/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10450035
Because rich oil jews want to milk the planet for their trillians of dollars for as long as possible.
Viable alternatives are constantly suppressed

>>10450035
BECAUSE OF THE FUCKING ENVIRO FAGGOTS AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION YOU NIGGER

>>10450061
This too. Enviro faggots are scared of nuclear because of decades of fear mongering

>>10450068
bwahahah lol. Retard boomer nuclear shill actually "this"ed my troll.
hahah fucking retard!

>>10450069
What? You don't think there's ignorant envirofaggots who purposely ignore the safety precautions and safety studies that have gone in to make nuclear power one of the safest and greenest of all energy technologies?
I think you trolled yourself

>>10450075
what about nuclear waste? We can't even begin to deal with global warming, can you even imagine if we had to deal with excess nuclear waste?

>>10450075
>safest and greenest of all energy technologies?

you realize Fukushima isn't over?
Google it, there's new radioactive water forming constantly

>>10450079
Have you heard of helium 3 and fusion? It's possible to have nuclear power without dangerous side effects.
>>10450081
It's possible for anything to be unsafe if you are retarded. They built a nuclear power plant in an earthquake prone region/country.

>>10450086
Not the troll, and I am a supporter of using nuclear instead of fossil fuels, as of right now fusion isn't practical for energy production. There is still the problem of nuclear waste and where to put it safely.

>>10450128
you use a fusion reactor to turn the waste into quarks and electrons. just don't expect to get a net power gain system handed to you. it does however get rid of nasty materials. yes that's right the reactor converts matter into energy.

>>10450155
doesn't exist

Imagine if reactors weren't originally conceived to make weapons grade material and we started by using Thorium rather than fucking Uranium/Plutonium

>>10450159
it's hard to understand how to levitate a powerful nuclear chain reaction in a superconducting electromagnetic field. i can see why you think it couldn't be real.

>>10450128
At least until recently before the idea was scrapped, the U.S.'s solution for nuclear waste was to store it in a geological suppository for hundreds of thousands of years. The planning for such a suppository had a lot of research into its viability, but ultimately it was abandoned due to politics.

>>10450198
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository

this place right?

>>10450205
The very same, yes.

>>10450086
>It's possible for anything to be unsafe if you are retarded. They built a nuclear power plant in an earthquake prone region/country.

the entirety of japan is earthquake prone. How do you propose Japan uses nuclear energy while securing energetic independance at the same time?

you're the fucking retard anon.

>>10450263
For one they can build them not near the fucking ocean and two they can simply put the backup generators on the fucking roof rather than the basement.

>>10450035
Nixon era oil lobby pushed regs and 3 mile island.

>>10450069
cringe, non argument and bluepilled.

>>10450081
So?

>>10450079
Just put it in containers designed to withstand corrosion about 100 years until the stuff has decayed a little and dump it in the middle of the ocean. It might slightly increase radioactivity in seafood by a few kilo becquerels, but nothing too dangerous. When people tell you the half life of a certain isotope is millions of years, they're fear mongering, because that means the isotope is very stable and actually generates very little radiation.
Or just drop it in the middle of Antarctica.
Materials hot enough to build a dirty bomb with are easy to detect with a Geiger counter, and the people handling the material would die before they're able to haul a significant amount of it anyway. Maybe put surveillance systems around the facility if that's a concern anyway.

>>10450086
>>10450263
>>10450286
Friendly reminder the Fukushima meltdown could've been averted had the fucktards who designed the security cooling systems not put in valves that FAIL CLOSED when losing electricity with no way to open them without electricity (manually or with compressed air bottles). They basically assumed electricity was going to be available at all times, or the reactor melting the fuck down was a foregone conclusion.

omg its dangerous thats why

just put all the nuclear waste on a rocket and send it to the sun, lmao

feels like i'm taking crazy pills in here

>>10450403
Fukushima also could've been stopped mid-accident with no radiation release or damage to the environment had TEPCO actually listened to the international nuclear community's recommendations instead of trying to solve it their own way. It literally could've been a Three Mile Island level of accident where the only damage was the loss of the reactors, but TEPCO wouldn't follow the guidance because they insisted they could save the reactors and as a result they melted down and the rest is history.

>>10450035
because hippies

>>10450888
>>10450403
Based

>>10450888
>had TEPCO actually listened to the international nuclear community's recommendations
Which were what?

>>10450035
Probably because most innovative reactors turned out to be memes like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300

>>10450964
Ehh I wouldn't say they're a meme.
Molten salt reactors are in principle safer and haven't really been proven in a commercial setting so we don't really know whether they're economically viable for producing energy, but it seemed to work just fine in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment..

>>10450205
>>10450198
This makes me sad. We could be living in a nuclear powered Utopia right now.

>>10450936
To inject seawater into the reactor to keep the passive cooling system filled with water. This would naturally ruin the reactor, as all the salt and grime would build up inside the coolant system and you could pretty much never get it all out without replacing the entire thing, but it would keep it cooled and prevent a meltdown.

TEPCO wouldn't do it, though, because they wouldn't give up on the reactor. They insisted they could find some way to save it. It wasn't until 24 hours after the incident began that the workers on the ground went against TEPCO's express orders and did the seawater injection, which finally brought the active portion of the incident to an end.

>>10451036
>To inject seawater into the reactor to keep the passive cooling system filled with water.
>It wasn't until 24 hours after the incident began that the workers on the ground went against TEPCO's express orders and did the seawater injection
Well, the question is, did they have the pumps to suck sea water onto the reactor on-site or were they brought in by trucks from the outside?
Otherwise why would they delay the decision to pump in sea water, did they believe that enough water had remained in the reactor to cool it (and why did they believe this, since anyone involved in operating nuclear reactors would know the water would evaporate in 2 or 3 hours), or that the main pumps were operational? Is this documented anywhere?

>>10450079
>what about nuclear waste?
What about it? Just bury it nigger. Or reprocess it.
>it's dangerous therefore it will never have a solution
>we should stop building bridges, what if they fall?

>>10451055
It's all documented in painstaking detail in various places, yes. They used fire engines that were stored on site and brought in from the nearby town to pump the water. They were actually already on site, because they were used at the beginning of the accident to pump the fresh water they had on hand into the reactors, but when the fresh water ran out they waited nearly 24 hours to start pumping in seawater on TEPCO's orders because TEPCO didn't want the plant to be decommissioned.

The Yoshida report from Asahi Shimbun is a solid writeup of the incident aimed towards civilians, if you want to read it. Here's the bit in specific where they're talking to Yoshida, the plant manager on plant 1, about what he can remember about the water injection. There are also many more technically minded reports on the topic.
http://www.asahi.com/special/yoshida_report/en/2-1.html

A relevant section for the topic:
>However, within TEPCO, even after all the problems that had been experienced, the thinking of not using seawater to avoid decommissioning the reactor did not go away.

>For example, the head of the group set up at TEPCO headquarters to work toward resuming plant operations continued to argue for using fresh water even seven hours after Yoshida declared that seawater would be pumped into the No. 2 reactor.

>“Laying out the selfish thinking on our side, starting with seawater from the beginning will lead directly to decaying of materials, which would be wasteful,” the group leader said. “Can we have the understanding that there is also the option of waiting for fresh water as long as possible?”

I am, admittedly, simplifying the situation a great deal, but there's no denying that the several hours of delay that this search for fresh water caused is what led to the partial meltdown of the reactors. If they had gone straight to seawater like they are supposed to, it would've still been a fucking awful accident, but ultimately it would've been a near miss.

>>10450035
Because at that stage we had all the nuclear weapons we would ever need.
Economically nuclear power was never competitive to begin with.

>>10450079
They're already doing research on reducing nuclear half-life, just do some research on the MYRRHA-plant in Belgium.

They didnt
We have new designs, liquid salt coolers, new control rods

The anti nuclear hype died until fukushima, and even thats dying out, because there just isnt anything cleaner that produces the fuckton of megawatts nuclear does

But there has been alot of progress

>>10451305
>>10450079
You can build dual plants, one that recycles the waste and one that can use the recycled waste

>>10450888
Yeah but at least they got to make some of that sick ass corium

>nuclear lava
How fucking metal is that?

>>10451305
But anon, reducing nuclear half life would actually make the waste more radioactive... Or is the idea to make it burn fast enough that you can deal with the most problematic isotopes before actually disposing the stuff?

>>10450079
If storing the waste long term isn't viable, then we need to get off our asses and start reprocessing it. Either finally build a PUREX plant like France did, or distribute smaller pyroprocessing machines to individual sites once Argonne finishes engineering them. This way, instead of throwing away the entire fuel rods, we extract all the useful materials from it (which is over 99% by volume) and we only throw away the last 1% of the fuel as true waste. And that true waste is actually quite mild in terms of radioactivity compared to the whole spent fuel rod.

https://www.ne.anl.gov/pdfs/12_Pyroprocessing_bro_5_12_v14[6].pdf

Argonne National Lab is working on developing this technology into a small, plant-sized set of machines that can be used on-site so we won't even have to ship the waste off site. You can just pull it out of the reactor and toss it in the reprocessor and out comes more fuel, a bunch of commercially valuable medical isotopes, and a tiny amount of true waste.

>>10450394
there are actually a bunch of stuff with half lives of low thousands of years that are super deadly for a long-ass time

>>10451347
If you're standing next to it, sure. If you dump it in the ocean not really.

>>10450059
Sci is too populated with tunnel-vision chinks whose eye width accurately depicts their ability to consider a wide range of evidence and skinny nerd virgins who repeat what they are told to come to this logical and empirically backed explanation

>>10451357
yeah you rely on this stuff long-term it's going to reach an equilibrium in an environment like the ocean
it's why nobody uses nuclear depth charges after Bikini

because of nukes, better, safer, and more efficient reactor concept did not create the yield of fission materials for atom bombs. that why they kept the god damn solid fuel pressure water reactor. there has been innovation, but in favor of the solid fuel cycle for nukes, and the nuclear energy lobby the government was actively shutting down all research and development on alternative reactors which have shown in long time experiments superior safety features, were self regulating, inherently stable by themselves. they did not even need electric power. in case of a power failure, or a containment vessel breach, the whole thing would just shut down by itself. even overload scenarios did their experimental reactor stabilize by itself. that thing would use a liquid fuel instead of fuel rods, which would circulate through the reactor, it would be the heat transfer medium and fission medium at the same time, able to use up all the fission material you feed it, unlike a solid fuel reactor , where you have to manually rotate fuel rods from the center to the outer sectors of the pile until the rod cant take the heat stress anymore, and the fuel pellet coatings crack when just about 30% of the fissionable material has been spent, and you have to dispose of the whole rod. the liquid fuel on the other hand would not have this issue, since it would stir itself the entire time while its in the reactor, keeping the fissionable material homogeneous . also, the liquid fuel would operate under high temperatures, but just with atmospheric pressure, in case of a leak you would not have a radioactive steam cloud shooting out of the reactor. that fuel is mostly a molten salt solution, so it solidifies as soon it cools outside the reaction chamber in case of a leak. one of its safety features is a "frozen" plug of salt which would turn liquid as soon the power is failing, draining the reactor vessel into a tank where the fuel solidifies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZxlZVHV9-0

>>10451489
Well, the problem with those is that you get a lot of corrosion in the pipes and pumps (which are hard to do maintenance on since they're in direct contact with the fissile material) and you need a chemical reprocessing plant on-site to remove the spent parts of the fuel from the mix.

>>10450059
go back to /pol/

>>10451500
The chemical plant isn't a downside, it's an upside. You have to deal with the waste at some point - molten salt reactors force it to be dealt with sooner rather than later. Just throwing the spent fuel in a hole in the ground is wasteful as fuck, we really should be reprocessing it, and forcing plants to pull the waste out of the fuel stream also forces the plants to reprocess the waste into its constituent elements for easier storage of true waste and commercial sale of useful isotopes.

If we're ever going to upscale nuclear into being our primary source of energy then we're going to need a reprocessing plan of some sort. Molten salt reactors enforce reprocessing on a plant by plant basis, because if you don't deal with your fission products then the molten salt reactor stops producing energy.

>>10450059

>>10451515
What about the corrosion and embrittlement issues then?
How would you prevent fissile material with highly dangerous byproducts literally shooting out of your reactor due to the pipes breaking down under the stress of having extremely radioactive molten salts flowing through it?

>>10451500
its a problem, but solvable with material science.
they use beryllium in solution for example to make the corrosion happen on the beryllium before it even happens to the piping, the chemical separation of depleted isotopes in a high temperature liquid can be solved as well, its expensive and complex for sure though, but the safety features and cleanliness of the system overweight the price you have to pay imo. being able to take nuclear waste, get that stuff into solution and "reburn" that stuff in a molten salt reactor, making it decay faster, and turn in change thorium into fissionable material is quite a neat trick. you could use nuclear waste as fuel. the problem of waste handling, recycling it into liquid fuel is to solve. its an entirely new fuel cycle which has to be developed, expensive as fuck. india and china are working on a thorium fuel cycle

>>10451489
dood, that video made me google for nuclear powered bomber.... this is so outlandish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLK9hYXWZw4&

>>10451556
dear anon, come and marvel at the great works of the /k/ube
behold, SLAM

>>10451534
it wont shoot out of your reactor, its not under pressure. it would leak from the pipe, and turn into a solid plug as it "freezes"

>>10450035
are you that retarded, you can't connect this simple events?

>>10450035
because it's not profitable, also atomic plants tend to blow up, nobody wants this in the neighbourhood

>>10450059
Fpbp should have ended the thread here

It didn't, and you're seriously misinformed about nuclear power if you think otherwise. Every 10 years the US built some sort of new, high-end reactor but only for the Navy.

This thread really just goes to show how /sci/ is full of brainlets that can't even be bothered to do a single wikipedia search for reactors built after 1990.

>>10451589
Example of soviet incompetency. Bringing up problems resulting in reprisals. Eventually this snowballed into a widely neglected plant that complicated existing flaws with the design.
>>10451763
They don't "tend" to blow up, you utter brainlet. There have been nearly 500 reactors built and all so called catastrophes were overblown and were not the result of any inherent fault with nuclear power. Reactors from the fucking 1950s are still in operation today.

>>10451763

Nuclear energy is profitable, most plants (nearly all) do not blow up, and there are plenty of places to put nuclear reactors where people don't live.

>>10451507
All of 4chan belongs to /pol/

>>10451815
yeah but the Navy's specialty reactors that they get built by bullying the red tape out of the way and disregarding all the laws set in place to make reactors impossible to use aren't really relevant to the rest of us, are they

>>10451582
>its not under pressure
Yes it does you brainlet. It has to be under positive pressure, otherwise it wouldn't flow at all. That's what the pumps are for.
>it would leak from the pipe, and turn into a solid plug as it "freezes"
No it wouldn't. If the reactor wasn't shut down all your fuel would just leak right into the floor of your reactor building, causing a big mess that couldn't be coeared up for decades due to how radioactive the room would be, and you would basically have to scrap used nuclear fuel from the floor which I imagine is not an easy task.

>>10450075
>You don't think there's ignorant envirofaggots who purposely ignore the safety precautions and safety studies

No. I think politicians basically ignore environmental concerns over economic concerns 99 times out of 100.

>>10451362
Nuclear depth charges were actually only retired in 1990 when the Cold War ended and better anti submarine torpedos had made them increasingly obsolete.

>>10450035
All technology is beginning to stagnate, except bio. This is because bio is hard, but it will also stagnate eventually. Turns out most of sci-fi just that, sci-fi.

>>10451901
This isn't 4chan, thankfully.

>>10450035
Because it hurts liberals feelings :(

Three Mile Island Pennsylvania. Look it up.

>>10450035
Because just once, the Soviets met one of their five-year plans' goals in a fraction of a second.

>>10452268
Yeah it's under enough pressure to sluggishly move molten salt which is literally fucking nothing compared to high pressure water reactors.

>Oh gawg the fuel would leak all over the place and make a nuclear Shoah!

As if beneath the plug wouldn't be a propose built catchment basin that catches the salt as it flows out while it cools down which would not be long as there is no heat from the fuel cycle to keep it molten.

Fuck out of here retard.

>>10452987
ayyy lmao

>>10452997
>As if beneath the plug wouldn't be a propose built catchment basin
You don't get it do ya. If there's a leak in a random place in the piping, the plug wouldn't magically melt. An operator would have to find the leak and the refrigeration system which keeps the plug solid would have to be manually shot down.
What the plug is supposed to protect against is one of the pumps failing and the fuel overheating because of a lack of cooling, not a random pipe being damaged and the nuclear fuel coming out of it.

>>10452997
>sluggishly move molten salt
And sure, the pressure would be less than pressurized water reactors, but I doubt you can get enough cooling by sluggishly moving the fuel through the heat exchangers. The flow rate would have to actually be pretty decent if you want to maximize power output.

To answer you question seriously OP, they cut the funds right when they needed them to starts building the prototypes. The finding for fusion see stagnating all over the world, especially in USA. Only Europe, France in particolar, is still spending a decent parte of its resources on fusion research (and this only due to them spending a lot on nuclear).

>>10451918

yes they are, because that's how nuclear energy always progressed. The Manhattan Project was the largest black project in history, which resulted in only atomic weapons and maybe the promise of a future energy source. That energy source (civilian reactors) would take another ten years to build in the form of the USS Nautilus, upon which it took another ten to commercialize.

Go read a book, the US Navy has always been at the forefront of reactor tech and always been the place where commercial designs are pulled from, for better or for worse (thorium fetishists argue the latter).

>>10453780
there are a lot of regs on the books that basically make civilian innovation impossible
we're still using 70s tech

>>10450035
Because the funding stopped coming in when the breeder reactors where perfected.

>>10450936
Not him but I remember TEPCO was whining to the chief engineer about not using seawater to cool the reactors because it might break them, even though they were already ruined

>>10451324
either that, or so that it can be tossed straight back into the reactor to generate more energy