(Part 2) Best nuclear engineering books according to redditors

> Yeah, because the energy companies are just waiting to build new plants. Oh wait, they don't. They have invested in nuke tech in the 70s and just try to milk every cent out of that without any intention to create new plants.

What are you talking about?

There have been a lot of attempts at building new plants, but objections from "environmentalists" and NIMBYs make it so difficult that sites don't get approved. In addition, the government won't fund development of new forms of nuclear power station because of exactly the above reasons.

Water cooled uranium reactors were never originally considered to be the end all and be all of nuclear power, it was only step 1 up the nuclear technological ladder. We never even got to step 2. We've just spent 60 years trying to improve the design of step 1. There is a good book on the subject, that I'd recommend, not that anyone on reddit actually ever reads books that contain controversial things like "facts", but I can but try..

Alright, basically - this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Systems-Volume-Hydraulic-Fundamentals/dp/1439808872/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341343789&sr=8-1&keywords=nuclear+systems+1

Nuclear Systems I by Kazimi and Todreas. Previous edition is good too. Volume II is more about individual components, volume I is more plant-wide.

One thing to remember - a lot of thermal hydraulics in a NPP are safety systems (emergency cooling, etc.) and not directly to energy conversion. An example of that would be the containment itself, which is a giant control volume, essentially.

That book will have all you need.

Better yet, avoid YouTube university and read something like this or this. No? Too much work? Well, ok, I guess you could go on making silly statements on the internet.

If you're going to be modeling the edge/divertor region then I would highly recommend looking into [The Plasma Boundary of Magnetic Fusion Devices by Stangeby.] (https://www.amazon.com/Boundary-Magnetic-Devices-Physics-Dynamics/dp/0750305592) I personally have not read it, but my friends in the edge community swear by it. It's not cheap, and I don't know how much money you have to spend, but if you're going to do edge physics then it's worth considering.

Chen's Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion is the classic introduction to plasma physics text book. If you haven't taken any plasma physics then it is a good starting point.

Freidberg is a classic text on ideal MHD. You can't go wrong with it. It's also a good book for new PhD students in Fusion research. In case you want to save some money I'll point out that Friedberg's book is based off of his Ideal MHD review paper. You'll probably be able to access the paper for free through your university's library. At some point you'll probably want the book if you stay in the field. It goes into more detail, and the latest edition has been updated to reflect modern trends in confinement.

Hazeltine & Meiss is a good book for people going into plasma theory/computation. It does a good job of introducing a lot of advanced topics relevant to plasma physics. It's a great deal for it's price.

I think Steve Jardin's book is a good tool if you don't have a background in computation. In one chapter he introduces methods to solve a particular type of equation (elliptic, hyperbolic, parabolic, etc) and then in the next he applies those methods to problems relevant to magnetic fusion research.

Styx is a good reference if you know plasma waves, but I don't think it's a good book for learning plasma waves. Sawnson's book is better for learning waves.

I'm not too familiar with the other books you mentioned. I've heard good things about Birdsall & Langdon. I've heard mixed reviews of Goedbloed. I'm aware of Tajima's book but I know nothing about it. I've never heard of Hsu's book.

If you want an introduction to policy and science together, you can't beat Nuclear Energy in the 21st Century. It's required reading for World Nuclear University, an annual professional development conference for future industry leaders sent by their companies; but is remarkably accessible to the layman as well (some of the attendees do not have a science background at all - e.g., communications staff, project managers).

There are many benefits to hydrogen as a storage medium over chemical batteries: more energy per unit of space, less crazy rare elements, less toxic manufacture/disposal, better energy storage over time to name just a few.
Unfortunately to go from a petroleum to a hydrogen economy in the US would require a WWII like effort, where as we pretty much have functioning electrical distribution everywhere.
-> the argument for hydrogen is spelled out pretty well in this book : http://www.amazon.com/The-Phoenix-Project-Shifting-Hydrogen/dp/0970250207

but there's a giant amount of investment in infrastructure required in the front end. Making the endeavor a pipe dream.

>TAE has made some really good progress in the past years and their reactors are producing experimental results that match predictions. That is important

But so did ZETA in 1957. And, literally, hundreds of machines since. And yet all of them, every single one, failed to scale.

Every time I read your posts I have the feeling that you're mostly familiar with the recent stuff. GO AND READ BROMBERG'S BOOK! It's no Distant Mirror (best history book EVAR) but it shows that the entire history of this effort is filled with things that scaled once and then crashed out.

So from my perspective, hitting some number that's five orders of magnitude too low in triple product and four orders too low in confinement time even for D-T is useful for predicting exactly nothing.

> There's always one on Reddit ;)

Oh, you open up with a personal insult... Nice.

Well, this is it, then. The thing is, I do not disagree with the nuclear experts; in fact, I agree with them.

I also do not really care about making a point for nuclear power; I don't work for the nuclear industry. However, I don't like factually incorrect posts in "serious" subs.

Anyhow; since you don't seem to be really keen on respectful conversations I don't really want to waste my new year arguing. (And it makes no difference to me, either way. I dislike people with agendas, anyhow.)

Go to a library, read the following book (http://www.amazon.com/Radiation-Protection-Dosimetry-Introduction-Physics/dp/0387499822) and then you can come back to me if you have questions.

I just looked it up. It's called Nuclear Heat Transport. Here's a link to it on Amazon. I'll be honest though, we didn't use the book too much but from what I've read it has some good information

This one is good, easy reading: http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle-Analysis-Management/dp/0894484516

For historical perspective (free): http://books.google.com/books?id=aeB_gqp-QFwC&source=gbs_navlinks_s

One of the best books ever, very rare and hard to get: Nuclear Reactor Engineering: Reactor design basics, by Samuel Glasstone and Alexander Sesonske

For MSRs, the best is still FFR Section 2: http://energyfromthorium.com/pdf/

and the recent French papers: http://lpsc.in2p3.fr/index.php/en/scientific-activities/reactor-physics/systems-scenarii/molten-salt-reactor/38-activites-scientifiques/physique-des-reacteurs-nucleaires/523-msfr-bibliography

>If this technology was truly viable I believe that at least some company/government would be using it currently.

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>but it just seems to impossible to believe that such an important, flawless technology could simply be lost to a government


If it were not for the fact it would take billions in research and development to go from a small prototype reactor built in the 60's to a large commercial power plant, and that the existing solar/wind/renewable, fossil fuel, and nuclear power generation lobbies vehemently oppose LFTR, coupled with it's inability to produce weapons grade material, then yes we probably would already be using it. The head of Oak Ridge National Labs sacrificed his career to go to bat for LFTR, ultimately the Nixon administration canned LFTR research and went for the Sodium Fast Breeder because it could breed PU239 for use in weapons, and LFTR could not generate weapons grade material.

I want to quote you something from a book written about LFTR technology from an editor at wired magazine.

---------------------------------------------------------

"I’ve written for Wired for ten years, and I’ve often joked that every
story in the magazine has to use the word revolutionary. Thorium
power actually seemed to justify that label. The more I learned about
the lost history of thorium — especially the successful creation of a
thorium-powered reactor at Oak Ridge in the 1960s and the career of
the Oak Ridge director Alvin Weinberg, who championed safe thorium
reactors and lost his job for it the more astonished and outraged I
became. Here was an inexpensive, safe, abundant energy source that
could power every city on Earth, with enough left over for hundreds of
millions of electric vehicles, for several millennia. And we were sitting
on it, essentially doing nothing. It was insane. And the small band of
technologists I was traveling with that day seemed like the only ones
who were actually trying to bring the technology back to life, with zero
encouragement from the government and plenty of disdain from the
nuclear power industry."

https://www.amazon.com/SuperFuel-Thorium-Energy-Source-Future/dp/113727834X/


SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future

-Richard Martin

Go read a book - http://www.amazon.com/Power-Save-World-Nuclear-Energy/dp/0307266567

Funnily enough, intentionally or not, Koch businesses on the whole help combat global warming.

Nothing we do in the west will make much difference as long as China is building 1GW worth of new coal plants per week (each of which dumps 1 ton of CO2 into the atmosphere every 2 seconds). The only thing that can make a real difference is making natural gas cheap enough to compete with coal for energy generation in China and other developing countries. This ultimately comes down to the economics of the fracking process, i.e. making it as cheap as possible to extract.

Source: Energy for Future Presidents by Richard Muller