Featured Future Toyota Prime PHEVs: How much range and performance?

At the risk of sounding less smart than a nuclear engineer, why do we have waste storage sites? Why do we need them? isn't our commitment to electricity great enough that the locations of our power plants aren't themselves the storage sites? is there some expectation that we will someday use that land for anything other than hosting hot rocks to boil some water?

Why can't we just bring in the enriched fuel bits, and leave them there? Makes it easier to budget just knowing that you have to secure the one site in perpetuity, and once you've done that, you might as well make electricity there too.

 

Interesting in a few ways, for me anyways! Coal = cheap / inexpensive fuel to date. Bringing cost down is the business number one rule (at the top if the list of business rules. or so we are lead to believe and implement).
Obviously than. burning more coal is a cost savings measure following the current business model that we all hear about on a daily basis. Or should I say most of us are indoctrinated with, daily (if not minute by minute).

The other thing is the acronym (NORM) in its context of natural occurring radioactive material. Is it possible to get more ironic than that? Even understanding what natural occurring radioactivity is and how much of it humans can handle or recover from without losing all their / our hair in the process.

I'm not getting what is and what type(s) of contaminated steel is dropping to lower levels since 50 years ago?
I agree it's a waiting game and always has been, since science, gov, religion, what have you, have so far always been on the winning side, overall, so to speak.

 

Source: Some fish in Alabama are not safe to eat

The Alabama Department of Public Health is warning of mercury contamination among species of fish. Data collected last year found some levels were to high for human consumption. This mainly impacts largemouth bass and some species of catfish.Jul 20, 2021​

The mercury comes from burning coal. Some of our favorite fishing streams hold toxic fish.

Bob Wilson

 

There are many technologies that may happen. e.g fusion, Thorium fission, renewable hydrogen, direct air capture etc ... but all of these are in various stages of development and all are likely to be more expensive than digging up fossil fuel. What we have so far are targets and various actions like subsidising EV's in the hope that it will make a difference quickly enough ... but we are not addressing the fundamental issue that we are still burning massive amounts of fossil fuels and will continue to so for decades and the reality is that we need to pay more to clean it up.

For example air flights are very CO2 intensive and so much is discretionary. So do we wait 10, 20 years for someone maybe to work out a carbon neutral solution .. perhaps fund some research into electric planes .. or do we charge a carbon tax on top of the ticket price and then spend that money to remove the carbon emitted during the flight.

My pessimistic view is that we will not really start until things get much worse and so I guess we need things to get worse quickly.

 

It's my understanding that cali (and possibly others like New (W)ork) are chomping at the bit to find outlets for presently storied (at site and otherwise) nuclear wastes. I know of one such site in cali with both plant and holding pond(s) right on the pacific coast just to the east of US 1. It sure did grab my attention as I drove by several times.

 

I've been remembering for several days now, an old article, still in this century though , that even the deep sea dwellers (fish and other marine life) around the galapagos islands were already mercury contaminated, although not as much as marine life in some other areas. The local river in my area is one place I'd not want to eat a fish that was taken from those waters.

 

Wow. Wayyyyy off subject.

Sounds like you are talking about the San Onofre power plant. That plant was closed down when they replaced the cooling tubes in the reactor. They used the wrong alloy. It turns out that the tubing cracked if welded. Guess what? It was welded. Someone decided that it was cheaper to shut it down than it was to replace the tubes a second time. What a shame.

 

sorry on two accounts, I wasn't the first poster that opened the nuclear door in this thread, and the plant I was referring to is the Oceanside / Carlsbad one.

 

That 90% is material with half lifes measured in years or less, and/or a low level of emittance. Some of it wouldn't penetrate the skin, even when held. What we are doing with it now works. It includes waste from medicine, research, and industries besides nuclear power and weapons. So it is something even countries without nuclear power have to deal with.

Most nuclear plants in the US are on the older side, so are reaching the limit of what they can store onsite, and NIMBY makes expanding storage facilities hard.

Recycling fuel rods could reduce that waste by up to 96%. The US doesn't allow recycling over proliferation fears. As a not truly ironic bit, recycling spent fuel rods would yield material for nuclear weapons, but instead the US is running reactors for the sole purpose of making weapons grade material, which is adding to all the waste we are making already.

"Microreactors" aren't small by most people's definition, but are designed to self contain nuclear waste. They are sealed up at the factory so the nuclear fuel can't be accessed, and once they are spent, you just leave them in the ground. Think of them as really big primary batteries with decades long lifespans for the grid. They are great solutions for remote locations where renewables aren't practical. A remote town in Alaska wanted to replace their diesel generators with one. They could also be an option to back up renewables with rechargeable batteries where extended periods of low production happen.

 

I guess I look at a reactor and its site as a really big promise. You go and build it there, you're going to have to maintain that site on an incredibly long timescale.... For those Alaskan villages, that isn't a big deal. Tons of space, they can afford to give a few hundred acres off to a fenced secure lot for the next 10,000 years without worry.

And honestly, so should be true of any nuclear site. Why can't they keep all the fuel ever used at Limerick (for example) in a set of ponds right there on that site? Seems to me that a fuel set occupying a few dozen cubic meters should easily find a home in hundreds of acres of land, even allowing for many multiple sets of fuel, theoretically allowing for continuous electrical production to pay for it all across hundreds of years and (hopefully) beyond.

 

So what? Is it not brutally obvious that you should make as little of it as possible? And how many half lives do we have to store it for before it's "safe"? Is 5 enough? 10?

Don't make the stuff unless it's absolutely necessary. Period.

 

MSR Tech can reduce the amount of waste generated by 99% and cannot make weapons Material

funny how we ignore fly ash
Why is coal ash more radioactive than nuclear waste and what is the exact reason?

 

Does it help with things like SCAPE suits, effluent, buildings and ship hulls?

 

Some of that waste is safe the day it's thrown in a steel barrel, and sent off to Yucca Mountain. A nuclear isotope was going to be used in a study as a marker at an animal facility I used to work at. All the used study materials, including the animals would be classified as nuclear waste. The isotope was an alpha emitter. Wearing exposure badges would be pointless, because it couldn't penetrate the plastic to reach the indicator.

Eating it, or breathing it in could be bad, but that can probably be said of many things we just toss into residential trash. Meanwhile, used fracking brine is laced with radium hot, and is sold has liquid deicer to the public.

We may not need nuclear power to reach carbon neutral power generation, but if we do, we do have the means to better manage the waste, and reduce it.

Mercury is a natural recurring element. Erosion will expose mercury minerals. Some will get into the food chain, and eventually makes it way to deep waters.

Coal and mercury is like coal and carbon though. We are taking it, and other heavy metals and radioactive isotopes, that have been locked away from the Earth's surface in the coal for hundreds of millions of years, and simply dumping it into the immediate environment.

A microreactor needs far, far less space. They are made and fueled at a factory, then shipped out to where they are needed. Some can be small enough to fit in a standard truck trailer. Most designs seem to be descendants of Navy reactors.

This is the one that was being considered for Alaska, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S. The core would have been buried in the ground, with a power generation building on top. For that town, the core would provide power for 30 years. At that time, you just install a new core next door, and cover up the old one once the building was removed. The spent fuel just stays sealed inside.

Microreactors - INL
This start up wants to make microreactors powered by spent fuel, Oklo planning nuclear micro-reactors that run off nuclear waste

Sounds like spent fuel isn't capable of supporting a fission reaction. This means they are no longer high temperature. Still hot, but the heat is a mere fraction of what was generated during the reaction. Electricity generation might still be possible, but it likely isn't economical. I think mainly because that heat generation drops quickly; 0.2% of an unspent rod after a week. We leave them sitting in a pool for a long period, because water is a great neutron shield.

So the fuel rods need to be reprocessed for reuse, which is illegal in the US. Things like breeder reactors could make use of older fuel within the core itself, but that isn't a simple retrofit to a plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel

 

The smallest 'microreactors' are just nuclear batteries--generating electricity from the heat output from the nuclear material. The fancier name is Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator. The Perserverence Mars Rover, working hard on Mars at this moment, is powered by a nuclear battery. It uses plutonium, but it is possible to make them with less dangerous nuclear material.

 

It is their evolutionary development so that humans stop eating fish and they can survive.

 

There may have been a misunderstanding- I wasn't suggesting any continued use of the fuel rods for any purpose at all. With reprocessing outlawed and transportation somewhere between merely expensive and outright dangerous... why not plan to leave the fuel on the site for all eternity?

I'm making the argument that the places which are currently nuclear power stations should probably be fuel sites forever. Makes it easier to budget for future security and infrastructure if you know it will be an eternal expense.

 

Because many of those sites are in the middle of town.

"Forever" is a long time. We had a nuclear plant decommissioned and the site re-used here where I live (Fort Saint Vrain nuclear power plant).

 

I agreed with you on the first part but not the second.

I give you bmw - where the phev system seems to be between the prius prime and rav4 prime, and really doesn't do as good of a job in charge sustain (hv) mode. BMW in the first half of the year sold 26% of their cars as plug-ins. The 12 kwh battery can give 100 hp boost in power for 10 seconds and with the 330e accelerating to 60 in 5 seconds at motor trends test, you rarely need the extra power for that long. This is faster than the camry v6.

People will pay for more power and better nvh and plug-in driving can do that. More power is off brand for the prius, but with dealers scalping for the rav4 prime, and buyers paying a lot more after tax breaks and dealer added charges for it, there is a much bigger market.

News broke last week that Toyota are designing their second bz car using byd blade batteries.
Toyota Tapping Into BYD's Battery Tech To Build $30K EV In China
This or something from their partnership with catl for lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries greatly reduces the cost per kwh. The prius liftback already has 5 cooling loops, it would need to add another one or 2 for the battery, but cost of a 15 kwh lfp battery plus cooling modification should be a lot cheaper than their current air cooled 8.8 kwh battery in the prime. A bigger battery may actually lower the price ;-) Besides cooling loops upgraded power electronics and mg2 would be needed. A 2L hybrid dynamic force engine plus 15 kwh lfp battery should be able to produce around 240 hp in a phev system around double the prius liftback and would provide around 40 mile ev range in a a prius prime, but less in a camry ;-).

Hope this brings it back on topic.

 

In another thread, the majority of PHEV owners here said that the 25 mile (approx) range of the current Prius Prime was working well for them. The results are slightly skewed by excluding commercial use and inter region commuters. The logic was that those uses are not really what the car was designed for.

I would not object to a power train that provided slightly faster acceleration but I don't think that it would be a deciding factor in my purchase. A two hour charge gives me 28 miles or so of range, and that's sufficient for a California suburban lifestyle.