stox tips an article from Nobel Week Dialogue about
the biggest problem of the nuclear power industry: it's not fun anymore. The author, Ashutosh Jogalekar, expands upon this quote from Freeman Dyson: "The fundamental problem of the nuclear industry is not reactor safety, not waste disposal, not the dangers of nuclear proliferation, real though all these problems are. The fundamental problem of the industry is that nobody any longer has any fun building reactors. Sometime between 1960 and 1970 the fun went out of the business. The adventurers, the experimenters, the inventors, were driven out, and the accountants and managers took control. The accountants and managers decided that it was not cost effective to let bright people play with weird reactors." Jogalekar adds, "For any technological development to be possible, the technology needs to drive itself with the fuel of Darwinian innovation. It needs to generate all possible ideas – including the weird ones – and then fish out the best while ruthlessly weeding out the worst. ... Nothing like this happened with nuclear power. It was a technology whose development was dictated by a few prominent government and military officials and large organizations and straitjacketed within narrow constraints. ... The result was that the field remained both scientifically narrow and expensive. Even today there are only a handful of companies building and operating most of the world's reactors. To reinvigorate the promise of nuclear power to provide cheap energy to the world and combat climate change, the field needs to be infused with the same entrepreneurial spirit that pervaded the TRIGA design team and the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs."
An A C Gilbert Chemistry Kickstarter Project
By westlake
•
2013-Dec-7 20:35
• Score: 5, Interesting
• Thread
Chemistry sets were effectively banned a long time ago as a side effect of the war on drugs.
This fully funded Kickstarter project is an authentic recreation of an A C Gilbert chemistry set from the 1920s to 1940s.
Chemical List Arranged in the order originally published by the A.C. Gilbert Company along with their item number and the 1936 pricing)
Heirloom Chemistry Set
Re:Slight change in title, if I may
By jbolden
•
2013-Dec-7 20:58
• Score: 4, Insightful
• Thread
It had nothing to do with the war on drugs. The shifts came from consumer protection laws. A pre WWI set is a very dangerous toy by today's standards.
Decay heat?
By Beryllium Sphere(tm)
•
2013-Dec-7 21:16
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
Stopping the chain reaction is the easy part. What causes meltdowns is that short-lived fission products keep decaying and generating so much energy that there needs to be continued cooling.
Re:What would you expect?
By AmiMoJo
•
2013-Dec-7 21:33
• Score: 4, Insightful
• Thread
Unless the moderator is damaged and bits of it fall into the tank, or worse still block the plug hole.
Most alternative reactor designs suck
By Animats
•
2013-Dec-7 21:54
• Score: 3
• Thread
Most alternative reactor designs have some major flaw. Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Pebble-bed reactors have pebble jams. (An experimental one in Germany is such a mess there's no way to fully decommission it.) Helium gas-cooled reactors leak helium. (Fort St. Vrain was converted from nuclear to natural gas because of that.) One of the painful lessons of long-life nuclear power plants is that what goes on inside the reactor vessel has to be really, really simple. Anything complex in there will break. It's being shot full of holes at the atomic level, after all. (See "hydrogen embrittlement").
Pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors at least have only water to deal with. The fuel rods are solid rods. The thing is basically simple, although the plumbing gets insanely complex. Even then, big accidents have happened.
Some of the fancier reactor designs require an associated chemical plant to reprocess the materials. This is a pain if you're in the power generation business, and a source of leaks and risks.