From today’s column ( If Europe gets its power from bus-size nuclear reactors, why can’t we? - The Straight Dope ):
“Still, let’s acknowledge the larger point: major manufacturers are trying to come up with economy-size nuclear reactors…”
I always thought of economy-size as a description of a large package, not a small package, e.g., an economy-sized package of toilet paper. Did he mean “econobox-sized”, i.e., sized like a small car?
Actually, I would expect plants to grow really big if they went nuclear. There were a lot of movies about this in the fifties. Or think of Jimmy Carter in that SNL segment.
I imagine that this boat has a fairly compact nuclear reactor.
I think he was going for something like “much more affordable at this size for your average homeowner needs”.
I believe the point that the author was attempting to make, in somewhat roundabout fashion, is that manufacturers are trying to design reactor designs that are scalable, low maintenance, and essentially fail-safe. (Labor and safety are two of the largest recurring operating expenses for a nuclear reactor, and scalability allows for optimizing the size of the reactor suitable for the customer base it supports.) Overall, the article is somewhat slim on technical details, which is perhaps necessitated by its brevity and appeal to a non-technical audience, but while Cecil does touch on the problems of disposal or reprocessing of waste and the politico-bureaucratic issues of getting nuclear plants approved, he doesn’t really address the technical hurdles in adequate depth to provide even a superficial understanding of the current limitations.
Stranger
It is true that 800 words, including the question, is a very harsh mistress. I tried to get Cecil interested in talking about truly portable nuclear reactors, in different levels of concept-design:
Ford Motor Company dreamed up the “Nucleon,” a nuclear concept car which as neat as it looked, was somehow limited to a 5,000-mile range.
Nuclear-powered steam-turbine locomotive beasts were studied in the 1950’s and 1960’s, but somehow managed to avoid being built (I have a great advert of a conceptual one in my gallery).
The Soviet Union did actually develop a portable nuclear power plant called the TES-3, which could be moved on caterpillar treads or by rail, and deliver about 2MW on-demand (I found a paper in Russian showing the device; it’s really cool but I can’t read Cyrillic).
Nuclear-powered aircraft: the military sent a working reactor aloft for trials in a heavily-shielded plane, but it never powered an engine in flight. Project Pluto, an ambitious and incredibly radioactive design for a nuclear-powered bomb-dropping doomsday drone, managed a successful earthbound engine test, but thankfully was canceled.
Cecil felt like those topics were too far off from the questioner’s question so I don’t think he looked into those very much.
I understand the point he was trying to make. I just thought he used the wrong term – I hadn’t ever seen economy-size to mean anything but large.
Anyway, the other designs that Una discusses are pretty cool.
On the very small side, there are nuclear powered satellites that are used for deep space missions – I think the radioactive source creates heat and the power comes from some kind of thermocouple, but I’m not sure about that. I don’t think they generate much power, though, and I guess it requires a “cold” source, such as space, so it probably wouldn’t work well on Earth to power my car or something.
I think you’re right.
Nothing helps me sleep at night better than the thought of Russian-designed, barge-mounted nuclear reactors.
Perhaps he meant to say ‘Fun Size’.
There’s also the Army’s ANPP program, which was aimed at small, nominally portable reactors for geographically remote stations. The infamous SL-1 reactor was part of this program, as was the charmingly nicknamed “Nukey Poo” PM-3A stationary plant that had been installed at the Navy’s McMurdo Sound station. (I’ve heard that they had many difficulties with the plant, even before the final leak was found - keeping the cooling water from freezing was a major engineering and technical challenge.)
Ha! Excellent.
And don’t forget the reactor at conceptual Camp Century (see Army TR 174, October, 1965). I think that was an SM-1?
If you’d like to read more: http://www.fusor.net/ and https://www.neco.navy.mil/upload/N68936/N6893609R0044RFP_09-R-0044.pdf.
This is true. The USSR also used them for HEO satellites, but the largest of them were in the kilowatt range.
As a former Nuc Submariner, thanks for the bow to the Fleet. The US Navy is also at the forefront of of fusion technology, having recently issued a RFP for the WB8. This is an outgrowth of the fusor electro-static reactor developed by Farnsworth back in the 1950s. WB8 is expected to achieve break-even using proton-Boron, which is the cleanest of all possible fusion processes: the reaction products are alpha particles (helium) and neutrinos.
Another way to view “economy sized”.
American nuclear reactors are so few and so differrent you could almost say everyone was a custom design. One off builds are never cheap, particularly when you are trying SO hard to make sure everything is built perfectly and the design is perfectly safe.
You design something small. Smaller is generally also simpler and with few parts. Less likely for a design flaw to sneak in. Now you can afford to actually build a couple to just to play with. You start making them assembly line fashion, which will really drop costs. There are enough out there early on that you can get useful statistical info from their design flaws and operation. You can refine the construction process.
Imagine how much even a simple car would cost if you designed it from scratch and custom made every part one at time. And every car was somewhat different. Cars would cost a gazillion and the fleet would not be nearly as safe as possible.
I would call this “off-the-shelf”, not “economy sized”.
No heat sink is needed, but they are not efficient, no better than 10%, Wiki says. Not to mention pricey.
The traveling-wave reactor is an intriguing design. If it works, it’ll be a sealed, self-contained breeder reactor and quasi-reprocessor. It uses mostly U-238 with a small U-235 starter. The U-235 converts the U-238 to plutonium, which then provides energy and converts more U-238.
This is understandable but disappointing, particularly Cecil’s statement, “The problem with small nukes isn’t the technology but rather the same issues that have hamstrung nuclear power at any scale — security and disposal,” which implies that it is more bureaucracy and politics than technology, when in fact while it was assumed back in the 'Fifties that we’d have economical personal fission reactor cells in each house, car, aircraft, and rocket in three or four decades, the reality of sizing down fission power to a portable, modular scale have proven to be insurmountable with even modern technology. Certainly the public abhorrence of nuclear power is somewhat at fault, but even if it were not, the technology just isn’t there to provide small footprint nuclear fission power in an economical fashion. A brief mention of the projects you mention (particularly the Project Pluto-derived ‘SLAM’ would have offered an opportunity for a Dr. Strangelove reference) would have enhanced the column significantly.
Stranger