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Backing out of building novel nuclear power plant + Could we build a Dyson Sphere?

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Several U.S. utilities back out of deal to build novel nuclear power plant
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/...ower-plant

INTRO: Plans to build an innovative new nuclear power plant—and, thus, revitalize the struggling U.S. nuclear industry—have taken a hit as in recent weeks: eight of the 36 public utilities that had signed on to help build the plant have backed out of the deal. The withdrawals come just months after the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), which intends to buy the plant containing 12 small modular reactors from NuScale Power, announced that completion of the project would be delayed by 3 years to 2030. It also estimates the cost would climb from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion.

“The project is still very much going forward,” says LaVarr Webb, a spokesperson for UAMPS, which has nearly four dozen members in Utah, California, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Although some UAMPS members have dropped out, “promising discussions are ongoing with a number of utilities to join the project or enter into power-purchase agreements,” Webb says.

However, critics of the project say the developments underscore that the plant, which is designed by NuScale Power and would be built at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Idaho National Laboratory, will be untenably expensive. M.V. Ramana, a physicist who works on public policy at the University of British Columbia says he’s not surprised that so many utilities have opted out of the project. The question, he says, is why so many are sticking with it. “They ought to be seeing the writing on the wall and getting out by the dozens,” he says... (MORE)


Could we build a Dyson Sphere?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/d...on-sphere/

EXCERPTS: Humankind is energy-hungry. As our civilization has industrialized over the last couple centuries, global energy consumption has spiked more than twentyfold with no end in sight. When demand outstrips what we can reap from Earth and its vicinity, what will our power-craving descendants do?

A bold solution: the Dyson Sphere. This megastructure—usually conceived of as a gigantic shell enclosing the sun, lined with mirrors or solar panels—is designed to collect every iota of a star's energetic output. In the case of our sun, that colossal figure is 400 septillion watts per second, which is on the order of a trillion times our current worldwide energy usage. What's more, the interior of the Dyson Sphere could, in theory, provide far more habitable real estate than a measly planet.

[...] From an engineering perspective, a Dyson Sphere sounds pretty wild. And it is: As an immense, hollow ball, the structure is impossible. "An actual sphere around the sun is completely impractical," says Stuart Armstrong, a research fellow at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute who has studied megastructure concepts.

Armstrong says the tensile strength needed to prevent the Sphere from tearing itself apart vastly exceeds that of any known material. Another problem: The Sphere would not gravitationally bind to its star in a stable fashion. [...] That's too bad. If it could be stabilized, a Dyson Sphere built at 93 million miles from the sun, the same distance as Earth, would contain about 600 million times the surface area of our planet in its interior. However, comparatively little of the surface would be habitable on account of a lack of gravity. By spinning the whole sphere, you create gravity in the form of centrifugal force along an equatorial band. But this rotation would wrack the megastructure with yet more destructive stress.

[...] Okay, so the fanciful Dyson Sphere appears to defy the laws of physics. A related concept — the Dyson Swarm — is more promising. "The Swarm is the more realistic model," Armstrong says. A Dyson Swarm consists of thousands of relatively small mirrors or solar panels in an array of orbits around the sun. Like a dense cloud of bees buzzing around a hive, a Dyson Swarm largely shrouds the sun from external view, capturing most of the available solar energy.

Armstrong says that a robot-driven manufacturing process could build up a Dyson Swarm in as little as several decades. His plan relies on exponential returns from a virtuous cycle beginning with robots mining material from Mercury. The material is rocketed into orbit (not too tough, given Mercury's weak gravity), then fabricated into an energy-collecting Dyson Swarm unit... (MORE - details)


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/pP44EPBMb8A
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