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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Laura and I'm joined by Antonia to talk about some unusual examples of using nuclear technology as a power source and figure out just how useful these alternative power sources could be now Antonia you work in the energy industry as an analyst and you consult on things relating to sustainability so I guess you'd be
interested in this from a decarbon ation aspect oh yeah definitely we have to explore different Technologies to find the solution because there isn't a one size fits all there are certain challenges of going down all one particular technology because it doesn't solve every problem so yeah I've got to find out what is out there I'm with you on that I mean there's a whole challenge around Net Zero targets and trying to meet them without new technology could be really difficult you want to get to
next Z by 2050 that's not very far away not anymore no I've learned about several types of nuclear technology that I think you might find interesting so the first one is about new designs of nuclear reactors so I guess you know working in the industry that we get reliable low carbon electricity from our existing reactor Fleet in the UK but new ones could provide better ways of doing this or could do more than that okay I'm intrigued I've heard of some things
they're not operating commercially yet but uh what have we got so the UK is looking at alternative applications such as generating high heat for various industrial processes so if you look on the government website you do a search for like UK Advanced modular reactor programs it's a word I can't say apparently modular you just need to break it down into smaller pieces exactly mod so if you look for that you'll find out that uh they've selected high temperature gas
reactors is the chosen technology for future nuclear power plants these can produce Heats of up to 950° C which is way more than you'd need for generating electricity normally so most electricity generating power stations they need to boil water or some other fluid or gas boiling water on here requires 100° C right and that's what some reactors do to power their turbine 950 obviously way more could be used for way more things going up to 950 de se sounds really
useful yeah when we generate steam we still go above 100 cuz we're pressurizing it cuz that way you get more energy density and you can transport it in smaller pipe work so it's more efficient for materials as well and easier to maintain than like massive pipes that are as big as your head or something bigger y I can see that yeah something I'm looking at for companies and it's a challenge to find something on the market that generates heat above say 160° C but people need
heat like 500° C for say an industrial oven in the food industry or furnaces start at 300 degrees and go up to 1,000 2,000 for smelting Metals yeah so some of those temperature ranges you gave obviously 950 degrees C will exceed some of those so could you use the Heat from a nuclear reactor in your food oven or in your furnace but then you mentioned smelting metals of a few thousand degrees C that'll help you get there I suppose but then I would imagine you'd
want a secondary source of heat to bump that up a bit more but you can see how that would save energy though can't you if you've got high heat coming from a nuclear reaction and it's not Radioactive by the way the stuff that comes off it because you've got some sort of cooling Loop to just extract the Heat and leave the radioactive stuff where it is it would be what we call an indirect heat exchange rather than direct heat exchanging mixing reactive materials with the medium you you want
to transfer the heat into I'm glad you said that more succinctly than I was waffling around thank you when you spend all day talking about energy and mechanisms for it then hopefully I know a bit of lingo to make it make sense to other people working in it the thing is even if you did have that technology it just won't happen overnight because you've got to reconfigure thing so if you didn't have a direct Swap and you needed to create some sort of hybrid system with like heating it up to 950
and then higher then you've got to adapt your equipment yeah so I guess you could either use the electricity from the reactor if you're using it to do both things so you could use it to power your turbine when you need it you could use it to direct the heat to do other things elsewhere when you don't need the turbine yeah there are some things doing that currently which we combust fuels for so we're kind of relying on a fossil fuel or biomass or bio gas which you
combust but if we're going down the sort of decarbonized electricity route I wasn't sure how we get there to decarbonize yeah I guess it would need these less straightforward more integrated ways of using energy I mean I can see that like let's say that you're powering your turbine to generate electricity from the nuclear reactor and you can maybe store that power somehow and then if you then divert the heat from the nuclear reactor you can then use that electrical power to increase
the heat even further using well I guess some sort of resistance heating there are probably smarter ways of doing it though yeah the most efficient way that we know of is taking advantage of thermodynamic properties in certain fluids so refrigerants what what we call them refrigerants but they're hydrocarbon or hydrocarbon organic mixtures we use them in something called a heat pump it's a thermodynamic term where you put in work or electricity and you get more units of
heat so your efficiency is more than 100% oh wonderful yeah I feel like that's saying it kind of produces extra energy from The Ether like a perpetual motion machine it's to do with the pressure of the fluid it's not magic it's Works in thermodynamics can't say I really understand it it's kind of like if you think you understand quantum physics maybe you don't yeah we went over some of this now ther dnics episode a while ago and it took us a bit of um interesting
discussion to try and figure out how these things work back then and I think I've forgotten a lot of that information need to revisit that episode yeah I know the basics of it works so yeah it's something we can do a pretty smart physics and yeah I guess nuclear could be used for lots of other things you so not just supplying that heat I guess we haven't really talked about other application us to make fertilizers for example I think some of that would involve um using the Heat and
the electricity from the nuclear plant to produce hydrogen by splitting water and then you can use some of that to make fertilizers I could see there it could be applications for making Plastics from CO2 as well if you're capturing the CO2 from the atmosphere or from water you combine the hydrogen with the CO2 in some novel way that may use high heat another thought that came to mind is there's a lot of gas used in incineration trying to get Municipal solid waste into a form that is got safe
emissions you have to combust and heat everything to above 800° I did not know that and i' I've always considered that waste is just buried in the ground into turned into landfill and that's it but I assume there's only so much capacity for doing that and a lot of it doesn't break down that quickly so I guess is that the advantage of burning it yeah and you get energy out of it again we going back to perpetual motion machines I'm guessing it's less energy out than you put in yes that's correct
yeah if you're running out of space you can stick it in incinerator but it's also for things that you don't really want to just landfill if it's contaminated you don't really want to just leave it in land cuz then it could leak into waterways or leak into soil and so it's a inverted commas clean way to treat your waste I see in the future there's this idea that we could have something they're called industrial clusters it's is basically where you have all different Industries working on
the same site that can use products from that other industry so you could have your nuclear reactor that's either supplying electrical power or supplying high heat you could have that coupled to hydrogen production plan a carbon capture plan if you've also got gas fired reactor on site you could have your municiple incinerator there as well you could have food industry with the ovens yeah it's it's something that could be really interesting I think in the past that would have been more
common as well because people would say gather around a water source to use water as a I can't think of the word a water wheel yeah and then you would get Mills for flour and then you have Bakery and you kind of have all these basic Industries or clusters together Jasmine was actually doing some research in industrial clusters I believe and decarbonization plans oh okay so what we're doing now is just almost like a weird blip in human history where we've distributed everything and it's proved
to be not very helpful so we're going to bring it all back together well people are still close Ed but I think there's a lot less local networks I guess because you could share resources like you said and now there is maybe more benefit to combining resources to make a pipeline rather than just kind of everyone all doing their own thing okay so a more advanced version of having a water wheel that supplies different things with the same sort of power yeah but I guess if
we're looking at industrial clusters so how big are these high temperature nuclear reactors well the thing is there is so many different designs floating around the industry at the minute that they could be pretty much any size so you've obviously you know you got the really big ones that we currently have today that some of them I I'm sure they're like the size of a small town this is my impression of the ones that I've driven past you could have much smaller ones as well so we've obviously
got technology that's built on the reactors that are used to power nuclear submarines and some ships that have got nuclear reactors to power there and they're pretty small um so you can maybe even put them in the middle of towns or cities and the far future they've the small footprint and they're going to be designed to be like uber Uber Uber safe so you could be living next to a nuclear reactor perfectly happy having that power your city and maybe your industrial cluster as well so are we
going to have one in our back Gardens who knows maybe if they're literally just a thing you can get off the shelf and take home and an engineer can come out and service it you know same way that your car works now pretty much if you looked under the Bonnet of your car could you do anything to it at all no so yeah you never know yeah so it sounds like the development of these high temperature nuclear reactors could mean the future looks very different little nuclear clusters it's like a
nucleus one way of looking at it with satellite communities being electrons that do different things I don't know I don't know we're going with this analogy I feel like we should move on no it's just an image isn't it yeah so I mentioned there are other different Technologies out there Beyond these reactors a good one that I'm aware of from working at the National eally Laboratory is uh space batteries okay are they batteries that work in space they're probably not what you think of a
traditional battery you know like lithium ion battery that's got cells in it and electrochemistry happens instead these use uh the Decay heat from an isotope that's radioactive and that provides a small amount of power but it's enough for space probes and the way that works is because you have that heat you've got the heat source and you've got the cold of space if you've got a thermoelectric module I can't say that word either the modular is really escaping my brain today a thermo El
electric module or a Thermo Electric device in that temperature gradient you have a voltage difference um a voltage as a current I'm also completely mashing how electricity works voltage and current are obviously two different things they are so an isotope decays and it releases heat yes and we get electricity out of that the cool science thing here um isn't necessarily the natural radioactive decay it's a thermoelectric module itself these work a little bit like solar panels where
energy is imparted and then that causes the liberation of electrons that can then flow in a certain direction because of how the thermoelectric module is designed with um semiconductor materials so you have bits that are naturally positively charged and bits that are naturally negatively charged p and N type cells yes PN Junctions yeah pretty much okay I kind of understood that good I'm glad apart from the bit where I'm like yeah voltage and current use interchangeably obviously very wrong
there was flow of charge exactly which is driven by the voltage which is a potential difference that's what I was trying to get up so this I'm going to guess could be quite a lot smaller scale than the first example you gave yes so if we're talking about powering space missions that what generally need small amps in a smallish voltage compared to nuclear reactors that Supply a phenomenal amount of power yeah I follow good I'm glad I have I have another small scale example okay
there's some emerging technology that's known as Diamond batteries shiny sounds very exciting it does so these take graphite that's been used as a moderator in the core of some existing big scale nuclear reactors the graphite has carbon in it that undergoes beta which obviously produces electrons from that decay and you can use electrons to power things of course electricity when I was looking into this it looks like it was something that was considered for powering pacemakers that would be
inserted inside of you and then they found I think it was just more efficient ways of doing it or more useful ways of doing it so they start looking at it well I like the idea cuz you're kind of completing that full life cycle of a nuclear fishing plant this is different though the technology or the nuclear mechanism is different between the diamond and the space battery yeah so I think the space battery is typically undergoing alpha decay and giving off heat as it does so and it's the heat
that's used um the alpha particles have got a really low range they don't penetrate anything so it's the heat that's important whereas the diamond batteries are giving off electrons effectively or a charge which is used to produce the current okay is this the same same as amorium in smoke detectors yeah it pretty much works in the same way as a diamond battery the amorium gives off electrons that's detected by a detector on the other side of the smoke detector I'm saying the word detected
too many times and then when Smoke Gets In the way it affects the flow of the electrons and your detector goes hey there's not enough electrons getting through and starts alarming you so yeah similar principle it's the flow of the electrons from the radioactive source so right now well I say one of the ways we power stuff in space is with solar panels yeah that seems to be a very common thing you often see Satellites with those big solar panel arrays on them my
understanding is these would be really good for deep space missions which is Way Beyond where sunlight reaches or places that just don't see sufficient sunlight like the dark I say the dark side of the moon when the moon side is not in Sun then yeah yeah that would be quite a problem yeah basically so to here on Earth at night when the sun's not shining you need an alternate power source so if we having deep space missions I was trying to get an idea of what kind of power do these units use
and partly inspired by Polo 13 so I found alep which was the experiment station Hub thing that they leave on the moon everything took less than 75 watts of power or it said less power than a 75 watt light bulb which to me just said less than 75 Watts that is true but I guess if you're not entirely sure what uses 75 Watts it's helpful to know it's I guess an old school light bulb CU LED ones are much lower power consumption aren't they so it's a pretty small amount of power in my opinion even
though I've just said LED bulbs use less power it's still not a massive amount and you mentioned the Apollo 13 movie I think I watched that recently as well um they were talking about keeping the current below 20 amps when they were powering up the Command Module after the explosion and they were getting ready for re-entry back to Earth now I we just said the current and voltage aren't the same thing no 20 amps refers to the current and you need to combine that with the voltage to
find out the power use yeah the American National Air and Space Museum had some of the fuel cells that were used in Apollo it seemed like they would give the Command Module which is the thing needing 20 amps a power of up to 2,300 Watts still not very much no it sounds like it's about enough to power two three modern kitchen kettles or maybe a few microwaves that you might have at home why you'd want that many kettles and microwaves in your home I don't know but hey but yeah compared to those um
massive nuclear reactors I was talking about that are like megawatts of power small diamond batteries do small things what's the benefit compared to to a conventional battery though from what I understood the Command Module on the Apollo Mission used fuel cells that rely on combining hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity and water and they eventually will run out you've only got so much hydrogen and oxygen on board and the astronauts were consuming the water
and then ejecting it into space maybe they could have developed a way of doing that so as a CLA system I don't know it was the 60s and 70s and my brain is thinking of too many things um in comparison to the those fuel cells that run out or traditional like lithium ion batteries that need to be recharged Diamond batteries because the radioactive source is radioa for a really really long time like thousands and thousands of years the diamond battery will last for thousands and
thousands of years in comparison how long does your smartphone last what like 4 days less than that before you have to recharge it I suspect the power output from the diamond battery would be a lot lower than those fuel cells on the Apollo missions though so I guess it's about choosing the right power source for the right requirement yeah so I was looking them up for a bit more specification or statistics um and numbers at least the ones being developed by Bristol University on their
website they said the diamond battery could last for thousands of years providing really low power in comparison to a conventional AA battery which would provide maybe 30 40 times the power it would only last a day so that kind of matches with what I was thinking to me an AA battery would usually be considered low power if thinking about what you use it for at home definitely but then the diamond batteries and I guess the space battery that I mentioned that uses heat they're
probably even lower power but then that's fine for some long space missions I guess because they've optimized the power requirements of the instrumentation I can think of some examples where it could be useful on Earth though okay I'm intrigued in my investigations looking for energy saving measures you could get smart thermostatic radiator valves so it could turn the temperature up and down without you having to manually adjust it but if you have them powered with AA batteries
they run out after a year or two and you've got to change them and if you've put them in a building with lots of Radiators say student Halls any big office building with lots of Radiators someone has to go and change all those every one or two years and I guess all that time would add up I imagine it's fine in your own house where you've maybe only got seven or eight radiators yeah yeah someone would have to do the MK on how long would that take and is it really worth it or do you just stick
with something that's lower Tech doesn't require a battery or go for the the space Tech it could be space tech there is a solution where it's harvesting the Heat and supposedly could last 10 years but the fact that someone had some bad experiences with AA batteries was enough to put them off this yeah I mean I've been looking at getting some battery powered lights for decoration around the house it's Christmas time very light to traditional Christmas decoration and you
know you can get like little tea lights things that you put in like you know votive candles and it looks pretty yeah and they can be battery powered and the light bubbles around a little bit simul candle yes where they look like they they flicker but it's just a battery yeah yeah but then I was thinking about how long the battery would last and how long you'd have to replace them and it didn't seem worth it I figured it was easier to stick with traditional candles that you light with a match
okay here here's going to be maybe a dumb question is there any scope for nuclear or radioactive Things That Glow and could be your little light source instead um I'm not sure there are radioactive things that do actually glow it's normally that radioactive particles or energy from the radioactive source is interacting with another chemical that causes that to Glow you know the the glow-in-the dark stuff that I have on my watch that's not radioactive anymore but
it used to be way back in the day didn't it it was um a radioactive isotope the name of which escapes me but it should be right in my brain you can tell my brain's not working very well today is it raidon that's a gas I don't know I think we need to look into the chemistry a bit more though oh I feel like we're just starting to ramble about weird things um I do like the idea of um a diamond powered flickery candle light though seems totally unnecessary to have one that
would be powered for thousands and thousands of years would the light part of it die before the power part maybe you'd have to replace the bulb you need to feel like some sort of whole system analysis of faults and failure rates would be coming on which I feel is a totally different episode and might be a bit overkill for a little fairy light it's a thing I would find useful but I feel like we should stop there cuz my brain has started to melt about 20 minutes ago
it's seemingly not functioning today so we've discussed some ways that uh future nuclear re factors built here on Earth could Supply heat for lots of industrial applications not just generating electricity from a turbine and we've learned about some smaller scale applications that are being used to power space missions and we would maybe want to see them used on Earth too the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or
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