I am interested in hearing your opinions about nuclear power, what you know, if you have any fears, or ideas? Do you know if your country has any nuclear power generation?
I am interested in hearing your opinions about nuclear power, what you know, if you have any fears, or ideas? Do you know if your country has any nuclear power generation?
The nuclear everyone is afraid of was from an era where priorities 1-9 were making plutonium for nukes or justifying massive uranium centrifuge farms for making weapons grade material.
Priority #10 was making safe electricity. It honestly was more of a waste product from making nukes instead of the point of the plant… It’s not a coincidence that nuclear build out matches the cold war era perfectly. Once the cold war ended the US and allies didn’t need more nukes to make weapons with… The priority became stabilizing the Petro dollar, which nuclear helps undermine by decoupling nations from being dependant on USD and US treasuries.
Fast reactors and LFTRs are god awful for nuclear weapons (why they weren’t made beyond pilot plants or a few examples that exist purely to complicate my point) but are some of the safest designs for new gen IV reactors.
Fast reactors literally burn nuclear waste from Gen 2 plants…
Liquid core reactors can be built in two halves—the heat retaining high reactivity core, and the heat dissipating passively safe container you drain into in an emergency through a freeze plug. That plug works as long as gravity doesn’t go away.
Fast reactor waste is safe in 300-500 years, and they can actually be designed to run on existing nuclear waste as fuel. Even the stuff we can’t burn currently that has half lives in the hundreds of thousands of millions of years.
Thorium breeder reactors are the future for long term base load stability I think. Its not the only solution to our energy needs though but it’s a very attractive option.
I agree to this.
And I will add a strategic note. Power on demand is very important as an asset. You can in fact blot out the sun, a volcano eruption of significant magnitude would do that naturally and no amount of storage would be enough. Wind isn’t always available. Strategically and experimentally we need to be able to go “okay now 10x it!” .
It’s too bad we don’t have great ways to get power from waves yet. I am all for spreading out our dependence over multiple sources, but to not have the means when they fail is to rely on diplomacy and even more infrastructure.
I’m curious how far along Rolls Royce is, are any of those smr’s running yet?
Yeah I agree. It is a shame about wave energy too but I think we’ll eventually figure it out. The downside is to get meaningful energy without beating the crap out of your equipment (using giant waves) you end up needing to cover huge areas with wave generators.
Ironically hydro power and nuclear are natural partners when combined with other renewables.
Nuclear covers the base load generation, and hydro trims up the remaining power production to perfectly meet demand and condition power on the grid. When renewables begin over producing the dam can ramp down to its minimum flow to meet its water license, allowing the reservoir to fill.
I think it’s going to be a constellation of solutions to replace our current energy sources. One of the most important I’ve been watching is soapstone thermal batteries. You can massively over build solar and wind if you know there’s a bunch of soapstone thermal batteries to act as demand for it.
During overproduction you turn resistive heaters inside those soapstone batteries on progressively until the grid stabilizes. Germany actually had (has? I’m not sure if they still do it) something like this for water heaters using frequency sensitive relays to help stabilize grid production. If the grid frequency started to climb relay after relay would activate adding more and more heating load to soak up demand to stabilize the grid.
If we did the same for industrial users who currently burn natural gas, or even a thermal battery to provide district heating for towns and cities using cheap overproduced renewables, you can replace a huge amount of natural gas for nuclear, hydro, and renewable peak shaving.