Never mind that compounding as naively as you did implies the guard 10,000 years from now is receiving about $6e43 per hour.

Me:

1 kW⋅h = 3600 J

Obviously wrong!

1 kW⋅h = 3.6e06 J (3600 kJ)

10 cents / kW&sdoth; = 2.778e-8 USD / J
3.945e15 J @ 2.778e-8 USD / J = 1.096e8 USD ($110 million)

These I got right, althought it should be “kW⋅h” rather than “kW&sdoth;”. Character-order typo. No preview. Blinding glare of background whiteness. Those are my only excuses.

[Aside: on OS X you can do a sort of preview by command-a (to highlight everything in your edit box) command-c (to copy) then at the shell prompt (everyone runs Terminal, right? ) run "/usr/bin/pbpaste > /tmp/a.html" then "/usr/bin/open /tmp/a.html" which should cause your default browser to show you a formatted version so you can at least check your links and see dangling markup tags that cause half your comment to be italicized...]

… and this is why we normalize to SI units.

(Okay, admittedly we can expect other normalizations on a blog dominated by qc-gr topics, but I’m almost tempted to argue that geometrized or Planck units are less confusing to deal with than W⋅h).

Now it’s my turn to make errors!

How many joules do we get from 25 megawatts over 5a? Let’s assume the usual mean calendar year, since there are so many years to choose from.

1 a = 3.156e07 s [from NIST]
5 a = 1.578e08 s
2.5e07 W * 1.578e08s = 3.945e15 J

Normalizing bills, which are almost always for energy rather than power:
1 kW⋅h = 3600 J
10 cents / kW&sdoth; = 2.778e-8 USD / J

3.945e15 J @ 2.778e-8 USD / J = 1.096e8 USD ($110 million)

So, $25 million vs $110 million for almost 4 PJ of energy @ 25 MW of electrical power.

This ignores additional costs not included in the $25 million price, which might include things like insurance.

This also ignores additonal savings from the additional thermal energy doing work that might otherwise be done by electric, gas or oil boilers.

Finally, a question: what’s the power decay curves (electrical and thermal) of these small plants? Apart from the issue of isotope half-life, these piles are unmanaged, sot therefore they can develop unfavourable arrangements with respect to neutron economy, right? Five years is an unusually long duty cycle for a working nuclear pile.

Maybe this solution is better than giant multi-gigawatt installations ?

That’s a hard question to answer! Transmission losses from the giant installations are a large factor, but so are economies of scale — much hotter rectors lead to much more efficient electrical power generation per unit of fuel; alternatively bigger piles gain economies of scale with respect to on-line refuelling and other reactor pile geometry management (e.g. CANFLEX) which leads to less downtime and greater fuel efficiencies. These are unlikely attributes for a “no maintenance” small reactor.

In either case, the really rare resource, engineering and operational expertise, remains highly centralized, which is why the idea of large numbers of “non-field-repairable units” is tenable.

The bigger practical risk to the users of these reactors, I think, is not one of these reactors failing dangerously, but rather failing safely as designed, but taking a long time to be replaced because of production and delivery backlogs.

However, if there are a mix of large and small power generators, and a grid that can cope with dynamically distributing energy from supply to demand, the overall energy economy is more resilient in the face of plant outages (including planned maintenance and construction delays). Whether such a grid is realistic is an open question. At present, “selling excess power back to the grid” does not work in the way you probably think.

Mr Paul, you estimated the storage cost of spent fuel by compounding the guardian’s minimum wage over 10,000 years. In doing so, you ignored a gigantic factor.

Namely, you assume that the 25 MW of energy generated by the mini-nuke is worthless. The economic benefit of all that energy is difficult to estimate but should be several orders of magnitude greater than your guardian’s salary of $57,378 per year. This economic activity, like all economic activity, should be compounded too, and should by itself greatly overwhelm your FV calculation above.

Check this particular section which, to some extent, answers the concerns mr Paul as been talking about:

SHOULD WE ADD UP EFFECTS OVER MILLIONS OF YEARS?

I haven’t read the entire book yet, but this chapter and the one about comparing risks from various sources seems very interesting. The book seems a bit technical and is full of references to calculations in the appendix, but I strongly recommend everyone to take a good look at this.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html

This is the 11th chapter of a book entitled “THE NUCLEAR ENERGY OPTION” which was written by Bernard Cohen who is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh. You can check his Wikipedia Page here:

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

Take a look at these quotes from the beginning of Chapter 11:

“As an initial perspective, it is interesting to compare nuclear waste with the analogous waste from a single large coal-burning power plant… For example, if all the air pollution emitted from a coal plant in one day were inhaled by people, 15 million people could die from it (3), which is 10 times the number that could be killed by ingesting or inhaling the waste produced in one day by a nuclear plant.(4)”

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html

This is the 11th chapter of a book entitled “THE NUCLEAR ENERGY OPTION” which was written by Bernard Cohen who is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh. You can check his Wikipedia Page here:

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

Take a look at these quotes from the beginning of Chapter 11:

“As an initial perspective, it is interesting to compare nuclear waste with the analogous waste from a single large coal-burning power plant… For example, if all the air pollution emitted from a coal plant in one day were inhaled by people, 15 million people could die from it (3), which is 10 times the number that could be killed by ingesting or inhaling the waste produced in one day by a nuclear plant.(4)”

“For nuclear waste, a simple, quick, and easy disposal method would be to convert the waste into a glass — a technology that is well in hand — and simply drop it into the ocean at random locations(5). No one can claim that we don’t know how to do that! With this disposal, the waste produced by one power plant in one year would eventually cause an average total of 0.6 fatalities, spread out over many millions of years, by contaminating seafood. Incidentally, this disposal technique would do no harm to ocean ecology. In fact, if all the world’s electricity were produced by nuclear power and all the waste generated for the next hundred years were dumped in the ocean, the radiation dose to sea animals would never be increased by as much as 1% above its present level from natural radioactivity.”

Check this particular section which, to some extent, answers the concerns mr Paul as been talking about:

SHOULD WE ADD UP EFFECTS OVER MILLIONS OF YEARS?

I haven’t read the entire book yet, but this chapter and the one about comparing risks from various sources seems very interesting. The book seems a bit technical and is full of references to calculations in the appendix, but I strongly recommend everyone to take a good look at this.

I am shure that they calculated exactlly.
Xe136 is well included. Its basic.
And I belive that this miniature power plant will be save in respect of there technic and construction, but not save in respect of the society.

Its only the wrong direction.
And the biggist lost is the power of the scientist.

imagine they all would develop totaly cool hightech.

A electric car has a higher momentum as a otto-motor.
Tesla Roadster 0–60 mph (0–97 km/h) in 3.9 seconds
speed is electronically limited to 125 mph
you would never change back.

The idee of decentralisation is good for wind-energy:)—-
but realy definitly not for nuclear energy.
(man, and they claimed it as a advantage…..)

Oppenheimer and Einstein were in america because of the nazies . 6. Januar 1939 Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn and Fritz Straßmann discover the nuclear fission.
In this momant Einstein and Oppenheimer knowed there will be the bomb.
And Einstein knowed they all personally and what they can.

So Los Allamos.

I thing that is a huge impact of society in sciene.

I know good scientist, with a socialisation which would totally colaps if they would realise its not save.

“nuclear energie is on of the worst thing the humans did.”

I am shure that the physicist in los alamos are realy good.

Fantastic scientist.
Onla wrong direction.

Also nuclear scintigraphy: Te99
liver cancer; Selective Internal Radiation Therapy (SIRT) : Y90

best

“nuclear energie is on of the worst thing the humans did.”

Isn’t this an unjustified generalization? It was not humanity who created nuclear energy and nuclear weapons but professional physicists.

You do make a point in that it would be almost a religious faith that one could bury these and expect all to run without a hitch. Neutron damage or pressure build up, even if previously accounted for, could have unexpected consequences. If one of these fails and spews out it would result in a mini-Chernobyl incident.

Lawrence B. Crowell

If some one clamed this as clean and he is in charge and has the knowledge he is (almost) mass murder. Because he is taking to people they do not know and have to trust.

Anyway, this brilliant idee of miniature power plant is criminal. They claimed to sell 4000 un 10 years around the world and have already oders from Tschechien and dispute with the Cayman-Ilands, Panama and Bahamas. I am shure they will come all back.

And have they run one of them 5 years?

Neutron radiation modify the structure of stell.

They use UH3 which recersible decompose around 500°C into U and hydrogen. Because hydrogen is the moderator the reaction is self regulating. But this means they have to seal the reactor. So a huge increase of temperature will produce a nuge preasure.

How they deal with the fission product Xe135?
Due to Xe135 has a high probability to trapp a neutron the will arise Xe136 wich is stable.
Hence Xe135 makes around 6% of the fission product (normal reactor) and Xe135 has a half-value period around 9 h they will be around 1%-3% Xe136 as a stable fission product.
Its a gas.
So the pressure increase with livetime.
This means that decomposition enthalphie of UH3 invrease with livetime. So the reactor will be hoter if he gets older.

We dont talk about the issue that they want to use Kalium in the colding system which is a bomb if it get contact with water.

so there are some thought from me.

Better we take sunenergy. And silicon as energy storage.

best

Nothing paradoxical about it. Higher temperature means lower density, which reduces the moderating efficiency. More neutrons leak out before they become thermal, and thermal neutrons have a much higher chance of inducing fission.

But I read that this is based on the TRIGA design, which is described as a swimming pool reactor, which I assumed meant a boiling water reactor.

There are lots of uses for waste heat. In the winter it plugs into your heating system. In the summer, it regenerates the absorber in an absorbtion-cycle refrigerator, which provides chilled water for building A/C and for lab chillers.