Reactor goes brrr
Reactor goes brrr
158 comments
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I've always found it slightly funny that nuclear power is technically just a fancy steam engine.
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I never understood that either. It seems like the steam production is an extra step.
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So my general understanding is that you can use a magnet to create an electrical current. Its like it pushes the electrons, like a paddle pushing water. So they coil a bunch of wire around a magnet and rotate the magnet, which moves the electrons in the wire and that gets you electrical power. But you need something to push that magnet around, so you attach that to a big ass fan and use steam to push the fan. That's your turbine. Nuclear power is just using a hot rock to make the steam. Hydroelectric power uses a river to push the turbine. Wind power is doing the same thing, just uhhh, with wind.
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Turning heat into mechanical or chemical or electric energy directly is really hard, you know.
It's funny that you can get more energy from gas by using it to heat water and using a steam turbine to drive whatever. It's just not always practical.
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I'm not really sure how else you'd do it. The energy we can get out of fission is in the form of heat, and steam isn't as compressible as just gas and it's easy to make with just heat. Combine that with electromagnetism giving you electricity by spinning some magnets around some coils, and there you go.
It's probably possible to get some air hot enough and do some fancy convection work to get it to spin a rotor, but that's going to be really inefficient.
You could also use the heat to make materials glow and put a solar panel nearby, but that's also going to be pretty inefficient.
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It's just taking advantage of the change in matter state. H2O expands ~16,000 times it's size when it boils from liquid water to gaseous steam. That increase in size means it wants to go somewhere else, we just control where it goes and it's relief valve happens to be going through a spinning wheel with magnets on it, inducing currents in the coils of wire around the wheel.
Yes it's way more complicated than that, but it's the best way we have of turning heat into electricity, so it's what we use. With the primary exception of solar, nearly every form of power production is using heat energy to indirectly spin a wheel.
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I swear Nuclear Reactors were designed by a chemist with a grudge against a physicist and engineer.
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tbf, we have airplanes, but most goods are still being transported over lands or seas.
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It was a bad call to stop, but now it's an equally or worse call to start again.
Renewables win on essentially every measure and get better every day while nuclear gets worse every day.
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Another important point is the flexibility of wind and solar. The minimum investment to get some power out of them is very low, and a park can start generating power before fully completed and can easily be scaled up or down in capacity during construction if estimates change.
Nuclear on the other hand is a huge up-front cost with little flexibility and no returns until completion, which could take a decade or more.
Even if it wasn't more expensive, nuclear would still be financially risky. Many things can happen that effect power consumption and prices during the time it takes to build a nuclear plant. It can still be valuable for diversification though.
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That's a lie. Renewables produce more CO2 than Nuclear reactors per unit energy produces. They can also be significantly more dangerous (higher number of deaths per unit energy) in the case of hydro power or biomass. Solar and batteries require various rare materials and produce significant pollution when manufactured and must be replaced every 20 or 30 years.
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Run low on water, stop reaction. Fission products keep getting hot even though reaction stopped. Not enough water to cool them off. Shit.
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Thorium Thorium Thorium Thorium Thorium
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Uranium it is, then!
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thankfully modern ones like molten salt reactors have passive safety, where they stop the reaction if overheating occurs.
edit: My mistake, there's no active commercial molten salt reactors.
But nuclear power is very safe nowadays because of the multiple fail-safes, which some can still be passive like emergency cooling.
I much rather get electricity from magic rocks than destroying rain forest in developing countries drilling oil, gas or mining coal.
The biggest risk in nuclear is environmental disasters like in Fukushima's case, which is the last significant nuclear incident in past 13 years-
You can't stop decay heat. It's just molton salt reactors can operate at much higher temperatures and if it loses active cooling passive cooling with just air and infrared radiation while the salt passively circulates could be enough.
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there’s no active commercial molten salt reactors.
Experimental ones were all shut down within 5-10 years because corrosion makes them uneconomical to repair.
Fukushima’s case, which is the last significant nuclear incident in past 13 years
Zaporizhzhia (shutdown with IAEA concerns but may not fully report any emission releases) in Ukraine has military attacks against it, with intent of fundraising and politically blaming a disaster on the side that weapons providers, and the media they own, love to hate. Our media normalizes civil war as a response to Netanyahu not having his favorite ruler appointed.
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Turn water back on suddenly and realize what happens when water touches an object many times warmer than it's boiling point.
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Just throw some sand and boron on it, she'll be right mate.
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Same applies to geothermal.
lava is really hot
use lava to boil water
use steam to turn a generator
free electricity!
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Have we still not been able to progress past all power generation being "use water to turn a generator"? Humanity figured out the water wheel then just kept making it more complex.
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We have! Thermoelectric generators that make electricity directly from heat exist, they're just often not very good compared to the spinny wheel.
We even use them to make nuclear reactors with no moving parts, which I think is really neat. They're used in places where maintenance or refueling is difficult or impossible, like space probes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator
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What about a piss wheel instead of a water wheel?
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Chat is this legit gameplay or an exploit?
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Trolls and exploiters at it again. If god intended for us to make nuclear energy then he would've made it appear in nature. Stupid scientists making stuff from gods creation.
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Well do I have news for you
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
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Is just trolling.
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I love these, there's no way that would ever work
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free
The only completed attempt in last 25 years in US (Vogtle), cost over $15/watt. Before fuel, operations, security, waste disposal plan, and no insurance.
Turnkey (containers full of batteries) systems in China are under $100/kwh. A possible imported cost of $100/kwh.
5gw of solar and 19gwh batteries would have higher capacity factor than nuclear, use same transmission infrastructure size, and cost $7/watt. Where winter production is not enough to fill batteries, the batteries can still be charged by wind or peaker plants that can run a bit more efficiently for a continuous time over a day instead of in bursts.
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TBF 90% of the cost of nuclear in the US is political resistance. Not engry meeting
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100% of nuclear funding is political bribery. It is unbankable and uninsurable. Through bribery, cost+ funding can be obtained. More bribes = more covering of cost and time overruns.
If what you mean by "political resistance" is that bigger bribes are needed to overcome unpopularity, that is a tiny fraction of the bribery amount. Elected officials do blatantly destructive and unpopular acts all the time. The rate of approvals has little to do with project costs once approved.
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Disclaimer: I am a nitpicker, so apologies for this.
I do believe the symbol of the watt should be capitalized: W. Also the SI prefix giga, G. So that would be kWh, GWh, etc.
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i'm willing to have fizzle reactors on the moon. and mars. but i am not willing to shoot the fizzle materials via rockets to the moon or mars because of rockets tendency to blow up when designed and built by the humans.
i want no earth fizzle.
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Chernobyl could have been so much worse.
Considering the unregulated capitalist hell scale we live in, I can’t trust that some mega corp wouldn’t cut corners.
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I would hazard a guess that it ain't work like that.
You need a moderator to facilitate a slow fisson reaction. Some of the produced neutrons have misfit speed to create another fisson reaction.
Also note that fissile and radioactive is not the same, but you used them correctly.
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no it works exactly like that, I have 200 nuclear reactors in my backyard
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Why use 200 small reactors in the ground when you can use one really big one in the sky?
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David Hahn? What are you doing on Lemmy? I thought you died!
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Jokes on you, this is what humanity has been doing for years. I have one at home as well.
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Until you run out of that fissile material when you could just be using renewable energy...
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Atom floats on atom
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Somone send this to Remi
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I see all these pictures where the steam seemingly just escapes into the atmosphere.
Are there any designs where the cooling steam condenses and then pools and falls back down as liquid to turn even more turbines via gravity like hydroelectrics dams and then returns to the source pool to be reheated by the nuclear materials?
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That's not how modern power plants work. It's not an open loop to the cooling tower, instead you have a closed loop that gets superheated under high pressure and runs the turbines, but needs to get cooled down before the loop can start over. You cool it down by running the pipes through other water, which evaporated in a cooling tower. The evaporated water takes the heat out of the system, if you returned it to the loop, the system would overheat
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Ooooo That's a neat concept
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158 comments