Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman
Sadly, pool reactors don't produce electricity. Those power figures are the amount of heat they can produce.
Converting the heat into electricity isn't very practical. A pool reactor is a large open-topped pool of water with the nuclear fuel, control mechanisms and so on submerged in it. That water is both the neutron moderator and the shielding. To generate electricity in any quantity, you need steam to drive a turbine or other steam engine to turn a generator. And if you run a pool reactor hot enough to generate steam, you boil the pool water, it stops moderating and the reactor stops generating heat.
Most reactors for electricity generation are pressurised water reactors, where the moderating water is confined under pressure so it doesn't boil. That lets you run it hot enough to generate decently hot steam.
Yes, you could use thermocouples to generate some electricity from a reactor that isn't hot enough to boil its water. They're about 1% efficient, as opposed to a turbine and generator, which are 20-30% efficient. So if you could capture all the heat of a 1MW (thermal) reactor in thermocouples, you could get something like 10kW of electricity.
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Well if this is a nuclear winter apocalypse then it might not matter, BUT from the TRIGA (the kind of pool reactor being discussed) Wikipedia page
"The TRIGA Power System (TPS) is a proposed small power plant and heat source, based upon the TRIGA reactor and its unique uranium zirconium hydride fuel, with a power output of 64MWth/16MWe[5][6]."