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posted by mrpg on Monday April 03 2017, @11:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the pronounced-nucular dept.

Scientists at the MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory have devised an unconventional plan for accelerating the development of a small, safe, cheap nuclear reactor: they want to build a prototype that piggybacks on their existing facility.

Since the planned one-megawatt demonstration reactor would be incapable of sustaining a fission reaction on its own, the researchers believe they could avoid building a standalone experimental prototype, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission generally requires. That site selection and licensing process can take a decade or longer, so the hope is that this approach could cost hundreds of millions of dollars less and take half as much time to build.

[...] The researchers specifically want to test designs for a small, transportable molten-salt-cooled reactor, intended for off-grid purposes such as generating electricity for remote villages or worksites. Molten-salt reactors, first researched in the 1950s, are a subject of growing interest in the field because of the potential they offer for greater safety and lower costs compared with traditional nuclear power plants.

http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/03/mit-wants-to-build-add-on-1-mw-sub.html

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603963/mits-nuclear-lab-has-an-unusual-plan-to-jump-start-advanced-reactor-research/


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @02:51PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @02:51PM (#488203)

    wow. there's soo much wrong with this.
    first off the "arm-chair" MIT scientists should get off their butts and go dig out the freaking
    uranium or thorium themselves instead of relying on sub-human work force in some red-mud village in africa, got it?

    the "remote village" which will profit from this cheap and safe radiation .. errr ... energy source, is probably totally worth investing this tech into, because
    remote and village, e.g. it has like a huge population that wants to be there because, it is like totally important because
    some reason or another.
    the the project starts off on the "avoid red tape" foot. awesome. what other red tape might be circumvented later, you know, because verification takes time?
    the only good thing is that they'll nuke themselves and then nobody has to go to MIT (and invent "red tape avoiding" projects) anymore :)

    on a side note: i "like" MIT. there are smart people there that can do what they dream of and i do hope this new air of nuclear renaissance emanating from MIT in the last few years is just for show to please some totally pro-nuclear donor and not meant in honesty.
    anyways, should this be the case, maybe MIT could strap the nuclear reactor into the cargo bay of the private donor jet and convert it to a (one way) nuclear-electrical powered vanity jet?

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  • (Score: 2) by Sulla on Monday April 03 2017, @03:31PM

    by Sulla (5173) on Monday April 03 2017, @03:31PM (#488230) Journal

    I am not sure what came to your mind when you hear "remote village" but to me I thought "north slope drilling operations" , "native alaskan villages" , and "remote mining operations" . A small scale nuke reactor would replace the baseline need for coal and diesel generators when working on commercial projects. Would BP/Connaco Philips/etc rather have wasteful diesel generators as a baseline or a one-and-done nuke they can move project to project.

    I was also unsure if you were talking about thorium mining operations, there is a crap ton of thorium in Alaskan topsoil up in the NW of the state.

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @05:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @05:08PM (#488268)

    I'm wondering if you're a LaTeX user, but some of your lines are a bit wide for that. Most of my text editors are set at 100 columns even though I understand some people will get irritated at anything over 70 columns.

    Here's a random idea. Do we need a pseudo-LaTeX mode that collapses single newlines but turns multiple newlines into paragraph breaks? I suppose one could use HTML formatted, but that would require typing annoying angle brackets to get a paragraph break.

  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday April 03 2017, @09:09PM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Monday April 03 2017, @09:09PM (#488377) Journal

    there's soo much wrong with this.
    first off the "arm-chair" MIT scientists should get off their butts and go dig out the freaking
    uranium or thorium themselves instead of relying on sub-human work force in some red-mud village in africa, got it?

    WTF? Since when is Canada, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ausrtalia in africa? (together those four provide more than half of the world's uranium)

    But yeah, I guess the scientists in Massachusetts should visit the world's largest uranium mine, with that being the Canadian (Saskatchewan) Macarthur River Mine (provides 13% of world supplies). They deserve a vacation