Atoms for California @atoms4ca - Tumblr Blog

new report finds that over 30% of uranium in nuclear power plants is lost via engineers having a little bite when they think nobody's watching

atoms4ca

#ingredients you can pronounce

literallymechanical

The problem with the tritium inventory problem in fusion power – that ITER doesn't have a full tritium breeding blanket and is going to hog the global civilian supply of tritium once its online – is that this is entirely a regulatory issue!! Right now, civilian tritium is extracted as a byproduct from Canadian CANDU heavy water nuclear reactors, and that's it! And there's not much!!!

But!! DOE gets their tritium stockpile from "tritium-producing burnable absorber rods" (TPBARs) in one single nuclear power plant in Tennessee, producing tritium via neutron capture of enriched lithium. They don't share the details of how much tritium they get every year, but it's widely assumed to be A Lot. From one reactor!!!!

And like. The thing is. The design of a TPBAR isn't that complicated. The program isn't even classified!! There's no technical reason why every pressurized water reactor in the world couldn't have their own little side business producing and selling tritium.

The problem. Is that if you (a civilian) retrofit your PWR with tritium breeders and start selling kilograms of tritium. you will get extremely immediately assassinated by every world government all at once all at the same time.

Oh well.

atoms4ca

Molten salt (fission) reactors that use FLiBe as their coolant need to enrich the lithium to very high purities of Lithium-7. Lithium-6 (7.6% of naturally occurring lithium) is a neutron absorber, which a fission reactor doesn't want, because those neutrons for the uranium atoms, gosh darn it!

As noted in your linked post, Lithium-6 + neutron = helium + tritium. Tritum is what (most) fusion reactors need whereas in fission reactor it's nuisance because it can permeate through metals and is very mildly radioactive, which regulators don't like. It so happens that there is an American fission company currently building a plant to enrich lithium to very high purities of Lithium-7. They have not announced their plans for what they will do with the leftover Lithium-6... but the potential to sell it to a fusion company is very strong.

thevaultoftheatomicspaceage

#big if true

barryogg

I wish all environmentalists a very suck cocks in hell

barryogg

I wish that this person would receive perfect clarity of mind about her actions and their consequences, and I wish a gun with a single bullet would be placed before her so that she could make good use of this mindstate

barryogg

Step 1: Mandate alternatives to emission-heavy systems

Step 2: Fail to provide energy for said systems

Step 3: ???

Step 4: ??? still

Step 5: Guess I’ll die

barryogg

Ma! Maaaaa! The Germans are blowing up their power plants again!

shieldfoss

i-love-linux-and-need-cat-ears

my favorite graph regarding nuclear

dragon-in-a-fez

reminds me of the time I said something pro-nuclear to my ex and they said “I don’t think you’d feel that way if you grew up near a nuclear plant like I did” and I asked “oh what happened” and they were like “well. nothing. nevertheless”

glutko

The Radiation Brothers

mia-down-under

official-boob-posts

official boob post

centrally-unplanned

Was writing about how its funny that every article about radiation exposure uses eating a banana for their point of comparison, but apparently that is in fact the standard unit of measurement for this kind of thing! A little potassium and you are the radiation king of fruit, very cool.

atoms4ca

it is a fun unit but shouldn’t be interpreted literally in terms of the biological impact of eating a banana

it’s more like “if you permanently installed a banana (that never rotted) in your body and for some reason the banana provided no shielding from its potassium 40”

personally I recommend using dental X-rays or CT scans as the “daily life” comparison in radiation SciComm

#banana equivalent dose

atoms4ca

What's wrong with this picture?

Source: Strandell, Marjatta (1976). "Productivity in power plant construction." Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Reproduction my own, from a figure in: Scott J. Sebastian (1979). An Exploratory Study of the Major Factors Influencing Craft Productivity in Nuclear Power Plant Construction. Master's Thesis, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.

atoms4ca

What's wrong with this picture?

Source: Scott J. Sebastian (1979). An Exploratory Study of the Major Factors Influencing Craft Productivity in Nuclear Power Plant Construction. Master's Thesis, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.

Reproduction my own.

These numbers add up to 29.9 hours, by the way.

atoms4ca

What's wrong with this picture?

Sources:

For 1976: United Engineers and Constructors. Capital Cost: Boiling Water Reactor Plant. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/7317996

For All Other Years: United Engineers and Constructors. Energy Economic Data Base (EEDB) Program, Phases I through VI. Link to Phase 1 here. You can find the reports for the other phases under the "related literature" tab.

#data viz #nuclear power

atoms4ca

What's wrong with this picture?

Source: Strandell, Marjatta (1976). "Productivity in power plant construction." Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Reproduction my own, from a figure in: Scott J. Sebastian (1979). An Exploratory Study of the Major Factors Influencing Craft Productivity in Nuclear Power Plant Construction. Master's Thesis, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.

atoms4ca

What's wrong with this picture?

Source: Scott J. Sebastian (1979). An Exploratory Study of the Major Factors Influencing Craft Productivity in Nuclear Power Plant Construction. Master's Thesis, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.

Reproduction my own.

These numbers add up to 29.9 hours, by the way.

#data viz #nuclear power

What's wrong with this picture?

Source: Strandell, Marjatta (1976). "Productivity in power plant construction." Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Reproduction my own, from a figure in: Scott J. Sebastian (1979). An Exploratory Study of the Major Factors Influencing Craft Productivity in Nuclear Power Plant Construction. Master's Thesis, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.

#data viz #nuclear power

depsidase

Data Source: FERC Form 1, with ancillary data from EIA Form 860. Cost account definitions here. Visualization my own.

I have chosen to present the data on the basis of power (kW) instead of energy (kWh) because basically all of nuclear power's operations & maintenance costs are fixed (i.e. don't go down if the plant operates less).

Nuclear power plants are indeed cheaper to operate per unit of energy produced because their fuel is much cheaper (excluded from this visualization) and they operate at 90%+ capacity factors. In plain English, that means they are very close to "always on," thereby churning out more electricity per year than an identically sized fossil plant. In contrast, fossil-fired plants are first to be powered down when demand falls because (1) more expensive fuel and (2) combustion causes greater wear-and-tear, requiring more maintenance. Nuclear power plants don't have that problem.

#nuclear power #data viz

Based on estimations by the World Nuclear Association and the International Atomic Energy Agency we can assume roughly 460,000 tonnes of used fuel has been discharged from commercial power reactors so far. 30% of this spent fuel has been reprocessed, which is not taken into account for this visualization. On the flipside, this amount would require a bigger volume for dry cask shielding so the calculated volume in this thought exercise can reasonably be argued for.

The nuclear fuel used in most commercial nuclear power plants consists of uranium dioxide (UO2), which we use as a proxy here. Assuming a UO2 density of 10.97 metric tonnes per cubic meter and a weight of the 460,000 metric tonnes we arrive at a volume of approximately 41,945 cubic meters. That volume would give rise to a simple cube measuring roughly 34.75 meters on each side.

Source: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/processing-of-used-nuclear-fuel.aspx

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