Topic: Fission Power Plants

[Skaran]

For SM:VM anyone know where I can find the fuel consumption details ie mass, volume, price per rating point for fission reactors?
I had thought I found them but I could have imagined it in any case I can't find these details now.

[Ynglaur]

Tech Law (1st Edition rules) had them under the starship construction section.  Not sure where they are in the Privateers series.

[Skaran]

Well found the section in SM1 it does have a volume per power rating per 100 days. No mention of mass that I could find, I suspect with fission it should be much higher than 1 tonne per cubic meter.

[GrumpyOldFart]

Let's see... Uranium is 18.9 grams per cubic centimeter...

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_grams_does_a_cubic_inch_of_Uranium-235_or_U-238_weigh

100 centimeters to the meter, so 100 x 100 x 100 x 18.9 = 1,890 kg per cubic meter.

[markc]

Look at post #19 here http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?topic=10576.0 . It will have the page numbers and some info you need.
MDC

[arakish]

Look at post #19 here http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?topic=10576.0 . It will have the page numbers and some info you need.
MDC

I looked at this post.  It is for Fusion fuel, not Fission.

However, as a guide, it costs more to produce fissionable material than it does to produce deuterium.  Say, maybe a 1.5 cost factor for fission fuel?

rmfr

[markc]

Look at post #19 here http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?topic=10576.0 . It will have the page numbers and some info you need.
MDC

I looked at this post.  It is for Fusion fuel, not Fission.

However, as a guide, it costs more to produce fissionable material than it does to produce deuterium.  Say, maybe a 1.5 cost factor for fission fuel?

rmfr

 Sorry for the fast reading of the post you made and the misdirection on my part.


 As an House Rule I think that it might be close to x2 the cost or 100,000 but that is just my guess until Defendi can give you an official answer.
MDC

[Defendi]

I'm pretty sure we never set a price, since the refuel times are so far apart.

[Marc R]

This just makes me keep hearing "One Point Twenty One Gigawatts!!!" and professor brown thinking that Marty could just pick up some plutonium at the corner store in 1980.

[arakish]

This just makes me keep hearing "One Point Twenty One Gigawatts!!!" and professor brown thinking that Marty could just pick up some plutonium at the corner store in 1980.

LOL 

Look at post #19 here http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?topic=10576.0 . It will have the page numbers and some info you need.
MDC

I looked at this post.  It is for Fusion fuel, not Fission.

However, as a guide, it costs more to produce fissionable material than it does to produce deuterium.  Say, maybe a 1.5 cost factor for fission fuel?

rmfr

 Sorry for the fast reading of the post you made and the misdirection on my part.


 As an House Rule I think that it might be close to x2 the cost or 100,000 but that is just my guess until Defendi can give you an official answer.
MDC

You are probably more correct than I with the x2 cost factor.  Thanks for correction.

I'm pretty sure we never set a price, since the refuel times are so far apart.

This is also correct.  Doesn't a nuclear fuel rod last for a decade or two?

rmfr

[Defendi]

18 months, I believe, on a normal fission reactor.  I might have thought it was longer when I wrote that book.  It was a long time ago.

[Skaran]

In my starship designs (in Traveller TNE) I usually fuel fission plants for at least 1 year. In this system fuel for a fission plant including shielding etc is 14 tonnes per cubic meter, so I could go with this.

[GrumpyOldFart]

That means the average density of the materials in a fission plant (fuel, shielding, etc.) is just about 15 times as dense as uranium.

Hmmm...

[Ynglaur]

Barring technological advances in lightweight, heat-resistant materials, of course.

[markc]

 IMHO Traveler may give a good baseline for the $ of the radioactive's also.
MDC

[Defendi]

I would do this.  (I won't have time to do the math on this this week (I have to do some tax stuff), but someone else could do it and post it here.)

Weight and mass should be irrelevant.  With an 18 month refuel time, you don't have to carry extra and a full load of fuel would already be figured in to the plant.

Calculate how much it would cost to run a fusion plant for 18 months.

Multiply that by two.

I suspect that gets us near a number we want.  If someone is willing, do the math on that and post it hear.  We'll see if it feels right.

[arakish]

Actually I was fairly close in my estimate several posts up.  Been researching and reading up on how long nuclear fuel rods last before they are considered spent.  Depending upon the technology, most open cycle (use fuel once then store it) plants can use fuel rods for 3 operational cycles (typically 5 to 6 years total now) inside the reactor.  And this is actually only using up only 5% of the total fuel mass.

Then you have the recycling plants capable recycling spent fuel for an additional set of cycles, extending the life of the fuel for about another 75% of time and about 10-12% of the total fuel mass.

Thus, with today's technology, our fission plants fuel can last for 5 to 10 years.  Higher level technology would only extend that fuel life.

Now I am off to look into cost.

rmfr

[Skaran]

By the way the density of Uranium is around 19 grams per cubic centimeter or 19 tonnes per cubic meter so an average value of 14 tonnes per cubic meter including shielding etc sounds more reasonable to me than ever.

[arakish]

By the way the density of Uranium is around 19 grams per cubic centimeter or 19 tonnes per cubic meter so an average value of 14 tonnes per cubic meter including shielding etc sounds more reasonable to me than ever.

Seems OK to me also.  However, U-235 provides the greatest amount of power averaging about 900 to 1000 MW per cubic meter.

Actually that depends on the fuel used.  Some reactors actually use liquid fuel which is much less dense than uranium.  Others use ceramic fuels, also less dense that uranium.  Others use what is called uranyl salts, again less dense.  However, these fuels do not produce as much power averaging about 250 to 600 MW per cubic meter.

Could not get any exact figures on the cost for creating nuclear fission fuel rods.  However, I did find many sites that mentioned cost comparisons to getting coal for fuel.

Where the real cost skyrocketer comes from is the safety measures.  More money has to be spent on the safety features than all other costs combined.  Of course, that is with today's technology.

Here is listed some things I found interesting.

Advantages

• Nuclear power costs about the same as coal, so it's not expensive to make.
• Produces huge amounts of energy from small amounts of fuel.
• Produces small amounts of waste.
• Nuclear power is reliable.

Disadvantages

• Although not much waste is produced, it is very, very dangerous.  It must be sealed up and buried for many thousands to millions of years to allow the radioactivity to die away.  For all that time it must be kept safe from earthquakes, flooding, terrorists, and everything else.
• Nuclear power is reliable, but a lot of money has to be spent on safety - if it does go wrong, a nuclear accident can be a major disaster.

In most of the material I found, it seems that producing fissionable fuel cost about 3 times as much as it does to create deuterium and/or tritium.  Of course, that is with today's technology.  With advanced technology, costs could flucuate, perhaps dropping.

Thus, using the 50,000 per metric ton for deuterium, a metric ton of fissionable material would cost 100,000 to 150,000 per metric ton.

rmfr

[Skaran]

Traveller's cost is 75,000 Cr per cubic meter of fuel. It has three fission reactors listed with fuel consumption of 0.75 cubic meters per MW per year at introduction, 0.25 cubic meters one tech level later and 0.1 cubic meters at the last level there is any improvement (basically now) since after this they are replaced by fusion reactors. So in that system basically three generations of fission reactor before fusion replaces them. This is for vehicles of course it doesn't cover the big power plants.