4:15 Supercriticality just means "reaction rate goes up", which is quite important when starting up a reactor. Increasing heat output is key for going from 'warm rock' to 'useful power plant'. It's just _uncontrolled_ supercriticality which is bad.

@MatthewHolevinski

12 күн бұрын

I'm surprised you even made it to 4:15, I can't make more than 3 to 5 seconds before I want to become "that" guy. It's like everyone gets their scripts from AI without any critical thinking.

@theheresiarch3740

11 күн бұрын

Considering the sheer volume of easily fact-checked misinformation in this video, I'm starting to wonder if this guy actually has a PhD or if he just says he does online. It's not like there are doctorate cops or anything to prevent people from doing that.

@olssonan

Күн бұрын

Had to comment when he started talking about "more like a bomb then an energy generator". This is total lies. Bombs need much higher enrichment then even 20%. He should have said meltdown but he is just another one looking for drama. Not going to watch more of his stuff now.

@MatthewHolevinski

Күн бұрын

@@olssonan lol I didn't even make it past a minute.

@Orgakoyd

3 сағат бұрын

@@olssonan Completely agree! The ''uncontrolled nuclear reactor is like a bomb'' line gets repeated over and over and over and over....Might be one of the single most damaging myths about nuclear power, that it's just a nuclear bomb being 'babied' to not blow up. As a result of this, most people still think Chernobyl was a nuclear explosion.....Absolutely maddening!!

Reactors in the 250-500MW range would be useful. I worked as a consultant for a Canadian power utility, who could have replaced their entire generation fleet with a couple of big reactors. It was not practical to do so because a typical large reactor is down for maintenance about 12 days a year. Taking a small modular reactor offline can be much more easily scheduled, if you have a fleet of them.

@clarkkent9080

21 күн бұрын

There is not and never has been economies of SMALL scale in power production

@AKUJIVALDO

21 күн бұрын

​@@clarkkent9080as always, advantages and disadvantages balancing...

@Suzuki_Hiakura

18 күн бұрын

The hell are you on about "Not a market"??? Did I imagine solar panels being invented? They dont produce gigawatts, but still is able to power a home, and even several cities are investing in roadside vertical wind turbines that produce 200 watts when a car passes by. The more redundancy you have, the less down time, and in greater numbers you can even outperform large scale installations.

@polla2256

16 күн бұрын

12 days time down is small change compared to the wind not blowing or too much cloud cover.

@polla2256

16 күн бұрын

​@@Suzuki_Hiakuratry it without base load, economically it makes absolutely no sense to put everything at the whim of the weather.

3-mile island failure was not dmging, just widely broadcasted by media and blown out of proportion. You can actually look up a list of failures and only 2 out of over 100 were dmging, there are over 400 total plants in operation as over 2023, but there have also been at least 100 that have been shut down in the 10yrs earlier. Every modern navy ship is nuclear powered, not one failure on those since their start of use.

@jeffspaulding9834

24 күн бұрын

No failure for American ships, anyway. The Soviets kinda screwed the pooch on that one.

@clarkkent9080

21 күн бұрын

Three Mile Island was a 3 month old multi billion dollar nuclear plant that was TRASHED. Cost $1 billion i n 1996 dollars just to cleanup the melted fuel. The containment is so contaminated that it is not even SCHEDULED to be cleaned up until 2047....that is 67 years after the accident That accident was no big deal

@colinmacdonald5732

18 күн бұрын

He's generalising from one example, Chernobyl. And even that one killed far fewer than the worst Hydroelectric dam failures. As for renewables being scaleable, they most assuredly are NOT. At least at grid scale anyway, because of their intermittent nature.

@agranero6

17 күн бұрын

Yes Three Mile Island was really not such a problem in terms of radiation release. Weirdly Windscale is completely forgotten and it was awful, but it was the frst British reactor, and since then the British never had an event near that proportion. About Chernobyl we have a corrupt, bureaucratic government and a very bad design (not only the factors popularized by the TV series but A LOT of others and a complete mismanaged way they made the test like adding more refrigeration pumps causing cavitation, the misunderstanding of how it was unstable at lower power, etc). Fukushima is similar: The Magazine of Nuclear Scientists had published an article a few years before saying that the inspections of nuclear reactors in Japan were an empty ritual that was only to appease the bureaucracy gods without any capacity to prevent disasters. lets remember that the manager of the plant flew to Tokyo to explain to his bosses that they could not take the crew there and let the reactor on its own or the disaster would be of gigantic proportions (yes the executives of the company wanted to just abandon the plant). It was an heroic action specially if you consider that in Japan you are not supposed to do something like that saying to your bosses in their faces that they are basically...well. coward, stupid, and even corrupt when they are (see the Olympus scandal for a tiny example). It is possible to build reactors in which the physics itself turn off the reactor when it goes awry (United Atomic had some of those in the 50s) but those reactors do not scale, as it is expensive to build reactors you need to build big ones to make the cost of the energy competitive with other energy sources: that is the real problem of nuclear energy, not the danger of reactors as the huge amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere are proving to be far more dangerous, and they can be made safe (other example wee the gas refrigerated reactors that are largely forgotten, again: cost).

@nickbrutanna9973

17 күн бұрын

When discussing Chernobyl, however, few seem to bother to note that the design was amazingly primitive -- *literally the exact same design as Fermi's very original nuclear pile in the early 40s, aside from the power generation aspects* -- and had absolutely nothing to do with modern nuclear power generation in the West. There were only something like 10 power generating plants in all of USA and Western Europe that used that design, and signs are that all of them had been decommissioned by *_1970_* Grasping what the design was -- basically, a giant pile of *_Charcoal Briquettes_* -- should give you an idea how ridiculous it is as a safety concept. "Yes, we're going to take the same thing you use in your backyard grill and heat it to several hundred degrees and pull hot water out of it." 😕 As the Guinness commercial goes, "BRILLIANT!" So the Chernobyl accident had absolutely nothing to do with First World power generation equipment, safeties, and dangers. As for Fukashima, that required no less than THREE particularly unique and improbable failures to occur -- 1 -- Massive earthquake nearby 2 -- Earthquake causes massive Tsunami 3 -- Previously unnoticed plug incompatibilities in emergency replacement pumps. That last one, well, I'm betting there isn't a freaking plant anywhere in the West, now, that hasn't addressed that issue completely, so that they all can handle one single plug for powering emergency systems.

The Moltex Static Salt design does away with almost every hazard from traditional nuclear power. Its sheer simplicity and intrinsic safety should dramatically reduce costs. It’s also scaleable by building more reactors on the same site. It is naturally load following and and cannot over heat. Excessive temperature stops the nuclear reaction long before it becomes dangerous. It could be disconnected from load at full power and nothing nasty would happen. It has boron shut-down rods but they are not needed as an emergency tool. There is no water or steam in the core so no pressure and considerably less corrosion than we get in PWR cores. We should be moving heaven and earth to build these things. Instead we have an out of control nuclear regulator that completely stalled progress. Moltex is now getting the job done in Canada.

@20:50 The lunar night is between 1.5 and 3.5 days? I don't think so. More like 14 to 15 days.

@kalrandom7387

Ай бұрын

Yeah I caught that one also

@nomadscavenger

Ай бұрын

I think he meant no light at all being reflected. In the country w/no human activity you can see some of the Moon before it turns new, then the sliver of silver crescent. Takes usually between 2.3 days on average to go from some discernable light to just nothing then back to that curved line of light - waxing or waning, the amount of X depends on the position of the embraced orbits around the Sun.

@ShawnHCorey

Ай бұрын

@@nomadscavengerYeah but that doesn't work for a fixed spot on the Moon.

@cmac3530

Ай бұрын

I'm no Astronaut but, wouldn't the lunar day/night cycle be shorter at the poles? Could that be the time-frame he's referring to?

@DeFraans

Ай бұрын

@@cmac3530I was thinking that too, but without any specification, you have to assume the Moon as a whole... and then it just doesn't hold true. On the other hand, I remember the next NASA landing spot being on the South pole (correct me if I'm wrong), so maybe he got it from that, but the info is skewed.

Bro...I got through the whole video and then heard "Westinghouse is also announcing their lunar base nuclear reactor" and I just had a sudden flash of a realization that the sci fi future we envisioned is easily within our lifetimes if we just play our collective cards right (far more hopeful than certain, but still)

4:05 Super critical doesn't automatically mean bomb or else it would be impossible to get the reactor to produce more than decay heat. The whole runaway melting/boom thing has to do with prompt criticality and a bunch of fun physics.

@hadensnodgrass3472

Ай бұрын

That was exactly what I was going to post. 👍 Also, to expound further, prompt critical is dependent on the neutron life cycle, which depends on a variety of factors to include fuel/poison loading, core geometry, moderator, and power history. The longer the neutron life cycle, the more controllable and safe the reactor is.

@SciHeartJourney

Ай бұрын

Great, we'll put them in YOUR backyard. 🤣

@anydaynow01

29 күн бұрын

@@SciHeartJourney Anyone who understands fission and how these plants actually work (doesn't get their information about the fission industry from the media and movies) will have no problem with this. Put one in my backyard, way better than a giant noisy wind turbine or solar panels which are more toxic per kW (GW-hr really considering lifetime) to produce and recycle than fission fuel, then there are all the batteries required to make renewables viable. Don't get me wrong, renewables + batteries have their place on say powering farmland or a small township, but you're not going to run an entire industrial sector or a place like Tokyo, Paris, London or NYC on a giant solar field and battery the size of a small town.

@zotriczaoh7098

29 күн бұрын

That was a joke

@braindecay9477

21 күн бұрын

Research reactors like at the University in Vienna even operate on prompt criticality, at multiple dollars for short pulses A normal big reactor never would/should enter such high criticality, but the special inherently safe design allows this. That's why students are allowed to fuck around with the reactor, and why it's interesting for research (high neutron density and shit)

I got 70% through this and still no mention of the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (which we had working just fine over 50 years ago). Why is that?

@dizkonekid

12 күн бұрын

Because that is off topic. Thorium reactors are not uranium reactors which he is covering and the big vs small uranium (or any) reactor is better in nuclear. Which is counterintuitive compared to the others.

@alextasarov1341

12 күн бұрын

He mentioned Molten salt at 4:56 as a type of coolant

@alexlabs4858

12 күн бұрын

The thorium reactor we had going was only a small scale research reactor. Scaling up to full production is a difficult game. There are some issues with thorium MSRs though they do seem like an interesting solution and I hope we chase that. I believe china has one MSR.

@jeroenvangastel9079

12 күн бұрын

Thorium does not create plutonium which is needed for the weapons industry, that is why

@toddmarshall7573

11 күн бұрын

@@jeroenvangastel9079 I don't need the weapons industry, do you?

the fact that Yellow Cake is not just less expensive than Printer Ink, but it's a low single-digit percentage, seems to be bordering on something profound... 🤣

@nicholashylton6857

Ай бұрын

That really highlights how much printer companies are screwing the public.

20:18 "...in the northern hemisphere and so receive less sunlight." I'll remind you that the northern hemisphere starts at the equator, and covers one-half of the Earth. Cheers.

@shanent5793

Ай бұрын

The northern hemisphere still receives less sunlight because it is tilted away from the sun when the sun is closest to the Earth

@JxH

Ай бұрын

@@shanent5793 I admire your generosity.

@OneEyedMonkey9000

15 күн бұрын

Finding a friend to proofread your script is surprisingly difficult. 😂

10/10 for excitement 5/10 for technical knowledge, 2/10 for commercial application, 0/10 for future use of micro nuclear plants. We have major switchgear yards adjacent to previous nuclear plants. These are the ideal sites for re-siting without significant GRID restructuring. It is the GRID STRUCTURE that determines the future generation sites not the generator.

“Just discovered your channel and I’ve already subscribed! You have a knack for explaining complex systems in a way that’s easy to understand, even for someone with little prior knowledge. Keep up the great work!”

The 3+gen European EPR reactor is producing 1600MW so the SMR mention in this video need 21 reactors to produce the same amount of power. EPR is buildt at 8-9M$ for each Megawatt, but the failed Nuscale/Utah project clocks in at 20M$/Mwat. Nuclear is ridiculously expensive both at small or large scale. Even before waste handeling is considered.

I had this discussion with some friends who live in a small town a few hours away from me. They were very enthusiastic about a small scale nuclear reactor that could be dropped off in their town, solving their energy problems forever. I asked them to have a look at their current lot of local councillors and council staff and choose somebody they could could trust to run the little plant, keep it safe for generations, and dispose of the waste. Nobody could put forward a name they would trust, which suggests to me that safety of these things depends on more than just good engineering.

@clarkkent9080

6 күн бұрын

The issue is not safety, it is cost. Ask your friends if they would be willing to pay 3 times or more for electricity in order to solve their energy problems? Vogtle (Ga.) just completed 2 new nuclear plants at a cost of $17 Billion EACH for a 1,000 Mw unit. SMRs cost more per Mw capacity. Can their town afford that in their budget?

Dr. Miles ignored the single biggest use case for mobile SMRs in the 50-80 MW range: commercial shipping.

@ultrastoat3298

Ай бұрын

Riiight. I'm sure pirates would love getting their hands on nuclear material. Nuclear doesn't scale for these reasons. 1. Cost 2. Risk 3. Proliferation 4. Waste management. None of these have solutions on the horizon for fission based reactors. Those are the facts.

@canepaper967

Ай бұрын

@@ultrastoat3298 proliferation? waste management? first of all the uranium used in nuclear reactors can't be used to make bombs. second, waste is usually stored on the reactor site these days in air cooled containers.

@willythemailboy2

Ай бұрын

@@canepaper967 Of course the uranium can be used to make bombs, it's just not much easier than starting with natural uranium. Waste management is a choice; we could be reprocessing and separating waste to the point of near irrelevancy but we don't.

@ultrastoat3298

Ай бұрын

@@canepaper967Lol..... I'm sure the world wants the Taliban to have nuclear reactors 😆. Ever heard of a dirty bomb? Also any country using nuclear energy will seek to build their own centrifuges or they will absolutely be held hostage by countries that do have them. So swing and a miss there. And waste materials are stored on site today...🤣🤣😂. Another swing and miss. I'll let think about it for a while and see if you can figure out why that is a dumb statement.

@canepaper967

Ай бұрын

@@ultrastoat3298 Any country using nuclear energy will seek to build their own centrifuges? I don't even know how to start addressing a statement this dumb. There are 9 countries with nuclear weapons and dozens upon dozens that operate nuclear reactors and have done so for decades. Maybe learn more about nuclear energy before criticizing it idk.

Another market for micro-reactors, is for self-consumption industrial use (e.g., manufacturing and tech). Tech companies are little more open to risk taking, exploring new technologies, esp. if they are low carbon. They. also have deep pockets and can take the early adopter premium. The growth of data centers, increasing energy use from AI, presents another use case, guaranteed uptake, to jumpstart a new industry.

@luka3174

Ай бұрын

Didn't he say that the solar panel equivalent was only like 1% of the cost? price needs to come down to be viable

@loganaurora

Ай бұрын

​@@luka3174you have to remember that they don't have to pay for the batteries bc it's constant power instead of intermediate that is extremely important for factories

@luka3174

Ай бұрын

@@loganaurora of course, and batteries at the moment are the most expensive part. But still the efficiency difference is too big, we have seen solar efficency increase with massive global investment, is it possible nuclear can do the same?

@brianmagner9220

Ай бұрын

I was going to write my own comment and say basically the same thing but you beat me to it. Factories, data centers, office parks, airports, military bases, sports arenas and other mega-structures are all great candidates for isolated SMRs which can either feed excess power to the grid or store the excess power in other forms (batteries, hydroelectric or thermal reservoirs, etc). The advantages over large solar arrays are the small footprint, easy installation and energy density.

@anydaynow01

29 күн бұрын

@@brianmagner9220 The NA fission industry and Canada and USA regulators are actually meeting soon to discuss SMR regulations. A lot of it has to do with streamlining the cost model of submitting FSARs, since SMRs will be modular a lot of the cost can be handled by not modifying a standard FSAR for an SMR design. It's just the sight anaylsis (siesmic, heat sink and the like) which will be project specific. This will massively cut down on costs, especially if the SMR company can bring in their own tradesmen to complete the project and initial criticality. Then hand the keys over to the utility after they have established and certified their operator/maintenance qualification programs.

Insane how much I learned in one video. That was brilliant.

Amazing channel. Glad I found ya! Great video, brilliantly done.

There are actually several ways to enrich uranium. For many years we used gaseous diffusion. Currently the most efficient method is gaseous centrifuge enrichment. In the future there is high hopes for a process called laser enrichment.

Thank you, Dr. Miles for bringing all these great events to the screen for me to watch. I love you. I love your channel. Thank you.

Nuclear power brings down electricity prices by 75% in Finland.

Very good presentation. Particularly impressive is your explanation of the accident at Chernobyl's Unit number 4. I have studied the event in detail, including perusing actual blueprints of the RBMK reactor. You are correct while being nicely concise. Thank you.

Another use would be backup power for facilities like hospitals or military bases. Places that are connected to the grid, but need to be immune to broader power outages or shortages. Normally it just sits there, selling power to the grid to offset its own purchase price. But if the day ever comes when it's needed, you've got megawatts available for any length of time you might want. In that use case, the fact that it's potentially more expensive than the alternatives is irrelevant, because you're only paying the difference to have guaranteed power on demand.

@otm646

Ай бұрын

The military tried this at Fort Greeley in Alaska in the late 50's and again 10 years later at McMurdo. Both were operational failures. Reciprocating piston diesel generators are an extraordinarily well developed technology with low acquisition costs, low storage costs and lower operational costs.

@Thunderbuck

Ай бұрын

@@otm646But that doesn’t answer the carbon emissions.

@kennethferland5579

Ай бұрын

That is rediculus, a SMR is not a back up disel generator, it contains highly enriched uranium and has to be guarded by armed men at all times behind a fortified limited access compund. Their is no way to just put that behind a hospital.

@salahidin

Ай бұрын

@@kennethferland5579 SMRs don’t use highly enriched uranium. Stop talking nonsense.

@jdlessl

Ай бұрын

@@kennethferland5579 Ok, so stick it out front where it's always in plain view. Definitely not a smash & grab operation!

It's also happening in Europe, a Polish, mostly government owned oil company called Orlen, which mostly makes gas stations, announced a year ago that they wil put SMRs near cities to power them, sadly I didn't hear anything about them for a long time other than them planning to do it before 2030 so I don't know if they will actually do it

@SocialDownclimber

3 күн бұрын

I'm watching Poland very carefully, as are many others. They are the real test case to see whether it is possible to rapidly, cheaply decarbonise a grid with nuclear in the 21st century.

This is the first I have heard of Micro Nuclear Reactors. I like it! Additional to terrestrial use, I could see something like this deployed on the Moon and Mars. Well done!

@frontiergeek4953

12 күн бұрын

In concept the idea is attractive, but imagine a booster exploding or veering off seconds or a minute after liftoff, carrying a 50mW plutonium core. That'd be a much larger ooooops.

"back of a lorry, delivered to site, plug in, off you go" was literally the cartoon concept of a late 60's "small boy's science book" I inherited from my older brother. This concept was really popular in the pre-internet days of in your face, establishment (pseudo) science propaganda. Although of course, this is an engineering problem. All the science is known and has been for nearly a century.

When every legal obstacle is thrown at a nuclear power plant project by green activists the price goes up. Since the activists don't have anything else to do it's cost effective for them and grossly expensive to the project. Time is money in construction. Every delay means compensation to contractors who should be working on building but can't proceed until the lawsuits are resolved. Green activists have gotten very savvy at timing litigation to increase costs to building projects as much as possible.

@seanhewitt603

Ай бұрын

"green activists" aren't green activists, they're oil company workers in disguise!!

My bets are on small molten fluoride salt reactors using thorium as the fuel, these are able to consume the nuclear waste deposits from LW reactors, and are inherently safe (self extinguishing upon cooling system failure). That means cheap fuel (waste) and they are also purported to do a 95% fuel conversion to energy rather than the 0.5% that most LW reactors achieve. Also they can be bolted into the ground sufficiently that you can't just drive away with it. They can also be continually refuelled so there is no actual down time as with most LW reactors except some maintenance.

Generally speaking, making things bigger and more centralized is the only economically viable solution… I have my doubts here.

I think the micro reactor model would be good for small rural towns, and not just ones that are very remote. This could reduce the need for large distribution centers that transport the power great distances. This would also have the advantage of being less susceptible to widespread outages because the grid could be segmented into smaller units.

@colinmacdonald5732

18 күн бұрын

That depends on how controllable the output is, traditionally nuclear reactors only function well with a steady output.

Wow how cool, great video

Small Modular Reactors remind me of science fiction spaceships. And these discussions are like a bunch of science fiction writers speculating on how to travel between stars, what colour the ships will be and what adventures the crew and passengers will have. One day ....

Well balanced views presented. On the SMR (or smaller) usage cases I remember reading a number of articles suggesting their use for marine propulsion. Clearly many hurdles to overcome here as well but this is an area which is much more difficult to address with renewables or batteries.

@zvorenergy

Ай бұрын

Well obviously it can be done reliably and relatively safely, we've got subs and carriers

As an Aussie SMRs, modular or micro, always fascinating to me. Now with the AUKUS sub deal, and talk of nuclear energy back due to it, the opportunity to have a unit that fits both uses made here in Australia, be awesome

@matthewsheeran

18 күн бұрын

Agreed. But the problem is the pollies because the're stupid and the industry because the're greedy will put them in your backyard instead of away from population centres with 50-100km very very low population density buffers and an emergency water source with fail-safe unpowered cooling but longer transmission lines. I think they should be built below the water line of lakes with sufficient water for emergency passive cooling without power: only need to turn the flood valves by hand. Even then they could be self-contained with batteries to switch em and human hands as backup. Near nil meltdown risk!

This is what I came up with that should be considered: 1. With all of these large scale light water reactors, we need to get back into fuel reprocessing. Only 5% of the U-235 is used, so we have vast reserves of U-235 just sitting in cooling ponds for spent fuel rods right now. This U-235 is what also makes these fuel rods hazardous for eons, so consider below for how to solve this problem. 2. The Thorium MSR. You may say well we have Thorium to burn. Right. But do you understand how this all starts? Well you stuff in some U-235 starter fuel (look above for the proposed source of this U-235) and long story short, you breed Thorium-232 into Uranium-233 and then burn the highly fissile U-233. This all gets into neutron absorption and decay where the Thorium has to absorb neutrons and then have a decay to become Uranium. The thing is Thorium is stable, so we have enough to last us until the Sun turns into a red giant and swallows the Earth. We don't have enough Uranium, so we really need to focus this in as a starter fuel and then run off of Thorium bread into Uranium after this. 3. A Thorium MSR can run a jet engine directly. No water needed for this power generator. Maybe even focus in on desalination as a second stage as in use the hot exhaust of the jet engine to make fresh water. 4. A Thorium MSR can be mass produced as an SMR. The thing is Thorium MSRs are very energy dense while maintaining inherent safety. Water just can't be all that hot and is inherently unsafe, so you end up with a large, low density design trying to compensate for these pitfalls. The MSR is high heat, non-reactive chemically, and inherently safe, so can be made energy dense. Energy dense can be made a lot more cheaply. So doing this at scale would be cheap and thus you solve the cost issue. 5. A liquid core MSR can have a continuous chemical process applied to it to separate out waste products and introduce more fuel. No need to stop the reactor to swap out spent fuel rods or even fuel spheres that have cracked from the gaseous waste products building up in them as atoms get split up into smaller atoms. 6. We can make chemical fuel with electricity. The reason we don't really do this at scale today is electricity is just too expensive. Mass produced Thorium MSR SMR reactors should get into extremely cheap power. So now you have this cheap electricity where ever you need it, you can get into mass producing hydrogen and methane. Methane (natural gas) is already used everywhere. Methane can be turned into propane and propane is used everywhere. Consider when you make methane and propane, you can capture CO2 from the atmosphere / before it enters the atmosphere from say a smoke stack. So you use CO2 in a circular fashion, making it net zero emissions wise. Especially if you get into making the propellant for SpaceX's Starship, you could have a major propellant producing facility powered by Thorium MSR SMR reactors pulling in sea water and air and outputting liquid methane, liquid oxygen, and liquid nitrogen, all of the things needed to make Starship work, and then just pipe it into the launch site from a safe distance away. As Starship launch cadence increases, just modularly add more reactors and other equipment to the facility. 7. SMRs can be used for giant commercial ships. Especially if the ship has say 250 MWs of SMR(s) onboard, it can fast steam around the world, slashing trip times. As for risk of hijacking / attack, well just fast sail around Africa, avoiding the main hot spot in the world where this kind of stuff happens. 8. As for space, especially if you help out Starship in #6, you want to fan out into the solar system and do resource gathering and processing in space. After all, everything on Earth fell in from space and space has all of the raw materials in its more pure and elemental form to start out with, so much better in a lot of ways than getting it from Earth. You just need nuclear to efficiently get around space and nuclear to also supply regular electrical power for everything as in deep space the Sun is too diffuse to be all that effective as an energy source. The Sun is only really all that useful as a power source in the inner solar system. And you are wrong about the Moon. It is 2 weeks in darkness and 2 weeks in the light. Need nuclear power to cover 2 weeks in darkness at a time. Once you have all of this resource gathering going on in space, something like Starship will be more focused on moving people around and less on moving material around. Starship as a shuttle to infrastructure in LEO has more interior space than a Boeing 747, a plane that can potentially hold more than 500 people. It is just if you kit it out for say a whole trip to Mars, it is filled with stuff for the trip and so very little capacity left to stuff humans inside. At this chemical is a very inefficient and ineffective way to get around the solar system where everything nuclear, and there are many possibilities around this, has a lot more kick and so can make it trivial to go anywhere in the solar system, turn around, and come back to Earth. Even going out to say Pluto, nuclear could make that a weeks to months long trip that you can then turn around from and make it back to Earth. So of course closer places like the resource rich and easy to mine asteroid belt are easy peasy to get to with nuclear.

0:26 agile and nuclear power are words I would never expect to hear in the same sentence

What's ironic is that the experimental reactors back in the 60s and early 70s were >400 KW reactors.

Micro's make a lot of sense when you consider a grid approach. If every town has their own generator, they can cross feed each other as needed and there isn't a single point of failure. It also means that simple coordination of maintenance windows is all that's needed during upgrades. It also somewhat simplifies the whole electrical grid infrastructure since there aren't a few huge producers, which also means it's easier to merge solar and wind into the total equasion, because varying the output of a micro reactor is much easier than a huge one. The overall cost to build is close to the one huge installation, but it's more incremental and can more easily benefit from improvements in technology when the lifespan is a less than decade compared to half a century.

In the water treatment industry, we are moving away from centralised infrastructure for various reasons. Some of these reasons likely apply to energy generation as well. I can see a use case for SMNRs in large new builds.

Brilliant ! Keep at It.

Dr Ben: Please address Thorium Nuclear as an option for SMRs.

@xcrockery8080

Ай бұрын

Germany started building a Thorium plant in 1970, took them about 17 years to finish it, then they shut it down within 15 months to cut their losses - the thing was costing way too much to run. People have been saying "ooh, what about Thorium" for over 50 years. There's nothing special about Thorium - it's still an incredibly expensive way to boil water.

@uwemielke6672

Ай бұрын

What is the risk if we don't use nuclear power ..? Answer: Being unable to defeat climate change! 2nd question: What risk is larger for mankind ... climate change or the use of nuclear power? Answer to reader ... please find out by yourself. There are many new founded companies worldwide since Oak Ridge ...researching and investing in 4th generation Thorium MSRs: Alpha Tech (2016) U.S.A., Copenhagen Atomics (2014) DK, Clean Core Thorium U.S.A., Elysium Industries (2015) Canada, Flibe Energy (2011) U.S.A., Kairos Power (2016) U.S.A., Moltex (2014) U.K., NAAREA (2020) F, Seaborg Technologies (2014) DK, Terra Power (2006) U.S.A., Terestrial Energy (2012) Canada, Thor Energy (2006) NO, ThorCon (2011) USA, Thorium Power (2015) Canada, Thorizon (2018) NL. @@xcrockery8080

@sameergupta7

Ай бұрын

India is working on thorium breeder reactor,right now 2nd phase just concluded and third is underway because India is abundant in thorium. In the next decade whole system will be complete

That eVInci microreactor looks really intriguing. Mining is going to electrify eventually and a system like this seems ideal. I live in a remote region and I know of fly-in communities that could benefit from this as well.

Probably will be in the next 50 years but a small module per house is when the tech will become practical/useful enough.

Small modular reactors should be easy, but they seem to be taking as long as nuclear fusion reactors to develop.

Thank you Dr. Strange for this detailed explanation

I haven't watched this yet... But is the new reactor just steam with extra steps? 3:30 Yup it's just a steam engine.

@DrBenMiles

Ай бұрын

It's almost always a steam engine

Nice video! Curious. Would micro nuclear reactors, like those built into trailers, be able to combine power output by having several joined to some sort of trailer hub? Would it make sense to include a series of trailers outfitted with batteries to ensure continuous power. That way a single trailer could be disconnected from the setup without having to shut anything down. Just plug a new trailer into the hub, or add additional ones as needed.

@nelsonsnow75

Ай бұрын

That’s a great idea, at that point I think it becomes an electrical engineering task to link multiple reactors together, from a nuclear standpoint there’s no issue aside from maybe some external event type regulations

There are a few companies seriously looking at deep (20km-ish) geothermal electricity generation using syncrotron drilling. If that's viable, then they will need a few megawatts for a couple of years to melt bedrock into gas. SMRs make a lot of sense if you need that kind of load in the middle of nowhere for a limited period, and it would be an almost magical pairing of nuclear and true renewables.

These are revolutionary.

Flammanville III in France was supposed to be online in 2012. So far it has not even had the fuel rods loaded. It was 5x over budget years ago.

@rayengel714

10 күн бұрын

And that one is a prototype - the same design was built in Finland and China and now is built in Hinkley Point (and Sizewell). The one in Finland was a little bit faster, the ones in China are online now for over 5 years.

Amazing subject, love those micros

It's a good thing these micro nuclear reactors fit on the back of a truck so we can easily transport them to the moon.

@Bora1333

Ай бұрын

We can ship them though. In a starship.

@auspiciouslywild

Ай бұрын

Space is probably the best use for these kinds of technologies in the long term. Fundamentally, there's more than enough energy in the form of solar, wind and geothermal to do anything we want here on earth. Energy is abundant here, we just need to pluck it out of the air. The sun is blasting us with a ridiculous amount of energy every day. But in space, especially further from the sun, energy is far more scarce.

One correction, boron in the rods capturing neutrons DOES decay, specifically into Lithium-7 via alpha decay (Boron-10 + n -> Lithium-7 and an alpha particle) So technically the control rods even get "used", but idk how relevant that is in practice. But it definitely decays.

Micro installations could also help shore up deficiencies in the grid, be they long-term or short-term as a result of recent events, even if they aren't full blown disasters.

Very good analysis; and for what it's worth, thank you for pronouncing "nuclear" correctly.

20:16 Remote Communities in the Northern Hemisphere are more likely (statistically) to be near the equator. Perhaps you meant to say "remote communities in the far northern latitudes". Obviously, I understood what you meant, but with the caliber of your execution on these videos, and you script writing, I would have expected this to have been caught and corrected by your editing team. Thanks Ben ! Let's go Nuclear ! !

How about using them to power ships?

1:35 He said uranium is "4% the price of printer ink" LMFAO, its so true.

@miscbits6399

6 күн бұрын

LEU is around the price of gold. Raw uranium metal is about $150/kg. Yellowcake is cheaper still (it's like bauxite - more processing needed to be useful) Fun fact: When the Manhattan project needed something to pack around the plutonium and uranium bombs (tamper), they seriously considered using gold as it was dirt cheap compared to the Uranium/Plutonium and had sufficient molecular weight to do the job

The neutron actually interacts with the nucleus and if the neutron is too fast it won't interact with the nucleus. In Chernobyl when the rods started to re-enter they slowed down the neutrons and the reaction increased. The guy who invented the type of reactor first put in civilian use was against such big reactors. His reactor was for nuclear submarines and at that level of power generation the core can be contained in case of a meltdown. There are a few sunk nuclear submarines and afaik none has leaked to this day.

I've long had an idea for how an SMR might be used.. In a new construction development, they could use an SMR to provide not only electricity but district hot water to every home in the development. I ran the numbers real quick, 120M divided by 300 homes, that's about 400,000$ per home. With inflation, that's about what new homes go for anyways, so you've just doubled the cost (If it costs 120M for the reactor, I'm using a random number I saw you mention). But, every one of those homes has all their energy needs met forever. If people don't use all the electricity it can be sold to the grid and paid out to homeowners. This doesn't account for re-fueling, 8 years, let's say $8M for ease of calculation, each of those 300 homes would have an annual fuel cost of about $3,300 or $280/month. That's really competitive. Someone check my numbers? Are they totally off? High? Low? Reactor sizing also.. 6KW/home (electricity plus hot water) that's... Hold on. Only 1.8 Megawatts? Okay, that reactor can be waaaay cheaper than 120M or we're doing something very very wrong. What are we doing???? Why is this not happening??

Was the cost vs time plots around 8:08 adjusted for inflation? If not, there was rampant inflation during that same time period.

I think energy independence will be recognized as more important in the future. Especially for vital services such as hospitals and military installations. I really think there is a niche for truck portable ready to go micro nuclear reactors. Especially in disaster recovery and relief situations.

I would like to see SMRs or MNRs using fast neutrons so that they can utilize U238 and existing "nuclear waste".

The main weakness of SMRs is competition. For their business model to work, they need economies of scale. One company needs to produce hundreds of copies of their SMR. If there are too many companies competing, each individual model can not be produced cheaply enough to be worth it.

One aspect not discussed here is the concept distributed generation versus central generation, and its impact on infrastructure stability. Blackouts aren't usually caused by a failure at the generator, but rather something within the distribution grid. These small failures can cascade when the load transferring nature of a grid activates a sequence of self protective features. The current power grid relies on a few HUGE generation points, and massive distribution networks. If it were feasible to build smaller generation facilities efficient and clean enough to place throughout a region, then the amount of distribution serving each generator would be much smaller and the ability to contain any particular loss of power to a small area would be dramatically improved. SMRs are the only technology likely to meet this challenge. As much as this would benefit wealthy nations with extensive and aging grids, it would be an absolute game changer for countries with less overall power and little grid stability.

You still need nuclear engineers to staff these reactors. I love the idea,but the economics unfortunately don't make sense. Now what level of subsidy is justifiable for a diverse and healthy grid is a question I can't answer but might be worth looking into.

@kevincrosby1760

13 күн бұрын

You don't need credentialed nuclear engineers to staff a nuclear power plant. Contrary to popular belief, it is quite possible to be well trained without ever attending college.

@footbru

11 күн бұрын

@@kevincrosby1760 Good ol' Homer Simpson.

@kevincrosby1760

10 күн бұрын

@@footbru Actually, control room operators have spent almost as many hours in the classroom (not including simulator training) as the average person with an AA degree has. The difference is that their training is ALL job-related...no Psych/Soc, no English, no PE, etc. Think of it this way, do you need to be an automotive engineer to be an excellent mechanic?

@footbru

10 күн бұрын

@@kevincrosby1760 "hmmm ... donuts" "No matter how good you are at something, there's always about a million people better than you."

What if office workers get angry and decide to take it out on the SMR in the parking lot in the same way as the truly brilliant use of the office space clip? (Also, thank you for a good laugh!)

Thorium would be a better source honestly. Little to no run-away meltdown risk, and far less toxic waste. As for "clean" ... Nuclear is cleaner and safer than "green" energy statistically speaking.

@clarkkent9080

10 күн бұрын

what actual operating reactor are you basing your comments on?

All SMRs mentioned in this (very good) video still need custom steam plant turbines to turn low temperature steam into electricity. Heavy nitrogen (N15) cooled reactors with direct cycle turbines based on open cycle turbine designs from natural gas plants might be a solution. I'd also like to see these nitrogen gas cooled reactors borrow Moltex Energy's idea of putting a molten fuel salt in fuel pins. This eliminates the real hazard of nuclear reactors - release of radioactive gases in an accident. It would also surely lead to much lower fuel costs than using TRISO fuel.

So if I develop an extremely efficient small modular reactor, what should I do to get it happening

You should interview Dr. Robert Zubrin on this matter. He wrote a book The Case For Nukes.

One application MNR could be useful in is a situation we have here in Kansas. Panasonic is building a large battery factory in a near by city. This requires a huge upgrade to the areas power grid. This is being done via a special tax and a rate increase for the customers of the local power company. However, neither of these apply to the county this plant is being built in. The local residents that are going to benefit from the large amount of high paying jobs are not footing any of the bill for this. If instead this plant could have its own MNR or two to power itself the grid upgrades wouldn't be necessary thus meaning no cost being spread out to surrounding communities that aren't getting the benefits of the site to begin with.

I’m hoping for smr to solve the carbon problem of global shipping. As a marine engineer, the amount of carbon released by just the small ships I run is staggering.

I am not a physicist, therefore, any comments for comparison need a track record of performance, cost of installation, productivity, and waste management for someone like me to juxtapose their comparable problems/solutions. It sounds good to have clean efficient power but our host is casting shadows of nuclear reactors past, present, and future. It is the honest thing to do but fear of nuclear energy has long been fraught with bean counters trying to save a buck and shit starts blowing up like an SNL Pepsi Syndrome skit. A heroic President Jimmy Carter stood within the 3-mile Island facility to show its design capabilities were safe and would continue to this day, percolating a bit less. I believe that nuclear power is the solution. I marveled at Fukushima being built on a fault line with one cooling pond for 6 reactors. (What bean-counter thought of that?) It was built on a Pacific Rim fault line and the predictable result happened. I check my tuna fish for radioactivity and is considered safe for human consumption, just kidding. Eggheads like Dr. Ben Miles with his ambivalent approach aren't swaying many hearts but he is honest and his own assessment is casting considerable doubt. (Muster up that Pt Barnum spirit!) What I have seen in my lifetime, are Republicans on the take for Russian bribe money now in the news, leaking of sensitive documents to our enemies, denial of them to support our allies while Russia attacks the last nuclear reactor in Ukraine, and refusal to protect our already born children from automatic weapons. I do not see them shutting off the fossil fuels anytime soon. How did Trump win the electoral college vote? (I wonder if Donald Trump would stand in 3-mile Island for a photo-op?) I doubt the Democrats would borrow Navalny's coffee cup, Republicans might. Tell Vlad to leave the 2nd reactor intact! -To sum up, we can build a space station now in 146 days using robotic assemblers. We can effectively power moon missions with microwave power beamed to the moon from orbiting power stations, why fuss with the dust? We can build Elysium in orbit with a constant rotation of solar panels and backup nuclear power. Our future assets are in space. Nixon was an idiot to slash the space program. Let's electrostatically capture helium-3, and store it in superconductor materials that capture not only electrons but helium isotopes, protons, and gamma particles to power our own UFOs. How much energy is in a 2-liter bottle filled with compressed helium-3 at a storage temperature of 3 Kelvin background radiation? Is it enough to go to Pluto and back? I favor nuclear power, Good video!

I think we should just go ahead with these SMRs and nano reactors. The first ones may have a bit higher cost, but are necessary to build out economies of scale. The issue is that nuclear has stagnated for decades, so cost to start building them again is high. There is a lack of experience in the industry, so costs are higher. This combined with unnecessary regulation and irrational public fear keeps nuclear of life support, rather than commonplace.

Some mines experience reduced sunlight during winter

Do these modular or micro reactors still produce nuclear waste. As in the irradiated cooling fluid?

Ideal for aluminum smelters I would have thought

Replaced my printer ink with Uranium for cost. Thanks for the hot-tip!

@robertrebbe8010

17 күн бұрын

thanks for the glowing report!

Modular would be amazing for energy intensive industries, if the cost per megawatt becomes attractive.

solar prices is a sht market to compare it with since you can basically double the price without subsidies and while its not on the bill, people still need to pay for those subsidies

This is what we need, hundreds of small reactors plugged into the grid. We could have a distributed power grid where small reactors are spread out throughout an area and they replace them like batteries when they run down, and send them off to be refurbished and refueled. Send the spent fuel and waste to a burner reactor to finish it off. It's only because the populous has been conditioned to be terrified of nuclear energy that we don't have a super cheap stable power grid.

A better question is "should it?" Every property generating solar and wind and feeding excess into a communal grid is a very resilient system. A single reactor is a single point of failure for an entire city.

@factnotfiction5915

10 күн бұрын

> A single reactor is a single point of failure Sure, but .... The most common type of blackout/brownout is due to transmission/distribution losses. See EIA/EPRI/NERC for citations. (trees falling on lines, animals short-circuiting the lines, etc) The plants themselves (nuclear, coal, natural gas, hydro) rarely go offline. On the other hand, you can site them near your city - so LESS line to go bad; intermittent RE (wind/solar) tends to be sited far from cities (mountains/offshore for wind, plains/desert for solar) - so MORE line to go bad. > Every property generating solar and wind and feeding excess into a communal grid is a very resilient system The problem with that is that residential (industrial suck waaay more juice than their area can cover) transformers all experience the same weather at the same time. So if you have transformers (installed over the last 20-30 years) designed to provide, not accept power, and you force them to provide instantaneously when a cloud goes over a neighborhood, and then switch in minutes to accepting power when the cloud leaves, and the power accepted is higher than the rating .... poof! The magic comes out as smoke.

@AndrewJohnson-oy8oj

10 күн бұрын

@@factnotfiction5915 Your reflexively problematizing seems somewhat removed from reality. Do you live in a world where every lightning strike takes out the grid? The grid is already designed to absorb surges. additional protection against your fantasy scenario would be far cheaper than a modular nuclear reactor. Transmission/distribution incidences are far less likely to either occur or to take out entire grid regions when generation is fully localized. Industrial facilities have flat roofs often acres large plus massive parking lots. More than enough area to produce their own wind and solar. Imagine what you could come up with if you put even a fraction of the mental effort that you just put into inventing problems to looking at solutions instead.

MNR sounds interesting, but can the unit's be daisy chained on one site???

I am curious about the delay in implimenting small reactors on land, when they've been used to power ships since the 1950's

@darnoc0010

16 күн бұрын

The biggest delay like most things is public opinion. Nuclear has gotten a bad rap in the public's eye since Chernobyl. I know of a lot of people that think nuclear subs means they carry nuclear missiles.

I liked this video over all. But please be careful when using the term "base load". 9:44 base load power does not complement renewable sources. What you need is balancing power (capacity). Yes, there is "base load" in the electricity demand on the grid, but you really care about is meeting demand. (Currently) Base load power plants are not that flexible and most cost effective if they run continuously. If you use them to complement renewable electricity production, the price per kWh rises too. I can however see SMR being used to directly produce Hydrogen, using thermochemical water splitting due to the higher temperatures compared to traditional nuclear power, which than can be used in to complement renewable sources, if still cost effective.

@user72974

Ай бұрын

I think the term "base load" has been spun around. People use it now, when describing power production, to mean "good" in a way that renewables apparently aren't good. But if a power plant can only produce electricity when it runs continuously at max capacity, that isn't good. That's bad. Because demand isn't continuous. If such a plant didn't produce enough electricity to match demand peaks, you'd still need other sources of production. And if you overbuild it to account for the peaks, you'd still need to find ways to throttle it down or absorb the excess power when not in peak hours. Like you said, things need to be in balance. I saw a KZread documentary recently about how a hydro pumped storage facility is used in modern times to balance power output from nuclear. So nuclear alone (without energy storage) is not the answer.

@gbjbaanb

Ай бұрын

yes, base load means continuous power delivery and people mistake stored power (eg gas) for this simply because it effectively acts as the same thing. We probably need different types of storage (more hydro if possible, flow batteries probably) and maybe hydrogen, but not likely as the low efficiency of making hydrogen outweighs the efficiency of building out batteries. But there again, if nuclear is "too cheap to meter" for the electricy production part, you can make more than needed and just throw the excess away and it might still be cheaper than trying to store it.

@otm646

Ай бұрын

You seem to be forgetting about grid scale storage which is becoming widely installed. California has required it in all of their existing power plants. Hawaii is following suit. Having massive energy storage both means you can lean more on renewables and you can better optimize your plants which throttle slowly like nuclear.

@junkerzn7312

Ай бұрын

Traditional base-load running 24x7 is indeed a terrible fit with a modern renewables-heavy grid. It's an economic problem, particularly for a nuclear plant which needs to be producing revenue with its (mostly) constant-power output 24x7. The problem is that it can't. The output is only useful to the grid after roughly 6pm and basically worthless (not able to produce significant revenue) for 12 hours out of the day. California, for example, actually has to curtail solar sometimes during the day just to let its one remaining nuclear plant continue to generate at a constant output. NG assets drop to nearly zero something like 8 hours and then cover a large chunk of the demand overnight. Solving this problem for nuclear requires grid-scale storage and a lot of it. Only grid-scale storage soaking up excess renewables during the day and dumping that energy into the evening and overnight is able to smooth out daily cycle sufficiently to allow traditional base-load style generation (nuclear for example) to generate 24x7 and also stay solvent economically. At the moment only California and Texas are really putting a lot of money into grid-scale storage. It is turning out to be incredibly beneficial to the grid. Not only is it soaking up excess power during the day, grid-scale storage is also able to be situated to remove grid congestion across the late afternoon and evening peak, economically revenue generating for its effort. That dynamic, in turn, reduces the need to expand transmission line infrastructure and defrays the cost of the batteries so much that it isn't even a question now whether to install battery storage or not any more. The economics are just too good. -Matt

@kennethferland5579

Ай бұрын

You could just synthesize hydrocarbons with surplus renewable energy too, solar thermal would be the optimal means as you can generate heat comperable to nuclear and heat reduces the electrical energy needed for water electrolsis. Their is no reason to utilize nuclear power for the hydrogen economy concepts, a concept which I should point out exists primarily to propup Natural gas industry.

Someone needs to send this to Peter Dutton

Small modular reactors have a significant drawback: it is difficult to ensure their protection. For example, when the Zaporizhia NPP was attacked by cocaine рuhrer Zelensky, several air defense systems provided its protection and they successfully coped with this task. But still, several shells hit the roof of the station. However, it did not harm the station. It is difficult and impractical for small power plants to provide the same protection as for large ones. But in the case of nuclear reactors, this is a must.

Post-disaster micro-reactors while useless for residential because the infrastructure is damaged, would be perfect for medical facilities

isn't a micro reactor still preferable to solar due to the absurd amount of green minerals needed to produce them? i understand uranium mining happens in conflict areas but it seems like a more sustainable manufacturing resource then lithium. also just seems like overall less tonnage removed from the ground so arguably less environmentally destructive. i know very little on the subject though so would love to hear what others think

@allangraham970

12 күн бұрын

Lithium can be mined sustainably, not saying this is true for all lithium mines though. If this not good enough for you sodium batteries are coming, you can get a near infinite amount of sodium his from sea water, and there are easier ways to sodium especially in usa C0bolt is currently used in some batteries, but their are many other materials that can be used, LFP batteries are an example of this. Solid state batteries open up different material choices as well

It sounds very promising.

We need MMRs and SMRs for deployment on a distributed basis, giving us back a lot of wire and steel for use in other endeavours. We just don't need the high price tags. Maybe puny humans can get it done before micro and small fusion plants deprive fission of all usefulness. When replacement time rolls around, fusion slots right in.

@SocialDownclimber

3 күн бұрын

That's never going to happen. Fusion energy is too advanced for our civilisation this century. The economics of fission don't even stack up, and that is orders of magnitude simpler than a tokamak.

Very interesting info. I’m sure there are a lot of great use cases for nuclear power in whatever capacity, but there always a number of potential & real issues that make it a hard sell also like, acts of terrorism, war, natural disasters, meteorite strike, earthquakes, maintenance oversights and toxic waste to name a few. I would like to see more R&D on geothermal power plants. In Australia, (& many other countries) I would have thought we have a huge potential here for tapping into decent heat sources for this type of scalable & reasonably green power source. Without regard to the many hot surface springs we have, the Artesian Basin is only 3 kms down with a footprint that covers 4 major states, surely it is not that hard to dig, drill, blast &/or bore tunnels to this vast resource of over an estimated 1.7 million square kms with around 65,000 cubic kms of hot water (up to 100 degree C) for geothermal power generation when I see all the huge tunnelling projects that are being done locally and globally. I know there has been some disasters created from geothermal exploration around the world, but the idea of radioactive contamination probably scares people more than the idea of pumping coal, fuel, deisel & gas fumes into the atmosphere or creating a mountain of hot mud with a geothermal stuff up.

The Rolls Royce UK SMR is planned to be operational by the end of this decade. The economy of scale in SMRs is in the multiple units coming off a production line all to the same design. The obvious locations for initial SMRs are any existing nuclear facility with spare grid connection capacity, recently decommissioned nuclear power plant sites which could host multiple SMRs, and then decommissioned coal (or even gas) power plants. A ship to shore power plant is also an obvious choice for emergency restoration of power following disasters - just need the port to have the power connection facilities. A SMR powered water desalination plant could also be a game-changer in some locations.

@clarkkent9080

14 күн бұрын

There has never been and there is not economies of small scale in power generation. Every nuclear power plant uses standard components built in a factory and system modules are built in factories and shipped to the site. The build it in a factory cost savings will never happen because it has already been used.

"In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future"(2017).

TIL that 3 tablespoons of HELEU can be converted to 3.1 GWh of output energy after losses and transports. That is enormously more efficient than even the most optimistic fusion believer solution could produce. (Considering a developed country citizen uses on average 4.5kW (household/workplace/school/hospital stays/infrastructure/car and so on) over their lifetime of approximately 80 year)

@ericnewton5720

Ай бұрын

I don’t think your energy usage figure is even close to accurate. A standard water heater running one hour uses 4.5kW.

@_Karlsson

Ай бұрын

I think I count more things than you do. You take all the energy (electricity, gas, gasoline, diesel, oil, coal, solar power, wind power, water power, and much more) the society uses and divide it by the number of people. That's how much energy every individual uses and needs to live life as they do. But you can also just add the things you feel you want to add instead of everything that's needed for each individual in your country. Then you can get to much lower energy needs.

@0:10 those monumental costs and delays are entirely regulatory costs and delays. No that the technology has matured those regulations can be lifted or changed so it isn't cost prohibitive to build nuclear power plants.

Essential polling suggests approximately half of Australians, support development of nuclear power. 55% of respondents supported use of small modular reactors. However, 1. Toxic Waste, 2. Security Risks, 3. Policy Proliferation. Australia, a major uranium exporter, has only one nuclear research reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney, producing essential medicines for cancer detection and treatment. A balanced approach, considering energy needs and risks is required, fast as Australia is indeed in an energy supply crisis. Anyone who pays bills, will tell you that.

For 30 years we have been living in market conditions which are increasingly out of equilibrium. The cost of the manipulation, both financially and politically, seems to us all to be hearing a point where it will no longer be possible. The crash back to equilibrium may take a decade and a global war, but inevitably it will come. Following that return to market equilibrium, the cost environment for nuclear is likely to be far more competitive. Time will tell.

20:51 "... between 1.5 and 3.5 days at a time, which is the length of a single night on the Moon." What? The moon rotates on its axis once every ~28 days (once per orbit), making a "Lunar Day" that long. Meaning the night on the moon is half that time - ~14 days (two weeks).