SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Mass-produced floating nuclear reactors use super-safe molten salt fuel
Copenhagen startup Seaborg Technologies has raised an eight-figure sum of Euros to start building a fascinating new type of cheap, portable, flexible and super-safe nuclear reactor. The size of a shipping container, these Compact Molten Salt Reactors will be rapidly mass-manufactured in their thousands, then placed on floating barges to be deployed worldwide – on timelines that will smash paradigms in the energy industry.
[...] [Perhaps] the most impactful change to the business model is Seaborg's proposal to install these reactors on barges, and float them offshore rather than buying up land to develop nuclear power plants. There are several advantages here. For starters, you can manufacture them in bulk at a single facility. Seaborg is looking at Korean shipyards, which are already closely and efficiently connected to supply chains with enormous production capacity.
"If you want us to build not one reactor to start with, but a thousand, we could start by building a thousand," Schönefeldt told Radio Spectrum. "That will take, like, three or four years on these shipyards. So it's basically unroofed in how fast you can scale it."
These barges can be moved just about anywhere on the planet, either moored offshore or on large or small rivers, depending on how big a reactor it is. There's virtually no site preparation required; it's fully self-contained and very easy to connect to a power grid. Seaborg estimates it can service 95 percent of the world's population this way, putting basically no land requirements on a baseload or load-following power station up to a healthy 600 MW, which could supply nearly 100,000 homes.
Some imagineering required.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 21 2021, @12:26PM (2 children)
If you float these things in deep water, they're probably OK. Put them in shallow water, a tsunami destroys them. How much you want to bet that everyone who buys one wants to put it close to shore, in fifty feet of water, to save on transmission line costs? Or, they put them out in a harbor that channels tsunami and storm water, making the rise and fall of the barge more severe.
Detailed description of the results of anchoring in shallow waters here:
http://www.drgeorgepc.com/LossUSSMemphis.html [drgeorgepc.com]
More general background of the ship, and (probably) less accurate details of the incident here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Tennessee_(ACR-10) [wikipedia.org]
As an aside, note how the ship's crew describe a 70 ft wave, but the history revising son of the ship's captain later claims that it was a 100 ft wave.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @03:57PM (1 child)
If you put them in deep water you have to worry about collisions. I have an old study of a proposed floating nuclear plant that specified it had to be protected from a carrier going full tilt.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 21 2021, @04:17PM
I think that I can say, with some confidence, that aircraft carriers won't be speeding at full tilt in 200 to 500 ft deep water.
Of course, something that weighs between 50,000 and 100,000 tons doesn't have to be moving very fast to destroy a little barge. It would be interesting to see how they proposed to "protect" this floating reactor.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.