Do you want to operate your own 1 MW nuclear reactor?

[NNadir]

Try this fun simulator. It's a pressurized water reactor about 1/1000th the size of a real reactor.

http://www.ae4rv.com/games/nuke.htm

My advice is to keep flows to the primary and secondary loops fairly high, and remove the control rods slowly. If you're doing well, you'll eventually be able to pull them out all the way after many adjustments.

The software is sensitive fuel burn up and so later in the fuel cycle you will need to withdraw the rods quite a bit.

You may melt the reactor down a few times - and you can melt this reactor if you don't get the heat out - but it's all for fun. There is a learning curve.

The goal is to generate as much energy as you can on the fuel cycle.

Each time you adjust the parameters, you must click on the Go button to get your energy and to watch the performance of the reactor, heat exchangers and turbine.

You will be rated as a plant operator at the end of the cycle.

[phantom power]

1. I made my very own Chernobyl.

[phantom power]

2. OK, this time I averaged 1.3 megawats, over 141 days.

It's important to realize that control-rods at 100% means they're all the way out

:dunce:

[NNadir]

3. That's pretty good. I've managed 1.44 megawatts over 147 days.

It says that that my power production is excellent and that power rates in my area will not increase.

Once you get the reactor up into operating temperatures, one needs to bring the primary and secondary almost up to maximum. As the fuel depletes it is necessary to remove the rods at a higher and higher rate.

[phantom power]

4. My new best is 1.73 MW, over 123 days

[NNadir]

5. The thing's addictive. My best last night was 1.75 MW for 129 days.

Assuming the core had a half of ton of fuel, this is a burn-up of 45 MW-day per ton, which is not bad for a pressurized water reactor.

To power up, I took the control rods way out, 70% and ran the primaries and secondary loops at around 60% until I reached the low normal power range over 2 or 3 days. I feathered the control rods in two steps down to below 10% while raising the primaries and secondaries to 100% in steps. Then I kept my eye on the absolute values (rather than the graphs) of my comfort zone in the core, heat exchangers, and the power output, removing the control rods as appropriate to achieve power stability while not damaging the equipment. The reactor grows increasingly sluggish to control rod removal as the burn up increases. I had one turbine trip warning light at 2000 MW for one day, but the reactor ran pretty smoothly for the rest of the run.

It told me, because I was very close to the maximum average power, power rates in my area will be falling. Maybe I should apply for a part time job at Oyster Creek and help my fellow New Jerseyans out. :-)

[phantom power]

6. That sounds similar to what I did.

I wasn't quite as brave with the control rods. I think I started out at 25%, and brought it back to 15% after 6 days.

I kept everything pretty much in the yellow, and spent a bit of emergency coolant if it drifted in the red. Thus proving that I should never be allowed within a hundred feet of the controls for any real reactor.

[Ready4Change]

7. Are you guys doing this on Easy or Difficult?

I've gotten similar results on Easy, but system failures drop my rates to 1.0 or less, plus maintenance costs and leaks. :(

[phantom power]

8. I didn't try "difficult" mode...

But now that I've become a nuclear reactor expert, maybe I'll give it a try

:dunce:

[Ready4Change]

9. Are there Home Reactor Kits?

Like Rock Polishers or Chemestry kits?

I wanna be the first kid on the block to create a meltdown!

:silly:

[phantom power]

10. I once saw a small reactor built inside a garbage can.

It was in the back of a physics lab. At least that's what my wife said it was. I didn't peek inside.

[Ready4Change]

11. I've had trashcans like that.

No idea how garbage men handle opening cans like that. Wooof!

:nuke: Took days of washing to de-smell them. :)

[NNadir]

13. There was a report here about a kid trying to build one.

I can't remember the thread.

The kid had zero chance in hell of really going critical, but I liked his innovative spirit. He did manage to make some neutrons apparently, using an alpha emitter and beryllium.

Critical nuclear reactors in theory can be made very small, but one needs special materials. One could probably make a reactor the size of a small computer if one had access to Californium, for instance, especially the isotopes 249, 251, and (as an intense neutron source) Cf-252. Californium-252 is kind of hard to come by. Every atom of Cf-252 that is made requires 1600 atoms of uranium-238 starting material. The other 1599 are fissioned during the sequences of required 14 neutron captures. In addition considerable time is required, both for irradiation and various nuclear decays.

During the cold war and in the terrorism hype afterwards, there was much discussion of a putative "suitcase bomb" that could theoretically be built from californium isotopes. It was claimed that the Russians actually had one. Like most scare stories, the telling was more frightening than the reality, although it apparently did result in Strangelovian appropriations from Congress. There is no evidence that more than a few grams, if that, of Californium have ever been prepared. The critical mass of californium is typically on the order of 100's of grams. Hundreds of grams of californium would require many, many, many billions of dollars, huge remotely operated reprocessing schemes, and the efforts of thousands of highly skilled technicians and scientists.

Ultimately though, a continuous recycling process of nuclear fuels in thermal reactors could be used to make kilogram quantities of californium. Several generations would probably be required.

The simulated reactor we've been operating here is typical of a small university sized research reactor. These reactors use highly enriched uranium, essentially bomb grade material. There are reactors like this all over the world and a great deal of the usual paranoia surrounds them.

In spite of all the hype, no one has ever uncovered a credible nuclear terrorism effort based on the fuel for one of these reactors, or on spent reactor fuel, or of renegade soviet weapons, or for that matter, from agents of Saddam Hussein wandering around the document rooms in the government offices of the Republic of Niger. The only known claim of an exception comes from a bizarre rantings of the famous hack song writer (Let Eagles Soar) and sometime hack lawyer, John Ashcroft, who claimed that a confused young inner city Hispanic man with no known knowledge of physics, Jose Padilla, was engaged in such an activity. Apparently Mr. Ashcroft's accusation, because it contained the world "nuclear," was enough to deprive Mr. Paddilla of the protections of the Bill of Rights under which he, Mr. Padilla, was born.

Note that when I am speaking of "nuclear reactors" I am really speaking of "critical nuclear reactors." There are many kinds of subcritical nuclear reactors. Cyclotrons are examples. Many nuclear medicine facilities have cyclotrons to make useful materials like Tc-99m which is used both as an imagining tool and as a direct therapeutic treatment. Although cyclotrons are "nuclear reactors" they are not generally thought of as such.

[hunter]

21. That would be the radioactive boy scout...

"The Radioactive Boy Scout : The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor"

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0812966600/qid=1129777764/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-4304703-8972740?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

He did some interesting things with defective smoke detectors and other radioactive stuff.

[NNadir]

23. Yeah, that's the kid.

I liked the part with the smoke detectors and beryllium. I'll bet the kid's device, using the more active Am-241, probably worked better than Bothe and Becker's device that probably used radium. Smart kid. Wild, but smart.

Last night my first grader had a homework assignment on smoke detectors. I took one down and showed him all the parts and tried to explain (jumping up and down to show radioactive instability) all about radioactive decays and americium-241. He got into it.

Maybe I shouldn't have done that. :-)

I could have a problem on my hands when he grows up.

[Nihil]

26. Alternatively ...

> I could have a problem on my hands when he grows up.

... you could have a *really* neat power source out in your garage!

:-)

[NNadir]

27. Good point.

I always thought it would be cool to have an RTG in my house, something running on Strontium-90. This way I could be off the grid and have continuous power and be nuclear all at once. :think:

Maybe I'll steer the kid in that direction.

Of course, my big concern is that he has no future, mostly because no one has a future.

[phantom power]

12. I was able to get 1.5MW in "difficult" mode, by burning faster and...

using emergency coolant. I'm not exactly sure what "poor workmanship" means, but my best guess is that you have less time before coolant leaks, so you have to burn your fuel as fast as possible.

[NNadir]

14. I got 1.4 MW in difficult with no emergency coolant.

I powered up slowly and kept everything in the high green operating area.

It was "adequate."

[phantom power]

15. I couldn't make that work. I always ended up with coolant leaks.

Once the coolant started leaking, all hell broke loose. I had to shut down the reactor or end up with a meltdown.

[Ready4Change]

18. Burning faster works!

Got 1.7 in 125 days in difficult! (May never manage that again, but did it this once..)

Used 100% rod position and 50/40% flows at start to get power up quick. (Got in the green with reactor temps around 350?)

Then dropped in the rods and upped the flows to keep it from running amok. Once stabilised with 100/100 flows I pulled out the rods to get all the bars into the yellow zone and rode it along there, hoping to burn the fuel before it failed. Which it never did. (I also managed to never let anything go into the red, which seems to help longevity.)

Wow. I are an nukular fyzzysist. Now I just need my Rocket Scientister patch and I'll reach Super-Genius status!

[BeFree]

16. Well, shoot

I thought you meant I could buy one and produce my own electricity. After all, since they are not dangerous they should be available to everyone, right? Ya know, like solar.

One can just imagine this scenario: "Billy-Joe!, that there red light's a flashin' on that there new-cu-lar reactor thing again."

[NNadir]

17. Operating a real nuclear power plant requires a real education.

Nuclear engineers are required to have a knowledge of multidimensional (vector) calculus, materials science, nuclear physics, mechanics, stress analysis, thermodynamics and chemistry. Understanding these principles in a practical way is not easy, and anyone who has entered and passed a program in nuclear engineering must be assumed to be highly intelligent. A typical nuclear engineering text today is highly demanding reading.

This simulator is a toy for people to get a hands on feel for how reactors work. I note that each of us who have played with this toy, myself included, have managed to melt down the core several times. In real industrial life this has happened only once with a pressurized water nuclear reactor. This event occurred over 25 years ago, resulted in no injuries, and has never been repeated.

The simulator has limits. It does not for instance seem to have a a subroutine for demonstrating xenon poisoning. It also pretends that it is possible for a pressurized reactor to explode and breech the containment building. Such an event has never occurred. Of course playing with this game does not qualify one to be a nuclear engineer or a technical operator of a nuclear plant any more than the various flight simulators qualify one to fly war planes or to fly 767's. Moreover, unlike the people who actually operate real nuclear power plants, none of us who have been playing has training in such operations. I am probably better equipped to play than others who might be, since I have been studying nuclear reactors with some diligence for some twenty years. On the other hand, I have never operated a real nuclear power plant, although I have deep confidence in and high respect for those who have and who continue to do so.

One of the interesting things that this toy does do is to demonstrate how a learning curve works. It shows that experience does improve performance. The Three Mile Island Accident occurred during the first fuel cycle of the reactor. The operators were inexperienced, and had almost no hands on experience with the machine they were operating. In fact, at the time, there were almost no people on the planet with decades of experience operating a nuclear power plant, never mind a commercial nuclear power plant. At that time there was little communication between nuclear engineers in various companies, and much less reactor operating experience. There were few professional organizations. Many, many thousands of reactor-years of experience have accumulated since then and nuclear energy has demonstrated graphically that it is the safest form of energy known to the human race with the exception of intermittently available wind energy.

http://www.externe.info/results.html

Tens of thousands of highly educated - and highly paid - experienced nuclear engineers worldwide are working on the expansion of nuclear energy, an industry that will grow by more than 25% in the next two decades. Note that this growth is not 25% of next to nothing, it is 25% of an industry that already produces exajoule quantities of energy. These are exactly the kinds of jobs one should wish for in one's country: Jobs that require high technology, that are highly paid and - get this - are highly productive.

It is obvious that a poorly educated person, although he or she could in theory own a solar cell or for that matter a huge diesel truck, would be very poorly qualified in any sense of the word to understand anything at all about nuclear energy. Mostly they just regurgitate what they heard on TV, (getting stoned and watching the Simpsons for instance) or got by googling their way to www.ratical.org.

The low level of public education and interest in the sciences today represents, of course, a slight drawback to nuclear energy. It requires some technical knowledge to comprehend appreciate nuclear's vast advantages over all other forms of energy in terms of performance, waste management, and reliability. Most opponents of nuclear energy are precisely the people least equipped to comprehend it. Almost all of them show graphically a very poor comprehension of vector calculus (or even simple arithmetic), materials science, nuclear physics, mechanics, stress analysis, thermodynamics and chemistry. The number of cases of nuclear opponents who would meet even what I regard as a rudimentary standard for understanding these concepts is about as uncomfortably close to zero as is the percentage of electricity that is produced today (after decades of talk) by solar PV energy. This at least has been my direct experience.

This does not bode well for the outcome of the global climate change crisis, to which the United States is the single largest contributor. Democratic government requires an informed and educated citizenry. No one can accuse the United States of having an informed citizenry. The only remotely achievable way to arrest this crisis is to build as many nuclear plants as is possible as fast as is possible. In a time of vast public ignorance and superstition, this is hardly likely to happen.

[skids]

20. Oh so what your saying...

...is that nuclear power is for wealthy rich people?

:evilgrin:

[NNadir]

22. Not at all. What I am saying is that a highly productive person can be

highly paid and still produce a cheap product.

This of course is a win-win. A culture in which a person who works hard to apply high intelligence and at the same time makes it easier for the average (possibly less skilled) person to live well is a culture that is to be desired. Such cultures are largely possible if they include macroscale industries.

One of the conceits of the solar fantasy is that its proponents want to have it both ways. They can claim all kinds of (irrelevant) nonsense about being anti-corporate, with lots of speeches about living off the grid and distributed power for instance, while still claiming (without any industrial demonstration of the same) that solar power will magically become affordable through "mass production."

This is, of course, nonsense.

A nuclear power plant is a mass production machine, typically with each unit producing billions of kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. Because this electricity is centrally produced, mass produced, in a highly concentrated form, and is operated on high capacity plant utilization (typically close to 100%), it is cheap for the consumers of the product, electricity - even if it is capital intensive for the supplier to construct the plant initially.

For example, Unit 2 of the Catawba Nuclear Station in South Carolina recently operated for 531 days continuously without shutdown to produce 14.7 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, or 5.3 X 10^16 joules, or 53 petajoules.

http://www.dukepower.com/news/releases/2004/Sep/2004091301.asp

If the power company sells this power wholesale at $0.038/kw-hr, (see table 9.4 in the link below) the going rate in South Carolina, (twice the production cost by the way), then the plant will have generated in this period, $588,000,000.00 of revenue. Thus the plant is producing over $1.05 million dollars per day of revenue per day. Now, the generating cost of a nuclear power plant is roughly less than $0.02 kw-hr or roughly $300,000,000 of cost. Of this cost, about $80,000,000 is represented by the fuel. This leaves $220,000,000 of revenue for the plant to account for all of its other direct costs, including salaries and benefits.

http://www.abuse.com/environment/airmarkt/epa-ipm/chapter9.pdf

Five hundred thirty one days is 1.45 years. Thus the money available to pay for direct costs is $220,000,000/1.45 = $152,000,000 per year.

The two units of the Catawba station in Oconee County, SC employ about 700 people in two plants, or roughly 350 each.

Thus the amount contributed to offset direct costs per employee is $152,000,000/350 = $433,000/employee. Now not all of the employees are nuclear engineers. Some are janitors, some are clerks, some work in the lunch room. Still, even if the average employee salary accounts for 1/3 of the operating cost in salary and benefits, the employees can do quite well for themselves, live decently, and still provide for very cheap energy for consumers rich and poor.

http://www.nei.org/documents/Economic_Benefits_DukePower.pdf

Here is a guy on this website complaining about his electric bill, which he cannot afford to pay.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5104224&mesg_id=5104224

His retail price for electricity is about $0.11/kw-hr, about what I pay here in New Jersey.

Now let's go to www.solarbuzz.com. The price of solar electricity quoted there - presumably without inverters and definitely without batteries - is given as $0.212/kw-hr, or almost twice as high as the poor DUer to whom I referred cannot afford to pay.

Above I listed some technical skills that nuclear engineers must have. I neglected to include that another essential understanding that one must have in considerations of energy is an understanding of economics. While I don't hold a very high opinion of the overall technical level in the physical sciences of the "solar as savior" crowd, I'm not sure that I hold a very high opinion of their understanding of the so called "social sciences" either, especially economics.

Again, I have no grudge against rich kids who want to play with solar power. To the extent that I ridicule - which is easy to do by the way - the advocates of solar power, it is because they seem to think that they must malign nuclear power to support huge subsidies for their playthings. To the extent that they make anti-nuclear arguments, their arguments are absurd to the point of hypocrisy. Their contentions consist of the following balderdash: (1) Solar power is safer than nuclear power (it is not), that (2) solar power is cheaper than nuclear power (not even close), (3) that solar power is more reliable than nuclear power (again, not even close) and that (4) stopping nuclear power as opposed to fossil power is the most important task for environmentalists today (really, really, really, really far from even being close). The solar advocates who make these dubious claims are embracing a dangerous mythology that puts all humanity, indeed most living things, at high risk.

My personal malignity aside, although I regard solar systems as toys for rich boys, I fully concede that they have, overall, a positive effect on the world at large. The small amount of chemical pollution and other environmental degradation associated their manufacture, transport and installation aside, they are much less harmful devices than coal powered consumer electronic toys like big screen TV's and 500 watt stereo amplifiers. Therefore a rich kid who buys a solar system rather than an elaborate stereo or a Hummer should be praised. No one who cares about global climate change - which is my premier issue of personal concern - can object to someone buying PV systems or solar water heaters or big giant thermally south facing windows with thermostat activated automatic blinds or elaborate heat pumps - even if, in the last case, they do so because they just don't get the law of conservation of energy.

I'm sure that there are many people working at nuclear power plants who could afford to buy such things because they have good, highly productive jobs. A BS entry level nuclear engineer makes about $50,000/year, and should expect to make over six figures by mid career. These people can make a lot of money because their plants produce big revenue streams. (Also they probably understand issues in peak loading and therefore would think of such things as good deeds.)

I do not believe that the world can survive without nuclear power. My contention isn't part of some pleasant daydream or some kind of "wishful thinking" suppositional game. On the contrary, it is the result of a reified nightmare and absolutely obvious reality. The promotion of the nuclear option ought to be an environmentalist no brainer. All the cute solar rain and drought dances aside, there is no demonstrated industrially scalable (exajoule scale) alternative that has the remotest possibility of ameliorating the global climate change crisis, a crisis that is upon us NOW.

None.

[BeFree]

28. Very nice, Nadir

The problem is: What to do with the waste? Even with all the money made, with all the smarts delving into it, the best they can come up with is Yucca.

You: I do not believe that the world can survive without nuclear power.

The rest of us: Don't believe the world can survive with the waste from nuclear power.

It is short term thinking which got us into the global mess, and more short term thinking will dig the hole even deeper. After all, the very same type of engineers who created the coal problem are the same type who run nukes. They simply can't be trusted with the fate of the world.

Thanks. I know you think I am an imbecile and whatever else deragatory term you can think of, but it's my world too, and if I don't want to inflict upon my children a waste with a lfe of ten thousand years, I have a right to say so. Peace

[NNadir]

29. If you will name one form of energy that doesn't generate intractable

waste, I will more impressed.

So called "nuclear waste" is the only form of waste that has the following properties: 1) A billion year history of its behavior is known - the Oklo mines. 2) It is not generally distributed through the biosphere into all parts of it as is carbon dioxide. 3) Can be made to reach equilibrium where it decays as fast as it is formed, i.e - can be made to have a maximal value after which it cannot increase. 4) It is the only form of waste that has high economic value. 5) It is the lowest volume of waste that can be generated per unit on energy produced. 6) That can represent a path to lowering the overall radiotoxicity of the earth.

By the "rest of you," I think you are referring to four or five colleagues. I believe that there are far many more people who agree with me than who agree with you. I am comfortable with the large numbers of person here and elsewhere on after reflection, consider that I am right.

Let me know when you have learned of a single case of death associated with the storage of nuclear waste.

[dcfirefighter]

19. 1.83MW reg / 141d; 1.47MW difficult, one shutdown / 145d;

quite addictive.

slam the rods 100% for a kick-start
ease open the heat exchanger, 20 - 40 - 80 while halving rods back to 12-13%
keep your cooling tower 10-15% percent above heat exchanger, until primary is running at 95%, secondary at 100%
let temperatures find equilibrium, keep them 10-20 below max
if reactor is too hot, and heat exchanger has plenty of room for heat, up the primary, if not, drop the rods for a day.
ignore 'turbine overload' messages

they probably wouldn't let me run one for real.

[NNadir]

24. In real life, they wouldn't let you do that.

Well actually that depends. Something like you describe actually did happen once, not in the United States, but in a place called Chernobyl. They also ignored some warning lights. They were prepared to do so, because they had already disabled most of the safety systems, including flows to the heat exchanger. The reason they did this is because they were doing a test, the test being to see what would happen if their safety systems were disabled during a reactor excursion. They found out.

They ended up having a problem.

A real approach to criticality involves very slow removal of the control rods while their reactivity worth is calibrated.

Here's an account from some students at the Nuclear Engineering Department of the a Swedish nuclear engineering department.

http://www.neutron.kth.se/courses/reactor_physics/Laboratory/lab_4_-_kriticitet.pdf

Note that if you were taking this course you would have the option of submitting your report either in Swedish or English.

You did a good job with the simulator though. They probably should have given those Chernobyl guys a simulator first. They might have done better. Of course, in those days, there wasn't as much in the way of computing power as we have now.

[midnight armadillo]

25. I did ok

1.3 MW - rated 'just ok' by the program.

It took me 3 meltdowns to figure out that 100% on the control rods means that they're 100% REMOVED. Ooops.1.3 MW - rated 'just ok' by the program.