Re: Congress Passes H-Prize

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Bill Clawson wrote:
> I think there is also consideration for putting the
> reformer in the car and filling the car up with
> methane /alcohol or similar.  This still doesn't get
> rid of the carbon, but at least the auto should be
> more efficient running on electric -- not sure of the
> total efficiency though.
>=20
> Supposedly China wants or is building thousands of the
> pebble reactors to handle their own power needs.  From
> what I gather that reactor technology is fairly safe
> as the expansion of the pebbles as things heat up tend
> to moderate the reactor's radiation flux -- i. e. they
> are somewhat self regulating.
>=20
With solid oxide fuel cells you don't even need a reformer, but they're
not exactly small or light machines. A one kilowatt unit that runs on
natural gas is about half the size of a regular household water heater.
I think it'll be a while before a fuel cell comes anywhere near the
energy density of a good ol' internal combustion engine, especially when
you consider that if you're going to be using a completely series
electrical configuration anyway you can design your ICE to be maximally
efficient, quiet, and clean at a single RPM. We're talking breathe the
exhaust, here, at least with low sulfur gas :)

http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/ is really into zinc as a way to
transport energy. Zinc-air batteries have 4x the energy density of
lead-acid and zinc can be reduced directly by solar energy or nuclear
heat, using some carbon in the process, though only 25% of the energy
comes from the carbon. The only problem is you need to be able to easily
swap anodes because that's your refueling process. Ideally you'd just
like to be able to pull the old ones out from the front or back and slam
in new ones. We'd need some sort of anode standard, methinks. Maybe I
should figure out how to run a car on ground up aluminum cans or
nickels. (http://www.coinflation.com/)

Pebble bed reactors can be made completely self regulated. I believe a
US company has a patent on using a butterfly valve to regulate a nuclear
gas turbine - closed loop, just open the valve when you need more power,
close it when you need less. The reactor heats up when the valve is
closed but only to a certain point and then stops. The more power it's
generating, the lower the temperature is. Wired Magazine called it a
"walk away" technology IIRC; if you have a problem you can go home and
sleep on it and come back the next day to fix it  :)



Complete passive safety is something that's missing from every water
cooled reactor that's ever been built. Pressurized water reactors and
CANDU reactors each have a measure of it coming from different design
points - for CANDU it's the fact that the reactor is in a "barely
supercritical" configuration and any change in configuration (like the
collapse of the containment structure) makes it no longer supercritical,
and the fact that there are so many pipes that it can just radiate away
its decay heat to the air. With PWRs it's the negative void coefficient
of light water and probably a couple of other things I don't know about
because I've never been interested in PWRs  :)


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