> The "you can't be 100% sure" argument is impossible to defeat, and I don't think this design will move the needle.
You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their misinformed campaigns for that.
Meanwhile fossil fuels have killed tens of millions of people, billions of animals, and changed the climate. All directly or indirectly.
Somehow, it's a version of the quote "Kill one man, and you're a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you're a conqueror", a few deaths due to Chernobyl, and people are focused on it.
But those dead miners? Or those old people with lung disease? Or those thousands of miles of bleached, dead coral?
I think the biggest advantage to such a reactor is that it solves two major issues in nuclear power. Containment costs and disposal costs. Containment is solved by the thousands of feet of rock and disposal is just filling in the hole with concrete and dirt.
You are right though that you will never win the safety argument. Nuclear has become entrenched in our culture as a world ending bugbear. Meanwhile the actual possibility of world ending climate change is just scooting along while people picket nuclear facilities and wind turbines.
Define "safe". We've built less than a thousand commercial reactors ever and we've had multiple incidents where the impact will be felt for decades if not centuries.
Nuclear advocates hand-wave away Chernobyl ("because Soviets") like they're the only ones who can cause an industrial accident. But what about Fukushima? Over $100 billion has been spent on the clean up and compensation so far, with the ultimate cost to approach $1 trillion, require tech that hasn't been invented yet and will take decades if not a century or more [1]
And for what? The highest LCOE of any power source used for mass power generation.
Now this idea (Deep Fission) is an interesting one. It's basically a take on geothermal where instead of relying on natural heating (eg from lava) you basically just use a small reactor. If anything goes wrong, you just bury the whole thing. This requires some more thought about what the failure modes look like and some analysis on what the cost of power is. It is an interesting idea though.
This is debatable. What is pretty sure is that a field of wind turbines or solar panels just cannot trigger any disaster involving durably dangerous (and difficult to recover) stuff spread on a large geographic zone.
> they still can't be built because of safety concerns
Source?
The first EPR project in France (Flamanville-3) had problems documented in an official report (dubbed 'Folz', per the name of its main author), sadly AFAIK it wasn't translated into English: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville
Short version: it is very late and costs way more than planned, and the most prominent causes weren't "safety concerns" even if the Fukushima disaster happened during this project, and therefore added new requirements which, while non-negligible in absolute terms, were very minor causes of problems for this project.
Seriously this! Nuclear is held to the impossible standard of proving that no one will be harmed by it for the next 4000 years, as evidenced by some pointless bike shedding exercises like designing warning signs that can outlast civilization.
there is pretty strong evidence that Nuclear energy is significantly safer than most energy production with the exception of wind & solar which are similarly as safe. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Sorry, can't make that argument after Fukushima unless there is foolproof passive safety like a LFTR plug.
A problem with organizationally managed safety is just the human error problem, and two that human organizations come to resent and undermine regulations, particularly at the management level. This attitude is rite in the nuclear industry in America, and similarly from what I can tell from tepco management of Fukushima.
Nuclear needs a scalable price competitive meltdown proof full fuel usage reactor. I think LFTR, materials issues aside, is the solution, but possibly even that won't be able to compete long term with solar wind even with miraculous materials engineering.
As others have said it seems that digging isn't cheap. My question is, is it even safe ? Surely if there is an accident or incident, there are the same issues if not more, groundwater pollution for example, risk of explosion, potentially causing further natural events such as earthquakes ?
>so if it does manage to overheat, the nuclear reaction will automatically dampen itself down.
This seems extremely blasé. "it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ?
I am a believer in nuclear power. It can already be done safe and is being done safe in most cases. This isn't solving any real problem.
"A Mile Underground" is way below most ground water deposits. Most wells are less than 1000 feet deep. The world's deepest aquifer is less than 2 miles deep. You would not bury a nuclear reactor in such a place. Also, nature has multiple buried natural fission reactors just like this.
Essentially what is being proposed here is an artificial geothermal well. The cost of the drilling is offset by not having to pay for the construction of huge concrete buildings and disposal of secondary nuclear waste. Disposal of waste on-site would essentially be filling the well with concrete. You are killing two birds with one stone.
In addition, ground water is usually filtered through miles of sand, coal, and limestone. Well water is often radioactive and needs to be tested regularly because it has been filtered through uranium and thorium decay products. If such a reactor were to be breached, it's waste would not reach the surface unless it were placed in a mile deep spring that no one knew about somehow.
""it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ?"
We humans have a bias. We live in the biosphere, and from our perspective, we are surrounded by it. Everywhere we go from day-to-day, life abounds.
But this is a very deceptive bias. Most of the universe is not the biosphere. Outside of the biosphere, the universe is rather nasty. High levels of radiation are the norm. Extreme temperatures (or what we consider extreme temperatures) are the norm. Very life-unfriendly chemical regimes are the norm, either by being full of nasty chemicals (Venusian sulpheric acid) or, more commonly, being so full of boring chemicals that life is very very difficult (Mars).
This comes up most often in space exploration, when I see someone being concerned about putting nuclear power on the moon, whatever will we do with the waste, and the answer is that the lunar surface is already a radiation hell-hole. If you dump something like that on the surface, yeah, we humans will want to stay away from it, but it's a lot less material change than our intuition thinks. Our intuition wants to say "but what about all the wonderful life that will be affected", because everywhere we go, there is life. But there isn't any on the moon. Nothing will die because we dumped a couple hundred pounds of waste on the surface.
Similarly, the subsurface of Earth below the biosphere... and I include the bacteria living in rocks and the water table and everything like that as part of the "biosphere", we know it goes deep but it doesn't go down forever... is already an incredibly harsh place. The chemistry is already nasty. It's already full of chemicals either too "interesting" or too "boring" to be useful for life.
I'd like to see a good analysis to make sure this isn't going to work its way back up into the biosphere, yes, but your intuition that anywhere we put something, some life is going to be affected, does not necessarily apply to a mile under the surface. "Radiating its surrounding environment" is definitely not an issue in the slightest. There is no "environment" there, in the sense you mean. I'm more worried about what might physically migrate around into something that does have an "environment", but a mile is a long way for anything to travel through solid rock, and it needs to move pretty quickly too to get up into the biosphere while it's still a danger.
According to the article it is "self limiting" so that risk is very small, and an explosion a mile underground is a lot less threatening than an explosion in a facility on the surface. A mile of rock is going to provide a lot more protection than any amount of concrete and steel.
> potentially causing further natural events such as earthquakes
I'm not a seismologist, but I think the risk there is less than the risk of an explosion in a reactor on the surface.
> digging isn't cheap
No. But it might be cheaper than building a large facility above-ground that meets all the necessary safety regulations for a nuclear reactor. And probably produces less carbon emissions in the process as well.
It seems that digging cost is pretty minor when compared to the usual cost of these projects.
As far as safety, I would expect this depth to be below and away from any groundwater, so even with a meltdown there would be no effect on water sources. Presumably if something like Chernobyl happened they would bury the hole and the fuel would just melt its way further down without ill effect. There were plenty of underground nuclear tests already so some of the effects might be understood in practice as well.
If we can construct nuclear reactors a mile down, doesn’t that mean we can more easily drill for essentially unlimited geothermal power? I realize this is an “obvious” question but it isn’t addressed by TFA.
> As others have said it seems that digging isn't cheap. My question is, is it even safe ? Surely if there is an accident or incident, there are the same issues if not more, groundwater pollution for example, risk of explosion, potentially causing further natural events such as earthquakes ?
Digging isn't cheap if you wanted to drill a gas well for yourself. A mile would cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe even a million. A million is chump change when talking about a nuclear plant, which are priced either in the tens of billions or possibly even in the low hundreds of billions.
Groundwater is not a mile down.
Nuclear reactors cannot explode in the same way that nuclear weapons explode. But if they somehow could, a mile down isn't going to hurt anyone.
> This seems extremely blasé. "it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ?
I cannot decide if this is ingenious, incredible dumb, or maybe both at the same time.
Where does the "1 mile down" come from? That seems more like based on emotion than on science / engineering. If it isn't, I'd like to see some of the tradeoffs of different depths.
I could imagine that drilling this deep might be the most expensive part, so if you could get away with, say, half of the depth, that would be quite the advantage.
What do we know about the safety tradeoffs of putting a reactor that far underground?
I'm not trying to shoot down the idea, it's just so unexpected that I feel I haven't even begun to think of the right questions yet.
Where to even begin.
1. Temperature - The higher the temperature difference, the faster the loss of heat. How will the steam maintain it's energy (temp) in that long pipe.
2. Drilling each borehole is no small feat, and uses lots of energy and materials, all of which have associated embodied energy costs. Is is really worth it once all that work is done?
3. Geothermal. Interesting analogy, why not just use that instead. Boom, no additional radioactivity required.
This whole things sounds very Rube Goldberg machine like.
Or just use reactor designs that have a negative void coefficient and won't end up in a positive feedback loop.
There are many to choose from now.
The high cost of nuclear fission plants comes from deliberate government, petro-corporation and environmentalist attempts to kill it off (usually funded by petrostate interests like Russia, Qatar or oil corporations directly).
Positive feedback loop isn't the only risk of nuclear power. Fukushima had a negative void coefficient too, right? Rather than pretending there's negligible risk, I'd rather say it's there but the alternatives are worse.
Right. We have to bite the bullet on nuclear power sometime, and it may as well be now.
I've nothing against green renewable energy and welcome it but we not only need reliable base load energy but lots more of it than we have now—and that base load will continue to increase at an exponential rate into the future (especially so with conversion to EVs).
Making a move to nuclear has almost become a necessity whether we like it or not. We've now three-quarters of a century of nuclear engineering experience behind us and it's pretty much sorted. It's not without risk but it's now about as safe as any of our other major engineering infrastructure.
> Or just use reactor designs that have a negative void coefficient and won't end up in a positive feedback loop.
Positive feedback loop isn't needed for a nuclear accident to happen. Sure it's what happened in Chornobyl, but not in TMI or Fukushima. And from an engineering perspective Chornobyl isn't that interesting as an accident example because it's mostly a product of brainwashed egotic manager who had all the power over the engineers.
Also it's not always entirely straightforward to keep the void coefficient negative at every point of the operating cycle, especially if things go wrong: PWR have a negative void coefficient most of the time but not 100% of the time: when the reactor is cold you put tons of boric acid into the water to counteract the reactivity and avoid divergence, but at this particular time the void coefficient is positive because of the high level of Boron. Of course in regular events it doesn't matter because the reactor is off, but that's something that can also happen during an emergency situation where you inject a massive amount of boron in the water (there are scenarios where you do that).
But again, the reactor's power getting out of control isn't the biggest risk anyway, the biggest problem comes from the fact that residual power is still annoyingly high even when you've shut down your reactor and you need to deal with it. The fact that you can't just shut it down and everything's OK when something is wrong is the real pain of working with a nuclear reactor.
Source: I have a nuclear engineer specialized in immediate response to incidents and accidents at home.
And the high cost mostly comes out of the fact that we don't build nuclear reactors as series + the fact that we finance it at insane rates. Antinuclear activists have their responsibilities in that, but even without them I suspect most states wouldn't be doing the right thing either: nuclear isn't a good fit for neoliberal thinking anyway.
While this is mostly true. There is also a lot of truth in the argument that nuclear reactors are somewhat dangerous. I often find that the danger is exaggerated, but it does still exist. For instance, how much less stressful would the Russian attack on Zaporizhzhia have been if the reactor vessel was a mile underneath the area instead of on the surface. How much less of an issue would Fukushima have had if the spent fuel pool had been a mile under sea level?
If running reactors under the surface isn't significantly more expensive than surface containment then I think it's a wonderful idea.
It sounds like geothermal without using the earth as the heat source. What benefits does this have over geothermal, which is proven and safe, and also ticks the 'non-nuclear' box which makes it considerably easier to convince a population to live next door to?
> Since the water column is a mile high, it would pressurize the reactor by its sheer weight, much like sticking it a mile under the sea, so no need for a pressurizer and the cooling system would be entirely passive.
> In addition, being encased in solid rock far below any water table removes any need for a containment system. If things get really bad, fill in the shaft and cap it.
Why is it cheaper to have this with a ready to activate shaft filling sarcophagus (and the redundant backup systems for that) vs doing it on the sea floor or land + a 0.1 mile deep hole?
I think it's interesting to read people voicing concerns and limitations of the projects in the comments (that's why I came to read them), but I was hoping more people would be excited about the idea. Even if it doesn't work out, I root for people who try out ideas like this.
Every once in a while some crazy idea like breaking down atoms to generate electricity works out and we're all better off thanks to it.
The groundwater contamination angle seems a bit... hand-wavey?
> In addition, being encased in solid rock far below any water table removes any need for a containment system. If things get really bad, fill in the shaft and cap it.
"Solid rock" feels like there's a lot of geological asterisks there. How about the casing around that mile-deep hole? Where do you pump all the inevitable leaks?
9 out of 10 startups go bankrupt, what happens to the hole if the company (or the project-specific LLC) goes belly-up? "Just fill it up" is a bit disingenuous and ignores how groundwater tends to seep into everything given enough dozens of years... Texas is littered with half-capped polluting shale wells that were just kinda left there when the wells stopped being productive and the project-specific drilling LLC was dissolved when it hit the bankruptcy-by-design phase of the corporate lifecycle.
Centuries of potential contamination feels like a risk that should have more than 2 sentences.
The practical arguments in favor of nuclear seem to assume that new nuclear technology only needs to compete with old nuclear technology.
Let's set aside the safety argument. They're claiming $0.46 per kilowatt-hour for a technology they haven't developed yet. I believe that's about an order of magnitude more expensive than what wind can do right now. Heck, right now my local utility's website is reporting a retail spot price of seven cents per kilowatt-hour. Maybe paying six times as much is worthwhile for the reduced carbon footprint relative to fossil fuels, but if that's the argument then just say that rather than weakening your position by calling it "cheap" when it's easy to see that it isn't.
This is so silly, it might be just a form of trolling.
A nuclear power plant is a nuclear rector plus a thermal power plant, i.e. a turbine. Even if the safety of the reactor is 100%, what happens if there's an accident with the turbine? How do you perform maintenance? Sure, you have elevators to move people up and down, but how do you move things that are several tons up and down? A typical fuel rod assembly is about 4-5 meters long. The efficiency of the thermal power plant is about 30%, which means you need to dispose of 70% of the heat coming from the reactor. With regular nuclear power plants you use cooling towers; how are you going to do this when you are 1 mile underground? Do you install some pipes that bring cold water from the surface? Sounds reasonable until you do the math and find out you need to move 10 tons per second. The pumps that need to push the water up will need to fight the gravity of a column of water one mile high and push 10 tons each second. The math is not that difficult (potential energy = mgh), such pumps need to have a power of about 150 MW. That's ignoring the friction of the water in the pipe. But that's a big thing to ignore for a mile-long pipe. Oh, and the pressure at the bottom is 165 bar, about the same as the pressure in the reactor. You can avoid this huge pressure by creating moving the water up and down in stages, but that complicates the engineering, and increases the construction and maintenance cost.
This seems of a piece with trying to directly address the concerns of those who are opposed to nuclear power. This does not work, because most of those folks actually are not interested in nuclear power at all, and they will never lack for reasons not to do it. This is true of almost anything: It's always pretty easy to come up with reasons not to do something.
Those who oppose will simply keep coming up with new reasons not to do it. They will only accept a reduction in usage. Anything that allows us to maintain our existing level of energy consumption will not be tolerated.
You have serious constraints in neutronics when constrained to a drillable borehole diameter and low-enriched uranium. The radial peaking will be high. May still be an ok tradeoff.
> With its promise of limitless energy by breaking down matter itself, nuclear power has long held a utopian promise for humanity
What a strange, science fictional way to describe fission! Surely it's not breaking down matter itself any more than burning wood or coal is. Would you say, about eating a sandwich, that it 'offers the promise of limitless energy by breaking down matter itself'?
I'm not commenting on the practicality or viability of this. Rather, I see a lot of commenters talking about cost. I understand some projects or technologies would literally be too expensive, but realistically, we need to move away from fossil fuels. We can't just keep polluting the Earth because it's cheaper than clean energy.
Even if it's unnecessary I still think this is a great idea. It's obvious that the people who are scared of nuclear power are not interested in the actual safety data, it's that radiation is scary and has bad connotations.
If it will put people at ease, then just do it so we can finally have nuclear energy.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|1 year ago|reply
The "you can't be 100% sure" argument is impossible to defeat, and I don't think this design will move the needle.
It also provides the argument that wanting to bury reactors 1 mile deep shows how incredibly dangerous nuclear power really is.
[+] [-] DrBazza|1 year ago|reply
You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their misinformed campaigns for that.
Meanwhile fossil fuels have killed tens of millions of people, billions of animals, and changed the climate. All directly or indirectly.
Somehow, it's a version of the quote "Kill one man, and you're a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you're a conqueror", a few deaths due to Chernobyl, and people are focused on it.
But those dead miners? Or those old people with lung disease? Or those thousands of miles of bleached, dead coral?
Where's the outrage for that?
[+] [-] foxyv|1 year ago|reply
You are right though that you will never win the safety argument. Nuclear has become entrenched in our culture as a world ending bugbear. Meanwhile the actual possibility of world ending climate change is just scooting along while people picket nuclear facilities and wind turbines.
[+] [-] Kon5ole|1 year ago|reply
The perceived safety is the result of being operated by highly trained and vetted personnel 24/7/365 for decades on end.
In actual fact nuclear reactors are extremely dangerous.
[+] [-] jmyeet|1 year ago|reply
Nuclear advocates hand-wave away Chernobyl ("because Soviets") like they're the only ones who can cause an industrial accident. But what about Fukushima? Over $100 billion has been spent on the clean up and compensation so far, with the ultimate cost to approach $1 trillion, require tech that hasn't been invented yet and will take decades if not a century or more [1]
And for what? The highest LCOE of any power source used for mass power generation.
Now this idea (Deep Fission) is an interesting one. It's basically a take on geothermal where instead of relying on natural heating (eg from lava) you basically just use a small reactor. If anything goes wrong, you just bury the whole thing. This requires some more thought about what the failure modes look like and some analysis on what the cost of power is. It is an interesting idea though.
[1]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fuku...
[+] [-] natmaka|1 year ago|reply
This is debatable. What is pretty sure is that a field of wind turbines or solar panels just cannot trigger any disaster involving durably dangerous (and difficult to recover) stuff spread on a large geographic zone.
> they still can't be built because of safety concerns
Source?
The first EPR project in France (Flamanville-3) had problems documented in an official report (dubbed 'Folz', per the name of its main author), sadly AFAIK it wasn't translated into English: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville
Short version: it is very late and costs way more than planned, and the most prominent causes weren't "safety concerns" even if the Fukushima disaster happened during this project, and therefore added new requirements which, while non-negligible in absolute terms, were very minor causes of problems for this project.
One of the main causes is known: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
[+] [-] thmsths|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] manvillej|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] TrexArms|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|1 year ago|reply
A problem with organizationally managed safety is just the human error problem, and two that human organizations come to resent and undermine regulations, particularly at the management level. This attitude is rite in the nuclear industry in America, and similarly from what I can tell from tepco management of Fukushima.
Nuclear needs a scalable price competitive meltdown proof full fuel usage reactor. I think LFTR, materials issues aside, is the solution, but possibly even that won't be able to compete long term with solar wind even with miraculous materials engineering.
[+] [-] darby_nine|1 year ago|reply
If this were true we would have buried coal plants decades ago
[+] [-] bilekas|1 year ago|reply
>so if it does manage to overheat, the nuclear reaction will automatically dampen itself down.
This seems extremely blasé. "it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ?
I am a believer in nuclear power. It can already be done safe and is being done safe in most cases. This isn't solving any real problem.
[+] [-] foxyv|1 year ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
Essentially what is being proposed here is an artificial geothermal well. The cost of the drilling is offset by not having to pay for the construction of huge concrete buildings and disposal of secondary nuclear waste. Disposal of waste on-site would essentially be filling the well with concrete. You are killing two birds with one stone.
In addition, ground water is usually filtered through miles of sand, coal, and limestone. Well water is often radioactive and needs to be tested regularly because it has been filtered through uranium and thorium decay products. If such a reactor were to be breached, it's waste would not reach the surface unless it were placed in a mile deep spring that no one knew about somehow.
https://www.epa.gov/radtown/natural-radionuclides-private-we...
https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/departments-and-agencies/dph/d...
[+] [-] jerf|1 year ago|reply
We humans have a bias. We live in the biosphere, and from our perspective, we are surrounded by it. Everywhere we go from day-to-day, life abounds.
But this is a very deceptive bias. Most of the universe is not the biosphere. Outside of the biosphere, the universe is rather nasty. High levels of radiation are the norm. Extreme temperatures (or what we consider extreme temperatures) are the norm. Very life-unfriendly chemical regimes are the norm, either by being full of nasty chemicals (Venusian sulpheric acid) or, more commonly, being so full of boring chemicals that life is very very difficult (Mars).
This comes up most often in space exploration, when I see someone being concerned about putting nuclear power on the moon, whatever will we do with the waste, and the answer is that the lunar surface is already a radiation hell-hole. If you dump something like that on the surface, yeah, we humans will want to stay away from it, but it's a lot less material change than our intuition thinks. Our intuition wants to say "but what about all the wonderful life that will be affected", because everywhere we go, there is life. But there isn't any on the moon. Nothing will die because we dumped a couple hundred pounds of waste on the surface.
Similarly, the subsurface of Earth below the biosphere... and I include the bacteria living in rocks and the water table and everything like that as part of the "biosphere", we know it goes deep but it doesn't go down forever... is already an incredibly harsh place. The chemistry is already nasty. It's already full of chemicals either too "interesting" or too "boring" to be useful for life.
I'd like to see a good analysis to make sure this isn't going to work its way back up into the biosphere, yes, but your intuition that anywhere we put something, some life is going to be affected, does not necessarily apply to a mile under the surface. "Radiating its surrounding environment" is definitely not an issue in the slightest. There is no "environment" there, in the sense you mean. I'm more worried about what might physically migrate around into something that does have an "environment", but a mile is a long way for anything to travel through solid rock, and it needs to move pretty quickly too to get up into the biosphere while it's still a danger.
[+] [-] thayne|1 year ago|reply
It is well below the water table
> risk of explosion
According to the article it is "self limiting" so that risk is very small, and an explosion a mile underground is a lot less threatening than an explosion in a facility on the surface. A mile of rock is going to provide a lot more protection than any amount of concrete and steel.
> potentially causing further natural events such as earthquakes
From what I can tell (see for example https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-nuclear-explosions-cause-earth...), underground nuclear weapons tests, which have larger explosions than this could possibly create have a rather limited risk for earthquakes.
I'm not a seismologist, but I think the risk there is less than the risk of an explosion in a reactor on the surface.
> digging isn't cheap
No. But it might be cheaper than building a large facility above-ground that meets all the necessary safety regulations for a nuclear reactor. And probably produces less carbon emissions in the process as well.
[+] [-] foobarian|1 year ago|reply
As far as safety, I would expect this depth to be below and away from any groundwater, so even with a meltdown there would be no effect on water sources. Presumably if something like Chernobyl happened they would bury the hole and the fuel would just melt its way further down without ill effect. There were plenty of underground nuclear tests already so some of the effects might be understood in practice as well.
[+] [-] matthewdgreen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|1 year ago|reply
Just put these in areas where the water is already contaminated from fracking. Then when the stuff starts bubbling up it can be toxic AND radioactive!
[+] [-] francisofascii|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] donny2018|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] NoMoreNicksLeft|1 year ago|reply
Digging isn't cheap if you wanted to drill a gas well for yourself. A mile would cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe even a million. A million is chump change when talking about a nuclear plant, which are priced either in the tens of billions or possibly even in the low hundreds of billions.
Groundwater is not a mile down.
Nuclear reactors cannot explode in the same way that nuclear weapons explode. But if they somehow could, a mile down isn't going to hurt anyone.
> This seems extremely blasé. "it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ?
Did you read the same article as the rest of us?
[+] [-] perlgeek|1 year ago|reply
Where does the "1 mile down" come from? That seems more like based on emotion than on science / engineering. If it isn't, I'd like to see some of the tradeoffs of different depths.
I could imagine that drilling this deep might be the most expensive part, so if you could get away with, say, half of the depth, that would be quite the advantage.
What do we know about the safety tradeoffs of putting a reactor that far underground?
I'm not trying to shoot down the idea, it's just so unexpected that I feel I haven't even begun to think of the right questions yet.
[+] [-] geod_of_ix|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] GardenLetter27|1 year ago|reply
There are many to choose from now.
The high cost of nuclear fission plants comes from deliberate government, petro-corporation and environmentalist attempts to kill it off (usually funded by petrostate interests like Russia, Qatar or oil corporations directly).
[+] [-] honestjohn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hilbert42|1 year ago|reply
I've nothing against green renewable energy and welcome it but we not only need reliable base load energy but lots more of it than we have now—and that base load will continue to increase at an exponential rate into the future (especially so with conversion to EVs).
Making a move to nuclear has almost become a necessity whether we like it or not. We've now three-quarters of a century of nuclear engineering experience behind us and it's pretty much sorted. It's not without risk but it's now about as safe as any of our other major engineering infrastructure.
[+] [-] littlestymaar|1 year ago|reply
Positive feedback loop isn't needed for a nuclear accident to happen. Sure it's what happened in Chornobyl, but not in TMI or Fukushima. And from an engineering perspective Chornobyl isn't that interesting as an accident example because it's mostly a product of brainwashed egotic manager who had all the power over the engineers.
Also it's not always entirely straightforward to keep the void coefficient negative at every point of the operating cycle, especially if things go wrong: PWR have a negative void coefficient most of the time but not 100% of the time: when the reactor is cold you put tons of boric acid into the water to counteract the reactivity and avoid divergence, but at this particular time the void coefficient is positive because of the high level of Boron. Of course in regular events it doesn't matter because the reactor is off, but that's something that can also happen during an emergency situation where you inject a massive amount of boron in the water (there are scenarios where you do that).
But again, the reactor's power getting out of control isn't the biggest risk anyway, the biggest problem comes from the fact that residual power is still annoyingly high even when you've shut down your reactor and you need to deal with it. The fact that you can't just shut it down and everything's OK when something is wrong is the real pain of working with a nuclear reactor.
Source: I have a nuclear engineer specialized in immediate response to incidents and accidents at home.
And the high cost mostly comes out of the fact that we don't build nuclear reactors as series + the fact that we finance it at insane rates. Antinuclear activists have their responsibilities in that, but even without them I suspect most states wouldn't be doing the right thing either: nuclear isn't a good fit for neoliberal thinking anyway.
[+] [-] foxyv|1 year ago|reply
If running reactors under the surface isn't significantly more expensive than surface containment then I think it's a wonderful idea.
[+] [-] pjc50|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] moogly|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] danbruc|1 year ago|reply
What happens to the two one mile long pipes attached to the reactor?
[+] [-] fulafel|1 year ago|reply
> Since the water column is a mile high, it would pressurize the reactor by its sheer weight, much like sticking it a mile under the sea, so no need for a pressurizer and the cooling system would be entirely passive.
> In addition, being encased in solid rock far below any water table removes any need for a containment system. If things get really bad, fill in the shaft and cap it.
Why is it cheaper to have this with a ready to activate shaft filling sarcophagus (and the redundant backup systems for that) vs doing it on the sea floor or land + a 0.1 mile deep hole?
[+] [-] troebr|1 year ago|reply
Every once in a while some crazy idea like breaking down atoms to generate electricity works out and we're all better off thanks to it.
[+] [-] pojzon|1 year ago|reply
But molten salt ones are literally impossible to cause any harm.
Cant explode, cant cause uncontrolled pollution, can be safely decomissioned whenever.
But they are not cheap.
[+] [-] floatrock|1 year ago|reply
> In addition, being encased in solid rock far below any water table removes any need for a containment system. If things get really bad, fill in the shaft and cap it.
"Solid rock" feels like there's a lot of geological asterisks there. How about the casing around that mile-deep hole? Where do you pump all the inevitable leaks?
9 out of 10 startups go bankrupt, what happens to the hole if the company (or the project-specific LLC) goes belly-up? "Just fill it up" is a bit disingenuous and ignores how groundwater tends to seep into everything given enough dozens of years... Texas is littered with half-capped polluting shale wells that were just kinda left there when the wells stopped being productive and the project-specific drilling LLC was dissolved when it hit the bankruptcy-by-design phase of the corporate lifecycle.
Centuries of potential contamination feels like a risk that should have more than 2 sentences.
[+] [-] bunderbunder|1 year ago|reply
Let's set aside the safety argument. They're claiming $0.46 per kilowatt-hour for a technology they haven't developed yet. I believe that's about an order of magnitude more expensive than what wind can do right now. Heck, right now my local utility's website is reporting a retail spot price of seven cents per kilowatt-hour. Maybe paying six times as much is worthwhile for the reduced carbon footprint relative to fossil fuels, but if that's the argument then just say that rather than weakening your position by calling it "cheap" when it's easy to see that it isn't.
[+] [-] credit_guy|1 year ago|reply
A nuclear power plant is a nuclear rector plus a thermal power plant, i.e. a turbine. Even if the safety of the reactor is 100%, what happens if there's an accident with the turbine? How do you perform maintenance? Sure, you have elevators to move people up and down, but how do you move things that are several tons up and down? A typical fuel rod assembly is about 4-5 meters long. The efficiency of the thermal power plant is about 30%, which means you need to dispose of 70% of the heat coming from the reactor. With regular nuclear power plants you use cooling towers; how are you going to do this when you are 1 mile underground? Do you install some pipes that bring cold water from the surface? Sounds reasonable until you do the math and find out you need to move 10 tons per second. The pumps that need to push the water up will need to fight the gravity of a column of water one mile high and push 10 tons each second. The math is not that difficult (potential energy = mgh), such pumps need to have a power of about 150 MW. That's ignoring the friction of the water in the pipe. But that's a big thing to ignore for a mile-long pipe. Oh, and the pressure at the bottom is 165 bar, about the same as the pressure in the reactor. You can avoid this huge pressure by creating moving the water up and down in stages, but that complicates the engineering, and increases the construction and maintenance cost.
[+] [-] Nifty3929|1 year ago|reply
Those who oppose will simply keep coming up with new reasons not to do it. They will only accept a reduction in usage. Anything that allows us to maintain our existing level of energy consumption will not be tolerated.
[+] [-] acidburnNSA|1 year ago|reply
You have serious constraints in neutronics when constrained to a drillable borehole diameter and low-enriched uranium. The radial peaking will be high. May still be an ok tradeoff.
[+] [-] karaterobot|1 year ago|reply
What a strange, science fictional way to describe fission! Surely it's not breaking down matter itself any more than burning wood or coal is. Would you say, about eating a sandwich, that it 'offers the promise of limitless energy by breaking down matter itself'?
[+] [-] poikroequ|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Dig1t|1 year ago|reply
If it will put people at ease, then just do it so we can finally have nuclear energy.