Nuclear power at your backyard.

TheWesDude said:
1) you do not have to use uranium for nuclear reactors
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I think for the example Victor and I are talking about its not really that important if they use Uranium, Plutonium or anything else that is comparable and in use with nuclear Reactors ... even if it would NOT emit radiation most of the used materials are at least toxic since they are usualy heavy metal. Even when we are talking about Deuterium. Drinking it is not a option. Tests with mieces showed significant damage when 50% of the water was mixed with Deuterium.

If we give every household the access to nuclear reactors even if small ones the possible danger would increase with the numbers of used reactors. Regardless how save you make them risk would increase, be it by wrong use or a simple failure. Even with a hypothetical risk of just 0,000001% (or less) it would be still significant considering how many households are present in the US and worldwide we cant even manage to make completely save cars and yet anyone would really consider to make reactors a every day commodity ?. And the mistakes in reactors that happend so far shows that even with much care it can happen.

And even if we forget everything about savety and health there is also still the question of what we should do with the waste since you cant simply throw it away like some usual garbage. The nuclear waste we have already now with the nuclear power plants proves to be a very serious issue and we havnt found yet a really satisfying soultion for it.

Nuclear reactors for every household, car or what ever are a "neat" idea. But they are just that ideas. It proved not to be very applicaple in the 50s and it is still not today. To many issues that outweight the use to make reactors as common like cars for example.

TheWesDude said:
2) you need to have a bit of the stuff to get an explosion, you can make reactors that function with less amounts than allow explosion
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You know what a dirty bomb is ?

TheWesDude said:
3) you do know that hospitals and medical offices and lots and lots of places have "nuclear material" to make dirty bombs? its in the x-ray machines and other such machines. last i heard, if you removed the materials from 3-5 you could make a dirty bomb.
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Question is. What is easer to get access to :
Some nuclear material in a closed hospital with security patrols
Or stored in your own home

Its not a question if you can get access to such material. But how easy it is. Making it a every day commodity like oil, coal or gas is I think not a good thing.

TheWesDude said:
1)
4) these are called micro-reactors. they are so small relatively that the amount of material in them is not enough to create an explosion
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See 2:
You know what a dirty bomb is ?


TheWesDude said:
5) beware the nuclear laptop batteries! they last for 10 years! they blow up easily! ( oh wai... they dont... )
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ok ...

anyway
See 2:
You know what a dirty bomb is ?
 
Nowhere in that article even suggests that these reactors would be installed in every household or even at a house to begin with.

Also there is no chance a reactor of this type could attain critical mass.

Also this type of reactor actually uses what is now considered nuclear waste as a fuel.
 
Kilus said:
Nowhere in that article even suggests that these reactors would be installed in every household or even at a house to begin with.
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I know I was just saying for the case someone would want that. Sorry about that should have been more clear.

Kilus said:
Also this type of reactor actually uses what is now considered nuclear waste as a fuel.
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Even such reactors that use waste as fuel will still produce some kind of waste. At some point you dont have the needed elements or situations present anymore for the needed reaction I am no physician nor a pro with reactors. But there is no reactor without polution. Even reactors working with Fusion can and will produce waste though they do produce a lot less compared to any usual nuclear reactor working with Plutonium or Uranium. So the issue still stands even with most modern design. What to do with the dangerous elements you cant use any further. What ever if nuclear energy is usefull or not and I am not against nuclear energy I think that we still need it for now but it definetly IS a dead end in the long term of energy production. Not only cause of the waste but also cause the needed material is not endless available as what reactors need doesnt grow on trees. It might take 100 years or 400 years before its depeleted but it will be at one point which is as well one of the reasons for the research in Fusion since it can use elements which are much more common like Deuterium-Tritium, Deuterium- Helium or something like that not sure.

Kilus said:
Also there is no chance a reactor of this type could attain critical mass.
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Crni Vuk said:
ok ...

anyway
See 2:
You know what a dirty bomb is ?
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Thorium can be used as nuclear fuel and it's abundant, less hazardous (read: radiation :D ) and cheap.

Thorium is found in small amounts in most rocks and soils, where it is about four times more abundant than uranium, and is about as common as lead. Soil commonly contains an average of around 12 parts per million (ppm) of thorium. Thorium occurs in several minerals including thorite (ThSiO4), thorianite (ThO2 + UO2) and monazite. The latter is most common and may contain up to about 12% thorium oxide. Thorium-containing monazite(Ce) occurs in all continents
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Even such reactors that use waste as fuel will still produce some kind of waste. At some point you dont have the needed elements or situations present anymore for the needed reaction I am no physician nor a pro with reactors. But there is no reactor without polution. Even reactors working with Fusion can and will produce waste though they do produce a lot less compared to any usual nuclear reactor working with Plutonium or Uranium. So the issue still stands even with most modern design. What to do with the dangerous elements you cant use any further.
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All the waste from all the reactors in the world produced in 100 years can fit in a cave the size of a football field.
 
Blakut said:
All the waste from all the reactors in the world produced in 100 years can fit in a cave the size of a football field.
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Yeah sure....But NOT IN MY BACKYARD! as pretaining to the waste not the reactor.
 
Blakut said:
Even such reactors that use waste as fuel will still produce some kind of waste. At some point you dont have the needed elements or situations present anymore for the needed reaction I am no physician nor a pro with reactors. But there is no reactor without polution. Even reactors working with Fusion can and will produce waste though they do produce a lot less compared to any usual nuclear reactor working with Plutonium or Uranium. So the issue still stands even with most modern design. What to do with the dangerous elements you cant use any further.
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All the waste from all the reactors in the world produced in 100 years can fit in a cave the size of a football field.
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are you sure of that? Sources?
 
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf04.html

I was talking about fuel, not other kinds of secondary waste. Maybe not just one football field, but the scale is good.

A cave with the volume of a football field can hold 18.6 million tons uranium. That's because i don't know the density of the waste. I assumed density of Uranium.
 
The volume of a plane? Right.

The waste is usually a mixed bag of metals, with different densities. But I don't really see the relevance of density unless you have a given mass.
 
The volume of a plane? Right
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Well of course i multiplied the area of the football field with the length of its short side. I could've used the longer one, to get a bigger volume...

120*90*90 (meters)
 
Maybe you confused it with the volume of a football (soccer) stadium.

Either way, it's not really relevant to the topic. You only have a set quantity of useful fissionable material on Earth, and if it isn't consumed by small-scale reactors it'll eventually be consumed by current reactors. Also, the article apparently said the new reactors would run on depleted uranium.

The issue is more about safety here. Especially if, as the OP said, there's one for every household. But where in this article is this explicitly mentioned? I think they mean one for every city.
 
I've read about this in National Geographic. They plan to have a reactor for small towns. Super safe and small (as big as a 7-10 story building).
 
Radiated Heinz said:
Now, if one explode... Its going to be worse than a nuke! Yay!
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Nuclear reactors can't explode, not in the way that you're thinking at least. When they fail they melt into a giant lump of radioactive metal within the containment vessel.

victor said:
That's my point. It's nearly impossible for a civilian to build a fissionable weapon, not to mention they'd have to use depleted uranium, which doesn't even really serve that purpose (you can use it to build a fusion bomb, but that's a level of complexity unreachable even for most states).
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The only hard part of nuclear weapons is the fuel, once you have that it's easy for any state to make a nuclear weapon (you can find the designs for the early ones online).

OH NO, YOU CAN BUY URANIUM!!!!11!1!
 
UncannyGarlic said:
The only hard part of nuclear weapons is the fuel, once you have that it's easy for any state to make a nuclear weapon (you can find the designs for the early ones online).
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All you have to do is tell some Libyans that you'll make them a bomb, but instead give them a case filled with pinball machine parts.
 
I really don't care about the negative effects this might have. I'm more interested in how awesome the paradigm shift would be for society.
 
I think one for a town of sufficient size would be ok. Like everybody else is saying, if everyone has one, someone will find some way to fuck theirs up and poison their land for a hundred years.
 
Blakut said:
All the waste from all the reactors in the world produced in 100 years can fit in a cave the size of a football field.
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And how many places do you know where you can store such waste for the next 10.000 if not 100.000 years without any risk that someone might someday step on it or the potential risk that the waste could eventualy escape to the surface ?

The issue with radiating waste isnt just the space it takes. Its actualy more the danger that you have with the radiation. You cant just walk in to the next cave and throw that waste in there in the hope that everything is fine cause it will not effect you anymore. Thats what they did in the past in some places in east and west Germany and now we have a lot of issues with those places. How to get rid of the waste that is stored there and no one really knows where to store it for a long time.

The bigest issue that is still not solved really is the long term management of Radioactive waste and providing a surety that there might not happen a disaster in the future. Cause of the long half-live some radioactive species have even the smallest leak proves a unpredictable risk. And while some might argue that we should not care about what happens in the next 1000 years I think thats not a good plan. Particulary when we have to consider anyway to step out from nuclear energy at some point or at least away from how we use it now since the resources for reactors are not endless. What ever if we use Uranium Ore or Thorium. Its the same discussion like why we use Oil and Gas still for cars or energy production which has to stop at some point as well. Not now of course that would be unrealistic we cant stop using nuclear energy or oil in one day but we have to think about new ways how we can eventualy get away from all the resources we are using now in the next 10, 20 or 50 (and more) years. Many simply think that cause of the issues with carbon based resources they should simply construct more nuclear reactors (France and Britain) which might sound nice but is not really a option for long term solutions. Nuclear plants are highly praised as "clean" energy. But it simply is not. Its a fallacy. The issues we solve on one side with the use of reactors like no carbondioxide or other kind of polution will be just repaced with another problem that is almost as worse.
 
Soviets powered remote light houses by nuclear mini reactors.

just sayin'. not quite a new concept.
 
victor said:
UncannyGarlic said:
OH NO, YOU CAN BUY URANIUM!!!!11!1!
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Very small quantities for labwork. Order sufficiently to build a decent dirty bomb and you'll have the FBI knocking ar your door.

Also, dirty bombs aren't much deadlier than conventional bombs. They're just... Well, annoying.
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You can buy more quantities of Uranium and other radioactive materials than just that online legally.

Plus that doesn't include the large amount of MUF that the DoD reports each year.

Also, Dirty bombs aren't just annoying. I mean, they make whatever land they are detonated on useless and dangerous for a decent period of time. A bomb just tosses stuff around, a dirty bomb tosses poisoned shit around and is the equivalent of someone taking a giant AIDS poop in the community punch bowl at the party.


Though in a society that ingests McDonalds on a regular basis I doubt the tumors and sickness would be noticed.
 
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