Nuclear power

[freebeard]

Nook-ular ektanoplan:

ARGONAS First Look

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

They don't build them as they once did and we could stick new sensors, instruments and controls in them that were never available when originally built.

An eventually more reliable tech, retrofitted with enhanced safety features, doesn't sound bad.

[redpoint5]

I didn't realize there was an Small Modular Reactor (SMR) product already.

https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/...tems/ap300-smr

Nuclear is clearly gaining momentum as various anti-humanist movements retreat.

I wonder how the electricity landscape would have looked if Chernobyl and Three Mile Island never happened?

[freebeard]

The real inflection point was 1973.

Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. ... his team built a working reactor ... and he spent the rest of his 18-year tenure trying to make thorium the heart of the nation's atomic power effort. He failed. Uranium reactors had already been established, and Hyman Rickover, de facto head of the US nuclear program, wanted the plutonium from uranium-powered nuclear plants to make bombs. Increasingly shunted aside, Weinberg was finally forced out in 1973.[15]

[oil pan 4]

3 mile island proved how safe the light water PWR design is.
A BWR definitely would have blown up.

[freebeard]

How about this?

Incredible Advances In Nuclear Stirling Engines For Space Exploration

The trick seems to be using a Helium vacuum working fluid. They say no moving parts but there is a piston and displacer bouncing on a spring.

While this is NASA aerospce technology, perhaps it would scale down from nuclear to backyard solar.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

3 mile island proved how safe the light water PWR design is.
A BWR definitely would have blown up.

I almost left my mention at Chernobyl considering how much of a nothingburger Three Mile Island was, but it might have been the straw that broke the camel's back. Wasn't around then, but the fact I know about it means it meant something to people then.

We don't make rational decisions, we make emotional decisions, and the magnitude of something has little to do with response.

[oil pan 4]

Chernobyl didn't have a containment dome, so when it went bad loss of containment was guaranteed. It was basically a nuclear reactor in a warehouse.
Nuclear uses the least resources, uses the least land, has the least environmental impact and makes the least CO2 of anything that we can actually build more of.
Ya hydro makes hardly any CO2 but where we going to put it?
Geo thermal is pretty low but to make a geo thermal steam plant starts at 20 million dollars and something like 3/4 projects that start drilling never finish drilling, are abandoned before the hole is finished or are shutdown within 2 years because of toxic corrosive gases in the steam.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Ya hydro makes hardly any CO2

It's often pointed out the raw methane from the organic matter left to decay in the flooded area is much more critical regarding greenhouse-effect than CO². Odd enough, while relocating wildlife is now implemented while a hydroelectric powerplant is under construction in my country, using the timber from the trees which will be left to rot and release methane after the area is flooded is illegal if the trees are from a native species

[oil pan 4]

That's why I said CO2.