Posted on 08/19/2016 6:56:17 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
On the horizon are U.S.-designed small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) that range from 50 megawatts to 300 megawatts electrical power output. Like renewables (wind and solar), SMRs produce no air pollution or global warming gases, but SMRs are also capable of generating base load electrical power on demand.
Almost 50 companies are creating designs for SMRs using 21st-century technology and enhanced features. These designs include modularity, efficient factory construction, rapid siting and exceptional safe operation. Very important is that SMRs are less expensive and easier and faster to site and build than conventional 1,200-megawatt nuclear plants. Reliance on renewables as now pursued by Germany has resulted in 37 cents per kilowatt-hour in U.S. dollars compared with France (75 percent nuclear base) at 17 cents per kilowatt-hour and Utah at 11 cents per kilowatt-hour.
U.S. electrical utilities have focused on large nuclear power reactors such as the 1,200-megawatt Westinghouse AP1000. Because of their size, complexity and multibillion-dollar cost, most utilities now avoid them. However, SMRs are factory built at great cost savings and assembled in modular clusters as needed and rapidly sited as electric generating capacity increases. Each SMR module can be operated independently of others to match operation coordinated with renewables' fluctuating duty cycle. To accommodate varying electrical power demand or refueling or maintenance outages, the SMR modules provide optimum electrical generation.
Most SMR development involves startup companies and is privately funded....
(Excerpt) Read more at beta.deseretnews.com ...
If we can stuff one in a metal tube and sail it underwater round the world, we can surely build many micro plants where they are needed, and not risk a Chernobyl or Fukushima.
It’s not the technology, it’s the regulation blocking the technology, that I worry about.
These devices are absolutely the way to go. Safe, clean, and extraordinarily versatile, a really distributed power grid, and not amenable to centralized control. These things ARE the future. IMHO.
Wouldn’t it be smarter to focus on and expand where Tesla left off? Specifically his ideas and experiments about FREE ENERGY that is all around us transmitted wirelessly to the masses. You will need his research papers, see the CIA,NSA,FBI....
Pebble Bed Reactors?..........
Any idea what kind of reactors these SMRs will be? I read about the molten salt reactors not too long ago and they seemed promising.
No. Not nearly enough. Normal radiated energy from electronic communications devices would not supply 1/10,000 of the amount of power required. Besides, it still has to be GENERATED somewhere.
Why do we need renewables at all if these are cheap and efficient? No ugly fields of solar panels and bird-killing wind mills are required if this works,
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Using the fuel in production is not.
As much of a huge fan of Tesla that I am, his investors saw little possibility in wireless power transmission.
‘SMRs are also capable of generating base load electrical power.’
True. American technology from Cal Tech and Berkeley brought about four tools in the 1980’s that should be used to strengthen American, decrease energy prices and please the global warming freaks.
Plasma recyclers. Turn everything (even radioactive waste) into electricity.
Boron cars. One tank lasts twenty years.
Integral fast reactors. Clean, safe, self-contained and capable of powering 80% of America.
Oil. A natural, abundant, renewable substance that should be 50 cents/gallon.
What blocks the 80’s technology? Blindness of leaders.
What opens the 80’s technology? Discovery and awe.
MSR’s are at least a decade out. We had one working in the late 60’s but Nixon canceled the program after several years of successful operation of the first MSR.
There are 3 nuclear core meltdowns in Japan that will be dumping radioactive waste into the environment daily for decades (and have been doing so since March 2011). And yet, nuclear power is STILL being touted as “clean”???????!
Nuclear engineers are the first to admit the technology does not exist to clean up Fukushima but the “answer” is to forget about it and build something new?
I don’t think we’ll see super-saver coupons in the Harbor Freight flyer for a cheap family size chinese knockoff nuclear pile anytime soon.
The grid is a big risk and copper loss is huge in transmission. Local small sources of power make sense like nuke sub power plants for counties and cities. Thorium would be best...
Its my understanding that Tesla believed the electrical differential was generated by the rotation of the earth's magnetic field itself, and the interaction between the magnetic fields of the earth and sun.
In any event, It's a fact that the government seized all his papers when he died. They should be released.
Light Water Reactor design is stupid.
All LWRs - same stupid designs by same stupid industry protected by the hacks that they support.
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