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Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumBack to the Future: Advanced Nuclear Energy and the Battle Against Climate Change
http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/backtothefuture[font face=Serif]
Published 12/12/2014
[font size=5]Leslie and Mark's Old/New Idea[/font]
[font size=3] The Nuclear Science and Engineering Library at MIT is not a place where most people would go to unwind. Its filled with journals that have articles with titles like Longitudinal double-spin asymmetry of electrons from heavy flavor decays in polarized p + p collisions at √s = 200 GeV. But nuclear engineering Ph.D. candidates relax in ways all their own. In the winter of 2009, two of those candidates, Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, were studying for their qualifying examsa brutal rite of passageand had a serious need to decompress.
To clear their heads after long days and nights of reviewing neutron transport, the mathematics behind thermohydraulics, and other such subjects, they browsed through the crinkled pages of journals from the first days of their industrythe glory days. Reading articles by scientists working in the 1950s and 60s, they found themselves marveling at the sense of infinite possibility those pioneers had brought to their work, in awe of the huge outpouring of creative energy. They were also curious about the dozens of different reactor technologies that had once been explored, only to be abandoned when the funding dried up.
Though nuclear engineers were mostly men in those days, Leslie imagined herself working alongside them, wearing a white lab coat, thinking big thoughts. It was all so fresh, so exciting, so limitless back then, she told me. They were designing all sorts of things: nuclear-powered cars and airplanes, reactors cooled by lead. Today, its much less interesting. Most of us are just working on ways to tweak basically the same light water reactor weve been building for 50 years.
But because of something that she and Mark stumbled across in the library during one of their forays into the old journals, Leslie herself is not doing that kind of tweakingshes trying to do something much more radical. One night, Mark showed Leslie a 50-year-old paper from Oak Ridge about a reactor powered not by rods of metal-clad uranium pellets in water, like the light water reactors of today, but by a liquid fuel of uranium mixed into molten salt to keep it at a constant temperature. The two were intrigued, because it was clear from the paper that the molten salt design could potentially be constructed at a lower cost and shut down more easily in an emergency than todays light water reactors. And the molten salt design wasnt just theoreticalOak Ridge had built a real reactor, which ran from 1965-1969, racking up 20,000 operating hours.
[/font][/font]
Published 12/12/2014
[font size=5]Leslie and Mark's Old/New Idea[/font]
[font size=3] The Nuclear Science and Engineering Library at MIT is not a place where most people would go to unwind. Its filled with journals that have articles with titles like Longitudinal double-spin asymmetry of electrons from heavy flavor decays in polarized p + p collisions at √s = 200 GeV. But nuclear engineering Ph.D. candidates relax in ways all their own. In the winter of 2009, two of those candidates, Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, were studying for their qualifying examsa brutal rite of passageand had a serious need to decompress.
To clear their heads after long days and nights of reviewing neutron transport, the mathematics behind thermohydraulics, and other such subjects, they browsed through the crinkled pages of journals from the first days of their industrythe glory days. Reading articles by scientists working in the 1950s and 60s, they found themselves marveling at the sense of infinite possibility those pioneers had brought to their work, in awe of the huge outpouring of creative energy. They were also curious about the dozens of different reactor technologies that had once been explored, only to be abandoned when the funding dried up.
Though nuclear engineers were mostly men in those days, Leslie imagined herself working alongside them, wearing a white lab coat, thinking big thoughts. It was all so fresh, so exciting, so limitless back then, she told me. They were designing all sorts of things: nuclear-powered cars and airplanes, reactors cooled by lead. Today, its much less interesting. Most of us are just working on ways to tweak basically the same light water reactor weve been building for 50 years.
But because of something that she and Mark stumbled across in the library during one of their forays into the old journals, Leslie herself is not doing that kind of tweakingshes trying to do something much more radical. One night, Mark showed Leslie a 50-year-old paper from Oak Ridge about a reactor powered not by rods of metal-clad uranium pellets in water, like the light water reactors of today, but by a liquid fuel of uranium mixed into molten salt to keep it at a constant temperature. The two were intrigued, because it was clear from the paper that the molten salt design could potentially be constructed at a lower cost and shut down more easily in an emergency than todays light water reactors. And the molten salt design wasnt just theoreticalOak Ridge had built a real reactor, which ran from 1965-1969, racking up 20,000 operating hours.
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Back to the Future: Advanced Nuclear Energy and the Battle Against Climate Change (Original Post)
OKIsItJustMe
Dec 2014
OP
Sigh. Raise the tariffs on Chinese solar panels, ALEC demands and gets legislation
djean111
Dec 2014
#1
djean111
(14,255 posts)1. Sigh. Raise the tariffs on Chinese solar panels, ALEC demands and gets legislation
to limit residential solar power by making it more costly to use the grid and doing away with solar subsidies while increasing coal and gas subsidies, adorable new ways to build nuclear plants - one in every back yard! - looks like the Kochs are being very successful at protecting their investments at the expense of people and the Earth.