From the “3D printing is the answer to EVERYTHING” category
Swear to little baby Jesus in the manger, if Chernobyl didnt happen, we would be so much more advanced as a species.
Nuclear is the future.
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Maybe Bambu will put silicon carbide filament in one of their flash sales…
Help me understand, printing a reactor is OK, but printing a gun is not?
How soon will Makerworld have the .3mf?
Don’t give the politicians any ideas
Maybe we will get more of these guys…
Or Three Mile Island, or Enrico Fermi, or Chalk River, or Mayak, or Windscale, or Idaho Falls, or Lucens, or Griefswald, or Browns Ferry, or Paks, or Forsmark, or Fukushima, or, or, or…
The problem with nuclear power is that consequences of “problems” can be very severe leading to making regions uninhabitable. Smaller reactors are less impactful but safety requirements are being reduced or eliminated in the rush to bring more nuclear power online. It’s now proposed that allowing more radioactive emissions at nuclear power plants would save money for operators so soon there could be upticks in thyroid and other cancers that typically cluster around nuclear accidents.
The money aspects are insidious. Corners get cut and compromises made that make accidents and releases more likely. Design flaws get covered up, not reported, and then humans under various pressures from pencil-pushers do things that open up the fault cascade that causes governments to cloud seed so black, highly-radioactive rain falls on Belarus instead of Moscow.
It’s just too dangerous when safety is compromised, and safety gets compromised a lot in the name of profits and reduced costs. What to do with waste that stays dangerous for as long as the earth has existed is a whole other topic.
On the other hand, now that global warming is now likely way past the point of no return, we won’t need to contain radioactive waste for more than a century.
While building lots and lots of reactors would supply lots of energy, so would conservation. And solar and wind are now producing more power than fossil fuels in a number of counties while a few have basically moved entirely to wind and solar. Conservation can be implemented now just by people changing behaviors. Solar and wind take a little longer. Nuke plants take decades. Those little reactors are also going to take time.
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A little bit more PR news
No suprise to me they are in Florida, I used to live near the Turkey Point facility (not related to AMPERA as far as I know).
The Nuke portion isn’t supposed to be available until 2030 but if you want to try printing your own spherical monolithic gyroid core you can play around with things like
This sounds like a completely normal news story
One must accept that 3d prinitng is used in manufacturing in this day and age, and seeng “3d printed X” is just non-news.
I see it as an evolution of a technology and find it interesting watching where it goes and how it is used. Like watching GPS going from replacing LORAN to being used in cars, phones, air and watches to being used by stalkers as Air Tags and Goverments keeping track of their citizens.
edit: Missed but not forgotten, drone & military use.
Sure, I get your point. But even the larger events like Fukushima Daiichi and Three Mile Island do not have any deaths or major radiation exposure attributed to them.
Just a lot more of a mess to clean up.
As for Idaho Falls, Chalk River, Enrico Fermi, WindScale, and Mayak, those we all in the 1950s and 1960s. With most of those being experimental reactors. Or to count the cheap and rushed handwork from the Soviets. Or a rush for the British to refine uranium after WW2.
Then I am not sure why you used Browns Ferry, Greifswald, Paks, or Forsmark as an example. Since all of those came to conclusion with a safe reactor shutdown, and Paks was the only one that released any radiation (below the regulatory limits)
Ok, I am just rambling.
My point is that technology has advanced significantly and Nuclear energy is not as dangerous as people think it is.
I use Chernobyl as an example because that is the big one that gave nuclear a bad name and that is the only one that has significantly led to a region being uninhabitable.
As for the safety aspects..
Safety requirements are not being lowered because of greed or money. (maybe a little bit, but I do not believe that is the main reason)
SMRs have a very low failure rate and produce considerable amounts of energy for their size.
I can see a time where every town has a SMR powering it.
They don’t need as much regulation because they are built with passive safety features in mind, instead of solely relying on human intervention.They are inherently safter by design, requiring different, not less, regulatory approaches.
Ok, I need to do something else, but I hope you get my point.
Some homework for you, look into the nuclear reactors that the US Navy uses, absolute marvels of engineering.
Holy crap, this actually exists…
No need to do any homework. I don’t argue that nuclear reactors can’t be built to high standards, run by skilled people, or use un-compromised designs. I didn’t want to add more shades to the discussion but I think things like nuclear reactors should never be operated for profit. Profit always brings compromise in design, materials, employee pay/qualifications, and operation.
Not to say that profit is key in all accidents. Many have been government reactors that had “issues”. For those unfamiliar with the bounty of nuclear accidents, thankfully generally small but sometimes quite dramatic, there have been a lot. Again, most small. But there’s been lots of releases and a very few casualties, but they illustrate how things can go wrong in a big way with such concentrated energy.
And there’s not just nuclear accidents to worry about. There’s environmental contamination from mining, processing, manufacturing, and decommissioning. There’s a proven track record of problems in those industries that nicely compliment the absolute disasters of meltdowns in the commercial power industry.
I have solar installed on my home. I sized the array so that it covers all our use plus an excess so it can microgrid and supply our power needs even in a winter outage - reduced but still covers essentials. Financing was available with payments set equal to our average electric bill for a term of 15 years (I also installed a backup battery which increased the price), all with nothing down. I didn’t do it that way but the point is I could have done it as easy as just paying the utility. That was all with five year ago electricity prices.
What I’m asking is when there are power sources that have no risk of meltdown, loss of containment, radioactive contamination, etc, why build sources that do?
The 3D printed part is certainly interesting, but I have questions about their overall design concept…
Ampera says its design features a proprietary neutron driver to provide a stable external neutron source to start and sustain operation
The “external neutron source” is going to be…a fusion reactor, somehow.
I mean, we can’t do fusion sustainably yet, and fusion reactors are massive, but somehow they’re going to invent and perfect compact fusion reactors…and then instead of just going with that, because fusion would be the pinnacle of nuclear energy, they’re going to use it to run a thorium reactor, which we also haven’t ever done.
This certainly appears to be less a cutting edge nuclear energy reactor and more a cutting edge furnace designed to incinerate investment capital.
3d printing is really common in high tech now. Not the way we do it mostly but…
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You will get a book in a few hours when I have time.
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It would be very difficult to sneak a 3D printed nuclear reactor through security check points, or to use one in a robbery.
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There is no need to waste your time. My opinion doesn’t matter and neither of us is going to change the other’s mind.
The goal is to not change anyone’s mind. This is not an argument. The goal is civil discourse in discussing the topic. But if you don’t care then that fine, I wont put in the effort.
I recommend looking into naval nuclear power plants because it is a genuinely interesting topic, not because I think you need to educate yourself.
Here’s the short list:
- Your viewpoint seems to be primarily based in fear
- Despite the theoretical dangers, Nuclear energy is very safe and very clean
- Extremely high regulation industry (already contains significant government intervention)
- Solar and wind energy are not reliable enough to be used worldwide
- Solar energy creates considerably more environmental damage when compared to nuclear energy
- Solar energy should not be ignored (I use it myself at my rural property), but does not work at large scale
- Ease of conversion to nuclear from coal and gas plants.
Fun little clip from Landman
Good thing no where in the constitution does it give you the right to bear nuclear reactors.
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I’ve worked at Brown Ferry (same design as Fukushima) pre and post U1 restart, worked at other nuclear plants and have a strong respect for the work ethics and culture that TMI and Chernobyl instilled in the programs throughout the US. I live a mile from two PWRs and have zero concern. I used to be on the other side of the debate with nuclear power. Edit to add, most of my fear was irrational without any understanding of the systems.
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