Toshiba Builds 100x Smaller Micro Nuclear Reactor

The stuff is a witch's brew of radioactive isotopes, some with very short half-lives, and others with exceedingly long half-lives; some of which result from the radioactive decay of the fuel; some from the long chains of decay which follow that; some of which result from neutrons bombarding the fuel, the rods containing the fuel, the containment vessel of the reactor, and the impurities in the water. Everything gets bombarded and the result is buildings, reactor components, fuel rod casings, fuel byproducts and decay products, all radioactive, some very poisonous chemically as well, and essentially impossible to neutralize except by burying it and hoping it does not come back to the surface in your own lifetime, because you can bet it will find its way back to the surface before it's safe.

 

Not to mention the free neutrons, alpha- and beta-particles that sorta float around. Thankfully alpha and beta radiation are reasonably easily contained. The other stuff, though, as well as the happily fissile by-product, is some scary stuff.

~ dan ~

 

Daniel: I realize all that junk, I'm just wondering what thing specifically since the number 100,000 years is being is being tossed around. Obviously not everything will be that long lasting.

fruzzetti: Since when is helium and electron particles particularly dangerous?.... said the gold atom to Rutherford

 

Wait a bit. eBay will have it on Buy it now for $2.6 mil. (Of course the shipping will suck.)

 

when it comes to radioactivity... it is basically understood that anything that so much as touched radioactive stuff is now radioactive itself. this makes the problem far more complex...

you wouldn't believe the amount of waste i generated while using radioactive tracers in biochemical assays. it was all contaminated, it all had to be disposed of with radioactive waste.

3H only has a half life of about 12.5 years and is a weak beta emitter, and the procedure was beyond obnoxious. imagine something that's truly dangerous with a half life extending into tens of thousands of years.

 

None of those particles travels far. Even neutrons do not travel all that far. The actual emitted radiation inside the reactor is not the problem. The problem is the waste produced in the reactor, and the waste that was the reactor itself, mostly caused by the absorption of those free neutrons and alpha particles (helium nuclei) and the fission process itself.

 

i once read some sci-fi where cars were running on a super mini power plant most likely fusion or fission....it did not really specify which. now the book went so far as to describe how in the early days how dangerous the fuel was in accidents, etc and how it had progressed to be something completely safe.

so, with all the opposition for this "first step" technology can we assume that book i read will remain sci-fi for ever??? it would sure seem that way.

now i read soooo much sci-fi crap when i was a kid, i could not even begin to tell you the book im referring to and it wouldnt surprise me to find out i have combined several books in my thoughts above.

just 2 cents here

 

What irritates me is that we still almost exclusively use phose-changing of water into steam to turn a turbine in almost all power-generating applications.

~ dan ~

 

And blasting stuff into space by dumping explosive fuel into the rear and riding the explosion is not going to get us very far when it comes to the distances of significance. I agree.

 

How does that compare to the realistic alternative, a coal plant?
In addition to all the combustion by products and mercury, those beasties are dumping radioactive material into the air.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
At least the waste is contained at a nuclear plant.

 

Apples and Oranges.

Coal plant definitely has more radioactivity released than any US nuclear plant....during normal operations. Its after normal operations are over that the problem is being discussed.

All Coal Plants vs. Chernobyl has Chernobyl releasing a LOT more.

Time to ditch both technologies.

 

But it is still, yes with effort, containable. Even with the pollution stopping after shut down, a coal plant would have exposed hundreds to thousands of people. Eating seafood has already become a gamble because of them.

The best place I heard for storing the waste, which was of course dropped, was using abandoned salt mines. Most are dry, and over time the salt creep will encase anything left in there.

I would love to ditch both, but there is going to be a lag where we will have to use the nasty stuff until the clean, renewable stuff cathes up. There will also be applications where the good stuff won't work. The mini nuke I originally linked to was for a small town in Alaska. Currently they are burning diesel for power. Which is expensive and won't last. A biofuel isn't available for use. I am sure transmission lines would have been put in if feasable. On site wind and solar have their limitations. Hopefully they'll be a viable choice when this mini nuke's service life ends in 30 years.

 

im sorry, but i dont believe that we DONT have the technology to sequester radioactive waste with reasonable amount of safety...

are problem is that it is not going to be cheap to do so. several hundred million just to dig a big hole. throw it in, several million in concrete to cover it and then a nice layer of dirt on it. can be done...just no one wants to pay for it.

we have TONS of isolated land we could use... but then again, that would increase costs by several million simply because of its remoteness.

is it a perfect solution?? well of course not... but we all know that in any screwed up situation there comes a point where the solution will have pain associated with it. we have past that point a long long time ago

 

Opinion. Far from fact. Modern metallurgy and nuclear expertise have only been around less than 100 years ......and from this we are sure that every single disposal site in the world will last 100000 years? In the US, the high level waste was generated by utilities depending on the government to figure out a perfect solution....without any proof, clue, or long term testing availible to show that a 100000 year solution exists....which probably does not.

Why? Where is the requirement that we must remain incredibly inefficient?

 

Dumping it into a sealed pool is more containable than dumping it into the atmosphere.

Efficiency is something to shoot for, but it to will not happen overnight. Will real gains in efficiency keep up with growing power demand in the world?

 

I agree with that statement. The point I was making is that the technology for 100% of all containers to work for 1000 times longer than anything ever built is probably not going to happen. Airplanes are mighty safe and well developed. Would you be willing to bet there is not going to be any major airplane accident in the incredibly short time period of a 1000 years? Why would that assumption seem foolish and the assumption that radioactive waste would never leak out over much, much longer with technology that is just in it's infancy.

I do not expect to happen overnight. What we do have is inefficiency of unbelivable magnitude in just about everything we operate and buy. The Prius makes it obvious how gas efficient a car can be if the builder wants an efficient car.....and buyers want an efficient car. That's why PriusChat exists. Now think about light bulbs, home appliances, water use, homes that use the sun rather than battle the sun, etc. etc. The amazing thing is, that efficient use of the resources we have leads to an increase in the standard of living. (just like the Prius's improved MPG also leads to less polution, less brake wear, higher reliability, etc.)

 

have to agree with many here... because nuclear radiation provides such a quick show of symptoms plus some long term effects, its difficult to quantify its real cost to us in leakage event. but i highly doubt that its as bad as we perceive it to be.

there has never been an industry that did not go thru growing pains. there are very few mature industries now that can boast a safety record that meets even a fraction of the nuclear industry.

all the power industries we use now have very bad effects on our health, oil, gas, coal... they are ALL KILLING US!! just much more slowly... but i think with much more devastating effects.

i think we need to stop looking for a perfect solution, stop spewing pollution by spreading "small" amounts ovver millions of square miles and look at the possibility that we do have remote areas of the world where we can sequester our nuclear waste and do so with a high likelihood that we will be safe from it for a few hundred years. by then, i feel that we will have figured out a better way (probably dumping it on the moon or some other inane idea....)

 

Why not instead work to engineer plants that can sink the pollution or even use it as nutrients? I'm not at all for genetic engineering or massive genetic modification, but I do think we could do some cool stuff.

Also, why not distribute solar panels? If a power company GAVE all its customers 200 square feet of solar array to fix to the grid, what would the output be on a sunny day? Could it be efficiently stored and redistributed as necessary? Could a grid with that many small components contributing to it really be maintained?

Sustainability has to be the way of the future, or else we're going to leave behind a hot, stinking shell of a planet in just a few generations while we look for a new habitat.

~ dan ~

 

sounds great.... to me that is... i wonder what electric company stock and bond holders would think about that??...well, i guess i dont wonder about it a lot...

sure it would be great... but why should they ruin their monopolistic nest egg?? they are the reason why we dont have them on every roof in america now...

their lobbyists made sure that housing associations banned them in the 80's... (just now getting that fixed after ONLY 20 years and only in parts of the country...)

they also made sure legislation was enacted that added several thousand dollars to the licensing and installation AND connections to the grid...(a million horror stories of people in CA who tried to install solar on their house and the red tape they had to go thru...only the most determined succeeded. there is no doubt that thousands simply gave up...)

so ya, its a good idea to everyone EXCEPT the people involved in the financial end of the power supply system now... and lets face it...MONEY makes all the decisions...

 

It's very true and very sad. But the one thing the human race will have to face if we live long enough is the complete exhaustion of fossil fuel supplies.

We must transition to sustainable fuels because the fossil fuels will not last forever. It may not be this generation, or the next one. But we will transition, regardless of what the economic establishment would like.

Here's my concern, and it was the subject of an alarmist paper I wrote some seven years ago: if humanity survives, we will face the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable fuels. It's inevitable. The real question is how the transition will be as it is a compromise -- we have the choice of getting our act together now to have a slow and gentle transition over a long period of time or we have the opposite extreme which is one day we abruptly run out of fossil fuels and suddenly the world freaks out, spending six months in chaos before the sustainable alternative is ready for us all.

We don't have a choice about the transition, but we do have a choice about how long (and, correlated to how long: gentle) that transition is.

</alarmist>

~ dan ~