Tony C's Blog Posts about Nuclear

over 2 years ago

This is great, goes into a lot of detail. Surprisingly didn't align completely with my priors.
Also - the 1970s again!? - what is it with this decade?
Interesting that the "zeroism" that we're seeing today in some places with covid was also at play with nuclear.
Found the analogy with the air travel industry particularly interesting - makes you reassess how you view airplane crashes and how careful that industry is in general.
"To avoid global warming, the world needs to massively reduce CO 2 emissions. But to end poverty, the world needs massive amounts of energy"
"The proximal cause of nuclear‘s flop is that it is expensive"
"Overcautious regulation interacted with economic history in a particular way in the mid–20th century that played out very badly for the nuclear industry."
"The irrational fear of very low doses of radiation leads to the idea that any reactor core damage, leading to any level whatsoever of radiation release, would be a major public health hazard. This has led the entire nuclear complex to foist upon the public a huge lie: that such a release is virtually impossible and will never happen, or with a frequency of less than one in a million reactor-years."

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over 3 years ago

Not exactly sure what this means - but it seems to mean that we could theoretically create immortal low-power batteries out of graphene. They can harness the energy, but it's not clear whether the energy "runs out" or at what point (although title says "limitless").
"A circuit capable of capturing graphene's thermal motion and converting it into an electrical current."
"A theory that freestanding graphene—a single layer of carbon atoms—ripples and buckles in a way that holds promise for energy harvesting."
"Refutes physicist Richard Feynman's well-known assertion that the thermal motion of atoms cannot do work."
"The second law of thermodynamics is not violated"
"The graphene and circuit are at the same temperature."
"The next objective is to determine if the DC current can be stored in a capacitor. If millions of these tiny circuits could be built on a 1-millimeter by 1-millimeter chip, they could serve as a low-power battery replacement.

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about 4 years ago

This seems... big.
"Compact" - tennis court size as opposed to football pitch size.
Researchers in MIT who are building it, released the papers about why they think it's viable. Very aggressive timeline of 3 to 4 years from construction (starting 2021).
They are approaching Fusion in a different way to current approaches & hadn't told other scientists what their approach was. This paper expands on that and "distinguishes it totally from all of the start-ups, which are by definition more edgy and higher risk"
Other effort in France targeting 2035 construction.
Other researchers think papers prove viability, but timeline is too optimistic.
"This high-field path still looks viable. If we can overcome the engineering challenges, this machine will perform as we predict"