[HN Gopher] Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci mic... ___________________________________________________________________ Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci microreactor Author : akeck Score : 80 points Date : 2022-11-23 21:01 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.power-eng.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.power-eng.com) | nwatson wrote: | After ethics reviews, send some prototypes to Ukraine this | winter. | worldsayshi wrote: | Sounds like something you don't want Russians to target | thought. | BlueTemplar wrote: | > Commercial deployment is targeted for 2027. | | (Sounds like the new fuel might be available sooner, but | probably not for this winter?) | sebmellen wrote: | I love seeing innovative tech like this spring out of the | Pittsburgh region... Once the nation's capitol of industry | innovation, maybe it can be again. | riffic wrote: | the rust belt has _good bones_ , as they say. | ngvrnd wrote: | Wow... Walt's Mill. My mom worked there, I have a photo of her | standing above a fuel storage well... It used to be a test | reactor with a channel of water through the core that they would | send boats through to test samples of materials for radiation | exposure effects. | Gravityloss wrote: | I feel that this reactor is _too small_ for actual usage. It 's | about wind turbine sized. But better to err on this side, if you | want the iteration speed up and start mass production. Future | versions can always be scaled up. | jasonwatkinspdx wrote: | DARPA and NASA have some combined projects developing small | reactors suitable for both mars and deep space exploration as | well as replacing oil tanks for generators in remote military | installations like in the arctic. This is almost certainly | chasing that, not consumer generation. | ripe wrote: | From Robots In Plain English [1]: | | The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers each carry an old kind | of power supply: a nuclear power generator that runs on | radioactive plutonium dioxide. | | This generator has been used on many missions since the | 1960s. | | It produces a steady 110 watts of electricity. The decay of | the radioactive material also emits heat, which helps keep | the electronics onboard warm through the freezing nights on | Mars. | | Supplemented by rechargeable batteries, the generator | provides enough power to let the rover pull all-nighters for | years to come. | | [1] https://www.robotsinplainenglish.com/e/2020-08-09-nuclear | .ht... | cjtrowbridge wrote: | The keyword in Small Modular Reactor is Modular. 5mw is not | "too small for actual usage." You can connect many of them | together in one plant to produce however much power you want. | Just like wind turbines, a typical design includes more than | one. | masklinn wrote: | Seriously, 5MWe is what, a few thousand homes? Low thousand | if you need to plug in local commons and you've got lots of | EVs around maybe. | | Alongside a few MWt to shed into district heating, that seems | pretty nice in a distributed grid context. | | > Just like wind turbines, a typical design includes more | than one. | | Wind farms are a thing because location is an issue, and | there's a lot of nimby-ism, so if you can plop down turbines | you plop down a bunch. | | Though I guess nimby would also affect SMRs, location is way | less of an issue, if you have space for a farm you might as | well use a classical nuclear plant. | | Plus the capacity factor of nukes is way higher than | turbines. Assuming SMRs follow the nuclear norm you don't | need to overbuild to compensate. | multiplegeorges wrote: | Northern communities in Canada are a perfect application of this | tech. Currently, they mostly burn diesel for power. | rx_tx wrote: | > The microreactor can generate 5 MW of electricity or 13 MW of | heat from a 15 MW thermal core. Exhaust heat from the power | conversion system can be used for district heating applications | or low-temperature steam. | | They are aiming 8 years planned service life, and one novel thing | is the use of heatpipes (like your CPU cooler) using liquid metal | as a working fluid. | | They actually don't say how big it is, I guess still quite | sizeable given the heat output. Definitely not a single-family | home device. | cjtrowbridge wrote: | It's a shipping container, same type of footprint and install | as the tesla battery packs. They have pictures and videos if | you google it. | BlueTemplar wrote: | 4 trucks for the whole setup | masklinn wrote: | > I guess still quite sizeable given the heat output. | Definitely not a single-family home device. | | I'd think the 5MWe would be a hint. Standard residential | service drop is like 40kW. | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | My understanding is on-shore windmills cost about ~$1.5M and | $50k in maintenance per year - last for 20 years - for 1MW. | | I'm skeptical this can come anywhere close to that. | | But if it's within an order of magnitude - it could replace old | coal powerplants as they're decommissioned. | beambot wrote: | Apples & oranges: wind is an intermittent generator versus | eVinci for base generation | aeyes wrote: | A problem with on-shore wind is that it is already getting | hard to find more space for it in some European countries. | You also can't put windmills in densely populated areas where | most power is needed so you have to take energy transmission | cost into account as well. | | If it can be demonstrated that these reactors are safe, you | could put them almost anywhere. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-11-23 23:00 UTC)