Cesium go away with reprocessing? Maybe processing removes some useful and some harmless stuff from your waste stash and so you're slightly better off, but I fail to see where the issue of hazardous nuclear waste is actually dealt with.
In fact it's not even clear that reprocessing spent fuel is useful. You get more energy out of fuel, but the fuel is cheap and plentiful (and you need little of it). I'm glad that France is doing it, but just because maybe having that capacity and exp
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How do the Strontium and Cesium go away with reprocessing?
10 seconds of your time would have taken you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... [wikipedia.org] where you would have discovered that methods have been devised to separate them out and thus in large part detoxify the remaining waste (given that we should already be recovering the other useful elements).
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didn't we just spend half a year trying to deal with with a broken oil platform?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]
DH was a failure of a blowout prevention device. This essentially BLASTED the rig off the well, which continued to spew oil.
You're not going to have that sort of problem with a reactor.
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Howso?
Unlike DH, a floating reactor has no hard-line connection to the sea floor that can be snapped the way the well head was.
It's basically soft anchored and just using subsurface water as a monster heatsink.
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They're leaving. And have thanked us for all the fish.
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No they don't.
The shielding on any fission reactor is so massive that a normal torpedo won't hurt it. A nuclear torpedo would, but in that case the area is screwed anyway.
Chances are that even a nuclear bomb isn't going to cause much extra fission in the reactor fuel.
The neutron pulse from it travels at 14000 km/sec. That is way faster than the shockwave that damages the shielding. So the reactor shielding is still there to absorb much of the neutron pulse.
If the neutrons from the bomb are not inducing much
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