Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Ben on May 08, 2023, 01:32:46 PM
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Westinghouse has developed a small nuclear reactor, capable of powering 300,000 homes. This is kinda in 50s scifi territory, where every homeowner has a nuclear reactor. =)
I wonder if gov regulations will let them further develop, and actually implement this? It sure is a heck of a lot smaller than a solar or wind farm that would provide the same capacity.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/us-firm-unveils-game-changing-small-nuclear-reactor
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I've read about a few plans for small reactors but don't know of anyone building anything.
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General Atomics builds small non-power reactors for use around the world for research, medical isotopes, etc. Back in the day Kodak had a small non-power reactor in Rochester, NY. It is about time the small power nukes have come about. Now if the .gov will just let them be free to research and build.
bob
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This isn’t even worth wasting time thinking about. You all know the insane environuts will file lawsuits immediately to stop anything like this.
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Small nuclear reactors have been in service since 1955 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nautilus_(SSN-571) ). 68+ years of technological development and advances should have given us universal neighborhood nuclear power by now.
:mad: :mad:
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Glad someone is still working on this concept. One day we might actually use it.
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This isn’t even worth wasting time thinking about. You all know the insane environuts will file lawsuits immediately to stop anything like this.
This is very true, at least in the USA.
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Most of the environut stuff has grown from Europe, where the USSR bankrolled the heck out of the greenies to oppose nuclear power, with the long-term goal of cornering the market on the power generation...
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This isn’t even worth wasting time thinking about. You all know the insane environuts will file lawsuits immediately to stop anything like this.
Of course, and they'll also sue to stop wind farms, because they might impact swallows or chickadees. And they'll protest solar farms because ___. And they'll protest new hydroelectric because of the fish. And they'll protest tidal electric because of the clams and the lobsters.
In short, they won't be happy until we're back living in the stone age.
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Is small good?
I thought for things like power plants, economies of scale meant that bigger is better. I mean that's how it is for windmills anyway.
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There is a reason the smart aliens don't stop here. They had nuclear and now they are back to windmills? We get the dumb ones that think the cows run the world.
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This is kinda in 50s scifi territory, where every homeowner has a nuclear reactor. =)
Watch a couple of Just Rolled In videos and you wouldn't want 99.9999% of the population anywhere near a nuclear reactor.
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Of course, and they'll also sue to stop wind farms, because they might impact swallows or chickadees. And they'll protest solar farms because ___. And they'll protest new hydroelectric because of the fish. And they'll protest tidal electric because of the clams and the lobsters.
In short, they won't be happy until we're back living in the stone age.
They will be against something then also. It is there nature of their personality.
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I want to see the Thorium and other secondary byproduct reactors get their chance. They don't all have to be plutonium producers.
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Apart from the above all-too-obvious "general disruption tactic" of the Greenies and Reddies...
Small nuclear reactors have been in service since 1955 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nautilus_(SSN-571) ). 68+ years of technological development and advances should have given us universal neighborhood nuclear power by now.
:mad: :mad:
Yeah, I thought we even had atomic power plants in some of the satellites and hyperspace probes. They ran on the heat of decay to power either thermopiles or high-pressure helium Stirling engines. Standard tech.
Not sure why they were unsuitable for home use, but they had to be small and light.
I can see why the development of a small nuclear weapon ("Davy Crockett") was a bit of a challenge, but to just continuously extract heat from atomic reactions was pretty SOP.
So I'm not sure why there's a "buzz" about small reactors. I was also told semi officially back in the seventies that there were lots of pocket nuclear power plants distributed around the country. I won't guarantee the source validity, though.
:cool:
So what gives? Slow news day?
Terry, 230RN
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Is small good?
I thought for things like power plants, economies of scale meant that bigger is better. I mean that's how it is for windmills anyway.
Bigger is more efficient (economies of scale). A network of smaller generators is more robust (redundancy). I kinda like a combination of the two. I am not an expert, and am speaking *very* generally here.
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^ Like. One of our major vulnerabilities here is the centralization of too many critical things. Just think what life would be like if a Tallboy were dropped at the corner of Broad and Wall in Manhattan.
Or in the center of the garment district... why, we wouldn't have any more clothes !
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Apart from the above all-too-obvious "general disruption tactic" of the Greenies and Reddies...
Yeah, I thought we even had atomic power plants in some of the satellites and hyperspace probes. They ran on the heat of decay to power either thermopiles or high-pressure helium Stirling engines. Standard tech.
Not aware of any hyperspace probes... but most satellites that go to Jupiter or farther out in the solar system eschew solar panels for an RTG powerplant. The Mars rovers also had RTG's on board. All of these systems put out less than 500 watts, though. Pretty anemic. Curiosity and Perseverence on Mars can only generate 110 watts of electrical power, on top of about 2000 watts of heat energy. The Voyager RTG's were spec'ed to put out 160 watts but are very old now and putting out far less than that today. New Horizons and its peer satellites are running on 300 watt RTG's.
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Bigger is more efficient (economies of scale). A network of smaller generators is more robust (redundancy). I kinda like a combination of the two. I am not an expert, and am speaking *very* generally here.
Bigger is subjective to some extent. The article mentioned 100 MW or 300 MW power plants. While that is pretty big, you would still need a network of them around the country paired with natural gas or coal to handle fluctuations.
I would love to have something more like one of Heinlein's Shipstones, but it would work.
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Not aware of any hyperspace probes... but most satellites that go to Jupiter or farther out in the solar system eschew solar panels for an RTG powerplant. The Mars rovers also had RTG's on board. All of these systems put out less than 500 Watts, though. Pretty anemic. Curiosity and Perseverence on Mars can only generate 110 Watts of electrical power, on top of about 2000 Watts of heat energy. The Voyager RTG's were spec'ed to put out 160 Watts but are very old now and putting out far less than that today. New Horizons and its peer satellites are running on 300 watt RTG's.
Sorry, meant "interstellar," forgetting that "hyperspace" was a Trek term.
RTF = "Radioisotope thermoelectric generator"
"Curiosity and Perseverence on Mars can only generate 110 Watts of electrical power, on top of about 2000 Watts of heat energy. "
Not clear on what you meant there: Power production was 2000 Watts, but we're only capturing 110 Watts of it? So, 5% efficiency is not bad for something designed to be light and small, rather than efficient, i guess. If that's what you mean.
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Or, you can get a bunch of people together or go solo and try a DIY for the house. ;)
https://allthatsinteresting.com/david-hahn
bob
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Sorry, meant "interstellar," forgetting that "hyperspace" was a Trek term.
RTF = "Radioisotope thermoelectric generator"
"Curiosity and Perseverence on Mars can only generate 110 Watts of electrical power, on top of about 2000 Watts of heat energy. "
Not clear on what you meant there: Power production was 2000 Watts, but we're only capturing 110 Watts of it? So, 5% efficiency is not bad for something designed to be light and small, rather than efficient, i guess. If that's what you mean.
My understanding is they basically produce power with no moving parts. You have the loving soft warm glow of radioactive decay, which you surround with TECs (Thermoelectric Couplers). TECs generate electricity as heat is transferred from one side to the other, but are not very efficient at all. I played with TECs a few years ago when I experimented with building my own custom dimension fermentation cooler, and used TECs to cool refrigerant and expelled the waste heat through radiators and fans. Used a lot of electricity in order to inefficiently move a little bit of heat.
The space implementations just have large radiators on the outside of the TECs rather than liquid cooled passages and pumps like my home very non-space-worthy application. The more heat saturated a TEC gets, the less efficiently it operates. In a thin or nonexistent atmosphere with radiation as your only means of shedding heat, heat sinks are not very efficient and TECs get heat saturated.
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We have opportunity for economy of scale with solar or wind, without doing giant, but strangely photogenic, solar/wind farms...
If they would encourage outfits with lots of roof space (factories/warehouses/retail) to do on-site installs... Plus, we've got a lot of locations that could hook in as microgenerators.
But politicians like BIG things. Like railroads... Fixing a pothole? Not that big... Nuclear and hydro could do a great deal of picking up nighttime/calm slack. But a single windmill, not even all that high-tech, could keep Farmer John's barn running to pump well water, etc...
Back before Mother Earth News went and got off the rails political, they had so many small projects...
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Watch a couple of Just Rolled In videos and you wouldn't want 99.9999% of the population anywhere near a nuclear reactor.
In something very closely related and on-point . . . I suggest you read H. Beam Piper's story, Day of the Moron. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18949/18949-h/18949-h.htm
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We have opportunity for economy of scale with solar or wind, without doing giant, but strangely photogenic, solar/wind farms...
I have always said that solar works best as distributed energy. As long as it's not through force of government, solar roofs on houses, using an existing footprint, make a ton of sense.
If the usual suspects had been pushing that instead of ginormous desert solar farms, with their energy loss through long distribution networks, you could by now probably do solar roofs for the same cost as good quality comp roofs.
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My understanding is they basically produce power with no moving parts. You have the loving soft warm glow of radioactive decay, which you surround with TECs (Thermoelectric Couplers). TECs generate electricity as heat is transferred from one side to the other, but are not very efficient at all. I played with TECs a few years ago when I experimented with building my own custom dimension fermentation cooler, and used TECs to cool refrigerant and expelled the waste heat through radiators and fans. Used a lot of electricity in order to inefficiently move a little bit of heat.
The space implementations just have large radiators on the outside of the TECs rather than liquid cooled passages and pumps like my home very non-space-worthy application. The more heat saturated a TEC gets, the less efficiently it operates. In a thin or nonexistent atmosphere with radiation as your only means of shedding heat, heat sinks are not very efficient and TECs get heat saturated.
I definitely recall, but cannot recover, a description of a spacebound generator which used a Stirling engine with high-pressure helium as a working fluid to turn a generator.
Agree with your description of thermocouples to generate power ("convert energy"), with respect to cooling. When I played with then, I had the same heat dissipation problem. But, as I mentioned, "efficiency" is not the name of the game in this application. Overall weight, longevity, and size, is.
I played with a small office Peltier Effect refrigerator (your TECs, I believe) and found the efficiencey was terrible. Forgot the numbers but many Watts were involved to get the temp down to only about 45°F. The basic problem was heat from the hot side would get back to the cold side, which was trying to extract heat from the inside of the refrigerator.
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I played with a small office Peltier Effect refrigerator (your TECs, I believe) and found the efficiencey was terrible. Forgot the numbers but many Watts were involved to get the temp down to only about 45°F. The basic problem was heat from the hot side would get back to the cold side, which was trying to extract heat from the inside of the refrigerator.
I went quite overkill with my experiment. I had cooling loops running inside the compartment (I was using isopropyl alcohol as refrigerant fluid). They would pass through a pump and into a liquid channeled heat sink on the cold side of the TEC. The hot side of the TEC had a separate pump and piping environment that went to an array of radiators with fans attached to them to speed convection with ambient air and move the heat away from the insulated compartment. I got about a 10 degree temp increase in my hot loop from ambient, and up to about a 40 degree temp decrease in my cold compartment from ambient. It worked for fermentation, but wouldn't be sufficient for proper refrigeration. I could just barely knock at freezing with it running full tilt, pulling about 120 watts. But it effectively acted like a heater in the corner of the house it was in, and I'd estimate that a good 90+% of the power put into it from electricity turned into waste heat.
Those rocket scientists really had their hands full, getting a TEC to not destroy itself with only passive radiative cooling to control its temperature. I went through a stack of TECs (granted they were Chinesium Amazon grade TECs) due to cyclic failure. I always meant to try PWM to throttle the machine, but never got around to it. I was just using a thermostat relay to engage/disengage the circuit once I hit a target temp. TECs don't like being turned on and off a lot.
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I have always said that solar works best as distributed energy. As long as it's not through force of government, solar roofs on houses, using an existing footprint, make a ton of sense.
If the usual suspects had been pushing that instead of ginormous desert solar farms, with their energy loss through long distribution networks, you could by now probably do solar roofs for the same cost as good quality comp roofs.
Energy loss in distribution is pretty minimal. If you can locate the panels somewhere even minutely better (better sun, cheaper land that letd you throw up a couple more panels, etc.) it will be worth it.
It depends what you optimize for, like always. But I don't think rooftop solar is actually efficient compared to solar farms. If the goal is to generate a fraction of our energy by solar, rooftop is maybe a small part of that but would be a terrible way to go about it.
The idea of rooftop solar is to use space that's otherwise available (your roof) and therefore cheap. The problem is nobody's roof is optimized for the angle, so there's a guaranteed steep loss there vs. a dedicated solar farm (50% is not out of the question). Then there's the quality of panels themselves, maintenance of them (dirty panels can easily lose another 50%), and the conversion efficiency of the small homeowner (read:cost-optimized) inverters is probably a tick worse than a grid scale inverter. So it really makes sense only if you are out of cheap land. You can stick solar panels a lot of places that are otherwise worthless for farming, building or anything else. So I don't think rooftop solar really competes with solar farms at all. They make sense if the individual with the panels can make some money off of them, but I think most people who think they are making money off their solar panels are bad at math and accounting. So that leaves the independence effect of generating your own power. If the panels give you some limited grid independence then they don't have to make money...grid independence is worth money all by itself (look at what gensets cost). I know people that have solar+battery setups as a replacement for a standby genset and they seem very good alternative if you have the space for the panels. I've never penciled out net-metering that makes any sense to me though.
In the category of putting panels in otherwise unused space, I'd rather see more solar farms over parking lots. Parking lots are a tragic waste of space. If you could park under the solar panels it would give shaded parking and walking plus basically open up whole fields that we could blanket with solar panels nearby. It might still be more efficient to park them in the desert though. The US southwest is one of the very best places on the planet for solar.