Do 2 Kilowatt Nuclear Reactor Still Exist

[jim hardy]

interesting times those must have been.

internet is just amazing:
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev25-34/chapter3.shtml

The Bulk Shielding Reactor and Tower Shielding Facility were designed to test materials that might be used on a nuclear-powered aircraft. For the U.S. Air Force, improved materials represented a means toward an end: a nuclear-powered engine that could drive long-range bombers to takeoff speeds and propel them around the world. To achieve this goal, the Laboratory designed an experimental 100-kW aircraft reactor as a demonstration.


Mock-up of ORNL's "Fireball" reactor designed for sophisticated experiments.
This small reactor, operating at high temperatures, used molten uranium salts as its fuel, which flowed in serpentine tubes through an 18-inch (46-centimeter) reactor core. A heat exchanger dissipated the reactor's heat into the atmosphere. In 1953, the Laboratory constructed a building to house this experimental reactor.

To contain molten salts at high temperatures within a reactor, the Laboratory used a nickel-molybdenum alloy, INOR-8, designed by Oak Ridge researchers and fabricated at the International Nickel Company. Able to resist corrosion at high temperatures while retaining acceptable welding properties, the alloy was commercialized as Hastelloy-N by private industry (an early example of technology transfer) to supply tubing, sheet, and bar stock for industrial applications. The aircraft reactor also compelled Laboratory personnel to learn how to perform welding with remote manipulators and how to remotely disassemble molten-salt pumps. In addition, Laboratory researchers also devised two salt reprocessing schemes to recover uranium and lithium-7 from spent reactor fuel.

The first test run of the Aircraft Reactor Experiment took place in October 1954. The reactor ran at 1 MW for 100 hours. Don Trauger and other observers of the reactor's operations recall that the reactor core, pumps, valves, and components literally became red hot. Completing the design, fabrication, and operation of such an exotic nuclear reactor in five years was considered a noteworthy event, and dignitaries such as General James Doolittle, Admiral Lewis Strauss, and Captain Hyman Rickover visited Oak Ridge to see the red-hot reactor in action.

unobtanium ? Wow, i could have had INOR-8 !

that tower shielding facility was still visible just outside Knoxville, along I-75, until late 80's.

 

[etudiant]

interesting times those must have been.

internet is just amazing:
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev25-34/chapter3.shtml


unobtanium ? Wow, i could have had INOR-8 !

that tower shielding facility was still visible just outside Knoxville, along I-75, until late 80's.

Wonderful information. I did not know that. Thank you.
Only quibble is that red hot (maybe 600 degrees C) is not enough for a good engine.
A good jet engine today has a compressor exit temp of about 1000 degrees C, with turbine inlet temperatures a few hundred degrees higher. ( The turbines don't melt because cooling air from the compressor is pumped through the turbine blades.) So the reactor would need to run at about 1500 degrees C to be an adequate substitute for a contemporary fossil fuel burner.
That said, I'm sure that engineers could make a 600 degrees C heat source work pretty well. It might be horrendously inefficient, but with nuclear we have fuel to burn, so it could work.
How reliable it would be would need to be demonstrated rather carefully of course.

 

[jim hardy]

""A good jet engine today has a compressor exit temp of about 1000 degrees C,..""

wow

i have a good friend at Pratt-Whitney who specialized in blades.
i recall his amazement at materials progress in 80's. I suspect 1950's temperatures were more modest, at least until SR71..

still,,, even in humble world of power production,
when our turbine arrived on site the old timers said:

" I never thought i'd see another 550 degree saturated steam turbine. And surely never any turbine this big! "


thanks for your kindness,

old jim

 

[average guy]

jim
this happened to be on front page of
website i was looking for for other post.
'Energy Department Takes First Step to Spur U.S. Manufacturing of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors'

Have A Nice Day!

 

[etudiant]

jim
this happened to be on front page of
website i was looking for for other post.
'Energy Department Takes First Step to Spur U.S. Manufacturing of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors'

Have A Nice Day!

These are fairly chunky units afaik, minimally 50 megawatts.
But they are small compared to gigawatt beasts such as the AP 1000.

 

[Astronuc]

jim
this happened to be on front page of
website i was looking for for other post.
'Energy Department Takes First Step to Spur U.S. Manufacturing of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors'

Have A Nice Day!

www.grants.gov/search/search.do?mode=VIEW&oppId=138813 (The DOE is proposing a 50% cost share with industry)
www.ne.doe.gov/newsroom/2012PRs/nePR012012_print.htmlCached


http://www.ne.doe.gov/pdfFiles/factSheets/2012_SMR_Factsheet_final.pdf

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/commission/slides/2010/20100406/black-20100406.pdf

These are fairly chunky units afaik, minimally 50 megawatts.
But they are small compared to gigawatt beasts such as the AP 1000.

SMRs have a range of small capcities per module, but the point is to build several modules on one plant site. For example, 12 50MWe modules would provide 600 MW, or 5 125 MWe modules would provide a 625 MWe plant. With one module down, the others continue to operate, so the plant can conceivably achieve a high capacity factor (CF).

 

[average guy]

astro nuke
you just shot down what i was going to say
oh. they mean THAT kind of modular.
i thought it was one big unit where as things progress
they yank out a section and update with a new one.
'never mind'
note: astro nuke i hit report button by mistake on your post.
they need to move that button further away from 'reply'

Have A Nice Day!

 

[wizwom]

As others have noted, you could make a tabletop nuclear power plant in the kilowatt thermal range. The licensing, though, is just as crazy as for a 4 GW plant that takes up a square mile with all its support.

Bare-sphere nickel plated Pu (Jezebel) is about 12.6 cm diameter to sustain k=1; if you have a reflector you can bring close for a bit, you can bring k>1, if you put an absorber next to it, you go k<1.

Harvesting tiny amounts of power is an interesting problem, but a thermocouple or a sterling engine can do it.

 

[wizwom]

the Army built one that goes on a flatbed trailer truck. its intent was to make power for mobile communications centers back in the vacuum tube days..

That was the ML-1; it was designed for 350kW
http://www.atomicengines.com/ML1.html

The Antarctica unit was a PM-3A

 

[nikkkom]

I suppose you could take a thousand megawatt reactor, pull 2 kW off it and dump the other 999,998 kW as waste heat...

Or you can take Hanford's Cs and Sr canisters from their pool (see attached photo), put them into a RPV, let them heat up to ~300 C and run a turbine off their steam.

Granted, they generate only about 300 kilowatts, but the upside is that they need no stinking refueling for the next 50 years or so...