obvious Child

The one problem is due to their design which has small yields compared to the heavy water types, you need a lot of them to produce sufficient energy. It's really a trade off, but the risks in a PBR are extremely small. It may not even be possible for them to meltdown simply due to their design and yields.

Well that's a problem with all forms of electrical generation. If a coal/gas/oil plant or a windfarm of solar farm gets knocked down, you still face the same problem of needing a plan B.

PBRs are generally only talked about between people who've spent some serious time studying it (really who studies them for fun?). But what I find really interesting is thorium. A special type of reactor could reduce all of our waste down to 1% of current volume while generating power. That's where we should be going.

One side note, PBRs are a good way to tell if a nation is trying to get nukes or not. Iran rejected the West's offer to build PBRs which don't generate enough waste to make weapons and use LEU (low enriched Uranium). Plus they are cheaper, easier to run and safer. The only real reason a developing nation would pick a heavy water reactor that produced lots of waste that was more expensive, more complicated and more dangerous is for making weapons. Well that or making medical isotopes, but you can get those from the international market for cheap anyways.

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LaMidRighter

[quote] I don't see a problem with small yields to be fair, we have plenty of available area in our country and I think the benefits would outweigh the initial cost. It sounds like a good sound idea.



Very true. I just notice a trend with any alternative energy plan that having a backup gets ignored, I simply want us all to consider the worst case scenario to make sure that critical needs can be met during a plant outage.

Agreed.

Good point.

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LMR

Middleground

[quote=jallman;1057673990]A lot of Dems would help you.

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UtahBill

Being small can be a good thing, if they are pre-licensed, sold as a package, haul the parts in on a few trucks, assemble on site, attach to the grid, and you are there. Sites could be licensed in advance. Start with one reactor, add more as growth in the area demands more power.
The last one I worked at was PVNGS, west of Phoenix. It has 3 reactors, at 1300MW each. I hear rumors that they want to add a 4th reactor. The site was originally going to have 5, so it should be relatively easy to add
another, but it will very likely be another big one, with the typical 40-50 year old design.
The same site concept could be used for Pebble Bed reactors. Build the site in advance to allow for expansion simply by shipping in more reactors as needed. The utilities could use existing revenue to help pay for expansion.
Countries where the government owns the utilities, like France, are more likely to lead the way with nuclear, tho. The USA will likely fall behind. Even South Africa is ahead of us with the Pebble Bed concept.

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jallman

I think it's pretty much a bipartisan attitude that she is a scab on the ass of the House.

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obvious Child

[quote=LaMidRighter;1057674910]Investors (read: banks) may balk at a business plan that requires building a dozen of these to produce the same amount of energy at the same cost as a heavy water reactor. Much of the problem with nuclear technology is actually getting financing. Most people don't realize just how ungodly expensive nuclear can get, especially with the overruns in production that have effectively become the norm. Having lots of construction sites may give risk adverse bankers lots of reasons to not approval financing. But on the flip side, having all your eggs scattered around various projects is a plus. If you can put yourself in the mind of a banker, it's not hard to see why nuclear hasn't gone anywhere in the past 20 years. I'm not sure that PBR can overcome those fears.

The good folks at MIT have been pushing Thorium for quite some time. India has been researching it as a way to bypass the import restrictions on fuel from their refusal to sign the NPT. Virtually no waste, a fuel that can't be used as a weapon, cheap, safe and clean. That's the future.

obvious Child

Maybe, but last time I checked, PBR wasn't that simple to build, so unless there's been a new design change, that's not possible.

The great thing about the large reactors is the yields. Like you said, the ones you worked at had a combined 3.9 gigwatts of capacity. PBRs tend to run around 100~300 megawatts per reactor. Much less the conventional designs. To produce the same amount, you'd need around 20 or so PBRs at the average of 200 megawatts per. Yikes.

Everyone is ahead of us in PBR. I wonder due to their small size if you could build PBRs vertically, stacking them on top of each other and have them all lead to a central cooling tower. That would save space.

Reverend_Hellh0und

just thinking for all those wary of a heavy water reactors..... when was the last time any one had a real problem?

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obvious Child

That's not really the problem. Heavy water reactors generally produce abnormally large amounts of waste plutonium. Aside from the obvious issue of storage, the proliferation problem is quite large. Furthermore, they are generally more expensive and more complicated to build then light water.

Reverend_Hellh0und

how much waste per kilowatt generated is produced by each?