Tiny reactors could one day power towns, campuses; community input will be key

https://theconversation.com/nuclear-in-your-backyard-tiny-reactors-could-one-day-power-towns-and-campuses-but-community-input-will-be-key-261225

23•rntn•4h ago

Comments

arghandugh•1h ago

No, they won’t.

greenie_beans•57m ago

why not?

arghandugh•49m ago

Read a book or do a think and you can find out for yourself! Aditi already got paid.

greenie_beans•48m ago

very unconvincing argument and not helpful at all

arghandugh•41m ago

Which means I’m adding exactly as much to the world as “there will be a semi-truck sized semi-portable nuclear reactor that will somehow work, be politically viable outside of totalitarian regimes, and provide meaningful amounts of localized grid power within our lifetimes”

Zip fucking zero percent chance, forever. Move on.

greenie_beans•12m ago

seems you're adding much, much less to the world, except a cargo ship full of toxic behavior

dwood_dev•1h ago

As much as I am a proponent of nuclear, it's time has past.

It's already non-competitive with solar + battery for any new start builds. I doubt a single commercial installation would exist of these microreactors before battery and solar/battery costs drop another 50-80%.

Even hydro will have issues competing in 20 years.

homeonthemtn•1h ago

As some one with a long winter, I assure you solar is not a cure-all, especially if you receive significant snow or low altitude cloud cover.

Batteries, as well, are impacted by the cold in their own ways.

Is a tiny reactor the answer? Probably not. But energy at a constant rate all year round that also self warms? That sounds pretty good to me.

sudoshred•4m ago

Nuclear has advantages, but no one will vote in favor of a small chance of nearby catastrophe… given the choice.

tjmc•1h ago

I can see a future for microreactors powering container ships. Outside nuclear subs and aircraft carriers there are already nuclear powered icebreakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_icebreaker

privatelypublic•38m ago

Yea, micro reactors sound like a great idea for pollution control. But, given how many ships get seized every year trying to fake inspections and a dozen other things- the only way this works out is a modern version of Clipper ships (with less sinkings). Large premiums for getting your cargo across the ocean faster.

How much faster, is for somebody more knowledgeable than me to answer.

And now politics comes into play: these ships would have to not only have significant permanent armament, but given significant latitude to use lethal force.

credit_guy•55m ago

I'm also a proponent of nuclear.

And I agree that nuclear is not competitive with solar.

But we haven't really invested in nuclear for more than 4 decades now. Nuclear is just a technology. There is no reason to think nuclear capital costs need to be forever locked at the current levels. China has at least three times lower capital costs for nuclear power plants (judging by the cost of the Karachi units 2-3 at $9.5 BN [1] vs the Vogtle units 3-4 at $36.8 BN [2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachi_Nuclear_Power_Complex

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

mrheosuper•12m ago

Why not both, you don't want to put all egg in 1 basket.

rogerb•1h ago

No discussion of shielding in this article :(

barney54•53m ago

Community input is nice, but we first need working small reactors. Until we see that there is no need to talk about community input. And so far small reactors keep taking longer to get built than estimates.

JumpCrisscross•36m ago

My god, if there is one thing we need less of in America it’s community fucking input.

Reactors in towns are dumb. They make sense in remote locations where solar doesn’t work, e.g. West Australian or seabed mining, or on the Moon.

Be Careful with Go Struct Embedding

Sj.h: A tiny little JSON parsing library in ~150 lines of C99

Lightweight, highly accurate line and paragraph detection

Show HN: I wrote an OS in 1000 lines of Zig

40k-Year-Old Symbols in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language

My new Git utility `what-changed-twice` needs a new name

Calculator Forensics (2002)

Procedural Island Generation (VI)

DXGI debugging: Microsoft put me on a list

Why your outdoorsy friend suddenly has a gummy bear power bank

I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode

Timesketch: Collaborative forensic timeline analysis

Model Flop Utilization Beyond 6ND

INapGPU: Text-mode graphics card, using only TTL gates

Show HN: Tips to stay safe from NPM supply chain attacks

Node 20 will be deprecated on GitHub Actions runners

Unified Line and Paragraph Detection by Graph Convolutional Networks (2022)

Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast

How can I influence others without manipulating them?

How Isaac Newton discovered the binomial power series (2022)

Apple Silicon GPU Support in Mojo

LaLiga's Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions in Spain

Discovering new solutions to century-old problems in fluid dynamics

Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

A coin flip by any other name (2023)

EU to block Big Tech from new financial data sharing system

Bringing Observability to Claude Code: OpenTelemetry in Action

The Counterclockwise Experiment

Show HN: Freeing GPUs stuck by runaway jobs

Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently