Apparently nuclear power is easy to do. 2030 it goes online, just announced today... talk about fast.

[damric]

A tiny experimental research reactor 60+ years ago isn't relevant to the commercial power industry. It's like claiming Benjamin Franklin jolted by a lightning bolt is relevant to the safety of home electrical appliances.


I reckon I might. A graduate degree in physics, along with a decades-ago summer internship at a yellowcake and UF6 manufacturer.


Incorrect. Co-60 is has a *short* half-life, just over 5 years. Arsenic and lead are extremely dangerous to humans also-- yet there's a little of both in every bite of food and drink of water you've taken your entire life. The dose is the key.

The vast majority of Co-60 is produced intentionally (through Co-59 loading) because Co-60's a valuable isotope with many uses. The trace amounts produced in the steel of a reactor is quite small -- about 15 kCuries over the course of an entire 2-year fuel cycle, distributed throughout several thousand tons of steel. Fast-forward 20 years or so, and that amount's decayed to under 1 kCurie. You could sleep on a bed made of that steel without problem.

FYI: several apartment building in Taiwan were accidentally built with Co-60 impregnated steel scavenged from a nuclear reactor. Over the course of 30 years of exposure there, residents had lower rates of cancer than the general population. It's called hormesis.

Either you misread or you simply do not understand. Good for you that you went to summer camp as an intern Tell that to a navy nuke and you will be laughed out of the room.

Co-60 isn't from the steel. It's actually from the pump bearings as they break down. But if you want to sleep on some steel that's been irradiated by thermal neutrons I wish you well in your endeavor.

 

[Endymio]

Either you misread or you simply do not understand. Good for you that you went to summer camp as an intern Tell that to a navy nuke and you will be laughed out of the room.

I don't think the "appeal to authority" path is one you wish to travel. "Navy nukes" are good people, but even the officer graduates of their nuclear program take only a couple years of coursework -- equivalent to an associates degree in engineering. I may be wrong, but I believe the enlisted school's only a few months long, straight out of high school. All those graphs, charts, and tables of figures you reference by rote -- they're calculated by the physicists.

Not that this is germane. The nice thing about facts is that they remain true, whether expressed by a Nobel laureate or a nine-year old child. So let's discuss facts, eh?

Co-60 isn't from the steel. It's actually from the pump bearings as they break down. But if you want to sleep on some steel that's been irradiated by thermal neutrons I wish you well in your endeavor.

And you would be wrong again. The bulk of loose Co-60 detritus is from the stellite hardfacing alloys -- not just from pump bearings, but valve seats, control rod assemblies, etc. But all nickel-rich steels have substantial amounts of cobalt in them, and are thus subject to neutron activation generating Co-60.

Co-60 is an issue for nuclear plant operators. It's small both by volume and by total curies, and decays quickly. It's not a nuclear waste concern for the general public.

 

[joemama]

Now, this design using molten salts would have more irradiated steel due to the coolant being radioactive. However, it is a lot lower intensity than the core itself.

Isn't molten salt itself non-radioactive? I would guess they picked molten salt for better heat exchange efficiencies and less creep concerns due to lower pressure.

 

[the54thvoid]

A few posts getting mildly abrasive. Don't make it personal or you'll get kicked.

 

[Caring1]

Let me know when they get small enough for home use or to power a car.

 

[FoulOnWhite]

I wish britain would invest in nuclear, the whole UK could be powered by them with no reliance on anyone else.

 

[Space Lynx]

I wish britain would invest in nuclear, the whole UK could be powered by them with no reliance on anyone else.

I asked chatgpt, and it says this for the city of Manchester UK

The 700 to 1,000 megawatts (MW) is the **instantaneous power demand**, not a daily consumption figure. It refers to the amount of electricity Manchester might be using at any given moment.

To estimate daily electricity consumption, we need to convert this power demand into energy usage over time. If Manchester were using, for example, 800 MW continuously for 24 hours, the total energy consumption would be:

\[ 800 \, \text{MW} \times 24 \, \text{hours} = 19,200 \, \text{megawatt-hours} \, (\text{MWh}) \]

So, Manchester could consume around **19,200 MWh per day** based on that average power usage. This figure would fluctuate based on real-time demand throughout the day.

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so does this mean you would need 4 of this small nuclear plants that do 500 mega watts each to make sure the city of Manchester is covered? so it would be one power plant, but four small reactors to power it? or am i not understanding something?

 

[mb194dc]

I wish britain would invest in nuclear, the whole UK could be powered by them with no reliance on anyone else.

Hinckley point c? £46bn and takes a decade..+

Good luck to Google, on paper it's a reasonable idea. In practice they may find it's more difficult and expensive.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

Isn't molten salt itself non-radioactive? I would guess they picked molten salt for better heat exchange efficiencies and less creep concerns due to lower pressure.

Not inherently, but when it gets irradiated it produces secondary radiation. It's bad enough that they use a secondary coolant loop of molten salt before they transfer the heat to water.

@Space Lynx that's more or less what it means. Although you would need energy storage for the peak demand/fluctuation. I believe that each plant is 500mw, not each reactor.

 

[Endymio]

Hinckley point c? £46bn and takes a decade..+

Good luck to Google, on paper it's a reasonable idea. In practice they may find it's more difficult and expensive.

In practice, it'd be easier and less expensive. The more reactors you build, the cheaper they get. France used to generate more than 80% of its electricity from nuclear (even today it's over 70%) and had the lowest electric rates in Western Europe (behind only Norway and it's near-limitless hydro), whereas Germany's replacing nuclear power with wind and solar took its electric rates from the bottom 10% to near the top in cost.

If we built autos like we built nuke plants, a Honda Civic would cost $2 million and take several years to build. Each plant is a custom, one-off design, individually spec'd, designed, and receiving individualized regulatory approval. The lure of these small reactors is the hope that a single, standardized design would allow economies of scale to take effect.

The 700 to 1,000 megawatts (MW) is the **instantaneous power demand** ... so does this mean you would need 4 of this small nuclear plants that do 500 mega watts each to make sure the city of Manchester is covered? so it would be one power plant, but four small reactors to power it? or am i not understanding something?

No. Using your figures, it'd require two 500MW plants to meet a 1GW demand. Both figures are instantaneous power output.

However, using figures from the gov.uk website, Manchester consumed 2,376 GWh in 2022. Expressed as power, that's an average of 270MW. Your value is likely thus peak power demand.

 

[A Computer Guy]

Google adopts small nuclear power reactors at unprecedented scale — inks deal for seven reactors to feed AI data centers

Nuclear power startup Kairos Power is its partner.

www.tomshardware.com

Google just signed a deal with nuclear power startup Kairos Power to buy carbon-free electricity, with a 2030 initial delivery target and full deployment by 2035. According to Google’s blog ‘The Keyword’, the tech giant aims to deliver 500MW of “new 24.7 carbon-free power” to the U.S. power grid.

I know they are small reactors, but still. This is impressive. A holistic energy grid is very smart, really surprised government still hasn't done something like this, if a company like Google can.

Here is what I don't understand. We've been putting nuclear reactors in subs for many years. Why reinvent the wheel when we might adapt an existing production process for land use and produce smaller but more localized power stations for greater power grid redundancy?

 

[FoulOnWhite]

So what is the biggest yield single core reactor? Or does it have to be multiple smaller ones like fukishima?

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

Small reactors that can be buried and passively cooled would be amazing.


Building reactors where old coal plants were would be smarter.

I cannot find a link, but about a decade ago I read about the plans to power remote or otherwise difficult to access locations with a large nuclear battery that ran off something whose primary decay was beta and had a half life somewhere around 10 years. The goal would be to bury the sucker, and run for something like 25 years with continuous power. It's a fantastic idea for areas where you can trust the population and you're willing to spend a bit of money because conventional power solutions are either not viable or otherwise prohibitively expensive.


The problems with building new reactors have already been explored here. 5 years won't be enough to cut through the red tape...and once the plant is up and running the problem becomes reprocessing the fuel and storage of effectively "forever dangerous" waste. I won't comment on the politics of it, but the public is still really ignorant about nuclear waste. Case in point, Fukushima released treated water from the reactor and the CCP stated that they were poisoning the ocean. People in China bought that. The truth is that the waste was at or below background levels...and people in China exposed to the water coming from their own reactor waste water were getting much higher radiation exposure... With something that you literally cannot see, but you "know" is a problem there's a lot of...fear that is unfounded. It's what killed off good things like Yucca Mountain permanent waste disposal.

As someone who lives within spitting distance of three power plants, one nuclear included, I am infinitely more frightened of the fly ash from the plant burning coal and natural gas than the nuclear plant. That said, I also recognize that power utilities are run by people, and all morons are people (though not all people are morons), so by the transitive property there are morons running the power plant. I substantiate this joke by acknowledging that despite "being close enough to go borrow a cup of spare electrons" should I need to, twice a year there's 3-4 weeks where I experience regular black-outs because the infrastructure sucks...whereas a cousin 20 minutes closer to the city but using the same power plants has not lost power for more than 30 minutes in the last decade. Do you trust morons with the responsibility of dealing with something that cannot be undone? Remember Google stopped including "don't be evil" as a core value....

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

Naval reactors generally aren't designed to be refuelled, so you would accept a 30 year cap on lifespan - usually closer to 20 years. Which is a problem as the main cost of nuclear is building and tearing down facilities.

Also, they have low efficiencies. Size is more important than efficiency, so they run at around half of the thermal efficiency of a commercial unit.

Finally, they often use higher grades of enrichment, which is a proliferation concern.

Sub reactors are pretty classified in terms of cost but the best estimate I found for the cost difference on similar SSK vs SSN subs (Suffren vs Orka class) is $900M*, and have a power output of 21.5 MW. So around $41m/MW vs around $13m/MW for the Voltge Power Plant reactors (which were WAY over budget).

*Orka is smaller than Suffren, but to offset that is the cost of the Diesel-Electric powerplant. These numbers are very loose, not much info is available publicly.

 

[FoulOnWhite]

Naval reactors generally aren't designed to be refuelled, so you would accept a 30 year cap on lifespan - usually closer to 20 years. Which is a problem as the main cost of nuclear is building and tearing down facilities.

Also, they have low efficiencies. Size is more important than efficiency, so they run at around half of the thermal efficiency of a commercial unit.

Finally, they often use higher grades of enrichment, which is a proliferation concern.

Sub reactors are pretty classified in terms of cost but the best estimate I found for the cost difference on similar SSK vs SSN subs (Suffren vs Orka class) is $900M*, and have a power output of 21.5 MW. So around $41m/MW vs around $13m/MW for the Voltge Power Plant reactors (which were WAY over budget).

*Orka is smaller than Suffren, but to offset that is the cost of the Diesel-Electric powerplant. These numbers are very loose, not much info is available publicly.

Can a sub really use 21.5 MW

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

Can a sub really use 21.5 MW

5300 tons at nearly (or over) 50 km/h underwater takes a fair amount of power.

 

[mechtech]

Wow questions and off topics

from space lynx so home typically use 1kw avg so 1MW can power 1000 homes at typical avg use. Peak probably 5kw with an electric range or clothes dryer.

Industrial use is the biggest consumers. I used to work a metallurgical site and it used about 135MW continuously on avg. So that would work out to 135,000 homes. If there is a family of 4 in each home that’s 540,000 people worth of power used by 1 single site.

Largest reactor vs largest SMR are two different things.

Entire province of Ontario uses about 16,000MW avg continuous for reference.

 

[Endymio]

I read about the plans to power remote or otherwise difficult to access locations with a large nuclear battery that ran off something whose primary decay was beta ... The goal would be to bury the sucker.

If you're going to bury the sucker, then alpha, beta, and even a fair amount of gamma isn't a problem. It's neutron activation that's generally a problem for RTGs. Using beta-decay only radioisotopes, I've seen proposals for nuclear batteries for items as small as a cell phone ... your skin alone will stop the beta decay of Ni-63, for instance.

 

[Steevo]

I'm an old naval PWR guy. It's very old tech but it's proven and safe, provided procedural compliance. I've seen and been involved in some incidents, but even those were contained because of procedures and engineering redundancies.

I browsed your documents. The first one had some incorrect information, as there have been U.S. nuclear power deaths. If you are curious, I'll try and find some unclassified info on that. It's interesting that these small reactors are 500MW, as that's similar to what's on carriers. But wow the nuke plant is pretty much the whole bottom half of the ship. These new ones are tiny which is awesome, but they are unproven as far as safety.

It does bother me how much radioactive waste that commercial fission reactors generate, and it's absolutely stupid to store that stuff on site.

We would be much better off switching to breeder reactors and processing waste back into fuel for them.

 

[damric]

I don't think the "appeal to authority" path is one you wish to travel. "Navy nukes" are good people, but even the officer graduates of their nuclear program take only a couple years of coursework -- equivalent to an associates degree in engineering. I may be wrong, but I believe the enlisted school's only a few months long, straight out of high school. All those graphs, charts, and tables of figures you reference by rote -- they're calculated by the physicists.

Not that this is germane. The nice thing about facts is that they remain true, whether expressed by a Nobel laureate or a nine-year old child. So let's discuss facts, eh?


And you would be wrong again. The bulk of loose Co-60 detritus is from the stellite hardfacing alloys -- not just from pump bearings, but valve seats, control rod assemblies, etc. But all nickel-rich steels have substantial amounts of cobalt in them, and are thus subject to neutron activation generating Co-60.

Co-60 is an issue for nuclear plant operators. It's small both by volume and by total curies, and decays quickly. It's not a nuclear waste concern for the general public.

Sorry I didn't have time to reply and correct you sooner. Been travelling.

Lets get to the facts.

As far as I know, I'm the only actual nuke worker on the forum. Reading about physics and postulating theoriecticals at community college isn't the same as actually having to learn classified reactor physics, shim rods on a real reactor on a daily basis, calculate said rod shims for startups and fast recovery from an emergency scram, ect. Not to mention having to calculate shielding required for maintenance operations inside the reactor compartment, and actually having to pull said equipment apart for maintenance and repair. Yes, some people dream theory, and others live it.

As far as navy nukes. They are the nuclear gods. I understand that's why there is jealousy over the legacy of Rickover as we control all aspects of regulation. Why is that? It's because we have been doing it safely for about three quarters of a century.

Naval nuke officers get the same science degrees as anyone else, but then they have two more years of school at NNPTC, another 6 months qualifiying on a low power training reactor (which is a real reactor plant), then up to two more years to qualify as a plant watch officer. By about 4 years at sea, they are able to take the engineer's exam offered by the department of energy and will become plant engineers over up to two propulsion plants at once. That's a lot of training, and that's why they get the six figure annual bonuses to stay on.

As far as enlisted, the navy nukes are the top 0.01% of the military. The ET nukes are the top 10% of the nukes, and those are the ones that do maintenance on reactor control systems and are also the ones that qualify to stand reactor operator. These are the true gods that change matter into energy. Everyone else on the ship calls them wizards, and rightly so. Yes you can start that journey right out of high school, it can take up to four years of training before a rear admiral allows you to touch those rod and pump controls. Nuclear A, power, and prototype schools were designed by M.I.T. It is the most stressful learning a human can experience.

And if you decide to grace our presence in the plant one day I can show you where the Cobalt-60 comes from, where it accumulates, and how to protect yourself from it. It is the single most dangerous particulate and accounts for nearly all of our radiation exposure when we do maintenance.

Have a nice day.

 

[Endymio]

As far as I know, I'm the only actual nuke worker on the forum. Reading about physics and postulating theoriecticals [sic] at community college isn't the same as actually having to learn classified reactor physics, calculate said rod shims for startups and fast recovery from an emergency scram . if you decide to grace our presence in the plant one day I can show you where the Cobalt-60 comes from, where it accumulates, and how to protect yourself from it. It is the single most dangerous particulate and accounts for nearly all of our radiation exposure when we do maintenance.

You can't classify the laws of physics. Nor are reactor startup/shutdown procedures relevant. no matter how well-memorized.

Co-60 comes from (n, γ) neutron activation of Co-59. It will form wherever Co-59 is in proximity to meaningful neutron flux. It is, in fact, the entire reason that stainless steel used in reactor construction must be certified to a maximum percentage of cobalt content.

By mass, the stellite hardfacings on your rods, bearings, etc are a fraction of the total cobalt in a reactor. But because they're a surface coating, they form the bulk of particulate detritus...which likely explains why you believe they're the "only" source of Co-60. For you plant technicians, they're all you need to be concerned with. Don't drink the CRUD. For the general public, however, Co-60 isn't a concern. Despite your "extremely long half-life" claim, it decays quickly -- which is why not one single civilian in the history of commercial nuclear power has been harmed by the isotope. (I'll exclude former SSR nations from that claim) This is the fact that matters. The chlorine and sulfuric acid used to produce writing paper is quite deadly too ... but I don't worry about that when I pull out a sheet to write a note. If I'm wrong about this, provide evidence to the contrary.

Also, despite the 'thermal neutrons' claim, Co-59's cross section for resonance and higher neutrons is quite high. It's not U-235.

As for the community college comment, my Masters is from one of the top five schools in the country in my field ... many of the nuclear engineering students there took the 240 class I taught while in the program.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

Keep it civil folks. Don't make it personal.

 

[damric]

ok so my coworker who died from leukemia, no relation to the cobalt-60, nor a care from the academic wing. got it thanks

thank god the academics aren't the ones on the regulatory commission deciding my maximum monthly REM

 

[joemama]

The 700 to 1,000 megawatts (MW) is the **instantaneous power demand**, not a daily consumption figure. It refers to the amount of electricity Manchester might be using at any given moment.

So, Manchester could consume around **19,200 MWh per day** based on that average power usage. This figure would fluctuate based on real-time demand throughout the day.

You don't have to take the usage time into account, if the maximum power demand of Manchester is 1000MW and one reactor provides 500MW, then it only takes 2 of them to power Manchester. Taking maintenance, backup capacity and other factors into consideration, 3 or 4 reactors would probably be a realistic number.

 

[Mister300]

I'm an old naval PWR guy. It's very old tech but it's proven and safe, provided procedural compliance. I've seen and been involved in some incidents, but even those were contained because of procedures and engineering redundancies.

I browsed your documents. The first one had some incorrect information, as there have been U.S. nuclear power deaths. If you are curious, I'll try and find some unclassified info on that. It's interesting that these small reactors are 500MW, as that's similar to what's on carriers. But wow the nuke plant is pretty much the whole bottom half of the ship. These new ones are tiny which is awesome, but they are unproven as far as safety.

It does bother me how much radioactive waste that commercial fission reactors generate, and it's absolutely stupid to store that stuff on site.

Yeah I figured on some classified incidents(not as bad as the USSR disasters), my son does cybersecurity for some Naval vessels and one of his bosses is a nuclear engineer and will not answer any questions on submarine reactors period.

Problem with Nuclear tech is public image and nuclear waste. Most assume Chernobyl or TMI when you mention nuclear plant issues. Chernobyl was FUBARed from day one due to void coefficient flaws and lack of understanding and training due to Soviet military secrets/dogma bullshit. Stubborn control room engineers and local politician clashed.