Monday
VR Adventure:
Another week goes by without my headset. Just no luck on VR fitness this week.
Food: 36
Weight: 188.5
Today’s Awesome:
Those who know me know I absolutely love nuclear fusion. It’s the future! (And the joke is that it always will be).
Still, if folks are serious about decarbonizing and such, nuclear might be worth a serious look. It’s just incredibly potent, folks have new ideas about how to handle the waste, and so on.
Consider this new plan in Finland.
In a matter of months, the machines inside this boxy gray building will begin a weekly routine that will continue for a century: placing highly radioactive gray cuboid rods into copper cylinders the length of a Lincoln Town Car. From there, the canisters will travel roughly two hours underground to crypts meant to keep the spent-fuel rods undisturbed for millennia in bedrock that geologists say hasn’t shifted in almost 2 billion years. Sealed twice over in bentonite clay ― which expands when wet, preventing water from seeping in and corroding the capsules, and offers stability in case of an earthquake ― this site is meant to entomb nuclear waste for as close to eternity as any human endeavor can guarantee.
Also this cool context for the waste.
The U.S. alone has produced more than 85,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. That may sound like a lot, but nuclear waste is heavy, and even that total is compact enough to fit on a single football field. Hardly the green glowing goo seen in cartoons, spent fuel comes out in hollow bundles of zirconium-alloy rods filled with gummy bear-sized pellets of enriched uranium. The country’s 93 remaining reactors, which generate just less than one-fifth of U.S. electricity, produce waste at a rate of about 2,000 tons per year. Spent fuel is stored across the country at about 80 sites, mostly at the same facilities as the reactors that produced the waste, either in container pools where rods are kept cool or in dry casks.
For Your Consideration:
Tuesday
Food: 37
Weight: 187.7
Today’s Awesome:
One big idea for nuclear: go small. Modular reactors are all the rage right now.
For Your Consideration:
Wednesday
Food: FAIL DAY
Weight: 185.7
Today’s Awesome:
Nuscale is one modular reactor that got design approval (a MASSIVE win), and is beginning production!
For Your Consideration:
Thursday
Food: 27
Weight: 187.1
Today’s Awesome:
What’s cooler than small, modular reactors? Microreactors! Like this one from SpaceX engineers. Check out their site here.
For Your Consideration:
Friday
Food: FAIL DAY
Weight: 187.0
Today’s Awesome:
Another idea for nuclear waste? Turn it into batteries that last for thousands of years.
For Your Consideration:
Saturday
Food: FAIL DAY
Weight: ?
Out on a trip.
Today’s Awesome:
Before we turn that waste into batteries, you can recycle the waste from conventional plants and keep using it as fuel for small, modular reactor.
For Your Consideration:
Well played
Sunday
Food: FAIL DAY
I wasn’t good at keeping track over a trip I took. Oooof.
Weight: ?
Out on the trip.
Today’s Awesome:
What about meltdowns? One company is making meltdown-proof balls to hold the fuel. Nuscale also plans for passive cooling techniques. TerraPower, a Bill Gates-invested company, is already building in Wyoming.
The design makes the system safer, he said, and inherently prevents meltdowns.
“That liquid metal has a very high boiling point, and what that means is the reactor can’t get hot enough to boil the coolant off,” Navin said. “So in the event of an accident happening, or loss of power, we don’t have to touch anything to keep the reactor from melting down.”
As a word of caution to hypers like myself, the article goes on:
We’ve been here before
There have been high degrees of enthusiasm at various times in U.S. history for investing in nuclear power. Such endeavors have always come with baggage. It’s expensive, technically complex and dogged by safety concerns. Public concerns about the prospects of a core meltdown, proliferation or security breach require constant management.
Nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism risk is the danger that nations or terrorist groups could illicitly obtain nuclear-weapon-usable materials from reactors or fuel cycle facilities, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
For Your Consideration:
Outro:
Oooof. I lost some days there, but checking in Monday, I’m back to around 186.9 as a rolling average. Not great. Still, not the worst. Man, I miss my VR headset already. It was nice to have something consistently improving for more than half a year! Will I be able to find a way to make workouts fun and accessible while I wait for a controller to become available (they’re still out of stock)? Fingers crossed.