Calling plutonium a bridge fuel to HALEU is such a crazy thing to say. Plutonium is derived from Uranium-238, which is 99.3% of natural uranium. HALEU is enriched U-235, which is 0.7%. There's no large-scale nuclear future running on HALEU. It's always either been plutonium derived from U-238 or U-233 derived from thorium.
I tried showing a finance guy a Python version of a levelized cost of electricity spreadsheet he made. He laughed in my face and continued using Excel to drive executive decisions.
It's not that impressive. IMHO. The thing they're demonstrating is that they have connections in the admin sufficient to get access to get stuff done. That can be valuable.
They used old TRISO fuel from General Atomics, not their own new fuel.
They used their connections to Secretary of Energy Chris Wright to get priority access at LANL, who provided nuclear engineering services and an existing critical facility (including building, safeguards, instrumentation, controls, rigging hardware).
LANL operated the facility to bring it to cold critical.
This is a cool milestone for sure, but bringing legacy enriched uranium critical isn't really interesting from an engineering perspective. I think they just wanted to claim to be the first VC to do a critical assembly.
I like that Valar is trying to move fast. It's true that you can't really learn much about your reactor until you have a commercially-relevant prototype, and they're trying to get to that point really fast. Respect for that. This little criticality experiment is more of a stunt though, for sure.
BTW TerraPower, a VC-backed nuclear startup, was splitting far more atoms, at high temperature and power, in the Advanced Test Reactor 5 years ago testing new fuel they designed themselves. So while it may be true that this is the first VC-backed criticality experiment, it's not the first time VC-backed companies split the atom (which is how the Valar founder announced it).
I like the idea of battery powered ships for short haul ferries. I'm expecting nuclear-powered civilian ships like the Savannah, Otto Hahn, Mutsu, and all the Russian icebreakers to be the better solution for longer haul cargo, tanker, and cruise ships.
Are you one of the old school nuclear people that think these newcomers are crazy and this might actually damage nuclear's reputation or do you think this will actually work?
I was already sceptical, but this feels like nuclear DOGE.
I'm right in the middle of those groups. I think they're mostly crazy and will be hit on the head with the Rickover memo when reactor performance and economics become real considerations, but also I think the industry has been pretty stagnant and needs some new excitement and to split a few atoms with weird and fun reactors.
Main focus of the industry by far should be deploying more AP1000s or ABWRs right now though.
The cruise missile is technically easier than the airplane because you don't need to shield the pilot or crew, which is the really hard part in the air because radiation shielding is heavy.
This was never an actual reactor design. Ford imagined a future where nuclear power could, maybe somehow, be miniaturized. It was a vision.
Even as early as 1956, textbooks said [1]: "The fantastic possibility has been envisaged of including in an automobile enough fissionable material, about the size of a pea, to last the life of the vehicle. In order to realize why this is not within the bounds of reality, it is necessary to understand something about the fission process."
I have freshrss on a VPS and use the web interface as my client on computers and my phone. Is FocusReader a big upgrade over the native web experience?
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