I've listened to his presentations on geometric unity several times. Again I think there are some flaws in his thought processes.

My biggest problem with gravity manipulation as a concept is the risk of a condition called false vacuum or vacuum decay. Something that if unleashed could completely unwind the universe as we know it.

On a more practical level. In fiction when they have gravity manipulation it's usually just used to create spaceships with artificial gravity. If a civilization has the ability to manipulate gravity and only uses it for that. It would be a bit like using electricity strictly to run fans.

Back to the subject at hand. Our civilization has a lot of problems. But most of them go away if we have abundant cheap energy. Fortunately we have sources. Nuclear fission and space based large scale solar are our best options at the moment. When we have the infrastructure for large scale space based solar we will be a good part of the way to becoming a Kardeshev 2 civilization. But before we get there we are probably going to have to kill a whole lot of people because a significant portion of the current population isn't interested in becoming a Kardeshev 2 civilization. They want technologically advanced civilization to die or at least collapse into a clean, green environmentally friendly feudal knightmare.

So those people will have to be accommodated.

Doesn't take 5 years, not even close. Dry storage can be done MUCH faster than that

How much solar with battery would it take to keep the pumps running?

That would seem like the best place right? You'll never have to worry about the oceans going away for billions of years.

Dump them down into the Marianas Trench.

Really.

The V.C. Sumner plant in Jenkinsville, SC is built below a big reservoir. Hard to imagine them having any trouble either.

60 pools sounds like a lot of failure points but it's probably a much smaller number that would require extraordinary measures before the material cooled down.

Natural evaporation is sufficient to keep spent fuel pools cool. All you need is a hose to keep the water topped off.

If there was a global electrical blackout, spent fuel pools would be far, far, far, far, far down the list of things to worry about.

So what happens if the transfer method breaks between the reactor and the pool and you can't get the rods into the pool?

if they start to go dry, put more water in.  If they boil it off, put more water in.  Put more water in.

I'm serious. It's that simple.


or contact Sam Brinton for deets.

While that may cause some headache, the rods are submerged the entire time, so not much would happen. The pool (at least at my plant) is directly adjacent to the reactor vessel. It all gets flooded with the same water and a gate gets opened between the two for the transfer

lol...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10520757/Biden-taps-non-binary-drag-queen-look-nuclear-waste.html

One of many problems about “ throw it in the ocean” is there’s nothing to stop the possible chain reaction within a fuel assembly (a neutron absorber). An old dry assembly won’t go critical, a submerged one can. So each assembly would end up as it’s own low power reactor. In most reactors that absorber is boron. SF pool water provides three functions: maintain a subcritical chemistry, cool decay heat generated, and neutron shielding for personal.

Then there is corrosion that would eventually cause assemblies to break open, allowing broken fuel pellets to possibly release hot particles into the ocean currents.

If in a pool that is just evaporating adding fresh water is no big deal because boron doesn’t evaporate. But if pool water goes away due to leakage then with gallon loss then added to, boron gets diluted and fuel assemblies get closer to critically. Actually no water on an assembly is better than water with no neutron absorber IF that assembly has been out of the core for some period of time, criticality and heat wise. But radiation would be lethal without concrete shielding.

Edit: another factor in SF pool design is geometric configuration of the fuel racks. Originally for most plants there was calculated spacing between stored fuel assemblies to prevent a critical mass. As power plants got life extensions, and reprocessing fuel was out of the question, companies went to high density fuel racks, with sheets of boron carbide sandwiched within each storage cell of the racks. When it was discovered that the boron carbide degraded over time, then companies had to be creative with shuffling fuel into different areas of storage pools based on fuel cycle burnup of each assembly. An assembly is typically considered ‘burned up’ after three complete fuel cycles, based on that particular power plant design. So ‘midlife’ assemblies can still go critical under the right conditions.



https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power-plant/nuclear-fuel/spent-fuel/radioactivity-and-decay-heat-of-spent-nuclear-fuel/#:~:text=Spent%20Fuel%20Decay%20Heat%20When%20a%20reactor%20is,after%20shutdown%20is%20referred%20to%20as%20decay%20heat.

This is wrong on multiple fronts. Firstly, spent fuel can never sustain a chain reaction on its own. It does not contain sufficient U-235/Pu-239 (for low enriched uranium commercial reactors). Only fresh fuel can. I don't expect anyone would be chucking brand new fresh fuel into the ocean. Secondly, spent fuel pools are specifically designed so that that fuel in unborated water can not be critical. There would have to be multiple things go wrong for that to happen.

The reactor has its own system to circulate water and remove heat from the fuel in the vessel while shut down and open, it can remain there indefinitely.

You leave them in the reactor - you just can't refuel and eventually you can't use the reactor because it doesn't produce enough heat.

He is a very sharp dude. While an old school leftist, he is critical of wokeism. His background in evolutionary biology lends itself, believe it or not, to complex systems analysis.

He may be painting a worst-case scenario, but it's worth thinking about, in much the same sense that an asteroid impact, while unlikely, is worth thinking about.

But what if global warming means there's no more water? Like anywhere! It just vanishes off the surface of the Earth and we can't get anymore? What do we do then?

Click To View Spoiler

We can, but a Jimmy Carter era regulation forbids this.

This.  The fish already look like this down there:








Not like a little mutation would be noticed ...

Seriously.

Drill a 2 mile deep bore hole out in the desert somewhere and drop them down it. Drop them in the Marianna Trench where they will be gone forever. Why do we store them the way we do instead of doing either?

just work a deal with elon, and a little bit of spent fuel goes on each and every star link satellite.  Just make sure when they hit end of life they reenter the atmosphere over our enemies...

That sounds like a gamechanger. Empty pools would solve most of the problem.

I find it interesting that despite there being experts present, nobody has brought any real numbers to the table. Obviously this issue has been widely studied at least since Fukushima Daichi's reactor 4 spent fuel pool reached equilibrium temp close to boiling on the 3rd day of the accident.

In that case the decay heat was 2.25 megawatts, equilibrium temp was 87 deg Celcius and the water lost to evaporation was 86 metric tons per day. That's two huge tanker trucks every day. Now obviously the need to use a cement pump truck was due to the radiation and hydrogen explosion hazard, in a less extreme station blackout you could pump that with a Harbor Freight gas powered pump from the nearest stream or a pond running it just 2 hours a day. And you would have weeks to dig new ditches to get that water close enough to pump with ordinary small scale pumps.

The scenario that this somehow becomes impossible after a few months doesn't seem reasonable because the decay heat goes down quickly and so does the equilibrium temp and evaporation rate. After 3 months using Fukushima SFP4 numbers that would be 1.5 MW and 83 C, 65 tons per day, 6 months 1.2 MW, 80 C, 43 tons per day. Even at about 2 years it would be 0.5 MW, 70 C and 19 tons.

The pool holds 1425 tons, so you could skip filling it up for a week or so and not have the rods exposed and a zirconium fire start.

If the Federal, state, regional, county and local village idiots are not able to task folks to deal with that long term, I guess they deserve to get a little extra ground shine for a few years in return.

Oh and sources:
Brewster: Evaporation of water at high mass-transfer rates by natural convection air flow with application to spent-fuel pools
Sandia Report SAND2012-6173
Additional Report of the Japanese Government to the IAEA - The accident at TEPCO's Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations - (Second Report)

I think the solution is to not store the fuel rods long term in the pools, but envirocunts don't seem to want a solution to that because it requires moving them.

What problem?

Even if we were re-processing, we would probably still use the same 5yr cool off period in the pool before shipping for re-processing that we use for dry cask storage.
New cask designs can cut this by a couple of years.

They don't get stored in the pool long-term. They go to dry storage, in a separate on-site facility

But, it needs to be stated that a Spent Fuel Pool is only at that thermal load during outage, so there's less than an 8% chance of that initial condition being met in the first place.  And that 8% is a conservative number because that's basically 1 minus capacity factor.  Only during a fraction of that 8% are the core fuel assemblies (the ones representing 75% of the thermal load) in the SFP.

Regardless, our SFP analyses assume this initial condition.

I can't embed this video, but this is some b-roll of fuel being loaded in casks for dry storage from my plant.

LinkedIn link

If you can't cool the SFP with station power, you can't obviously cool the reactor either. To me it doesn't seem to matter at that point where the spent fuel is, when the cooling method would be evaporative cooling of water inventory where they reside.

I guess someone could figure out some convective cooling arrangement that is easier to implement than a commercial gas or diesel fired pump and some fire hose. But that seems to be the maximum effort required (with a week to get a replacement if it fails).

but they can shut down the reactor, though keeping it idling might be better because then the pumps can run for the storage pools.  I am not going to worry about it either way, its above my paygrade and understanding.

Dropping rods from the surface in a mile of water doesn't require they all be dumped in one spot, they can be released in a 25m grid and only a handful will touch each other due to currents on the way down.

Vitrification is what we should be doing.

Kharn

And these guys get most of it wrong. Look at AVe's review of the glock 19. Most of the tech guys are like that also. They put together a good YouTube program but whenever they cross into an area I know we'll they get more than I would expect wrong.

Doing exactly what we are doing now is what we should be doing.

Vitrification solves a "problem" that doesn't actually exist.

There will be reactors in the not too distant future that will consume "spent" LWR and HWR fuel and turn it into enormous amounts of additional energy.

I keep asking what problem we're trying to solve. The imaginary one by the guy in the OP?

I agree, what we're doing now is what we should be doing.

Bret is very smart and is less of an egotist windbag than his brother.

He’s also a biologist and theorizing about nuclear problems should be a question and not a statement.

I ain’t skeerd.

The Czechs have a proposal to re use them for nuclear district heating.

Teplator, A Revolutionary Nuclear District Heating System

“It would be possible to heat all big Czech cities just from the reserves of spent fuel already available today in the Czech Republic”

As a biologist he should spend some time talking about how absurd the Linear No Threshold model is for radiation effects on living organisms.

Clinging to this absurd and blatantly false model has set us back enormously.

More people should be talking about it.

Emphasis on imaginary.  His references are 404, and in trying to track down those references, there appears to be nothing of the sort in those references, aside from a paper on the initiating condition.

Bret and his wife are both terrified of nuclear radiation, I saw a clip where he mentioned they won’t eat any fish out of the Pacific Ocean due to the Fukushima water discharges.  Even the most scientific mind will come up with some dumb stuff when they cease being rational about a topic.

Yep exactly. And again, it goes to analyzing to the Nth degree. Our UFSARs are publicly available and everyone here is free to read them to their hearts content and see just how deep we DO analyze for, but there is a limit. We don't have to plan for a solar flare that takes out all of the grid forever and I don't have to analyze for asteroids and I don't have to analyze for dinosaurs.

That being said, FLEX is quite an upgrade and people should worry less about these "problems."

Disperse them 15,000 feet down in the Great Southern Ocean.

So basically he is a moron.

You want kaiju, this is how you get kaiju..

Lol wow.

I'm reflexively uncomfortable with any system that casually discusses bringing water coolant of a fuel assembly to Tsat.

This is the kind of stuff there needs to be public service announcements about. Energy independence is too damned important to let ignorance rule the day.
I hear the most insane stuff from people when I tell them that I work in nuclear. They have literally no idea how anything works.

The problem of cooling the fuel in the pool where there could be a problem from boil off or seismic cracking.

While that is marginally better than disposing of fueled reactor cores at a depth of 150m off the coast of Norway*, if a design idea is only marginally better than Soviet Union Best Practices, the standard advice is to keep looking at other options.