Oak Ridge National Laboratory & University of Maine Print a House With Biobased Materials.
A little while back, in a conversation with someone with whom speaking is a clear waste of time, an antinuke, I was told that I was "soothsaying" when I remarked that work is underway to print nuclear reactors.
Actually, my son is seeking a Ph.D. in a laboratory that is actively working on this idea, and I hope to encourage my son (a first year student) to choose a thesis project that explores aspects of this idea, built around printing materials exhibiting strength, high temperature, corrosion, and radiation resistance and stability in extreme conditions.
This is of course is a tall order, and it seems likely that at best one can combinatorial optimize materials to include these properties, tailoring them to the specific cases. I believe my son should aim high. (We'll see; one of the rights of passage is to tell one's father to mind his own damned business.)
As for antinukes, as a class, often demonstrated by specific instances, one cannot really expect them to know very much, since they are generally poorly educated, poorly read, and are so wrapped up in their dogma that they don't bother to find things out, but chant loudly, persistently the same old crap on and on and on and on and on...
However they do know something about soothsaying. For my entire adult life - I'm not young - I've been listening to antinukes predict a "renewable energy" nirvana "by 1990," "by 2000," "by 2010," "by 2020," "by 2030," "by 2040," "by 2050..."
In the face of all these soothsaying predictions, a nirvana driven by so called "renewable energy" did not come, is not here, and frankly, won't come. While so called "renewable energy" once did in fact power the world, it was abandoned in the 19th century for a reason. Advocates for returning to this state of affairs are not progressives; they're reactionaries.
The results of antinuke soothsaying are in:
New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 424.40 ppm.
So called "renewable energy" is much, much, much better at generating complacency and wishful thinking than it is a producing energy. The solar and wind industries after all this cheering, decades of it, produce trivial energy at an unacceptable and unsustainable expense.
Anyway, I'm used to appalling ignorance, and I'm used to people petulantly proclaiming their pestilential nescience proudly and loudly.
Although I have no use for mysticism, I sometimes joke - with no serious metaphysical import - "there is a God and she has a sense of humor."
After being told by the antinuke that my son's work is a fantasy, this article appeared in one of my news feeds:
ORNL, UMaine 3D print home from biobased materials, develop blueprint for rapid manufacturing
On the grounds of the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center sits the nation’s first additively manufactured home made entirely from biobased materials - BioHome3D. The 600-square-foot home, the result of a collaboration between Oak Ridge National Laboratory and UMaine, is serving as a testbed to see how well the materials perform over time in the Northeastern climate. If environmental analysis, weatherization testing and energy data gathering conducted are favorable, the home could lead to the printing of thousands more like it, providing an energy efficient and economical housing alternative in the United States.
While BioHome is located thousands of miles away from ORNL, the foundational research that led to its completion began at the Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at the lab. The house, which was co-developed by ORNL and UMaine researchers, traces back to a bamboo-based 3D-printed pavilion showcased in Miami in 2016.
“We were asked by a New York-based architectural firm to print large-scale components for a pavilion for a design exposition – and they wanted the pavilion to be made from environmentally friendly material,” said Soydan Ozcan, an ORNL materials scientist who leads research with UMaine. “We chose bamboo.” The result, he said, was more than 10,000 pounds of material printed on the Big Area Additive Manufacturing printer which formed the supporting structure and the arms that served as seating for the large pavilion.
“The first step we took on that project was to begin compounding bamboo in the lab to make pellets, just in small batches at first,” he said. “This was also the first time a bioderived or biobased material was used for a large-scale additive manufacturing application.”
New materials lead to new partnership
Ozcan and fellow materials scientist Halil Tekinalp engineered the bamboo with polyactic acid, or PLA, a bioderived and biodegradable thermoplastic polyester also known as a bioplastic. The mixture contained about 20% bamboo and 80% PLA with the printed product containing similar properties as wood, including recyclable characteristics. The formulation worked and produced sturdy parts for the pavilion that could withstand the hot and humid Florida climate as well. It also led to the research team thinking about additional bioderived materials that could be compounded and printed to make other large-scale components for applications such as boats and houses...
We have experience in the laboratory where I'm employed - albeit in an executive and not a bench top capacity - with PLA, which is a polymer that is in wide use in medical settings since it is biodegradable, breaking down to easily metabolized lactic acid, a precursor to pyruvate, known in glucose metabolism. It's an industrial polymer.
Cool. Printed houses. At the American Museum of Science and Energy at Oak Ridge, there is a printed Jeep on display.
We need a fast and clean way to build nuclear reactors extremely quickly; we are out of time, the climate wolf is not just at the door; he's broken it down. Printing them may be way to go.
Nuclear reactors have already worked with printed components, as I noted elsewhere:
Browns Ferry 2 Nuclear Reactor, Set a Record for Reliable Operation With 3D Printed Parts.
A video showing the printing of a nuclear reactor core is shown in a video below:
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