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 MIRV888 on Monday June 21 2021, @12:29PM (10 children)
"We’re not reducing the likelihood of an accident to zero, there will be accidents. We should avoid them as much as we can, but there will be accidents."
Wow. That's crazy honest. Even with 4 levels of redundancy they openly admit there will be accidents.
That's the kind of truth that makes people's heads asplode.
Seems like a doable decent design to me.
Lord knows we need base load power.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday June 21 2021, @01:11PM (8 children)
I'm not at all sure about operating these things on small rivers. I expect they use the water for cooling, and that could raise the temperature of the river substantially.
OTOH, these are a lot smaller than current plants, so maybe it would be ok.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @01:26PM (1 child)
So you're saying they should try it and see if it breaks anything? How millennial!
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Thursday June 24 2021, @06:04AM
Drop the science.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday June 21 2021, @01:54PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 21 2021, @02:55PM (1 child)
Not sure what you mean by "small rivers". As sort of a starting point, let's remember that these things are on barges, put into place by tugboats. So, you're restricted to "navigable waters". We might expect to find one in Little Rock, because the Arkansas River is regularly navigated. We won't expect to find any in Texarkana, because the Red River isn't navigable. (The Red River probably could be made navigable at great expense, not likely to happen.)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/33/329.4 [cornell.edu]
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday June 21 2021, @07:45PM
"Small river" is relative to rate of water flow and sensitivity to temperature change. So "navigable" probably isn't sufficient if the water flow is slow, but might well be if it's faster.
It's my expectation that this design uses the water that it floats in as a replacement for the "cooling ponds" that some other designs use. It might be better to scoop out a "man made lake", which could get a lot hotter without causing problems.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Informative) by turgid on Monday June 21 2021, @06:46PM (2 children)
A long time ago I worked at a nuclear power station. It was about 25% thermally efficient (25% of the heat generated went out as electricity). It was on a river estuary. It raised the temperature of the water by 9C. It was very popular with fish and shellfish.
The station could generate an extra 2MW electrical in winter when the sea water was colder. Cooling water temperature makes a big difference. In summer, electrical output was down since the cooling water was much warmer.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Funny) by PiMuNu on Monday June 21 2021, @06:54PM
The sealife follows the warm water. The fishermen follow the sealife. Plays havoc with your safety case...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday June 21 2021, @07:48PM
Try "it was popular with SOME fish and shellfish". Warmer waters hold less oxygen, and some species don't like that at all. Others don't have much problem until it gets considerably warmer...how much warmer depends on the species.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Sourcery42 on Monday June 21 2021, @04:47PM
You're right. I'm surprised a statement like that got past lawyers and PR people. It certainly wouldn't have from a US based company. Language like that will scare the herd, but humans are notoriously bad at assessing risks.
I've seen enough layers of protection analyses and qualitative risk assessment to know there is no such thing as zero risk. You can make processes where the risk of a catastrophic event is exceedingly low in the life of the facility. Without changing the process, you do that by adding layers of protection, and every additional layer tends to be substantially more complicated (both difficult to maintain and interact with) and expensive than the one that came before it. You can also develop processes that are interlocked six ways from Sunday and regulated to death such that they're very difficult to operate as well as terrible to maintain, aka the US nuclear industry.
I like their approach a lot. They've focused on developing technology to support an inherently safer process, as opposed to trying to engineering risk out of an inherently higher risk technology. Their consequence of failure is a radioactive rock to remediate. Still sucks, but its just a clicking hot rock. Contrast that with a traditional reactor that can spew a radioactive plume over a huge area or meltdown Fukushima style and leak its radioactive water; either is a much more negative and widespread consequence of failure.