Comments by "David Elliott" (@davidelliott5843) on "Real Engineering" channel.

  1. MillionFoul not to mention that molten salt reactors like the Moltex will totally burn all of the fuel whereas PWRs use only 3% of the fuel. A Moltex SSR will extract 30 times more power from every fuel rod creating 30 x less waste. The first plant being built in Canada is a waste burner, fuelled by high level waste fuel rods from the old plant next door.
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  2. Marc T the problem with all renewables is their unpredictable intermittent output. Once the grid has > 50% solar or wind the system gets unbalanced leading to power cuts. The only power plants that can efficiently handle the fluctuations are thermal store nukes like the Moltex. 1000MW reactor heats thermal salt stores which can deliver up to 3000MW of peak power the thermal stores and the reactor itself are naturally load following.
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  3. MillionFoul sorry but no. “Thermonuclear” means nuclear fusion. Plain “nuclear” means fission. With molten salt reactor cores it’s cheap and easy. Fusion is still vapourware and it will never be cheap. Cheap is good because industry will use it. Expensive is not good because they won’t. This is exactly the issue with the fundamentally flawed PWR reactor. They sound simple but making them safe is hugely expensive.
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  4. Sharky The Moltex SSR being built in Canada will burn the stored waste fuel rods. They have a simple chemical process to turn the used fuel to a salt. It then goes into the core. 97% of the energy is still there for the taking. The old plant only extracted 3%. They are being paid to take the waste fuel away and react it down to leave just 1% for medium term storage.
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  5. MillionFoul The existing US nuke regs work for PWRs. Kirk Sorensen is working on new regulations for molten salts. Moltex is working in Canada where they have a more common sense approach. U.K. is hidebound by micromanaging regulators who won’t say shag they want so its become an endless guessing game. Brexit night help but I doubt it.
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  6. MillionFoul Uranium is not renewable but we currently only use 3% of the available fuel energy. The other 97% just sits in the waste fuel ponds. The new molten salts will use 99% of the energy. 33 times more. And the tiny amount of waste produced has a half life of 30 years. A “bit” better than 30,000 years half life of the current waste products.
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  7. G Buz I body is building a real fusion plant right now. Not one of the experimental plants has managed more than a few seconds of fusion while burning up many times more power just to contain it. Fusion will not be cheap. It will be radioactive and it will create active waste. If it ever works.
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  8. B5429671 XJ If we had safety regulators prepared to get things done we could have molten salt fission plants burning waste nuclear fuel. That solves a long term storage problem and give the reactor operated an income before they’ve even fired up the reactor. Thorium is brewer still bet the issues are entirely regulatory. Not. because thorium is inherently dangerous simply because nuke regulatory bodies move at a glacial pace. The USA has to write an entirely new code of practice. U.K. simply won’t say what they do want. Even with established designs the regulatory process costs double the plant build costs.
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  9. encinobalboa Nuclear power is the safest energy source we have by a considerable margin. Fukushima and Chernobyl have blighted huge swathes if land. But tell that to the wildlife who live their perfectly happily. There are people in Iran living with natural background radiation 19x higher than the safe limit for nuclear workers. The people have LOWER than normal cancer rates.
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  10. One Autumn Leaf PWR nukes are ridiculously expensive because they are fundamentally flawed and will do bad things if given the chance. Molten salt reactors remove all of those risk factors by being intrinsically safe. The safety systems are entirely passive so costs are cheaper than coal. Check out Ian Scott and Moltex. They have the Chinese interested in removing coal boilers and replacing them with Moltex reactors. The steam turbines will be the same plant as before. Saving billions in plant replacement costs and cutting running costs as well.
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  11. James Neilson Graham High level nuclear waste is easily managed but Moltex Energy are building a full scale waste burner in Canada. It will take high level irradiated waste neckwear fuel and extract the 97% remaining energy that he PWR could not use. It’s not fantasy. It’s happening. Every megawatt of power will make 33 times less waste. What is left over, has a half life of 30 years and easy to engineer for storage. They are being paid to take the waste fuel. So it’s in their interests to solve the waste issue. They have it sorted.
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  12. G Buz PWR nuclear power fundamentally no different to a 1950s designed nuclear submarine is expensive to build safely. But that’s just one way to do it. Molten salts like Flibe and SSR have entirely passive safety. Much cheaper and much quicker to build though the very first plants (which are full size) will take the longest, because regulatory procedures are being developed at the same time.
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  13.  @ne2526  UK has removed almost all of it's coal fired power plants Guess who bought the Didcot turbo-generator plant - Germany of course.
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  14.  @spoonikle  USA cannot get molten salt reactors until it sorts out its safety regulatory process. Currently its a tick box system designed for PWRs. It wont work for reactors that dont have the hazards found in a PWR. UK is no better with it's regulators wanting everything done from first principles but expecting the new plant designers to guess what will be required.
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  15.  @nimistar01  That really is down to the nuclear industry surrounding everything with razor wire and making a huge fuss about all their Oh so great safety systems that cost $mega. Not surprisingly, people get concerned when you need all of that to be safe. The molten salt reactor was ignored in favour of PWR which back then was cheap. Three Mile Island changed all that but molten salt was still ignored. Who knows why, because they are intrinsically safe and therefore cheap to build. They cannot overheat and cannot melt down. The most recent design goes even further because all safety systems are entirely passive. They can lose the cooling at full power and still not overheat. That drastically cuts build and operational costs and removes the need for expensive engineers to monitor the plant 24/7. They all burn the fuel many times more efficiently creating a small fraction of the waste.
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  16.  @ne2526  Germany went into virtue signalling mode, closed it's perfectly good nuclear power plants then built coal fired power plants to replace them. Even worse they burn brown coal which is dirty and inefficient. Worse still, cleaning the sulphur-laden exhaust gas releases even more CO2.
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  17.  @nimistar01  Nuclear power has killed (or made ill) fewer people than any other power source we have. It is carbon neutral and over time the lowest cost energy we have.
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  18. The Tucano (which can be traced back to the WW2 P51 Mustang) is incredibly noisy. The enemy will hear them coming from miles away. But for tank busting that’s no problem and today’s tank busting missiles can be carried.
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  19. Sheet metal or machined surfaces with a line of flats at 15 degree angles behave to flowing air like a continuous curve. It’s highly likely a folded front with 15 degree flats would be no worse for pedestrians than “normal” truck fronts. There’s also no solid lump of metal hidden by a thin sheet with nasty claw fastener.
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  20. I will be labelled a denier. But the start of the industrial revolution was the the peak of the Maunder Minimum a period also called the Little Ice Age. How do the climate studies account for this purely natural warming?
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  21. Negative G flooding was a common flaw in most engines of the day. The German Mercedes Benz engines were fuel injected so didn’t have the problem.
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  22. The ridiculous costs expose that SLS is yet another way for USA to subsidise its aerospace industry.
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  23. Metal production requires massive amounts of power. Nuclear is the only way to get enough concentrated power. Kirk Sorensen rediscovered molten salt reactors while researching power for a moon base. Molten salt reactors are small and light. The moon has Thorium deposits making this type of nuke a no brainer. Even better molten salts can operate at very high temperatures cutting out the power generation altogether.
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