
Nobody builds nuclear reactors for fun anymore - atomatica
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2013/12/06/the-future-of-nuclear-power-let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom/
======
ISL
To make an an HN-relevant analogy: The FDA-hobbling of 23andMe pales in
comparison to what it's like to work with nuclear regulatory frameworks and
societal concerns regarding nuclear science. When I was an undergrad, DOE was
willing to _pay_ the university the entire relicensing and operating costs of
the on-campus TRIGA. The university declined, knowing that the requisite
environmental impact study for relicensing would bring withering community
backlash.

(For those who haven't seen one, here's what it looks like when the control
rods are blown out of a TRIGA [1]; the reactor runs away momentarily, but then
self-moderates when the fuel warms.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orNP1wMmPK4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orNP1wMmPK4)
. The Cherenkov flash is a beautiful blue.)

Nuclear power can provide a safe, well-studied, and effective bridge to solar
power. Almost nobody's dabbling in it because there's so much societal
opposition. Working on a reactor in an old schoolhouse in a rural area?
Someone elsewhere in the county will be willing to speak at every county
governmental meeting to shut you down. Their opposition has merit; it's easy
to point to Fukushima and Chernobyl as major disasters.

A simple, clear, and publicly-understandable regulatory framework in which
both society and innovators can feel comfortable with small-scale nuclear
experimentation would go a long way toward driving new startups in the field.
Experimenters shouldn't get their hopes up too far: Some forms of radiation
are extremely penetrating/hard to shield, and some hazardous isotopes live a
long, long time. If you're dabbling in the field, please plan from the
beginning to minimize and safely store your waste.

We only get one planet; I'd rather it not be too warm nor contaminated by our
litter.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA)

~~~
pflanze
I'm not sure what you mean with litter, but isn't nuclear waste storage still
an unsolved problem?

~~~
peterpathname
here in australia, decades of research and policy development have hit upon a
world-class solution to the nuclear waste challenge.

We're building a road in a semi-arid remote location, on the traditional lands
of a small, disemowered, remote indigenous community. At the end of the road,
we plan to build a shed with a barbed wire fence. In return for this
inconvenience, the local community will see employment opportunities (2
security guards) and compensation (scholarships for their children).

this standard of excellence is possible when you have a society that tolerates
institutionalised inequity and cultural genocide, and apartheid style laws
that target particular races. None of this should surprise, as this is the
same spirit in which a large portion of the world's uranium is mined on
traditional lands in Australia.
[http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/12/08/calls-
ranger-u...](http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/12/08/calls-ranger-
uranium-shut-after-major-accident)

~~~
XorNot
This is just garbage. It doesn't matter where you want to put our nuclear
waste disposal facility, some group will invent a story about how they're
being exploited to have what they'll paint as "landfill" being put on their
land.

 _Clearly_ a much better solution is what we do now, where we store all our
low and medium grade nuclear waste in random sheds and basements at
universities and hospitals all over the country!

~~~
frenchfred
not an invention: the people whose land is scheduled to store nuclear waste in
australia are subject to laws that target them by race, and deny them basic
social services (roads, health, housing, community safety) that others take
for granted. the people on whose land uranium is mined (or was until this
week's accident!) are subject to a specific federal law that compels them to
abide the presence of this dirty industry on land they own.

it must be nice for you to live in this imaginary world where
institutionalised racism, racialist legislation and the exploitation of
indigenous land owners is 'garbage', but unfortunately for the rest of us, its
your story that is mere invention.

(pete- throw away acct cos I'm away from my creds)

------
ChuckMcM
My daughter was one of the operators of the TRIGA reactor at Reed college.
Some of the students joked it was a Fisher-Price My First Reactor reactor :-)
at only 250kW its small as reactors go, but also exceptionally interesting.

It is very disappointing how constricted the field of nuclear research is, as
it is a demonstrably zero carbon footprint energy source. I understand the
emotion that nuclear power evokes in people, I think the only way to combat
the misperceptions is with improving results. I recognize I am a minority in
that regard.

~~~
stesch
And the waste simply vanishes if you really wish for it very hard.

~~~
ChuckMcM
That is one of the emotions.

If you read the article you will read about two reactors that are actually
_fueled_ by what we consider waste today.

That we don't completely burn the fuel used in a reactor is a 'bug', a
misfeature if you will. That was expedient when the initial reactors were
being brought online and now is a regulatory pain in the butt. There is
nothing in the physics that requires a nuclear reactor complex to generate
nuclear waste of any kind[1]. Only in the regulations.

[1] Nuclear incineration of even low level waste can effectively convert
anything that was once radioactive into short lived nucleotide. Converting
everything burned into its lowest energy stable state. But we don't do that
either.

~~~
dredmorbius
The fact that a reactor is _fueled_ by waste doesn't mean it doesn't _create_
waste or have a waste-disposal aspect.

In the case of _any_ nuclear reactor, the vessel and mechanism itself becomes
radioactive and must be disposed of (the same process also leads to
embrittlement and other issues with the vessel/structure itself). And the
resulting fission products are also still radioactive and require disposal,
though my understanding is that thorium designs tend to produce lower
quantities with lesser radioactivity than other designs. Or at least, that's
the PR / theory, as the designs haven't been put into production use.

Nuclear power in general has been a huge exploration of unintended
consequences.

~~~
XorNot
As opposed to coal, oil and gas fracking? I sure rest assured that when the
local groundwater and aquifiers for my city are too toxic to drink, well at
least I'll only be dying of organic and heavy metal poisoning.

~~~
dredmorbius
_As opposed to coal, oil and gas fracking?_

Tu quoque fallacy.

No, I didn't say that these weren't.

If you want to know, rather than project on me, my beliefs, you could ask me.
As it happens, my view is that humans, as with other life forms, exist to
perform the function of exploiting low-entropy energy stocks and flows. The
consequences of that ... tend not to be something we consider in advance.
We've benefited hugely from fossil fuels, but have put ourselves well beyond
the point of sustainability. Even _with_ , say, a practically unlimited energy
supply we'd bump into the problems of heat dissipation within a few centuries
to millennia at present growth rates. We've simply got to stop growing.

As to what's sustainable? Probably on the order of 500m - 2 billion souls if
you want any sort of industrialized lifestyle. Hell, even if not, not much
more than that.

The next century or two will be very interesting times. Starting likely within
a decade or two, possibly less.

~~~
XorNot
Sorry that was probably more hostile then necessary, but when it comes to
nuclear power there is very much a "but what about the waste aspect!" used in
a manner which implies all other fuel sources don't have very serious problems
as well.

~~~
dredmorbius
The law of unintended consequences has a damned long arm, that's for sure.

Perturbing systems creates long-lived ripple effects. Humans have been tapping
into stored carbon equivalent to a few hundred million years of fossil
deposits, and ... that's going to have some really long-lived effects. As to
what the future holds, my sense is that we're simply not going to have the
quantities of free, abundant, and fungible energy we've enjoyed for the past
century or so. There are a few people who've arrived at similar conclusions
(Dennis Meadows, one of the original _Limits to Growth_ team is among them).

The problem with nuclear waste for me (and others -- Hyman Rickover's
criticisms of nuclear energy are revealing) is that the stuff is of such a
concern for such a long period of time -- literally longer than written
history. How the hell do you create a warning iconography that's going to be
comprehensible in 10,000 years, or even 2000? Spoken and written English of
even 700 years ago (Geoffrey Chaucer) is barely comprehensible today. And
structures to contain it? The very oldest intact buildings we know of are
massive stone monuments and even they are both heavily weathered and have long
since been plundered (pyramids and other archaeological sites).

The primary problem with oil and coal are simply the quantities we've been
consuming of them. If human populations hadn't grown, and they simply
substituted for the biomass which was being consumed in their stead prior to
the Industrial Revolution, they'd be far less consequential.

I should try figuring out how large a population could be supported at, say,
50% of US rates of energy consumption...

~~~
XorNot
See the way I see it, that's asking the wrong question: _who cares_ what
civilization is doing 10,000 years from now, if it's lost sufficient record
and technology to comprehend nuclear waste?

Even a language change, if accompanied by a technologically advanced
civilization, would remember to change it's signs.

Whereas, it is much more likely that if we _don 't_ use nuclear power, we'll
create catastrophes that lead to that problem to begin with. I'm much more
concerned with what happens over the next 10,000 years then at the end of it.

~~~
dredmorbius
_who cares what civilization is doing 10,000 years from now, if it 's lost
sufficient record and technology to comprehend nuclear waste?_

It's possible to retain a knowledge of _what_ nuclear waste is (at least in a
mythic sense of "very bad juju") while 1) losing track of where that waste is
and 2) being unable to detect or determine where it is.

Humans have no senses which detect radioactivity (one possibility is that such
a sense evolves, though I suspect this is unlikely and would take a very long
time). Radiation detectors require some level of technology -- silver nitrite
films which fog on exposure, cloud chambers, Geiger counters, exposure badges.
It's fairly easy to lose track of where radioactive products are; there's
already history of radioactive decay products being incorporated into building
materials and otherwise going astray (the Mexican truck hijacking this past
week is only the most recent of many civilian-use accidents).

So: a future civilization, which _does_ have a written or oral history of
nuclear waste and its hazards, but no means of determining _what_ is
radioactive, could definitely have some issues going on. What the outcomes of
_that_ might be are an interesting question. It's possible there could be a
civilization reboot, or humans could make a long-term slide to obscurity
and/or extinction.

------
johnminter
My employer (Eastman Kodak) had one of the few industrial research reactors
built for neutron activation analysis (NAA) from 1974 to 2007. NAA provided
great trace analysis of impurities that caused problems with photographic film
and solid state devices. The reactor was located in the basement of the
research labs, next to my electron microscopy lab. I spent close to 20 years
next door to this.

There were two main issues that caused the company to decommission the
reactor. 1) replacement of the californium source would have been
prohibitively expensive. 2) Because the neutron source also contained isotopes
that could have been weaponized (with great difficulty,) we had to maintain
24x7 security - at great expense. The press reported on the removal
([http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/14/kodak-nuclear-
react...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/14/kodak-nuclear-
reactor_n_1515463.html))

During my tenure as "next door neighbor" to this, I was more concerned about
falling on ice in the parking lot during the winter than any concerns from the
reactor. The staff in the NAA lab were well-trained scientists who were quite
careful and they monitored constantly for activity.

------
chrisb
If anyone is interested in investigating nuclear reactions, there is a wealth
of publicly available data from a huge number of experiments; and simulation
software is available.

For example: EXFOR (Experimental nuclear reaction data [https://www-
nds.iaea.org/exfor/exfor.htm](https://www-nds.iaea.org/exfor/exfor.htm)) is an
international collection of more than 20000 nuclear reaction experimental
results dating back to the discovery of the neutron.

ENDF (Evaluated nuclear data library
[http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/endf/b7.1/](http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/endf/b7.1/)) is
the current best evaluation of the most up-to-date data available for many
nuclear reactions that have been seen experimentally.

FLUKA ([http://www.fluka.org/](http://www.fluka.org/)) "is a fully integrated
particle physics MonteCarlo simulation package", partially developed and used
by CERN.

Beware that all of these require some knowledge of nuclear physics to use and
understand (obviously!), and can be somewhat archaic in data formats and
computer languages used (think FORTRAN).

But it is truly wonderful how you and I have such easy access to such high
quality and complete data.

------
dredmorbius
The dynamics by which nuclear reactor design cease to be "fun" resonates very
strongly with yesterday's post on creativity, and in particular on
simonsarris's mention of John Cleese's video on creativity. The how to kill
creativity bit at the end in particular.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6862240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6862240)

I've got my own thoughts and doubts over the ultimate viability of nuclear
energy and of the net potential of technology, but brakes on creativity
itself, whether introduced or intrinsic to the system, are of concern.

~~~
memracom
And what about the guy who though up the Higgs boson saying that he would be
kicked out of university these days because he doesn't meet the arbitrary
bureaucratic metric thought up by small-minded administrators. I.e. he does
not publish enough papers.

These are a few examples of the idiocracy taking root. MBAs running companies
into the ground because they fundamentally do not understand the domain in
which their business operates. Police incompetence manifested as an increase
in paramilitary actions coupled with a decline in common sense. And what about
the TSA?

~~~
dredmorbius
That too. There's been something of a confluence of posts on this topic in the
past few days. Not that it isn't a topic that has some attraction here.

Another datapoint: a recently posted (here?) interview of Richard Feynman,
shot only a few weeks before he died. What really got me was the mischievous
nature he displayed: constantly smiling and joking. Einstein was somewhat
similar. God may not play dice with the Universe, but each of these two was, I
think, toying with it.

------
codebaobab
Freeman Dyson's book, Disturbing the Universe, which is quoted in this
article, is a great read. Highly recommended.

------
draker
Sure they do:

 _The Boy Who Played With Fusion_

[http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-
played...](http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played-
fusion?nopaging=1)

------
dm2
Probably because it's easier, safer, and cheaper to just purchase one or visit
your local university if you have enough interest.

You're very unlikely to invent a new nuclear reactor improvement in your
basement (50 years ago it would have been plausible).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S)

[http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-
Cycle/Power-R...](http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power-
Reactors/Small-Nuclear-Power-Reactors/)

[http://www.npr.org/2013/02/04/170482802/are-mini-reactors-
th...](http://www.npr.org/2013/02/04/170482802/are-mini-reactors-the-future-
of-nuclear-power)

~~~
icegreentea
This isn't actually the point that the article is trying to make.

The submission title for example can be reinterpreted in two slightly
different ways. The first is the way that you interpreted. The problem is that
-nobody- out of the general population chooses to make nuclear reactors as a
recreational activity of some sort.

The article however poses it in a different way. It rather seems to mean that
nobody goes into the field of nuclear engineering with the expectation of
experimentation and "having fun" while working. It has nothing to do with
expense, danger, illegality, working with universities, doing it in your
basement, or any of that. It has to do with commercial interests not
supporting their engineers in experimenting with possible designs.

~~~
dm2
Mini reactors are becoming a big industry.

For cities or countries (or large ships) that can't afford a full-scale
nuclear reactor there are smaller and cheaper ones that can replace fossil-
fuel power plants.

I'm sure most people go into the nuclear field to experiment, few people
expect to sit around with a checklist and watch a dial.

This company is working on similar goals:
[http://terrapower.com/](http://terrapower.com/)

------
memracom
This is just talking about America. Perhaps the people having fun building
nuclear reactors are now working in Russia. Interestingly enough Russia has
recently invested a lot on new kinds of R&D facilities including a suburb of
Moscow being modeled on Silicon Valley. And they are reforming their whole
system of doing science and science research, moving it away from the old
bureaucracy in which it became embedded in the Soviet era.

In life, usually when the pendulum swings to an extreme in one place, there is
another place where the pendulum heads in the opposite direction, and in
nuclear reactors it would not be surprising if Russia is the place where
nuclear innovation is happening these days.

------
dvanduzer
A few years ago, Jim Sanborn (also the Kryptos sculpture guy?!) built a
fission device based on an early Fermi/Bohrs/Teller experiment from 1939:

[http://jimsanborn.net/main.html#museuminstallations](http://jimsanborn.net/main.html#museuminstallations)

I got the impression from his talk that he was more worried about DHS than NRC
cracking down while working on it.

It wasn't ever turned on while it was in the museum, but just getting near the
device probably left me with a greater sense of awe than even the Apollo 11
capsule. On the shoulders of giants, certainly, but _one guy built this_.

------
DennisP
This is one reason I've started to think fusion might be more promising than
advanced fission. The regulatory barriers are so light that high school
students build reactors and run them on deuterium fuel just like most of the
big projects, and it's perfectly legal.

There's quite a lot of work being done on small-scale alternative reactor
designs. I wrote up a bunch of them here:
[http://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestI...](http://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/10/planId/1304168)

~~~
XorNot
Don't worry, "environmentalist" movements have gotten way out in front with
opposing the ITER project.

------
adamnemecek
There were a couple of IAMA's on reddit with some teenagers who (supposedly)
build nuclear reactors

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hmn56/iama_teenager_wh...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hmn56/iama_teenager_who_built_and_operates_an_iec/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/xd19t/iama_an_incoming...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/xd19t/iama_an_incoming_freshman_beginning_to_work_on_a/)

~~~
russellsprouts
These are impressive, but they aren't fission reactors, but fusion reactors.
They do not generate power, but they do convert hydrogen to helium.

------
trekky1700
Just one of the problems with kids these days, don't have any 'ppreciation for
the skill and craft of building a hobbyist nuclear reactor in their parents
basement.

------
pstuart
It'd be cool if some serious makers made a LFTR reactor :-)

~~~
manglav
There is a company trying to model it by 2015. Check FLiBe Energy out.

------
nicholassmith
I'm sure the last few times people built reactors for fun, people with large
guns appeared to ask them to stop what they were doing.

[http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-
scout...](http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout/)

------
dmfdmf
Barring some exciting breakthrough in physics that gives us either a new
energy source or high-efficiency solar and the ability to store it, eventually
nuclear will come back. It is the only viable civilization-scale power source
that can keep the heat, lights and computers on once the oil runs out.

------
crbnw00ts
Well, there's this company:

[http://generalfusion.com](http://generalfusion.com)

VC-backed, too!

------
lispm
You sound like it is a bad thing...

------
NAFV_P
David Hahn did.

