Former naval reactor operator here. It was clear to me at the time (1982-88) that one could be built that was fully automated. Dual redundancy to SIL 4 safety PLC's can make these micro reactors a single pushbutton operation without a "real" reactor operator present. PLC can be a hell of a lot smarter than the 20 year old kids we have running reactors on every aircraft carrier. I anticipate your funding will be well supported under the new Trump administration. Especially with support of advisors like Elon Musk.
I’m 36 now and remember as a kid reading a popular science magazine that had a cover story of the future home innovations of the next generation. In that article was a home reactor the size of a fridge that supplied power and hot water. Now kids just wanna learn tiktok dances.
@OVER-bENGINEERED SIL4 is only necessary in (or intended for) situations that can cause mass casualty events. So trains, nuclear plants, chemical plants, are places you would find such systems. We wouldn't find them in Naval Nuclear because technology in the US Navy is 20-30 years behind industry. Naval Reactors waits far too long for systems to be approved.
For those that haven't read the INL publication "Proving the Principal", it's an interesting read which goes as far as explaining the history of INL. I've read it a couple of times. I still learn something new.
Using AI for control of a nuclear power reactor? As a professional engineer of control systems that worries me. We've been down this road before with fuzzy logic controllers. "you don't have to tune PID loops" they said. True enough. But it couldn't tell you when things changed. So the controller would quietly compensate for something that someone needed to know about. Nobody would know about certain wear and tear until the controller simply let go because it couldn't handle the situation any more. The result? Failure due to foreseeable conditions had there been a plain old PID loop controller. Maybe the scientists have their reasons. But for the love of all that is good, please talk to a professional engineer with a couple decades of experience before committing to some shiny concept like AI.
"...fuzzy logic...": I haven't heard that term for a very long time. Today they would probably call it "quantum"... because that term, like AI, is in vogue. We need to rediscover: Digital will always be an approximation of analog.
But this comment implies we continue down the same path as we have been for decades. Worried and afraid to take chances leads to no progression. Also, as if nothing has been learned over the decades and documented and only engineers would have the knowledge needed to move forward. This will cause other countries to progress faster (if they haven't already) Now many of these smaller reactors use molten salt, liquid metal or other types of cooling solutions and not light water. Also I don't think anyone stated "nuclear" as your comment stated. There are other minerals to get the same reaction from a reactor such as Thorium etc. Just like the steel industry wouldn't adapt and change from open hearth to electrical arc, if we do not accept change we will be left behind. I personally don't believe we've used this technology to the fullest in fear of ____ (insert your fear) Current AI requires a database which is programmed by professionals with direct input from other professionals based on the system design required. We are not even close to AI = No humans in the loop and I don't know if it ever will be as the core AI community is well aware of societies fears. AI in 2024/2025 requires human oversight to monitor progress.
AI is only mentioned in design support. AI can do millions of runs of worse case scenarios and loop back to make a change to the design and run the simulation again. Millions of iterations to optimize the design. For actual reactor operation, simple dual redundancy safety rated PLC's with the right programming and rated to SIL 4 integrity is a no-brainer. I was a 20yo kid running a reactor for a nuclear aircraft carrier. A PLC can certainly handle that task.
Having recently watched National Lampoon's Vacation, I asked Google "How old was Christie Brinkley in the film National Lampoon's vacation?" Google's AI answer was "70 years old". Enough said. Keep both hands on the wheel humans.
A big step towards solving problems with the electric grid. Similar to the locovore movement. Consume products which originate locally. These can be installed at site of local peaker plants (possibly with changing electric cables, with no need for new towers or right-of-ways).
I was happy to hear that Russia rethought its withholding of nuclear fuel from Terra Power(correction, NuScale) and now WILL provide it to them. I lived 25 miles downwind of the SONGS nuke plants for 36 years and would be happy to have my city host a SMR tomorrow. We had no problems from SONGS whatsoever, and some friends worked out there jumping into the reactor area and helping change fuel rods. They've had no problems from it to this day, either. Distributed SMRs would end our vulnerability to terrorist attacks on the grid by doing away with the grid altogether(ish).
So this video just explained that we had clean energy technology since the 1960s. They might be expensive then but that’s often the case with new technology. More investment will eventually reduce the price.
You don't have to. They don't create weapon material. Even if they did no one would hit one in the U.S. because there are sensors that can track the material. Meaning it reads the radiation coming off the material at the neutrino level
@@sparksmcgee6641 Our neutrino detection is not as advanced as you think it is. If it were, we would have a detector on every sub hunter or on military satellites and know the exact location of every nuke sub in real-time.
@@sparksmcgee6641 Additionally, micro reactors would likely be used in remote locations off the grid in the first place. Remote meaning, it would be difficult to access by bad actors.
Not enough fuel density to be worth the effort steal. Extremely hot, both in temperature and radiation level. Fuel is encased in individual beads within the fuel rods. Would take a major effort to separate again.
3:15 "...here there are more reactors of more advanced and different types...": The Idaho facility was created to test practicality of nuclear power for flight. It took the concepts of the breeder reactor... and went nowhere with it. Why, in over 60 years hasn't it created a thorium reactor? Spent fuel from conventional reactors has 96% of its original fuel still unconsumed... and leaves it in a very dangerous state. A thorium reactor reactor with using molten salt instead of high pressure water for heat exchange could use that spent fuel as feed stock along with thorium, consume its remaining potential, and end up with minimal... and benign... waste. 12:00 "...retired colonel...": One thing the military has been eminently successful at: optimizing the Peter Principal.
Dear nuclear people. From my experience as a nuclear engineer and reactor operator, I can tell you with certainty that these smaller reactors are no more modular than the old big ones. I have worked on the older reactors as well as several of the new modular projects. Videos all over the internet depict modular reactors being transported to remote sites. But this is much the same way we delivered the reactor vessel to Calvert Cliffs in 1969. What the videos fail to show you is the additional 'stuff' you have to build to operate the reactor. Turbine building, reactor building, control building, rad waste building, circulating water system, circ water intake structure, output transformer, switchyard, security building and fencing. And all these systems must be included in your license application. So, your videos are disingenuous. They leave the impression it is just a black box you deliver it and turn it on. You better fix your ad campaign because you're going to lose public support when they find out the truth.
Micro reactors are great for hard to reach locations, but on the scale of things, i think they are vastly inefficient compared to large power plants. Economies of scale have shown across all industries, the bigger the factory the more efficient the plant. Dont fall into the trap of millions of small reactors that will burn up all the uranium available. After all, Uranium is a rare earth metal..... rare being the key word. Less availability will push up prices and will price out the general public and make everyone who doesnt use fossil fuels, energy poor.
@@michaelwhite8524Did you or your colleagues sign NDAs? In turn, is that why we do not know anything about this now in the public realm? Perhaps its been reporyed but this is the first i've ever read about the problem.
@michaelwhite8524 You in fact are lying. The exposure while it was in place was 10% of the minimum does to cause an increase in cancer. Publications are available on the site and situation. You are claiming you were there a decade after the reactor was shut down. So explain how it could effect you?
@@jamesmcdonnell5617 He's lying. I just looked up the report. Exposure dose was 10% of the minimum dosage that could cause cancer. Meaning they would have to have spent 10 tours working around it to even register a chance of cancer increase. That's not taking into account that a dose 10 over 10 years is not the same a dose over 10 in one year. So it's impossible for this liar to have any illness from being there.
I would say anywhere, if you require high density reliable power. If you need unreliable expensive power then solar is better. Solar is just something cute to put on your roof, it’s not for powering advanced society.
The whole point of these reactors is portability and rapid deployment. A 20 MW micro reactor can be deployed and running in a matter of weeks. Compare that to a solar farm, which would require 82,000 solar panels as per the Royalla Solar Farm in Australia, which took 100 people a year to build.
Solar is very competitive compared to retail electricity. It's not very competitive compared to wholesale electricity. Solar scales well to 15-20% of supply pie and requires baseload. The video describes better wholesale baseload.
Fantastic presentation but there's a LOT you left out. FIRST - I do support the use of nuclear energy but the pro-nuclear lobby needs to be a lot better at messaging and leaving out issues DOES NOT HELP. 1) No matter what anyone says there is always the issue of disposal. Here in Australia we have several Uranium mines including Olympic Dam which has around 30% of the worlds reserves. Its principally a copper deposit that's also laced with Gold and Uranium but its underground and is a stable land site. There's no reason why we can use it to store spent fuel. Why the rest of the pro-nuclear people can't or wont suggest disposal sites is pretty poor. 2) Micro reactors have a basic efficiency issue with neutron flux. Neutron flux (the flow of neutrons through the reactor core) is what keeps the nuclear reaction going. Yes these small reactors can work but because of their scale they are also LESS EFFICIENT because they have a lower neutron flux. 3) On the subject of efficiency and as an engineer this is a subject that annoys me a lot these days. No matter what anyone wants if you are using steam turbines then the THERMAL EFFICIENCY is limited to about 36% and that is simply dictated by the Laws of thermodynamics as any engineer knows. If you go and look at the latest reactors on Wikipedia and look at the thermal energy and electrical output you can find out the EPR 2 (European reactor) gets about 36% and the AP1000 (American reactor) gets about 35%. Interestingly MOST coal fired and other thermal plants get about the same efficiency because they also have to obey the laws of thermodynamics. Its because steam turbines are limited by a thing called Carnot Cycle efficiency Ceff = 1 - Tc/Th where Tc/Th is the temperature ratio over the Carnot Cycle and its not easy to get that Tc/Th less than 0.65. It has been done with high temperature flash boilers with coal. Its also why Gas Turbines are more efficient because they have a Tc/Th ration of about 0.54. Overall really good I just wished they'd go into some of the details a bit further.
They said, that it is absolutel safe, tested, failsafe and therefore harmless. Then came all the funny accidents and human errors. Yeah, not so safe, because industry will cut corners, not safe, because or human errors, not harmless, because of its radiation an poisoness... the more reactors, the more errors, the more danger. There is no cleanwashing human errors and greedyness....
It just has to be better that the gred and stupidity of mining coal. People like you don't care because you know it isn't anyone you know dying to bring you power so you want people to keep dying like they are now.
Micro modular reactors have only been 5 years away since the later 1940's yet not a single one has ever been built, by any country, anywhere on earth. The fantastic promise of MMNR's has prompted scores of billions of dollars of investment and lots more investment will be coming but the little actual research that all this money gets spent on keeps uncovering more problems that push the eventual commercial availability of MMNR's further down the road. Fact is, what we need WAY more than MMNR's is economical, efficient storage for renewable energy. Producing the energy, whatever the source, isn't the main problem, we have orders of magnitude more cheap, renewable electricity than we could use with quadruple the population currently on the earth, storage and transport is the issue. Sure wish obama had spent all our tax dollars on battery research instead of on flooding the country with existing technology Chinese solar panels. We'd probably have the miracle battery we need by now. Instead, obama pissed away all that money on virtue signaling that he could put his name on during his administration. He reaped the benefit, the country got screwed.
@@justanghozzst8218 No, even if there were no regulators or government hoops to jump through, the economic and physical barriers to implementing commercial micros are WAY too huge to realistically be overcome. Even if the entire reactor construction were no cost, the fuel would have to be 1/10th the price it currently is for micros to even start being economically viable. And while the cost of the fuel could hopefully be reduced some if huge volumes of it started to be made, the cost won't go down to 1/10 of what it currently is. Don't forget, the nuclear industry is making HUGE sums of money off of just the promise of micro nukes, why would they bother actually moving forward to what would be an inevitable failure and the end of the investment gravy train? The physical barriers, such as, the smaller the fuel quantity, the more radiation escapes into the shielding instead of hitting and reacting with other fuel means an enormous fuel loss compared with larger reactors. All that wasted radiation still has to be paid for and then dealt with, it just doesn't contribute to the economics of the operation. I'd love to see micro reactors achieve even a small portion of their fantastic promise but I have to admit that it'll never happen, it's just a fantasy that will and can never happen.
@@itsmatt2105 The reason it's so expensive right now is because there is no iteration. If you start mass producing SMRs at scale and standardize the implementation on a site the economics change. We can't do that now because all of the nuclear startups in the last few decades all just waste their seed money doing endless legal lobbying and hypothetical experiments when they can't actually build anything. Bill Gates just spent years and paid thousands of scientists to write a textbook of paperwork for the NRC before they got approval to have TerraPower even begin the approval process for further review. They're building a structure and hoping the thing ever actually gets approved. Tell me that doesn't easily 10x a budget instantly.
@@itsmatt2105 You're wrong about fuel costs btw, that's all just mining infrastructure and isn't real world. Thorium is a cheap byproduct and we have reserves of Uranium/Plutonium.
Well you know nothing about what the output would be. I was shocked when I saw how low the pollution wad on those units. They weren't made to be commercial jets. Long range bomber that could go anywhere in the world without refueling. Missiles made them irrelevant.
Honestly this footage is incredible.
Former naval reactor operator here. It was clear to me at the time (1982-88) that one could be built that was fully automated. Dual redundancy to SIL 4 safety PLC's can make these micro reactors a single pushbutton operation without a "real" reactor operator present. PLC can be a hell of a lot smarter than the 20 year old kids we have running reactors on every aircraft carrier. I anticipate your funding will be well supported under the new Trump administration. Especially with support of advisors like Elon Musk.
I’m 36 now and remember as a kid reading a popular science magazine that had a cover story of the future home innovations of the next generation. In that article was a home reactor the size of a fridge that supplied power and hot water. Now kids just wanna learn tiktok dances.
I was looking for an example of real SIL4 safety instrumented function. Got any?
@OVER-bENGINEERED SIL4 is only necessary in (or intended for) situations that can cause mass casualty events. So trains, nuclear plants, chemical plants, are places you would find such systems. We wouldn't find them in Naval Nuclear because technology in the US Navy is 20-30 years behind industry. Naval Reactors waits far too long for systems to be approved.
@ those are good examples of industry categories, I was just wondering if anyone knew of a specific SIF that had a SIL4 rating.
doesn't matter, nuke power is WAY too expensive
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
For those that haven't read the INL publication "Proving the Principal", it's an interesting read which goes as far as explaining the history of INL. I've read it a couple of times. I still learn something new.
Keep up the great work and as stated "we need this"
Using AI for control of a nuclear power reactor? As a professional engineer of control systems that worries me. We've been down this road before with fuzzy logic controllers. "you don't have to tune PID loops" they said. True enough.
But it couldn't tell you when things changed. So the controller would quietly compensate for something that someone needed to know about. Nobody would know about certain wear and tear until the controller simply let go because it couldn't handle the situation any more. The result? Failure due to foreseeable conditions had there been a plain old PID loop controller. Maybe the scientists have their reasons. But for the love of all that is good, please talk to a professional engineer with a couple decades of experience before committing to some shiny concept like AI.
"...fuzzy logic...": I haven't heard that term for a very long time. Today they would probably call it "quantum"... because that term, like AI, is in vogue. We need to rediscover: Digital will always be an approximation of analog.
But this comment implies we continue down the same path as we have been for decades. Worried and afraid to take chances leads to no progression. Also, as if nothing has been learned over the decades and documented and only engineers would have the knowledge needed to move forward. This will cause other countries to progress faster (if they haven't already)
Now many of these smaller reactors use molten salt, liquid metal or other types of cooling solutions and not light water. Also I don't think anyone stated "nuclear" as your comment stated. There are other minerals to get the same reaction from a reactor such as Thorium etc.
Just like the steel industry wouldn't adapt and change from open hearth to electrical arc, if we do not accept change we will be left behind. I personally don't believe we've used this technology to the fullest in fear of ____ (insert your fear)
Current AI requires a database which is programmed by professionals with direct input from other professionals based on the system design required. We are not even close to AI = No humans in the loop and I don't know if it ever will be as the core AI community is well aware of societies fears. AI in 2024/2025 requires human oversight to monitor progress.
AI is only mentioned in design support. AI can do millions of runs of worse case scenarios and loop back to make a change to the design and run the simulation again. Millions of iterations to optimize the design. For actual reactor operation, simple dual redundancy safety rated PLC's with the right programming and rated to SIL 4 integrity is a no-brainer. I was a 20yo kid running a reactor for a nuclear aircraft carrier. A PLC can certainly handle that task.
Having recently watched National Lampoon's Vacation, I asked Google "How old was Christie Brinkley in the film National Lampoon's vacation?" Google's AI answer was "70 years old". Enough said. Keep both hands on the wheel humans.
I am actually also looking at this technology for power options on the moon. Will be fascinating to watch and manifest into reality.
INL works on nuclear power systems for NASA, the Voyager Probes, the Martian Rovers. They did a nuclear rocket engine prototype at one point.
@@jokerace8227 Stanton Freidmen was on that team too
@@jokerace8227they're all fake, dummy.
A big step towards solving problems with the electric grid. Similar to the locovore movement. Consume products which originate locally. These can be installed at site of local peaker plants (possibly with changing electric cables, with no need for new towers or right-of-ways).
Great video. Gives hope that SMR's are within reach in a few years. Succes to all of you at INL.
I was happy to hear that Russia rethought its withholding of nuclear fuel from Terra Power(correction, NuScale) and now WILL provide it to them.
I lived 25 miles downwind of the SONGS nuke plants for 36 years and would be happy to have my city host a SMR tomorrow. We had no problems from SONGS whatsoever, and some friends worked out there jumping into the reactor area and helping change fuel rods. They've had no problems from it to this day, either. Distributed SMRs would end our vulnerability to terrorist attacks on the grid by doing away with the grid altogether(ish).
Poland is building 12 GE SMRs, Ontario is building 4 GEs and Saskatchewan is in the site selection stage before building a planned 4 GE reactors.
yeah more bridge or railroad or tunnel will be amazing
Wow, sounds great!
What do I do with my micro-reactor when I'm finished using it? Recycling or general waste bin? 🤔
Yucca mountain was always the best option, and still is.
Just dump it in the desert off of I5, and don't tell anyone.
So, why have we not seen advancements in commercially available reactor technology? Is it because of regulation (i.e. government)?
so the military was transporting modular nuclear reactors in those heavily guarded caravan videos?
So this video just explained that we had clean energy technology since the 1960s.
They might be expensive then but that’s often the case with new technology. More investment will eventually reduce the price.
Not using these everywhere we can is kind of stupid.
How do we maintain security for the reactor and its fuel?
You don't have to. They don't create weapon material.
Even if they did no one would hit one in the U.S. because there are sensors that can track the material. Meaning it reads the radiation coming off the material at the neutrino level
@@sparksmcgee6641 Our neutrino detection is not as advanced as you think it is. If it were, we would have a detector on every sub hunter or on military satellites and know the exact location of every nuke sub in real-time.
@@sparksmcgee6641 Additionally, micro reactors would likely be used in remote locations off the grid in the first place. Remote meaning, it would be difficult to access by bad actors.
Guards? The fuck else would we do?
Not enough fuel density to be worth the effort steal. Extremely hot, both in temperature and radiation level. Fuel is encased in individual beads within the fuel rods. Would take a major effort to separate again.
How dirty are they when they get exploded by the enemy?
3:15 "...here there are more reactors of more advanced and different types...": The Idaho facility was created to test practicality of nuclear power for flight. It took the concepts of the breeder reactor... and went nowhere with it. Why, in over 60 years hasn't it created a thorium reactor?
Spent fuel from conventional reactors has 96% of its original fuel still unconsumed... and leaves it in a very dangerous state. A thorium reactor reactor with using molten salt instead of high pressure water for heat exchange could use that spent fuel as feed stock along with thorium, consume its remaining potential, and end up with minimal... and benign... waste.
12:00 "...retired colonel...": One thing the military has been eminently successful at: optimizing the Peter Principal.
Dear nuclear people. From my experience as a nuclear engineer and reactor operator, I can tell you with certainty that these smaller reactors are no more modular than the old big ones. I have worked on the older reactors as well as several of the new modular projects. Videos all over the internet depict modular reactors being transported to remote sites. But this is much the same way we delivered the reactor vessel to Calvert Cliffs in 1969. What the videos fail to show you is the additional 'stuff' you have to build to operate the reactor. Turbine building, reactor building, control building, rad waste building, circulating water system, circ water intake structure, output transformer, switchyard, security building and fencing. And all these systems must be included in your license application. So, your videos are disingenuous. They leave the impression it is just a black box you deliver it and turn it on. You better fix your ad campaign because you're going to lose public support when they find out the truth.
🙏🙏🙏🙏
Micro reactors are great for hard to reach locations, but on the scale of things, i think they are vastly inefficient compared to large power plants. Economies of scale have shown across all industries, the bigger the factory the more efficient the plant. Dont fall into the trap of millions of small reactors that will burn up all the uranium available. After all, Uranium is a rare earth metal..... rare being the key word. Less availability will push up prices and will price out the general public and make everyone who doesnt use fossil fuels, energy poor.
whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
You're showing you're ignorant of the material and technology.
@sparksmcgee6641 nah. Throught history bigger is better. Simple.
is fukashima workin out for you?
12000 tons of contamination rock was shipped out of Antarctica
I wintered over at Mcmurdo station 86-87. There are still people suffering from radiation at Mcmurdo.
@@michaelwhite8524Did you or your colleagues sign NDAs? In turn, is that why we do not know anything about this now in the public realm? Perhaps its been reporyed but this is the first i've ever read about the problem.
@michaelwhite8524 You in fact are lying. The exposure while it was in place was 10% of the minimum does to cause an increase in cancer. Publications are available on the site and situation. You are claiming you were there a decade after the reactor was shut down.
So explain how it could effect you?
@@jamesmcdonnell5617 He's lying. I just looked up the report. Exposure dose was 10% of the minimum dosage that could cause cancer.
Meaning they would have to have spent 10 tours working around it to even register a chance of cancer increase. That's not taking into account that a dose 10 over 10 years is not the same a dose over 10 in one year.
So it's impossible for this liar to have any illness from being there.
It's better then solar?
Antarctica has 30-day periods of darkness, if not longer.
I would say anywhere, if you require high density reliable power. If you need unreliable expensive power then solar is better. Solar is just something cute to put on your roof, it’s not for powering advanced society.
The whole point of these reactors is portability and rapid deployment. A 20 MW micro reactor can be deployed and running in a matter of weeks. Compare that to a solar farm, which would require 82,000 solar panels as per the Royalla Solar Farm in Australia, which took 100 people a year to build.
Solar is very competitive compared to retail electricity. It's not very competitive compared to wholesale electricity. Solar scales well to 15-20% of supply pie and requires baseload. The video describes better wholesale baseload.
@@elizabethb4634 You need lots of batteries.
Love it except for the AI part.
we got in-home reactors before GTA 6
You used a slide projector sound! How cute.
Fantastic presentation but there's a LOT you left out.
FIRST - I do support the use of nuclear energy but the pro-nuclear lobby needs to be a lot better at messaging and leaving out issues DOES NOT HELP.
1) No matter what anyone says there is always the issue of disposal. Here in Australia we have several Uranium mines including Olympic Dam which has around 30% of the worlds reserves. Its principally a copper deposit that's also laced with Gold and Uranium but its underground and is a stable land site. There's no reason why we can use it to store spent fuel. Why the rest of the pro-nuclear people can't or wont suggest disposal sites is pretty poor.
2) Micro reactors have a basic efficiency issue with neutron flux. Neutron flux (the flow of neutrons through the reactor core) is what keeps the nuclear reaction going. Yes these small reactors can work but because of their scale they are also LESS EFFICIENT because they have a lower neutron flux.
3) On the subject of efficiency and as an engineer this is a subject that annoys me a lot these days. No matter what anyone wants if you are using steam turbines then the THERMAL EFFICIENCY is limited to about 36% and that is simply dictated by the Laws of thermodynamics as any engineer knows.
If you go and look at the latest reactors on Wikipedia and look at the thermal energy and electrical output you can find out the EPR 2 (European reactor) gets about 36% and the AP1000 (American reactor) gets about 35%. Interestingly MOST coal fired and other thermal plants get about the same efficiency because they also have to obey the laws of thermodynamics. Its because steam turbines are limited by a thing called Carnot Cycle efficiency Ceff = 1 - Tc/Th where Tc/Th is the temperature ratio over the Carnot Cycle and its not easy to get that Tc/Th less than 0.65. It has been done with high temperature flash boilers with coal. Its also why Gas Turbines are more efficient because they have a Tc/Th ration of about 0.54.
Overall really good I just wished they'd go into some of the details a bit further.
We need fast reactors no more light water
Hi AI, nice vid. Blink once if you concur
Micro reactors? 😂😂😂
Rosatom is light years ahead of this!
NHI hover around nuclear facilities 😮
The waste is always the problem.
Not always. Look at fast neutron molten salt reactors. Interesting stuff
Waste has been sorted 20years ago. Old propaganda scare.
No it isn't. People blocking proper storage is the problem.
Small units have waste that's only radioactive for 500 years.
They said, that it is absolutel safe, tested, failsafe and therefore harmless. Then came all the funny accidents and human errors. Yeah, not so safe, because industry will cut corners, not safe, because or human errors, not harmless, because of its radiation an poisoness... the more reactors, the more errors, the more danger.
There is no cleanwashing human errors and greedyness....
It just has to be better that the gred and stupidity of mining coal.
People like you don't care because you know it isn't anyone you know dying to bring you power so you want people to keep dying like they are now.
Micro modular reactors have only been 5 years away since the later 1940's yet not a single one has ever been built, by any country, anywhere on earth. The fantastic promise of MMNR's has prompted scores of billions of dollars of investment and lots more investment will be coming but the little actual research that all this money gets spent on keeps uncovering more problems that push the eventual commercial availability of MMNR's further down the road. Fact is, what we need WAY more than MMNR's is economical, efficient storage for renewable energy. Producing the energy, whatever the source, isn't the main problem, we have orders of magnitude more cheap, renewable electricity than we could use with quadruple the population currently on the earth, storage and transport is the issue. Sure wish obama had spent all our tax dollars on battery research instead of on flooding the country with existing technology Chinese solar panels. We'd probably have the miracle battery we need by now. Instead, obama pissed away all that money on virtue signaling that he could put his name on during his administration. He reaped the benefit, the country got screwed.
It's a government and regulatory issue and not a capability issue.
@@justanghozzst8218 No, even if there were no regulators or government hoops to jump through, the economic and physical barriers to implementing commercial micros are WAY too huge to realistically be overcome. Even if the entire reactor construction were no cost, the fuel would have to be 1/10th the price it currently is for micros to even start being economically viable. And while the cost of the fuel could hopefully be reduced some if huge volumes of it started to be made, the cost won't go down to 1/10 of what it currently is.
Don't forget, the nuclear industry is making HUGE sums of money off of just the promise of micro nukes, why would they bother actually moving forward to what would be an inevitable failure and the end of the investment gravy train?
The physical barriers, such as, the smaller the fuel quantity, the more radiation escapes into the shielding instead of hitting and reacting with other fuel means an enormous fuel loss compared with larger reactors. All that wasted radiation still has to be paid for and then dealt with, it just doesn't contribute to the economics of the operation. I'd love to see micro reactors achieve even a small portion of their fantastic promise but I have to admit that it'll never happen, it's just a fantasy that will and can never happen.
@@itsmatt2105 The reason it's so expensive right now is because there is no iteration. If you start mass producing SMRs at scale and standardize the implementation on a site the economics change. We can't do that now because all of the nuclear startups in the last few decades all just waste their seed money doing endless legal lobbying and hypothetical experiments when they can't actually build anything. Bill Gates just spent years and paid thousands of scientists to write a textbook of paperwork for the NRC before they got approval to have TerraPower even begin the approval process for further review. They're building a structure and hoping the thing ever actually gets approved. Tell me that doesn't easily 10x a budget instantly.
@@itsmatt2105 You're wrong about fuel costs btw, that's all just mining infrastructure and isn't real world. Thorium is a cheap byproduct and we have reserves of Uranium/Plutonium.
This is from the same outfit who wanted to fly around in aircraft equipped with atomic reactors. Wasn't THAT a great idea?
The USAF nixed that idea pretty quickly.
Well you know nothing about what the output would be.
I was shocked when I saw how low the pollution wad on those units. They weren't made to be commercial jets. Long range bomber that could go anywhere in the world without refueling.
Missiles made them irrelevant.
only iphone is validated
Too bad for idaho. Horrible place now.
Piss off bot
It's been there since before your parents were born.
👽
goodbye world !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah, idiots like you screaming your ignorance and stupidity are proud to pollute and destroy the world for your politics.