Nobody builds nuclear reactors for fun anymore

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2013/12/06/the-future-of-nuclear-power-let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom/

by atomatica • 13 years ago

188 102 13 years ago

blogs.scientificamerican.com

pstuart• 13 years ago

It'd be cool if some serious makers made a LFTR reactor :-)

manglav• 13 years ago

There is a company trying to model it by 2015. Check FLiBe Energy out.

codebaobab• 13 years ago

Freeman Dyson's book, Disturbing the Universe, which is quoted in this article, is a great read. Highly recommended.

trekky1700• 13 years ago

Just one of the problems with kids these days, don't have any 'ppreciation for the skill and craft of building a hobbyist nuclear reactor in their parents basement.

ISL8• 13 years ago

To make an an HN-relevant analogy: The FDA-hobbling of 23andMe pales in comparison to what it's like to work with nuclear regulatory frameworks and societal concerns regarding nuclear science. When I was an undergrad, DOE was willing to pay the university the entire relicensing and operating costs of the on-campus TRIGA. The university declined, knowing that the requisite environmental impact study for relicensing would bring withering community backlash.

(For those who haven't seen one, here's what it looks like when the control rods are blown out of a TRIGA [1]; the reactor runs away momentarily, but then self-moderates when the fuel warms. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orNP1wMmPK4 . The Cherenkov flash is a beautiful blue.)

Nuclear power can provide a safe, well-studied, and effective bridge to solar power. Almost nobody's dabbling in it because there's so much societal opposition. Working on a reactor in an old schoolhouse in a rural area? Someone elsewhere in the county will be willing to speak at every county governmental meeting to shut you down. Their opposition has merit; it's easy to point to Fukushima and Chernobyl as major disasters.

A simple, clear, and publicly-understandable regulatory framework in which both society and innovators can feel comfortable with small-scale nuclear experimentation would go a long way toward driving new startups in the field. Experimenters shouldn't get their hopes up too far: Some forms of radiation are extremely penetrating/hard to shield, and some hazardous isotopes live a long, long time. If you're dabbling in the field, please plan from the beginning to minimize and safely store your waste.

We only get one planet; I'd rather it not be too warm nor contaminated by our litter.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA

archgoon• 13 years ago

Can you point to resources to safely and legally begin dabbling? Are you familiar with the process to obtain proper licensing?

How are simple reactors like the Farnsworth Fuser regulated, or why are they exempt? Are non power generating reactors exempt from regulation? How does that get defined? Is it based on maximum emitted radiation?

ISL8• 13 years ago

While I work in the same lab as a bunch of nuclear physicists, my physics expertise is in experimental gravity.

To get the official scoop on such things, I'd start with the NRC: http://www.nrc.gov .

If you're at/near a university, many of them have a radiation safety office as a part of their Environmental Health and Safety department. University radiation safety officers are a great resource for timely details regarding rules in an experimental setting. Even if there's no "nuclear science" underway at a school, if there's a medical school or nuclear chemistry at work, there's probably a radiation safety office.

coldtea4• 13 years ago

Their opposition has merit; it's easy to point to Fukushima and Chernobyl as major disasters.

The disasters are one thing.

The constant lying from authorities, government and assigned experts was another. They were caught pants down telling lies and misinforming in handling the Fukusima accident.

This breaks trust. And for projects like that, that involve billions of dollars (enough to fuel much payola and greed), it's easy not to have much trust in the good intentions of those building and managing them in the first place.

sillysaurus22• 13 years ago

Sources, please? I don't disbelieve you; I want to know more. (And precisely what you're referring to.)

judk2• 13 years ago

Even our own revered patio11 got caught as a patsy, repeating propaganda about how perfectly organized and careful the Japanese nuclear industry was.

Anyway, overall, whether the dangers are technical or social, they are still dangers.

pflanze• 13 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean with litter, but isn't nuclear waste storage still an unsolved problem?

ISL8• 13 years ago

It's far from solved, but there are partial solutions, including reprocessing.

My appeal to dabblers was to think through the entire life cycle of an experiment before beginning. If I were to crack open a smoke detector in order to play around with the Americium source, I'd think hard first about whether I actually knew what I was doing, making sure I worked in a clean/orderly environment, that the entire experiment was nicely contained, and that I had a viable plan for how to safely manage the waste I'd created.

Just as with the bathtub ring in "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" [1], once contamination leaves containment, it can wander everywhere, generating lots of low-level waste. You'd rather not eat or aspirate an alpha-emitter.

Nobody wants an unsafe nuclear experiment in the garage next door; it's irresponsible. It's one thing to hurt yourself, but quite another to harm someone unaware of a risk. It's also irresponsible to dispose of a hot source in your garbage can. That source may no longer be able to hurt you, but it's able to harm everyone who comes into contact with it in the future.

Our lab's standard for whether or not something has been cleaned up: any residual activity is comparable to/indistinguishable from background, and any activated waste has been disposed of with someone licensed to handle it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_in_the_Hat_Comes_Back

peterpathname• 13 years ago

here in australia, decades of research and policy development have hit upon a world-class solution to the nuclear waste challenge.

We're building a road in a semi-arid remote location, on the traditional lands of a small, disemowered, remote indigenous community. At the end of the road, we plan to build a shed with a barbed wire fence. In return for this inconvenience, the local community will see employment opportunities (2 security guards) and compensation (scholarships for their children).

this standard of excellence is possible when you have a society that tolerates institutionalised inequity and cultural genocide, and apartheid style laws that target particular races. None of this should surprise, as this is the same spirit in which a large portion of the world's uranium is mined on traditional lands in Australia. http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/12/08/calls-ranger-u...

moca• 13 years ago

If we want sustainable nuclear energy, the only solution would be fast reactor that can burn nuclear waste. Politically, it is near impossible to find a place to build nuclear waste storage. Nobody know how safe is such a storage. If we can burn nuclear waste, we will have sufficient clean energy for several hundred years. By then, nuclear fusion will be harnessed, and we will have enough energy for next many million years, and they have much less environmental impact.

chrisb• 13 years ago

If anyone is interested in investigating nuclear reactions, there is a wealth of publicly available data from a huge number of experiments; and simulation software is available.

For example: EXFOR (Experimental nuclear reaction data https://www-nds.iaea.org/exfor/exfor.htm) is an international collection of more than 20000 nuclear reaction experimental results dating back to the discovery of the neutron.

ENDF (Evaluated nuclear data library http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/endf/b7.1/) is the current best evaluation of the most up-to-date data available for many nuclear reactions that have been seen experimentally.

FLUKA (http://www.fluka.org/) "is a fully integrated particle physics MonteCarlo simulation package", partially developed and used by CERN.

Beware that all of these require some knowledge of nuclear physics to use and understand (obviously!), and can be somewhat archaic in data formats and computer languages used (think FORTRAN).

But it is truly wonderful how you and I have such easy access to such high quality and complete data.

ChuckMcM7• 13 years ago

My daughter was one of the operators of the TRIGA reactor at Reed college. Some of the students joked it was a Fisher-Price My First Reactor reactor :-) at only 250kW its small as reactors go, but also exceptionally interesting.

It is very disappointing how constricted the field of nuclear research is, as it is a demonstrably zero carbon footprint energy source. I understand the emotion that nuclear power evokes in people, I think the only way to combat the misperceptions is with improving results. I recognize I am a minority in that regard.

stesch• 13 years ago

And the waste simply vanishes if you really wish for it very hard.

ufo• 13 years ago

It actually does, depending on your reactor design.

ChuckMcM7• 13 years ago

That is one of the emotions.

If you read the article you will read about two reactors that are actually fueled by what we consider waste today.

That we don't completely burn the fuel used in a reactor is a 'bug', a misfeature if you will. That was expedient when the initial reactors were being brought online and now is a regulatory pain in the butt. There is nothing in the physics that requires a nuclear reactor complex to generate nuclear waste of any kind[1]. Only in the regulations.

[1] Nuclear incineration of even low level waste can effectively convert anything that was once radioactive into short lived nucleotide. Converting everything burned into its lowest energy stable state. But we don't do that either.

vidarh• 13 years ago

The waste is a vastly exaggerated problem. We've released vastly more uranium and thorium into the atmosphere via burning of coal than we've generated waste from nuclear plants that needs long term storage (the vast majority of nuclear waste by volume has a half life short enough that it is not a storage problem for more than a few decades; only a few percent needs long term storage).

Now, the waste that needs long term storage is more dangerous than the dispersed uranium from coal, but most of the spent fuel can also be reprocessed at least once, and at least India is looking into reprocessing spent fuel multiple times to reduce the amount of high level waste that actually needs to be stored rather than reused.

The resulting storage volume is miniscule, and while it needs to be dealt with, it takes a lot for it to be a significant risk. E.g. plutonium is nasty in some ways - you really don't want to breathe in particulate. But it mostly emits alpha particles, which can be blocked by not much more than cardboard (I remember physics class when our teachers demonstrated with an alpha source, a geiger counter and cardboard...).

Large scale dispersal of plutonium particulate would require a large explosion, so the challenge with plutonium (and uranium) storage is largely to ensure there's no risk of reaching critical mass. But that's "simple" enough to do just by diluting the material enough. There is a security aspect (you don't want people to have an easy way of mining plutonium from waste to produce weapons) but the main storage problem is down to fear.

Most of the gamma emitters have short half lives. I grew up in Norway, and remember the massive fear after Chernobyl relating to Caesium contamination for example (fallout making it into the soil caused Cesium to get picked up in various plants that were eaten by sheep, deer, elks etc. in the highland regions). While it was a public health concern, Caesium-137 has a half-life of "only" 30 years, and a biological half-life in the human body of a few months, and there are plenty of "workarounds" in the case of a major accident (deep ploughing; screening the riskiest food sources; fertilizing with potassium) that helps reduce Caesium uptake until it's radioactivity has sufficiently diminished and/or it has been spread enough to not be a problem any more.

That's not to say we shouldn't take nuclear waste seriously, but it's not a big deal compared to a lot of other hazardous waste we don't think twice about.

coldtea4• 13 years ago

It is very disappointing how constricted the field of nuclear research is, as it is a demonstrably zero carbon footprint energy source.

Yes, if only it didn't have any other footprint...

zxcdw3• 13 years ago

Is this a real world problem with real world consequences?

It is my understanding that the nuclear waste can be stored safely without too much cost. It is also my understanding that there are ways to re-use the already used fuel rods, effectively 1) making them radiate less 2) getting "leftover" power from already consumed fuel.

Psychological footprint fueled by ignorance however... Well, that borders religiousness. Maybe education and awareness helps.

gaius• 13 years ago

If you take a sandwich into the control room of a nuclear plant and eat it there and throw the wrapper in the bin, that's "low level nuclear waste". If you do the same in an airliner, your sandwich will be exposed to more radiation! but it's just litter.

aestra• 13 years ago

People saying nuclear power plants having zero carbon footprint aren't really according for the entire nuclear fuel chain. the energy-intensive stages of the nuclear fuel chain are building the power plant, uranium mining, and nuclear decommissioning.

I still think nuclear power has its place for example having nuclear reactors on warships let them stay out to sea as long as they have food. They make their own electricity and water from the reactor. Just not for widespread power plants.

I think the future is going to move away from power being generated in one place.

sliverstorm3• 13 years ago

Of course, some of the work done in the construction/mining/decommissioning could be powered by electricity from other reactors, getting closer to carbon-zero.

But realistically, there is no extant electricity supply that has zero carbon costs over it's lifecycle. At least that I am aware of.

dm22• 13 years ago

Probably because it's easier, safer, and cheaper to just purchase one or visit your local university if you have enough interest.

You're very unlikely to invent a new nuclear reactor improvement in your basement (50 years ago it would have been plausible).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power-R...

http://www.npr.org/2013/02/04/170482802/are-mini-reactors-th...

icegreentea• 13 years ago

This isn't actually the point that the article is trying to make.

The submission title for example can be reinterpreted in two slightly different ways. The first is the way that you interpreted. The problem is that -nobody- out of the general population chooses to make nuclear reactors as a recreational activity of some sort.

The article however poses it in a different way. It rather seems to mean that nobody goes into the field of nuclear engineering with the expectation of experimentation and "having fun" while working. It has nothing to do with expense, danger, illegality, working with universities, doing it in your basement, or any of that. It has to do with commercial interests not supporting their engineers in experimenting with possible designs.

dm22• 13 years ago

Mini reactors are becoming a big industry.

For cities or countries (or large ships) that can't afford a full-scale nuclear reactor there are smaller and cheaper ones that can replace fossil-fuel power plants.

I'm sure most people go into the nuclear field to experiment, few people expect to sit around with a checklist and watch a dial.

This company is working on similar goals: http://terrapower.com/

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

I'm sure the last few times people built reactors for fun, people with large guns appeared to ask them to stop what they were doing.

http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout...

dvanduzer• 13 years ago

A few years ago, Jim Sanborn (also the Kryptos sculpture guy?!) built a fission device based on an early Fermi/Bohrs/Teller experiment from 1939:

http://jimsanborn.net/main.html#museuminstallations

I got the impression from his talk that he was more worried about DHS than NRC cracking down while working on it.

It wasn't ever turned on while it was in the museum, but just getting near the device probably left me with a greater sense of awe than even the Apollo 11 capsule. On the shoulders of giants, certainly, but one guy built this.

johnminter• 13 years ago

My employer (Eastman Kodak) had one of the few industrial research reactors built for neutron activation analysis (NAA) from 1974 to 2007. NAA provided great trace analysis of impurities that caused problems with photographic film and solid state devices. The reactor was located in the basement of the research labs, next to my electron microscopy lab. I spent close to 20 years next door to this.

There were two main issues that caused the company to decommission the reactor. 1) replacement of the californium source would have been prohibitively expensive. 2) Because the neutron source also contained isotopes that could have been weaponized (with great difficulty,) we had to maintain 24x7 security - at great expense. The press reported on the removal (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/14/kodak-nuclear-react...)

During my tenure as "next door neighbor" to this, I was more concerned about falling on ice in the parking lot during the winter than any concerns from the reactor. The staff in the NAA lab were well-trained scientists who were quite careful and they monitored constantly for activity.

DennisP• 13 years ago

This is one reason I've started to think fusion might be more promising than advanced fission. The regulatory barriers are so light that high school students build reactors and run them on deuterium fuel just like most of the big projects, and it's perfectly legal.

There's quite a lot of work being done on small-scale alternative reactor designs. I wrote up a bunch of them here: http://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestI...

XorNot5• 13 years ago

Don't worry, "environmentalist" movements have gotten way out in front with opposing the ITER project.

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

There were a couple of IAMA's on reddit with some teenagers who (supposedly) build nuclear reactors

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hmn56/iama_teenager_wh...

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/xd19t/iama_an_incoming...

russellsprouts• 13 years ago

These are impressive, but they aren't fission reactors, but fusion reactors. They do not generate power, but they do convert hydrogen to helium.

draker• 13 years ago

Sure they do:

The Boy Who Played With Fusion

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played...

dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

The dynamics by which nuclear reactor design cease to be "fun" resonates very strongly with yesterday's post on creativity, and in particular on simonsarris's mention of John Cleese's video on creativity. The how to kill creativity bit at the end in particular.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6862240

I've got my own thoughts and doubts over the ultimate viability of nuclear energy and of the net potential of technology, but brakes on creativity itself, whether introduced or intrinsic to the system, are of concern.

memracom2• 13 years ago

And what about the guy who though up the Higgs boson saying that he would be kicked out of university these days because he doesn't meet the arbitrary bureaucratic metric thought up by small-minded administrators. I.e. he does not publish enough papers.

These are a few examples of the idiocracy taking root. MBAs running companies into the ground because they fundamentally do not understand the domain in which their business operates. Police incompetence manifested as an increase in paramilitary actions coupled with a decline in common sense. And what about the TSA?

dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

That too. There's been something of a confluence of posts on this topic in the past few days. Not that it isn't a topic that has some attraction here.

Another datapoint: a recently posted (here?) interview of Richard Feynman, shot only a few weeks before he died. What really got me was the mischievous nature he displayed: constantly smiling and joking. Einstein was somewhat similar. God may not play dice with the Universe, but each of these two was, I think, toying with it.

memracom2• 13 years ago

This is just talking about America. Perhaps the people having fun building nuclear reactors are now working in Russia. Interestingly enough Russia has recently invested a lot on new kinds of R&D facilities including a suburb of Moscow being modeled on Silicon Valley. And they are reforming their whole system of doing science and science research, moving it away from the old bureaucracy in which it became embedded in the Soviet era.

In life, usually when the pendulum swings to an extreme in one place, there is another place where the pendulum heads in the opposite direction, and in nuclear reactors it would not be surprising if Russia is the place where nuclear innovation is happening these days.

NAFV_P• 13 years ago

David Hahn did.

crbnw00ts• 13 years ago

Well, there's this company:

http://generalfusion.com

VC-backed, too!

dmfdmf• 13 years ago

Barring some exciting breakthrough in physics that gives us either a new energy source or high-efficiency solar and the ability to store it, eventually nuclear will come back. It is the only viable civilization-scale power source that can keep the heat, lights and computers on once the oil runs out.

lispm• 13 years ago

You sound like it is a bad thing...

Nobody builds nuclear reactors for fun anymore

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