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I would agree that the regulatory environment in the west is hell-bent on killing any and all new projects, but you really can't blame them for being super-duper careful, as they have a hysterical public to deal with who perceive any failure, however small, as a catastrophe, thanks in large part due to media hype and fear mongering by news outlets and environmental groups. In Russia and China, meanwhile, the public realize that realistically it's either nuclear, with its occasional potential radiation release when it goes wrong (which can kill people, no doubt about it) vs. coal and natural gas, which kill people even when operating right and make places like Beijing look like freakin' Silent Hill.

As for IFR, no, the fuel isn't molten in the core, they're still solid fuel rods. The important difference for IFR fuel is that it's a pure metal, not an oxide, so its heat conductivity is much higher, which in turn allows higher temperature operation without stressing the material so much (as internal temperatures are far lower than the 1000C gradient experienced in oxide fuels). From this design decision, tons of other important features are derived, like the very strong negative temperature reactivity coefficient, the passive heat removal, ease of reprocessing (no more acid processes), etc. It's really quite an elegant design and it's ready to roll today.

This is why I push so hard for coal mining to be banned. I've heard that entire US towns have been made uninhabitable due to coal fires that won't go out for hundreds if not thousands of years. ( http://www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/centralia.htm )

I'll bet a whole city or two have been abandoned to underground coal mine fires; Centralia Pennsylvania comes to mind for one.

A coal mine underground has been burning for decades. http://www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/Johnathan_F_Beltz.htm

http://suspended.hostgator.com/?domain=www.offroaders.com Congrats. You took down a hobbyists' forum less than a week into the month. [I'm not sure if a smilie or a frown belongs here.]

Underground hydrocarbon-fueled fires are not new. Centralia, Pennsylvania has been on fire, underground, since 1961. That's forty-seven years. Second, those 'black smokers' are old news, also -older than most /. readers.

Exceeding 800 by how much? Temperatures 6 feet under the roads in Centralia PA have been recorded at 853F. The town is abandoned and the roads are detoured around. A coal mine underground has been burning for decades.

http://www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/Johnathan_F_Beltz.htm

Luckily PA isn't as prone to forest fires, but living on top of a giant Weber grill does tend to lower your property values.

we can do it better, but overall it's still the best bang for the buck (calculating the waste output, and handling of said waste output, into the buck) that we have.

How is nuclear power the best choice? We don't even have a way to deal with the waste.

I'm hopeful that when we do get around to building new reactors, they'll be of a more modern and efficient design than the ones running currently.

Where are these designs? And not just general hand waving but actual designs. And doing more research into new designs don't count, the same energy and money put into alternative resources may come out with better things.

Sorry, Falcon, but solar, wind, wave, hydro and all the other renewables won't cut it at our current consumption levels (see the link at the end).

So your news link beats my science links?

A nearly-as-bad downside is the fact that the footprint for enough of a solar or wind farm to replace a coal plant means you're eating up many times more real estate with concrete and metal than the coal plant did, and I've no desire to pave the planet.

Did you even read the Sciam article? Or the Wind Atlas?

So the big objection to coal power (which also pertains to combustion engines; cars) is that we're running out of the power source and there's not more we can get or make.

My biggest issue with coal, and nuclear power, is that it is dirty. If you're going to bring up carbon capture and storage, show one such plant in operation that actually works.

and then there's the limited-fuel-resources-from-few-suppliers drawback as well

Now I'll admit here the US doesn't need to worry about running out of coal, there's hundreds of years of coal in the US alone. As stated above though it's dirty. And not just the burning of coal but the mining as well. Mountain Top removal is probably the dirtiest mining there is, though uranium mining comes close. And underground mining isn't any better, healthier, or safer. It causes Black Lung as well as other health problems. There are a number of underground fires in coal mines, the Centralia mine fire in Columbia County, Pennsylvania has been burning since 1962.

However, with only a few thousand nuclear plants, eventually, powering the US

We don't need more centralized power, we need more distributed power. Nor do we need to devote land for just one purpose, which nuclear power requires. With wind gennies, generators, farmers can lease small plots, or use as their own, to erect a genny. This would create a second source of income for farmers. One of the biggest problems with wind farms are all the NIMBYs, such as the ones fighting siting wind farms off the coast of Cape Hatteras. The Mid-Atlantic Coast Could Supply 330 gigawatts of Electricity, from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras, alone according to researchers at University of Delaware. Meanwhile 4 Nuclear Power Plants in California had a capacity of 4 gigawatts in 2005. That comes to 1 gigawatt per power plant, whereas the wind potential off the Mid Atlantic comes to 330 nuclear power plants.

Would it be a good idea to use an old town like Centralia,PA for something like this? Or would that just be considered coal power?

The issue is whether we can sustain our usage at current levels indefinitely.

;)

Seriously, that's a cool place to explore. No, strike that, it's a _warm_ place to explore. Bring good boots...and fortitude.

The maximum torque occurs when the volumetric efficiency is the greatest. The maximum fuel efficency also occurs when the volumetric efficiency is at it's peak. Although it isn't common for the maximum torque and maximum efficiency to coincide. Maximum efficiency doesn't usually occur at the full power of that RPM. I've seen a bunch of engine charactaristic maps and they all have the maximum fuel efficiency at the rpm of maximum torque. I'm not sure when happens when you throw V-Tech into the picture though. I can't find any pictures online of such maps. I'll try to scan some and put them online so you can see what they look like.

http://www.offroaders.com/info/tech-corner/reading /cfm.htm
Volumetric Efficiency

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSFC
Bottom of the page, Note:

http://www.viragotech.com/fixit/FuelEconomyEngineE fficiencyPower.html
The whole page talks about this topic.

http://www.epi-eng.com/ET-VolEff.htm

Wrong Centralia. Odd that your Centralia is also a Coal town.

When a coal plant blows up, you wait for the fire to go out and build a new one. When a nuke plant blows, it makes the area around it (possibly for hundreds of miles) too radioactive for humans to live there.

Well Centralia, PA pops to mind when you ask that question. Although there are no dead there. But a 40 year fire is pretty bad.

Bigoted hicks in central PA have probably been breathing fumes from the Centralia Mine Fire. First google hit on it: http://www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/centrali a.htm

Maybe I'm partial to where I live but Knoxville, TN doesn't have much of a 'natural disaster' problem, nor does most of Appalachia.

I live in VA, about 20 miles from DC. I agree, the region looks like the safest place to live. Only problem is the sometimes bad snow falls (as I see it) that occur in the mountains. It scars the shit out of me everytime I have had to drive through West Virginia when it is snowing and visability drops to under 30 feet during the winter. The entire area to me (usually) falls under the snow fall category.

One question. Don't you occasionally have the problem of the coal hills catching on fire (underground, that is?) Here is an example from PA

That link gives me a 404.

Anyway, that phenomenon isn't unique to China. We have several going here in the US. Most famously the Centralia, PA fire.

I don't really know anything about this in terms of pollution as compared to the fire you cite, or number of cars, etc.

-Peter

You'd be surprised what sorts of disasters can happen with coal mining.

Humans have existed for >100,000 years.

Of course, every light-water reactor ever built has leaks too. The difference is that when sodium leaks you have a fire, when water leaks you don't.

With modern implosion designs it is quite likely that you could get a very significant yield from IFR plutonium; imagine what a 1kt explosion in downtown Manhattan would do.

As far as states acquiring nuclear weapons - an IFR gives them access to a neutron source suitable for blanket breeding (note that blanket breeding can produce any grade of Pu you wish, including very low Pu-240-content stuff). It also gives them the technology for isotope separation, since as you point out, the plant also contains a separation facility.

Reminds me of another ghost town I've seen (personally)... It's Centralia in Pennsylvania. You get near it where I80 meets Knobles or Route 61. (IIRC) - The story is that there was a giant waste fire burned in a open pit near a mine that ended up burning down hot enough/low enough to hit an exposed vein of coal under the mountains. The town has been burning ever since. It's not like a giant wildfire that you may first imagine, but a slowly moving, ever constantly burning coalfire underground.

This fire started in 1961 and still burns today. Centralia no longer exists on some maps because it has been deserted (by most). Due to the underground fire, some portions of land is too hot to walk on or has simply been dried out/burned to a crisp from the heat below. I wish I still had pictures of what I was able to take (lost the pics in a HD crash.) - From a slightly higher viewpoint, you can literally see a band stretching across... sort of like a slow moving creature devouring everything in its path and turning it all charred black or seared white.

One of the most interesting things I came across was scorched wood near an open vent: The steam coming up from the ground carried copper and baked it into the wood/bark. Lots of rocks were simply bleached white from the heat. I tried to be a dumbass and stood near an open vent to piss on the rocks... the heat was pretty damn intense. My shoes started melting (though I was standing a bit away from the vent) before I could finish urinating.

A link. (I used some info to correct my faulty memory.)

The Chernobyl Photo Journal is _stunning_.. I have considered going back to Centralia in the summer to do a more extensive photo documentation along the lines this young woman has. Beautiful work. First thought in my mind when I saw some of the pics was how desolate Centralia was as well... very erie and hard to describe if not for pictures.

Thank you for this long, elaborate answer. Top that up with Wind power, Tidal power, Hydro-electric, then make sure houses use energy saving lightbulbs, are well insulated, etc, and you can have a national energy system wihich needs little or no coal/oil/nuclear.

Actually, hydro-electricity is used as much as it can now. Every new dam implementation is an environmentally dangerous project, especially in Europe.

As for alternate source of productions, let's see. France generated 517 TWh in 2000, 76% of this nuclear. I don't have more recent figure. For the UK, the figure is probably similar since the UK has a larger GNP than France. The country has an area of 500,000 km^2. That's 517*10^12/365/(500000*10^6) = 2.84 W/m2. Now, if you factor by the usual availablity factor (70% efficiency, 8h/day, 120 day/year), you find that a solar generation density would have to be an average of 37W/m^2. How much solar panels would that mean? Well, the best solar panels out there generate about 200W/m^2. Some say 400 W/m^2 is reachable in the desert, provided you use arsenide panels, but these panels release arsenic. Let's retain 300 W/m^2. 37/300 is 12%. So you'd have to cover 12% of the territory with the best available solar panels in the world to reach that kind of power generation.

It is theoretically feasible, but the inhabitant of this one eight of the land would be pretty pissed off. The cost would be staggering. To give you an idea, the total area of all semiconductors manufactured in the world in 2000 is a couple of square kilometers (look up silicon wafer production stats).

Solar energy production is only viable in space. Once we have cheap access to space, it becomes feasable to deploy very large solar arrays in space that can operate 24 hr/day and beam their current production as microwave to receivers on Earth. That's the cleanest energy. But that's still far away, alas.

Regarding MOX: The technique you describe sounds good in theory, but in practice reprocessing still generates unacceptable levels radioactive pollution and waste that is still very difficult to deal in practice

Yet something has to be done to consume the stockpile of plutonium. Even if tomorrow, little green men pop up and give us a solar energy-generating space station, we'll still have the plutonium stockpile problem. Now some people say we have to bury it. This is a cop-out. Who knows where it will leak? Moreover, future scientific breakthroughs might find a solution that elude us today to turn plutonium into something less toxic -- provided their crazy ancestors didn't dump it in a geological fault. Right now, MOX is the only existing process to reduce the plutonium stockpile. A sad and imperfect reality, as often.

And the point is - why bother with nuclear, why take the risk?

Because I prefer to be downwind of a nuclear power plant than from a coal power plant. Or a heavy fuel power plant. Both pollute enormously, directly or indirectly. See the Prestige tanker still barfing heavy fuel pellets on French beaches? It was loaded with heavy fuel for a power plant. As for coal, by burning millions of tons of it, we release more naturally-occuring uranium every year than Chernobyl ever spilled, as you probably know. And look at the pollution by coal mine fires.

It's an imperfect world. Until we have clean power, we have to find a way to generate it. Nuclear is the less polluting alternative. Yeah, I know, Chernobyl yada yada, but in July, 58 people died in China in a coal mine accident, as an example off the top of my head. Civil nuclear energy still has to kill as many people as the oil and coal power plants do.

Ok, I will get off by soap box now.. :-)

I appreciate that you took the time to present your arguments. Thank you.

-- SysKoll

Warning: If you visit Centralia, it's probably best to do so with a buddy. The ground can sink, and the gases leaking from the ground (CO, SO2, and others) are none too healthy. If you visit and you start to feel lightheaded or nauseous, move upwind or downwind until the feeling goes away.

Interesting fact for the day: Centralia is a drop in the proverbial bucket. There's a coal fire in China that releases 360 million tons of CO2 per year, an amount "equivalent to that emitted per year from all automobiles and light trucks in the United States".

(Rant: With that in mind, can someone explain to me why those Canadians think the Kyoto Protocol, which won't apply to China, is worth ratifying, and environmentalists in America think SUVs are the real cause of global warming?)

Warning: If you visit Centralia, it's probably best to do so with a buddy. The ground can sink, and the gases leaking from the ground (CO, SO2, and others) are none too healthy. If you visit and you start to feel lightheaded or nauseous, move upwind or downwind until the feeling goes away.

Interesting fact for the day: Centralia is a drop in the proverbial bucket. There's a coal fire in China that releases 360 million tons of CO2 per year, an amount "equivalent to that emitted per year from all automobiles and light trucks in the United States".

(Rant: With that in mind, can someone explain to me why those Canadians think the Kyoto Protocol, which won't apply to China, is worth ratifying, and environmentalists in America think SUVs are the real cause of global warming?)

Last time I looked it up, plutonium was chemically toxic, and an alpha emitter. That means that if aerosolized and inhaled, it's bad juju for your lungs, and if ingested, it's bad juju for your intestinal tract, but you can hold a lump of it in your hand and it "feels warm, like a live rabbit".

> Seriously guys, which would you want to live near, a coal fired plant that is mismanaged and pumps out a lot of nitrous oxide, or a nuclear power plant that is mismanaged and leaks radioactive material.

Considering what's also in coal - a bit of thorium and uranium, rubidium-87, and piles of potassium-40 - goes straight into the atmosphere... considering the radon that gets released during the mining process of coal... yeah.

If you burn 10000 tons of coal daily to generate 1000MW, you're probably generating 50-100 pounds of radioactive waste a day. If we assume 1% of it gets released into the atmosphere (with scrubbers) or 10% (without), you're throwing pounds of it straight into the air. The rest doesn't go into the air, it goes into an ash pile with the rest of the non-radioactive waste, to be recycled into whatever they do with coal ash.

Granted, none of this is significant to human health, but the point remains that a coal plant, even when properly managed, emits radioactive material -- thousands of times more than the typical nuke plant, and even if the nuke plant is improperly managed.

If you want to count gross negligence and poor design (Chernobyl) against nukes, you must also count the hundreds who die every year mining coal, and the desctruction of towns like Centralia, PA, which has been burning for 40 years.

(If you think the Centralia coal mine fire is bad, there's a coal fire in China that burns 200 million tons of coal a year and emits more CO2 per year than every automobile in the United States.)

Coal cleaner than nuclear? Bullshit.

Amen.

And for all you enviroweenies talking about how we need Kyoto, and how horrible the US is for burning fossil fuels:

From a site on the weird chemistry going on around the Centralia Coal Fire, which has only burned a town in PA, something for comparison:

A very large underground fire burns through large coal beds in Northern China. The fires consume up to 200 million tons of coal each year. This fire is quite a bit larger then the largest Pennsylvania fire (Centralia), releasing almost "as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as do all the cars in the United States" (Kittl, 1999).

Now, could someone explain to me again why nuclear power is bad? Sheesh.