This actually happened in August and September of 2023 and it’s great validation for High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR) at larger scales. I hope they have the guts to also do a full loss of coolant test. I’ve also heard the these two reactors have been turned off for quite a while due to issues with the primary heat exchangers, temperature fluctuations, and uneven cooling - characteristically disadvantages of pebble beds.
There’s of course 2 flavors of HTGR (prismatic and pebble bed), and people choose the pebble version for continuous refueling despite all the drawbacks [1]. But there’s a lot of reasons to do prismatic. Can’t wait to see China’s prismatic HTGR.
"GDP is only a measurement of how reliant a place or country is on the global economy. Self-sufficiency has a GDP of 0. Wasteful consooomerism has an extremely large GDP."
I have a feeling that in hindsight, 30-40 years from now, this will seem like no brainer and that the period prior was heavily anti-meritocratic and counterproductive.
If the pipeline started operating, which it probably would in a few months with energy catastrophe in Europe - it would be total victory for Russia: natural gas revenues through the roof, end of war, etc etc. USA for some reason believes that Russian victory is against its interests.
In some respects, vulnerability to attack is a feature, not a flaw for promoting peace and collaboration instead of violence. A country with nuclear reactors is less likely to piss neighbors off enough to lead to an invasion. If invasion occurs, everyone will be extra careful. A country with nuclear reactors is less likely to be bombed to shit by other countries due to the reactor's radioactivity inventory potentially containing other countries as well as the country in question - ie. don't spoil the prize.
Meltdown accident: basically, reactor is turned off, however heat continues to be generated because of a thing called decay heat which is when isotopes generated by the fission reactions decay to more stable isotopes and release energy. It's about 7% of a fission reactor's power and continues for a few hours until it's negligible. 7% of a gigawatt reactor is like having a couple of jet engines going full blast inside the core. This heat has to be removed, and meltdowns happen when people fail to do so - basically pumps break, coolant leaks, or coolant is blocked from cooling down the core. Recent micro reactors get around this because they don't need active coolant or people to cool down the reactor - they just cool off by conduction or simple heat rejection systems. I read recently that fusion reactor will also generate decay heat from all the activated components and this is comparable to a fission reactor. The difference is there's a lot less radioactive crap in a fusion reactor - but the fusion reactor will still meltdown and they are expensive...
These guys explicitly want to couple their nuclear plant with wind/solar: https://usnc.com/mmr-energy-system/. And from top level, it looks a lot like a natural gas plant.
There’s of course 2 flavors of HTGR (prismatic and pebble bed), and people choose the pebble version for continuous refueling despite all the drawbacks [1]. But there’s a lot of reasons to do prismatic. Can’t wait to see China’s prismatic HTGR.
[1] https://lvenneri.com/blog/pebble-bed-nukegumball