Umm... Not even close.

Probably the ones who put hair dryers on the exhaust manifolds.

You wouldn’t get a debate on much of anything that matters. Engineers take their secret sauce seriously. Making someone else smarter is rarely an objective, in my experience.

Modern engine management uses a torque demand system tied to the throttle pedal. As such, the boost controller will control the turbine wheel speed to match the request. Doing this with small, responsive turbos and electronic wastegate actuators, very linear response is possible.

GM has the best batteries in the industry. Heck, they have the best electric everything from a quality standpoint. They have done a very good job with their electrification efforts.

From a levelized cost of electricity perspective, I believe we have a path to beat natural gas’s total price in the United States today. However, to do so will take a bunch of engineers who really want it badly. The nuclear industry is killing itself by accepting that nuclear MUST be expensive (and I’ll…

What’s interesting is that for solar to replace the power at Fukushima Daiichi, it would take up more square footage than the entire evacuation zone from the accident. So, by design, solar would displace more people than nuclear on a bad day.

A positive void coefficient is a negative trait which still can exist within a safe plant. Properly designing around it and its characteristics is achievable, regardless of cooling system. In many cases applicable to real plants, the primary concern is a short, destructive burst of energy, rather than a sustained…

Remember, fuel fabrication is expensive. Having to fabricate significantly more fuel wipes out a lot of the benefits of no-enrichment. Once the supply chain exists (and it does), covering the cost of SWUs (especially now that we’re using centrifugal enrichment) really isn’t a huge deal. And even there, the fuel cost…

“Thyroid-cancer rates skyrocked following the accident. Deaths as a result of exposure are impossible to quantify, but the figures tally from the tens of thousands to millions, depending on whose data you use.”

Economically, I think the whole chain of a CANDU is competitive within a nation. What you lose in power density, you get back in low forging costs, fewer long-lead components, and a less-intense fuel infrastructure. Conversely, you pay a penalty on heavy water production (CANDU 6 has about $1.5B in heavy water for…

I think the issue with CANDUs are that most run with a positive coefficient of reactivity. Licensing that with the NRC would just be a bear. The Canadian regulator is really pretty good and works with you to understand if something is actually an issue or not (from what I understand). The U.S. is more “thou shall not…

A post I wrote about Chernobyl for a class I helped teach:

Kind of funny to think that, in some ways, it could be argued that it’s safer to “island” them than go to diesels.

Well, most nukes can actually load follow quite well. We designed all of them to do pretty significant movements (often 5%/minute continuously over a range). However, as baseload became the standard of operation, the systems required to do it economically were often removed. Operations guidelines were also not really…

Refueling is an overblown thing. Truth is, plants turn off for a ton of reasons which have nothing to do with refueling. This is why the capacity factor of top performing CANDUs and top performing LWRs are very similar. You have to turn off every 18-24 months regardless of your fuel type. As long as refueling itself…

I think you’ll note that the Areva EPR projects are going worse than the AP1000 ones. It turns out, restarting an industry while contending with the most stringent regulations imaginable is really hard. I can say that the EPR or AP1000 are not the “problem” here. It doesn’t matter what plant design you want to…

I can’t get super involved in this discussion because I work for Westinghouse, but I’ll point out that said contractor was an owner of Westinghouse at the time. As such, certain decisions were probably not made as freely as you’d like (I wasn’t there at the time, but I can assume). I sure wish I could elaborate…

I read this statement in the same way that I read the following: “If I could modify my physique, height, and “game” to approximate Gronk with James Hunt’s mannerisms, I would have found more success in dating.”

CP...