Most nuclear designs can be traced back to research conducted at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). The site has hosted about 50 working reactors, the latest which went into service in 1973. (Wait what?) Research continues to this day and they now have 3 new plants in the works: the next one will be turned on 2025.
Factsheet from INL
As of 2022, three new reactors are proposed to be built at INL: the Versatile Test Reactor (VTR), the Microreactor Application Research Validation and Evaluation Project (MARVEL), and the Carbon Free Power Project small modular reactor plant. VTR is designed to rapidly test reactor materials and components, which will accelerate nuclear research. MARVEL is a microreactor that will be used to explore the possibility of nuclear microgrids and allow for end-user application design testing for industry partners. The small modular reactor plant will provide clean, carbon-free energy to Intermountain West communities by deploying six, 77-megawatt modules that will generate 462 megawatts of electricity.
Good to hear they are cranking up the research: I kinda wish this happened 20+ years ago. Bloomberg article:
In other INL news, bleeping computer reports that they’ve been hacked by the group SiegedSec: employee data is now on the darkweb. The Bleeping article refers to them as hacktivists, but I have my doubts about that characterization: the group self-identifies as gay-furry hackers and their ransom demands apparently involve catgirls. So, yeah. Google news shows several times as much coverage on this hacking incident than on INL’s research.
Well, it’s an acknowledgement that California can’t stay on track to meet its ‘carbon neutral energy production by 2045’ without Diablo Canyon. What happens after 2030 when they still haven’t deployed offshore wind or industrial-scale solar remains in question. But that can has been kicked down the road so many times that it is more dent than vessel.
The approval is a major boost for Alameda, California–headquartered Kairos Power, a privately owned nuclear engineering, design, and manufacturing company that says it is “singularly focused” on the commercialization of its fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor (KP-FHR). “Hermes is the first non-water-cooled reactor to be approved for construction in the U.S. in over 50 years,” noted Peter Hastings, Kairos vice president of Regulatory Affairs & Quality.
In case anyone has read about molten salt reactors where the fuel is dissolved in the salt, it’s other companies that are working on that. This is TRISO fuel pellets and a flibe coolant.
Unfortunately, she’s also a known contrarian, constantly saying that the scientific community has everything wrong, and pushes conspiracy theories. She’s not highly regarded in the YouTube science community, even when she comments within her realm of expertise (which she often goes outside of).
I’m on the pro-nuclear side, but I would recommend fact checking anything Ms. Hoffsteader says—especially if there is any emotional component to the presentation.
I think that’s a bit of an outdated view actually. Not a criticism; I’m just saying I think the situation has moved on.
Channels such as PBS Space Time and Fermilab now regularly cite Sabine’s videos – she’s really pretty mainstream at this point. And it’s been helped by the fact that Sabine, to her credit, has admitted she was wrong on the dark matter vs MOND thing.
She hasn’t shifted her views on grand particle accelerator projects being a bad bang-for-buck, but I think the community is moving towards this view actually.
In any case, I recommend the linked nuclear power video; she’s not just pulling opinions out of nowhere. It’s a pretty detailed and cited analysis (or as detailed as you can really get in a youtube video).
You totally can post vids. There is a bug which you’ve found. But it has a trivial and 100% successful workaround. Once you know what it is:
There are a few more expositions and details farther down in that thread. But all credit to @Dr.Strangelove for finding the root cause and the fully successful workaround for all situations.
Here you go, and with no errors since I know the workaround:
Hossenfelder is certainly a contrarian to the ‘conventional view’ in numerous areas (and no doubt driven in part by her own research at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies having been defunded, which is a peril any scientific researcher faces) but I would challenged you to provide an example of an actual conspiracy theory that she has promulgated; at most, she has cast shade on some broadly accepted claims such as the detection of gravitational waves (and not without some degree of technical merit, although that is more of a semantics argument than real doubt over the existence of them). She has certainly pissed off much of the particle physics community by suggesting that spending untold billions of dollars on a next generation hadron collider, but that isn’t exactly a controversial view given how much of the available budget that takes away from other, smaller scale physics and scientific research. (Ask anyone working in solid state and condensed matter physics research if they think they are getting an adequate slice of the pie and prepare to get an earful of complaints about how they are virtually ignored despite the disproportionate contributions that have been made to practicable technical innovations by the field.). Even among particle physicists in general, there is not a uniform consensus that the correct priority is the Future Circular Collider insofar as it takes money away from other heavy ion and e-p colliders that can be built more quickly and operated with much smaller budgets to do useful work on the fringes of particle physics instead of trying to verify the existence of supersymmetry or ‘dark matter particles’ which aren’t even cleanly predicted by theory the way the Higgs boson was.
As for the video, Hossenfelder is (largely) correct in the particulars of issues she addresses, but is deficient in what she neglects; specifically, the logistics of a massive buildup of nuclear power facilities in a timeframe to offset carbon emissions contributing to climate change; the costs (and corner-cutting) involved in the decommissioning and demolition of nuclear power and fuel processing facilities; and the Achilles’ heel of nuclear fission power: the extraction, enrichment, and processing of uranium-containing ore into useable nuclear fuels which requires its own elaborate chain of expensive and power-hungry infrastructure and produces substantial externalities in terms of environmental impact (almost entirely borne by local, often indigenous communities where uranium is mined and fuel is processed) and carbon emissions produced by transportation and processing that are not readily offset by ‘bootstrapping’ nuclear power to support the system. The cradle-to-grave of the nuclear fission fuel and power cycle is not nearly as clean or easy to mitigate as many advocates claim (or pretend to believe), nor is the issue of “burying waste in the ground” just the ‘simple’ political and pubic relations problem that advocates wish to dismiss with some kind of executive fiat even if all technical issues are addressed.
Advocates often point out how ‘rare’ serious nuclear accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are, and how few people were harmed by them while glossing over or just being ignorant of substantial nuclear incidents that weren’t reactor meltdowns, and refusing to address what the casualty and costs would be for a INES Level 7 incident that didn’t occur in a remote village or on the coast where prevailing winds and currents carry radioactive contamination offshore where it is diluted before it can affect a large concentrated population. The very real and well defined concerns by nuclear power safety experts over the severe consequences if the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant were seriously damaged in the ongoing conflict in the Russian invasion of Ukraine should be a wakeup call to anyone dismissing safety concerns of nuclear power.
I personally think that nuclear fission should be in the portfolio of baseload electrical power generation because (provided an adequate supply of fissile and fissionable fuel) it is a robust source of energy with a small physical footprint and a very manageable carbon impact, but we need to develop the technology such that we aren’t just using these expensive and problematic-to-extract-and-process fuels in a wasteful, once-through cycle, and that we also address the legitimate concerns of waste disposal and decommissioning of end-of-life facilities with real solutions that address community concerns and technical issues without handwaving these away to be solved by “due diligence” of some nebulously defined future responsible party. I particularly think that we should be developing the technologies to use thorium and mixed oxide fuels in reactors with partial or ‘full’ burnup capability to minimize the costs, risks, and waste of fuel processing/reprocessing and not hinge ourselves to the handful of high yield uranium deposits in a new resource war that is essentially a repeat of 20th Century conflicts over petroleum and natural gas reserves.
But Hossenfelder addresses none of that, either because it is too complex of an issue to go into such depth in a half hour video, because it is in contradiction to the position she is trying to defend, or because her research team doesn’t have the technical depth to really understand the scale and complexity of the issue. Whichever explanation fits, the video is not a comprehensive or definitive discussion of the issues around expanding nuclear fission power, nor are most online discussions by advocates and critics alike who are not really versed in the vast technical details of nuclear power systems.
This is literally the top result when you type her name into google:
It’s physicists calling her out for a video in 2023 that is considered extremely fringe, where she’s pushing FTL travel being possible, saying things 99% of physicists do not agree with.
And you cannot be following her and have missed her videos on trans people and autism, both of which were widely decried. She acts like being trans is some sort of trend–which is a conspiracy theory–and attacks autistic people as “extremists.”
I’m not making this shit up. She is very fringe, and is not generally a good choice to listen to. She is a contrarian, not someone into pushing facts.
I’m not saying her video on this topic is wrong. But given how much she’s gotten wrong in other videos, I’m telling you not to trust her. If you want people who do Science, there are far more people on YouTube who don’t get into the fringes and aren’t about pushing their own points of view as fact and attacking everyone else for not being on board with them.
You say that as if it were a bad thing (setting up a false dichotomy to boot). And yet science has only ever advanced via contrarian views.
Hossenfelder’s video about FTL is just fine. Despite the clickbaity title (which is unfortunately virtually required by YouTube these days), it’s not about demonstrating that FTL travel is possible. It’s about dismantling some of the usual reasons for why FTL travel is impossible. And specifically, that some of the impossibility claims (like that it would cause paradoxes) are not true under all circumstances, and could be violated under some conditions. In fact, one of those conditions (the condensation of the Higgs field producing less than infinite energy) is already thought to have happened.
Contrarians are wrong most of the time, of course (Sagan’s Bozo the Clown comment comes to mind), but status-quoists are also wrong most of the time. Thoughtful contrarians are more useful than status-quoists because they at least have a chance at coming up with something new.
Not quite, the march of time and science shows that contrarians have it less right nowadays.
The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every
century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern “knowledge” is that it is wrong.
The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had
said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. “If I am the wisest man,” said Socrates, “it is because I alone know that I know nothing.” the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.
My answer to him was, “John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”
The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that “right” and “wrong” are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.
What usually happens is that others do find by experimentation, other ways to find that the contrarians had something, but because the contrarians usually start with a wrong premise, they follow paths that misguide them. I noticed that with Calender in the 40-50s about climate change and Wegener regarding continental drift.
Experimentation won’t help if you reject new explanations. And status-quoism has the toxic effect of leading people to putting more faith into experimental results that reinforce existing theory rather than ones that might contradict it.
New theories are fragile, and early evidence is often not very good. The data supporting Kepler’s laws wasn’t entirely unambiguous initially. Nor was the eclipse data that supported General Relativity.
Obviously, today’s contrarians on the subject of round-earth theory and similar things can be ignored. But there is plenty of room for pushing back on the status quo of say, dark matter or quantum gravity. Not to mention non-scientific questions like “is building gigantic particle accelerators really the best use of limited research dollars?”
Perhaps one day we’ll really have figured out almost everything, and there will be no more need for contrarians. But today, we’re not even at a place where answering questions reduces our amount of uncertainty in the laws of the universe. Lord Kelvin famously said in 1900 that “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” All of the scientific development since then has not made that any less false.
Missing the point, the examples I gave are examples of the contrarians being “vindicated” with different explanations/experiments than the ones they mistakenly suggested. Most of the time are experimenters from the “status quo” the ones that stumble on the solutions or ideas proposed by the contrarians, while the contrarians remain wrong about how to get there.
Point being that if contrarians do have a point, experiments will support some of their ideas, because: evidence does not care about feelings. Truth will show up, with difficulty, but it will. And the status quo does react to that, even if one does not think so.
Barely. Otherwise we wouldn’t say “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
The contrarians worth listening to–like Hossenfelder–do have some evidence on their side. Often in the form of unexplained anomalies or unexplored edge cases. Which is almost always where new theories come from. We should take them more seriously instead of dismissing them based on being contrarian.
The examples you gave still vindicate the contrarians, since even if their explanations weren’t quite right, they still understood that the status quo was wrong, and had an inkling of what the right explanation looked like. By Asimov’s own reasoning: it may be that (Wegener’s explanation for) continental drift is wrong, but “static continent theory” is even more wrong, and anyone who thinks the two are equally wrong is more wrong than the two put together.
… it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established … An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.
Sorry for falsely denigrating Kelvin. Though it looks like the quote is going to be very hard to eradicate at this point.
Uh, that last line is directed at your extreme point of view about contrarians. And in issues like those ones does require others to apply the same skepticism about the status quo to the contrarians too, so far I have seen that some items are correct, but usually they are not a deal changer as contrarians would like.
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