Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV) Ingots

[Finishline42]

Saw this on X and don't know if it's accurate. Maybe our forum expert can chime in? If it is, it's going to be a big impediment to building a bunch of new nuclear power plants...

Link to tweet

?s=20

[FadedMullet]

1. The article lists the five countries that have the capabilty to make these vessels and the U.S. isn't one of them.

[Turbineguy]

3. We like to fire skilled people,

outsource and give the savings to CEO's

[Flash953]

4. Got that right

[NNadir]

2. The technology is not necessarily rocket science, and can be built. It is true that antinukes have worked to...

...destroy American nuclear manufacturing infrastructure, thus threatening the future, but it's not like it's a big industrial secret to build these pressure vessels.

In fact, as this is my son's field for his Ph.D. thesis - I just read his thesis proposal - this may be time for new classes of alloys. In the 1960's and 1970's the United States dominance in steel technology was lost because newer alloys required retooling industrial plants both in size and type.

In countries that had newer infrastructure, either as a result of wartime destruction or simply because they were entering a new field, the ability to create infrastructure to address new materials was incorporated into the design. This made larger, older facilities, noncompetitive.

It follows that the construction of new infrastructure offers the possibility of building superior manufacturing systems based on the most current technology.

This represents an opportunity, assuming we can restrain idiots and grifters.

The fact is that nuclear reactor materials, owing to the vast energy density related material and environmental superiority of nuclear energy over fossil fuel and so called "renewable energy" junk, will not require all that much material, and thus not all that many capable plants.

There is a never ending parade of course, of whiny antinukes raising specious - and usually ignorant - objections to claim the use of nuclear energy is impossible, representing relative trivialities as if they were insurmountable.

Meanwhile, in China, where since the year 2000, 56 new reactors have entered full commercial operation and 35 are under construction, blowing some rather huge holes in the rhetoric of what is and what is not impossible. China started with essentially no infrastructure in 2000 and now possesses the best infrastructure in the world.

I would note that my son is working on the frontier of a new approach to nuclear materials - real as opposed to hyped - additive manufacture. This will allow for preparing types of materials previously inaccessible by other means. He is working to understand the radiation related properties of materials that are decidedly "out of the box."

Additive manufacture, (aka "3D printing" ) is especially useful for building small reactors. There is a lot of hype around small reactors, and many programs will fail, but those that succeed - and succeed they will - will be in the catbird seat. My impression is that they can be built on a continuous basis running plants around the clock, plants powered by the small reactors they will produce.

By the way, fascist owned "X" is not a place to learn about nuclear technology or, in fact, any engineering or technical subject. Any idiot can write anything there, and often, as we know, idiots do write there and sometimes read there.

The success of ignorance cheering sales pitch of antinukes of course, has limited the scale of what is left to be saved by nuclear energy, but it remains the best, and really, only shot we have. We'd better get to it.

[Finishline42]

7. I had no idea a bunch of hippies with signs were so powerful...

The nuclear power industry in the US was it's own worst enemy. Instead of a US Dept of Nuclear Power we allowed local utilities to build and operate nuclear reactors. Some are very capable but others aren't. Every time a utility built it's first reactor it's was a learning experience. And then the bean counters short change safety measures in the name of profit.

For profit utilities operate on a 'run to fail' strategy. Operate equipment at it's limits and when it fails replacement just becomes justification for a rate increase. Don't think that works with nuclear power plants...

BTW, China is able to build a bunch of reactors because they don't ask for permission, they just do it.

[NNadir]

8. No, the worst enemy, then, now, and forever is mindless critics with poor educations who have sold the world a bill...

...of deadly goods, that nuclear energy is "too dangerous" and fossil fuels aren't "too dangerous."

The world is burning as a result, and still we have these tiresome fools whining about things they don't understand, layering them on irrelevant crap about "profit." I note as a result of the contemptable ignorance of antinukes, the fossil fuel industry is extremely profitable.

The war in Ukraine was funded by profits provided by Russian sales of gas, oil and coal to German antinukes.

Do any antinukes here, have no sense, at long last, of decency?

It's not about profit, other than the profits provided to the fossil fuel industry by miscreants attacking the only alternative, fission energy.

It's about ignorance.

Nuclear reactors have failed, and it takes a healthy dollop of arrogant ignorance to claim that these failures are worse than a dying atmosphere on a burning planet, but cults - and let's be clear that antinukism has all the properties of a cult, since no amount of information can change the minds of its adherents - cannot process the information that their little trivial bugaboos, their idiot chants of "Chernobyl!!! Fukushima!!!," events that did not do what antinukism has done, leave a world in flames.

It would be interesting if these people so caught up in bullshit about nuclear accidents gave as much of a shit about the 7 million people who will die this year from air pollution because of their service to fossil fuels, but they have neither the intellectual nor the moral strength nor the simple decency to do so.

Whose "permission" should China have asked to save human lives by building nuclear reactors? Chanting antinukes who want to tear the shit out of the earth and even the ocean floor for minerals to lie that the wind and solar energy are "renewable?"

Sustainable minerals and metals for a low-carbon future, Science, 367, 6473, 30-33, 2020.

Do we have here another, "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke here announcing that he, she or they with no training is better qualified to give "permission" than the highly trained engineers who run the Chinese nuclear program?

Is there one "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke who has any idea of how much work goes into becoming a nuclear engineer? What impetuous arrogance allows these sorts to think that anyone needs their permission to do good work on behalf of humanity?

One obvious tell of an antinuke, including those who march around here declaring themselves to not be antinuclear, the "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes, while raising one asinine after asinine another objection to nuclear energy is that they, like members of other cults, assume that only their opinion matters, their grotesquely uneducated opinions.

The most important point is that they never have, do not now, and never will give a fuck about fossil fuels. Their whole bullshit so called "renewable energy" scam is about attacking the last, best, hope of the world, nuclear energy. The Germans didn't phase out coal, or gas, or oil. They embraced them all. Every living thing on Earth is paying for that decision. They shut their nuclear plants. This makes it painfully clear what so called "renewable energy" is about.

My sig line in my posts here, from Max Born, atomic physicist and Nobel Laureate, seems to fit the bill here.

One of the big, big, big problems we face, the one that has literally left the world in flames, is that the piddling, pernicious, paranoia of antinukes, has gained wide acceptance, treating it as the only "truth," the one they alone possess, when in fact, their "truth" is nothing more than the muttering rhetoric of stupidity. It's irrational fear and the elevation ignorance, raised in times where ignorance is celebrated, that is strangling the world.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

[Flash953]

5. Molten salt reactors don't have problems with excessive pressure

Bill Gates almost ready to complete one in Wyoming. Look up a company called Naturium.

[FBaggins]

6. This dramatically overstates the concern. A few easy points to consider

* There's no requirement that a new reactor's pressure vesse be forged in the country where it will be installed.
* The new large reactors planned in the US will be AP1000's which use a 350 ton ingot, not >500...
* The expectation is for dramatically ramping up SMR production... and they have much smaller pressure vessels that could be produced by lots of foundaries.
* Expectations for global ramp-up of new nuclear plants sees new foundaries with the larger capacity in a number of countries (Two in Japan, one in China one in South Korea, the Czech Republic and Russia. With more planned in the UK and India