I'm skeptical, not because it can't be achieved, but because it's not that practical.

Diesel generators are "great" because diesel doesn't evaporate. You can have it there for years, and with good design, it just springs up the next day.

This nuclear reactor has to be connected for fleet monitoring if you want to operate it. Which excludes it from many real life scenarios where diesel generators are used.

Maybe for remote locations where constant power is needed (Antarctica and such), but I see their uses being very limited.

▲

cyberax 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Diesel generators are "great" because diesel doesn't evaporate.

LOL, no. I see, you have never worked with large diesels meant for backup.

If you just leave diesel fuel alone, then over time (6-9 months) the residual water separates at the bottom of the tank. And then various microbial life springs into action, happily living off all of that free energy. While there's some dissolved oxygen, it will happily use it to oxidize the fuel. But even without oxygen, the bugs will try to live off energy produced by polymerization of unsaturated hydrocarbons.

Polymerization == gunk that clogs up your fuel filters.

So you have to periodically clean up diesel fuel by removing water and filtering the gunk out. It's called "fuel polishing". Large diesels will have fixed systems, for smaller diesels, sometimes mobile systems are used like these: https://fueltecsystems.com/equipment/pneumatic-systems-2/

▲

p1mrx 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If I Google "diesel shelf life", the most common answer is 12 months. Do you have a better source? Propane probably makes more sense for fuel that needs to sit around for years.

Do you know the shelf life of TRISO fuel? I imagine it doesn't matter because it would be very expensive to build a reactor and not switch it on.

▲

SR2Z 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Diesel will degrade with exposure to oxygen, but a diesel engine can burn pretty much any flammable liquid that you can meter out. It really comes down to the engine itself and if it can handle less-than-perfect fuel.

▲

whatever1 3 days ago | parent [-]

It can even burn its own lubricant oil and die in a screaming runaway fashion!

▲

rob_c 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'm sure a nuclear reactor can manage that too if it's a competition :p

▲

whatever1 3 days ago | parent [-]

Not sure it will sound as nice though. In fact I don't think I have heard the sound of a runaway nuclear reactor. Maybe due to the turbines it can sound exciting?

	▲	M95D 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe the silence of the turbines when the water runs out ...

▲

lb1lf 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anecdotally, I came across a large (for a single user) quantity of diesel 9 years ago. (Nothing exotic - a company went titsup and I was the only one both bidding for and capable of removing the diesel from their premises within an acceptable time frame; I got approx 80% off the pump price at the time.)

I still run my tractor and Land Cruiser off the stuff; the tractor had an outing today. Granted, neither of those engines are very particular about the fuel they are given, but still...

(Water drained off every few months, also a biocide is added to keep the diesel gunk at bay.)

▲

AngryData 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean if you trying to run that fuel in a performance application where you are pushing the fuel to its absolute limit, it might be bad, but most diesel engines can be run on nearly any burnable oil, you just get less power out and a bit dirtier burn.

They give similar specs ideals about gasoline fuel going bad in 3-6 months, and yet 95% of gasoline engines will still run 2 year old fuel fine because they aren't pushing compression ratios to the absolute possible limit, and half of the performance engines that do push limits these days have adaptable computer controlled compression and sensors which will figure out how much it can push the fuel.

If I put 5 year old diesel fuel into any regular diesel motor or generator or vehicle and it didn't start up, I would be extremely surprised, and be most worried that the fuel either wasn't diesel fuel to start with or had a wide open hole in the container that a bunch of rain water drained down into.

That said, if I had some kind of tuned up diesel motor that I was trying to push 800+ HP out of, I probably wouldn't use year old diesel fuel just in case. High performance motors like that are already straddling the line between working great and catastrophic failure and using old potentially bad fuel only adds to it.

▲

actinium226 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> This nuclear reactor has to be connected for fleet monitoring if you want to operate it. Which excludes it from many real life scenarios where diesel generators are used.

I don't understand this sentence, why does connection to fleet monitoring preclude using this microreactor as opposed to a diesel generator? Can't you just hook a starlink up to it, and program it to shut down in the event of prolonged comms loss?

	▲	garte 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Adding an Elon company to the mix might make the reaction unstable.

▲

rich_sasha 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't have any first hand experience with diesel generators, but I saw three cases where power was lost and diesel backup was switched on. In two of these three cases, the generator failed (once didn't start, the other time it ran for 30 mins). In both cases it was in scenarios where I'd imagine reasonable care and maintenance were applied.