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World Nuclear University Launched
nuke-alwin writes "The first meeting of the 'academic council' of the newly-launched World Nuclear University (WNU) was held in the UK last week. The mission of the WNU is to strengthen the international community of people and institutions to guide and further develop nuclear power and many other nuclear applications (in agriculture, medicine, environmental protection). As workers in the nuclear industry are aging, organisations have started Young Generation Networks such as the YGN of the British Nuclear Energy Society. The WNU is a further recognition that the nuclear industry needs to educate a new generation of workers, so that nuclear power can continue to provide electricity without the production of greenhouse gases."
While solar, wind and tidal power look very attractive, they suffer from the problem of being at the mercy of nature. That is not the case with nuclear power. All you have to do is replace fuel rods once in a while and you get emission-free, clean power. There is the issue of disposing nuclear waste, but I'm confident that issue will also be dealt with as technology advances.
I wanna go there.
WNU -- it's 'da bomb.
Best Windows Freeware
Trolling is a art,
Students attending this new university are reported to have a half-life of only 18 months. Essentially, upon graduating students have little to no life left in them. How this differs from any other university remains to be seen.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Nuclear agriculture... I always wanted glowing green apples.
When in the same sentence, the words 'launch' and 'nuclear' usually signal bad things are to come.
A bunch of drunk college frat boys with nuclear waste. Nothing can go wrong with that at all.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Development of nuclear weapons can now be instilled in the hands of college students!! Go world peace!! :D
No doubt this will help all governments which are trying to get the bomb.
What if we held a nuclear war and everybody came?
Last time I checked, there were'nt a lot of opertunities for employment for Nuclear Engineers. Why go into a field with no jobs?
Kick in the Head
It's interesting that the amount of uranium (in a natural distribution of isotopes) injected in the atmosphere by the burning of coal greatly exceeds the amount put in by nuclear weaponry or nuclear plant crisis. In fact, in the U.S., more people die per year from natural gas (leaks, explosions, housefires) than due to radiation. The real danger to the general population is the mishandling or theft of spent nuclear fuel. Plutonium oxide is very poisonous, in addition to being radioactive. Remember to check scientific fact before arming the FUD Torpedos.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Prof: This proton accelerator destabilizes the atom in this chamber here, then propels it--
Homer: Uh, excuse me, Professor Brainiac, but I worked in a nuclear power plant for ten years, and, uh, I think I know how a proton accelerator works.
Prof: Well, please, come down and show us.
Homer: All right, I will.
Everyone abandons the glowing green building. Homer walks out, glowing green himself.
Homer: [to meltdown men] In there, guys.
Men: Thanks, Homer.
-- Homer Goes to College
Visit my Ebay listings for lead jock straps, helmets and surplus radioactive materials.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I hear that is *such* a party school...
I don't care what the moderators say. #gnaa, you are an inspiration to us all. I pledge my karma points to moderating you back up from now on. Who will join me?
My fellow Americans,
I am extremely concerned about this nuclear school and what it means for our national securitization. We must not misunderestimatify the potential for doing both good and evil that this nuclear school provides. We must keep tabs on it to make sure that the nuclear knowledge does not fall into the wrong hands and remains in the control of Americans for the good of America.
Thank you and God bless America.
George W. Bush
President, United States of America
When is the US going to grow up and recycle and refine spent uranium, instead of trying so hard to bury it in the ground. Other countries have breeder reactors that refine used uranium, meaning less fuel mined, less waste made, and the waste that is made has less radioactivity and half life...
We have enough power generation capacity sitting in nuclear waste cooldown pools to run all of our nuclear power plants for several decades... we just have to refine it.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Yay! It's environmentally friendly! None of those nasty greenhouse gases, no sir! Just waste that is very chemically toxic, emits powerful high-energy radiation, and has a half-life measured in millenia. And as an added bonus, it costs billions and billions of dollars!
What are they around 40 or so ;)
Thank god where I live we have enough rivers/lakes for hydroelectric stations.
How's the WNU football team look this year?
---
Lousy rotten karmic retribution.
Instead of greenhouse gases nuclear power produces radioactive wastet that will be dangerous for tens of thousands of years.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
funny the intro was written in 1953.
And funny it was held in the uk, where the nuclear program has finally been scrapped as the government has admitted that it is bankrupt with huge liabilities. Not technically scrapped as they will run a few plants for a bit, but none will ever be built again, and the entire uk nuclear indusrty is going to be turned into a cleanup operation. Which given their historical record will still be a disaster. Parts of Sellafield could still go critical because of the amount of nuclear material that has never been cleaned up properly.
I look forward to seeing the first convocation ceremony for the Nuclear University. All those young, fresh-faced graduates, glowing with pride... at least, we hope it's pride...
*BOOM*
Ask anyone who has served in a direct nuclear rate in the US Navy what kinds of opportunities in the industry there are. The answer is limited. The US Navy cranks out experienced officers (read: college educated, 4yr, masters and some phd) and enlisted personnel (two year degree equivelent + minimum four years OTJ training). Their training program is amazingly good. Britain, Russia and other powers with nuclear subs have pretty damn good training programs, too.
:)
This is a false shortage. The reason for this program is to promote building more power plants (which imo isn't a bad thing). I could use a break from $150 electric bills and acid rain
-- $G
Where do I send my $5 check?
Thanks.
- OBL
Awesome I can't WAIT to sign up!!
..."WNU's Not a University"?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
...especially the lab work.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
People need to look beyond how clean and how safe nuclear power can be. There are real political costs to maintaining a nuclear programme. I don't mean just domestically, but internationally too. How can a nation proclaim they support non-proliferation and try to prevent other nations (e.g. Iran) from building reactors when they continue their own dependence upon them. Lead by example, or be viewed as hypocrits and be ignored - this fosters international tensions. Those in glass houses shouldn't cast stones.
... welcome our nuclear overlords.
that finally N-tech will become available to all, even though not all will probably implement it in the near future (or will be allowed to)... this can help (the rest of) humanity go a long way in its quest for alternative power sources...
Finally we will see nations other than the N-club at present learn and use this technology for proper purposes. Free as in Freedom has finally arrived...
Kashyap
Yeah, whatever!!!
Whatever you do don't bomb any classes.
All of the information nessisary to create a nuclear device Several times the power of the hiroshema device is in the public dommain. The difficulty lies in obtaining the radioactive materal nessisary.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Nukem High is for real? I thought that was just a cheesy Troma flick...
C|N>K
Mmmm.. Tomacco.
I pledge to mod that dumbass and all trolls down.
Where did it go then, you deluded idiot?
I see Allah in the eggplant!
YOU so fucking FAIL IT!
On your computer it was modded as a troll...
A fantastical magical troll. Lol!
The US already has an excellent uranium 'recycling' program that consists of making bullets out of uranium and shooting them all over stinky foreign countries. Probably this whole "War in Iraq" thing is really just a cover for the program.
Just a brief read of the posts and I see the pro terror financing, pro greehouse gas, pro keep us strung out on mideast oil, we are all going to die, you cant't do anything about the energy crisis gang has only carping and nothing constructive to contribute.
If you have a better soultion to keeping the energy going in western society than nuclear energy please let us know about. No solar, wind or any other hippy bulls shit. Tell us about things that are affordable and available today.
We don't need more nuclear engineers we nuclear power plants under construction and to shoot the first prick enviromentalist lawyer that files or even threatens to file a suit to stop the US from being independent of arab/islamic oil or improving our energy infrastructures.
King Henry, VI part II act IV
"The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers."
It's a joke about lawyers sure it is. There are to many lawyers. Do your part.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
Iam sure the facility at yucca mountain will be pleased, after all the waste is only active for 10,000 years and the stock is increasing daily, so if clean means "sweeping it under the carpet" and trying to prevent future civilisations from digging it up this is great news
While nuclear power is fascinating to those physicists and engineers who have studied it for all these years, the promise of cheap energy from nuclear power has never materialized. All nuclear installations are subsidized; in a couple of countries (France and Japan) the limited range of other energy options has made nuclear a significant player, but for the rest of the world it is just not cost-competitive against oil, coal, hydro-electric, and now wind power.
What about the decline in fossil fuels and green-house emissions? If just a tiny fraction of the effort that has been wasted on nuclear energy had been put toward space-based solar power systems, we'd have a ready-to-go solution that has no adverse environmental consequences. There's still time to make it happen though...
Energy: time to change the picture.
In Soviet Russia, atoms split YOU.
Here's what you need to do.
1) Go to school, get multiple engineering degrees or whatever you need.
2) Find a way to make solar, wind and/or tidal power ACTUALLY WORK. And I mean in real life, not in some pseudo-science hippie diatribe. And don't point to useless windmill farms in nevada/california, they don't produce shit. You need about 100 acres of windmills to power one average home. And they don't call them "condor cuisinarts" for nothing.
3) The world will be 100% behind you. Until then, nuclear is the best option we have.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It's the approach of the anti-nuclear lobby that I despise. Instead of promoting research to see if and how these reactors can be made safer, they cling to the belief that these plants cannot be made safe, ever. Perhaps in another century we'll look at this in the same way as we now think about those people who insisted that heavier-than-air flying machines were an impossibility.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Nuclear power is the least efficient source of power in terms of dollars and cents and is also one of the more dangerous and polluting forms of power generation. Nuclear power costs between 13-18 cents per kwh (Kilowatt hour). That's before the environmental impact of having lots and lots of nasty waste and workers exposed to high levels of radiation. Coal while dirty is 9-11 cents per kwh, Wind is 5-12, Solar is 8-20, and natural gas is 5-7. These costs are with health costs paid for by industry and the government calculated in. So the real question is why are we still using Nuclear. It's certainly not cheap energy as it was touted to be in the 50s, and it's certainly not safe as has been shown in past incidents. It serves only to continue nuclear research that benefits weapons development.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
Most of you guys here are for nuclear power, but here in the Czech Republic there actually is a new power plant, and is now being tested. i'm not against it, as it is both cheaper and enviroment-friendly, but there are huge groups against it, like in Austria people who live close to the border just block the roads and protest against it, joining the EU is also problematic because of some politicans are against it. there are some groups within the country, so you can see posters on the walls, etc.
all those protest seem to be qite strong, and there is a posibility of it getting sopped. this would suck, imho.
You've got it right. Nuclear is very clean, and it will not run out of fuel until well after every oil well is as dry as the Sahara.
Some people think that there's an issue with waste and nuclear weapons and terrorists and things. But remember:
Nukes don't kill people. People kill people.
Cheerio....
The countries that have used nuclear power effectively have set up a program where they designed and certified a one, two, or a small handful of reactors. Then the built from those same reactors over and over and over again. Given that the amount of engineering man-hours in a nuclear reactor is staggeringly huge, this is a far more cost efficient than the US model where every nuclear power plant is a custom job.
Incidents are bound to occur in any sufficiently complex system. Due to safety conscious design, incidents in western commercial nuclear power plants are virtually never hazardous to the public. But it would be far better for a pump to fail prematurely at one plant, and have a message go out to 50 other plants to check that pump, rather than have every plant discover problems on their own.
Spent fuel reprocessing is probably a good idea too. It will reduce the amount of waste and also limit the amount of uranium mining. I recall that I once read that mine accidents dwarf every other cause of "commercial nuclear power" related deaths combined. If the remaining waste is glass-encapsulated and stored, it should be very stable and be cause for very little concern.
Finally, Americans must understand that every power generation technique has some impact. Fossil fuel plants likely contribute to tens of thousands of deaths each year - from mining/drilling operations, accidents transporting the product, people breathing the waste. Solar manufacturing exposes workers to fair numbers of toxic and hazardous chemicals. Hydroelectric plants have substantial envrinmental impact. Wind power is unsteady and kills birds. When these factors are all taken into account nuclear power looks fairly good on balance.
In the long run, I believe that a system of a large number of modern nuclear power plants built form a small number of designs should be operated as our "baseline" electrical energy source. The reactors will be supllemented with a system of solar, wind, and gas-turbine plants to accomodate peak demand. This system will minimize the impact on our environment, provide a high level of safety, and provid ethe power we need to grow.
Actually you need 2 small windmills and by small I mean a 20 foot windmill you put in your backyard. Wind is often cheaper than natural gas and coal which are two of the cheapest forms of generation. Cheapest is geothermal, but there aren't a lot of spots left to do that in.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
Much of the opposition to nuclear power in Europe where many plants are becomming end of lifed is the cost of the power. It was advertised as having a high upstart cost and a low operating cost, but it turns out it has high costs even after the startup costs.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
The costs of nuclear energy are piddling when compared to fossil fuels. As an american, as much as I hate to admit that I am, I can see that the nation has two options and two options only:
1. Develop Nuclear Technology to replace our dependance on fossil fuels.
or
2. Bomb the poo out of the Iranians, cuz let's face it, Saddam's oil ain't gettin' here fast enough.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
Weak little man. Show me what you can do. Mod this down. I dare you. Even God himself cannot stop #GNAA from serving its appointed duty!
So what are these two things Russia has built, exactly? Giant potatoes?
Have the sneaky russians cleverly labelled their potato farms as breeder reactors in order to throw off the americans?
Never mind that it takes a very specific configuration of a reactor to produce plutonium in a weapons-grade fashion, and separate facilities to remove it from the rest of the material...
Never mind that modern designs such as the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor don't use water as the coolant (it uses helium, which is inert, and does not absorb neutrons), so you don't have to worry about radioactive steam getting out, or a steam explosion, or the coolant changing AT ALL except for it's heat...
Never mind that also in said reactor, you don't have to shut it down for months to refuel it - new pebbles in the top, old pebbles out the bottom...
Also pay no attention to the fact that each pebble of fuel is of a small enough quantity of fissile material that all the fuel needed to operate a plant for 40 years can be stored on site from when the plant first fires up, to the point it is turned off for good. Oh, and there is still room for the waste to be there for up to 80 years - no transportation necessary...
Did I mention that it is physically impossible for this design to melt down? There goes that FUD...
Oh, and these things are cheap, and total construction time from ground breaking to flipping the switch is 24 months.
For some actual INFORMATION, please read this.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Who said energy is cheap? It sure isn't cheap when you factor in the all the other costs of using petro chemicals to make electricity. What about the health cost of breathing air fouled by coal and oil fired plants. What abouthte cost to the envirment from acid rain and increased greenhouse gases? I bet those are not calculated in the anti-nuclear power camp?
King Henry, VI part II act IV
"The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers."
It's a joke about lawyers sure it is. There are to many lawyers. Do your part.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
Nuclear energy. So clean and cheap and efficient. Its almost worth getting cancer.
In Soviet Russia.... Nah, it's too easy...
Learn something new.
What's the admission status for north korean students?
Just something to think about regarding this World Nuclear University.
- "They misunderestimated me."
I live in a very windy area. A large windmill project has been put up on the hills there. Construction time is less thatn a year. The projected power generated is .1 Nuke plant, I believe. The company building it is throwing around money like they don't care. I think this is a working wind concern, as the company expects a large return to be throwing around this much money. And this is in Pennsylvania!
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
Well, it might. 60 Hz AC is already speeding up the earth's internal AC magnetic field.
This is the answer of some hippy with one light bulb, a laptop,no stereo, no TV, no microwave, no fridge and no air conditioning.
He also has no car or if he does it's an old pre polution conrtol oil leaking, smoking VW. Would come up with.
When you can afford outfit my home with enough solar or wind power and the batteries to store the energy at a cost or 8 to 20 cents per killwat hour call me. I sure can't afford it. I already have "conservation" going. You can't run my house with the kind of pie in the sky hippy shit you a talking about. If I tried to put up a wind turbine some enviromentalist lawyers would be suing me as soon as I tried to permit it.
you forgot...
4) Profit!!!
To be honest, PGE has put some of these windmill things out in Eastern Oregon, and man are they an eyesore! I'd rather have one cooling tower on a river somewhere than fields upon fields of fans sticking up 50 feet in the air puree-ing birds...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
A. Caird
B.S. Nuc. Eng. 1993 U. of Michigan
M.S. Nuc. Eng. 1996 U. of Michigan
(but I've never worked as a nuclear engineer; IT jobs are available in nearly every city in the world, computational reactor design jobs are not)
Take it for what it's worth.
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. E. Tufte
"You need about 100 acres of windmills to power one average home"
Uh, my uncle and his family lived for 20 years in a very nice home entirely powered by 1 windmill. Nor has he ever mentioned any particular peroblem with birds.
Maybe you need about 100 acres of blindly asserted bullshit to justify that nuclear is the only real option.
Suppose a nuclear plant has a problem, you contaminate 100's of square miles with radioactive emissions, possibly contaminate ground water, and generate tons of highly dangerous waste.
So, a little bit of information for people:
TMI release NO RADIATION. Countless security from the 60s utterly failed but NO radiation was released. I don't know about you, but I call what happened at TMI a problem and yet the only area that was contaminated what the area inside the containment. No ground water; no gaseous emissions; all the waste is solid and much easier to contain than any pollution caused by natual gas, coal, or oil.
In general, the choice is between 1 kg of used nuclear fuel or 40 metric tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere that you get to breathe in no matter how careful plants are to clean their emissions. It all comes down to which waste you prefer. Technology has already lessened the risk of accidents in the first place to nearly zero and all but guarantees that no modern power plant can accidentally release radiation.
And FYI, Chernoybl was a very poorly designed reactor that was running illegal tests with low water when a sensor failed to measure that all the water had evaporated (and ceases to keep the reactor burning fuel at a controlled rate) and due to the lack of backup sensors operators did not react soon enough so the core heated up and when they did try to react and stop the problem additional design flaws (graphite control rods speed up the reaction before slowing it) caused the plant to blow up. US and all new power plants are IMMUNE to this possibility: if water runs out, the reactor stops and control rods do not speed up the reaction initially. If you want to complain the 3 other reactors of identical flawed design are still operating at Chernobyl then do so, but any new power plants are more safe than your car is.
Through osmosis, here's what I think I know about the issue: Nuclear waste is a dangerous poison that is poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years. Although the DOE has had a waste disposal fund for years, there's still no political consensus on a seismically neutral place (if such a thing exists) to store the waste. Almost no one wants it. So existing nuclear waste is sitting around accumulating in ponds at nuclear plants.
(That's pronounced "nuke-you-lar," by the way. :-)
My father, the physics teacher, always said he thought the stuff should be shot into the sun - which is great until a rocket explodes on the launchpad or in the atmosphere. And with so much of the waste around, there'd be ample opportunity for that to happen.
So we're still where we were 23 years ago, pitting the promise of clean power generation against the reality of highly dangerous waste. (My bias is that we'd better get the waste issue taken care of or I can't be in support of it.)
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
I can believe that hot fusion might be developed into a practical power source(The Farnsworth Fusor might actually be made to work). We have yet to see fission plants really stand on their own without various indirect subsidies from government.
Well, at least you don't need to resort to ad-hominem attacks...
develop nuclear power and many other nuclear applications (in agriculture, medicine, environmental protection).
Great idea! Nobody is going to fuck with Mother Nature once she's packing nukes!
Here I could make a crack about how that might just make Bush attack the environment even more, but I'm not above that.
The enemies of Democracy are
World Nuclear University Launched???
This giant University will destroy us all!
T-minus 15 minutes 'till impact!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I am no ecco-hippy I support nuclear power and don't give a fuck about my
King Henry, VI part II act IV
"The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers."
It's a joke about lawyers sure it is. There are to many lawyers. Do your part.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
All this supply-side approach to the energy situation is completely missing the point. The issue is not "how do we exploit more energy?" The issue is "What is the best way to consume an amount of energy that we can safely and affordably generate?"
Let's take the oil situation that you mentioned. George Bush, in his infinite wisdom, has decided that it's a good idea to satisfy America's insatiable thirst for oil by drilling for more in the Alaskan wilderness. It's a bit like dealing with a leaky roof by putting a bigger bucket under the drip rather than fixing the leak. Reducing America's dependance on oil (foreign or otherwise) is more easily (and cleanly) achieved by reducing consumption. This means closing the unbelievably stupid loophole that exempts SUVs & light trucks from the same emission and consumption regulations as cars. It means planning our cities and neighbourhoods so that everyday things are within walking distance of each other rather than forcing people to strap themselves into a three tonne vehicle and drive two miles to the nearest "convenience store" every time they need to buy something as small as a postage stamp. It means campaign finance reform to stop the automobile lobby from blocking the development of public transport at every turn.
As for electricity consumption, it was once said that if every home in Britain were to replace an incandescent light bulb with a flurescent one, one power station in the country could be dispensed with. Tax breaks for energy efficient appliances (particularly refrigerators) are a lot cheaper, more effective and cleaner than finding new ways to pump more power into inefficient older machines. Renewable energy becomes a lot more cost-effective when you get more bang for your killowatt buck.
No "bleeding heart wooly hippie liberalism" required. Just a good look at the big picture and a sensible approach to incentives on _both_ sides of the supply/demand equation.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
When your country sits on top of vast reserves of cheap oil, you can expect other countries to be suspicious when you express a sudden interest in developing a nuclear energy program for scientific research and energy production. Scientific research can be done with research reactors, which have minimal proliferation hazards. Power production reactors make no economic sense when there are abundant supplies of cheap oil.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
It's spelled "nucular" everyone knows that.
He didn't say "nukyular"
... put a nuclear reactor on a ship, and (with electrolosys) then sell hydrogen to the rest of the world. Not only could I get rich, but also get away from those sue-happy whacos who can't comprehend that nuclear power is far safer than any other power source ever discovered by human kind.
Perhaps now, this will provide the United States with an impetus to standardize on a reactor plant design. If the Federal Government approached nuclear power with the same notions as the U.S. Navy, perhaps we would see a greater role for nuclear power in our society. It is markedly more easy to design, develop, and implement a reactor plant design that can be certified; than it is to have to certify each individual reactor plant design. The U.S. Navy (and possibly other world Navies) certify a small number of designs and fabricators so that an inspection is all that is required. Example: The reactor system made by GE or Westinghouse has been certified by the Navy's nuclear regulatory authority and can be built immediately upon order from the Navy. A simple inspection and sea-trial are all that is required to validate its functionality. There is not a requirement that the design for that reactor be submitted for approval for each build, as the design has already been approved.
This is contrary to the public power generating stations. Each reactor and plant design must be submitted for review prior to the plant being built. It would be far wiser and more efficient to have the appropriate regulatory agency(s) (FERC, NRC, AEC...it changes) approve a set of reactor plant designs and their respective fabricators/construction agencies before a plant is needed. Example: A nuclear power plant design for 1000Mw, 500Mw, etc... has been approved for build by the appropriate agencies. Reliant Energy needs to expand its capacity to provide power by 500Mw in the next 3 years. Reliant has simply to consult the regulatory agencies list of approved design/fabricators to determine what they could build. The plant can be built immediately or as soon as possible and would only require inspections and testing, and would not require a design submission. This could shave off years of wait time for Reliant, and reduce the costs of electricity to consumers.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
According to this paper, the half-life of excess CO2 in the atmosphere is somewhere around 31 years. The lifetime of an average CO2 molecule is somewhat longer, ~100 years.
Anyone figured out a username and password for the members' section yet?
>Tidal power obviously affects currents and erosion.
>Even solar and wind power on large scale will
>affect weather patterns and climate in addition to
>the effects of their sheer size.
What are you smoking? Tidal power makes no difference to erosion, since these things are miles out to sea. And how do you figure solar and wind power affect weather patterns? Perhaps you mean the weather under a solar panel will be drier?
If moderation worked this would be +4 informative.
King Henry, VI part II act IV
"The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers."
It's a joke about lawyers sure it is. There are to many lawyers. Do your part.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
Never mind that also in said reactor, you don't have to shut it down for months to refuel it - new pebbles in the top, old pebbles out the bottom.
A distinct advantage to be sure, but refueling outages can range from 10 days if you are only refueling the plant (every 18 months) to 25 days minimum if you want to accomplish a number of other things as well. There are activities you can only do when the plant is shutdown, and these activities would be the same for a pebble bed reactor.
Also pay no attention to the fact that each pebble of fuel is of a small enough quantity of fissile material that all the fuel needed to operate a plant for 40 years can be stored on site from when the plant first fires up, to the point it is turned off for good.
Storing all the fuel on site is quite possible with conventional nuke plants as well. Spent fuel typically has to be stored underwater for 10-15 years, and after that, it's often safe enough to dry store onsite in a warehouse. Powerplants designed their spent fuel storage onsite with the promise of a facility like Yucca mountain being open in a reasonable amount of time. The facilities slowness in coming has led to numerous examinations of what we can safely do with spent fuel on site.
Oh, and these things are cheap, and total construction time from ground breaking to flipping the switch is 24 months.
New conventional nuke plants from Westinghouse can be up almost as fast. The lawyers and regulatory burden are typically far more troublesome than any construction process.
Anyway, I agree with you overall, pebble bed reactors look like a 'hot technology' and I'd love to see some of these plants go online.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
There are two important issues (along with many more): The time for half-life(s) to a nontoxic state and the amount of a Golly gee "Goof" that would threaten life on a large scale. The answer to #2 is not very much, especially if lost into wind driven dust or water born run off and into. The situation with storage is how to mark it as a danger, we are talking about 200,000 years here for plutonium. How do we say "stay out"? With the change over decades of thousands of years the skull and crossbones may evolve into a meaning of "Artifacts of the gods" and it will be dug up with the best of intentions. Leave a large pyramid warning to last thousands of years well there is the glaciers that will visit in 20,00-30,00 years or so, they do not leave much behind. Salt mines will have earthquakes, long term water movement that over time will penetrate most any underground cell used for storage. We are talking about thousands of generations. I do not take credit for these statements for they have been written in may articles over the past twenty-thirty years./////If you do not remember what you had for lunch yeterday..stay out of pronuclear statements..
I eat my grapes at room temperature, cuz the cold ones hurt my teeth
And no-one starts a capital project in order to lose money, so yes, wind turbines are about making money. What isn't?
While you are here, please sort out our broken nuclear plants. They've been down for years, and are just eating up subsidies.
One minor correction: they don't call them "condor cuisinarts" at all. It's the faux-libertarian Cato Institute that calls them that, and we know all about them...
I work in the Nuclear Industry in Canada; I'm a 40-something engineer, and I'm one of the young'uns. In the NDE division that I haunt, there are around 20 engineers, and about 40 or so techs. Of these, there are two techs and one engineer under the age of 30 that have signed on in the past half-decade. The evaporation of skills and knowledge is beginning now, and in 10 years more than half of the staff will have taken their pensions.
---- ---- --- -- --- ------ Keep Cool But Do Not Freeze
It is interresting to see how many Ex-Nukes like me are in the IT field.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
One measure of how much we affect the earth is how much of its net agricultural productivity is consumed (directly or indirectly) by humans, as opposed to being cycled in natural ecosystems. You could count areas which cannot grow much because they're permanently shaded by solar collectors as being part of that consumption of productivity, so by some measures solar could be a bigger blight on the environment than nuclear. (I'm not saying that measure is the right one, just that it deserves consideration in any open-minded evaluation of the tradeoffs.)
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
There are some long-lived isotopes in the mix, but we're fairly good at separating isotopes from each other. There is no reason we couldn't filter those out (e.g. Tc-99) and package them for multi-million-year disposal. The beauty is that the hot isotopes are short-lived, and the long-lived isotopes aren't hot.
100% safe... to sit next to. You know, like blocks of lead and sealed vials of mercury? Just don't take any internally.It might interest you to know that good old stable arsenic is a serious problem in parts of Asia. Turns out that the wonderful high-tech (not) invention of tube wells for drinking water allowed the over-pumping of aquifers, which let air into them. The air oxidized the formerly-stable arsenic, which became soluble in the water and came up via the wells. Now people across large parts of India have chronic arsenic poisoning. I can't think of any problem with Yucca Mountain affecting so many people or so large an area.
Yeah, someone is bound to lay claim to the world's oceans and all their dissolved uranium, and all the world's thorium while they're at it. And every bit of granite on the planet, and all the coal ash (the uranium in granite gives it more potential energy than coal, and the U and Th in coal ash has more energy potential than the carbon in the coal). I've got nothing against renewables, just badly-thought-out renewables. So what are you doing to support Bryan Roberts and his gyromill generators?Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
It's cheap, organic, carbon neutral and doesn't have nasty waste which could attract terrorists.
Plus you can make gas, oil, alcohol, paper, etc. out of a lot of it. Take hemp or algae for instance.
Why did GEAR crush RDP?
A nuclear power plant design for 1000Mw, 500Mw, etc... has been approved for build by the appropriate agencies...The plant can be built immediately or as soon as possible and would only require inspections and testing, and would not require a design submission.
You mean something like Westinghouses AP600/AP1000 nuclear reactors?
The NRC has approved the AP600, they love it, and the AP1000 is simply a scaled up version. From what I hear at my workplace, the NRC now has a system in place to get plants up and running in 5 years or so, from a licensing standpoint. Most plants in the US are of Westinghouse design, so their work could be seen as a de-facto standard. Combined with potential federal loan guarantees for another 8,400 MW of nuke plants, and you may yet see nuclear construction in the next few years.
In terms of legal hurdles, the easiest way to expand the US nuclear fleet is to add reactors at existing sites. The local population is already quite used to living in the shadow of these plants, and will probably just see it as more jobs.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Those are the government figures that take into account "true cost" which includes subsidies and health costs. Subsidies are why nuclear power is often looked at as the future of cheap power.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
It is terribly amusing that it's the Greens who call for taxes on fossil carbon to level the playing field for renewables, but continue to denounce nuclear power because it's "uneconomic" under the same conditions which make photovoltaics a hobbyist's or activist's game anywhere the grid reaches. If carbon were taxed nuclear powerplants of all kinds would be wildly profitable, and not even wind could take away their guaranteed payoff for base-load capacity.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Unfortunately, it does not seem to have worked. Even Iraq, Iran and North Korea appear to have gotten their hand on gas-centrifuge technology, which obviates plutonium entirely. That approach seems to have failed.
Even more unfortunately, the USA abandoned different approaches such as the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), which would have bred fuel and refined the fission products out without ever producing refined plutonium. The entire fuel load would have always been too radioactive to handle outside a hot cell (very resistant to theft, perhaps less so to government diversion... like they need to) and the waste would have come out as glass-encapsulated zeolite-immobilized salts ready for burial. A pity that we didn't give that the trial it deserved.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
...
Now, we've got to go build the _receiving_ end of the power transmission system. That's harder - some of the popular approaches create lots of toxic waste (most of the semiconductor systems) and it doesn't work very well at night. But that's mostly a Simple Matter of Engineering.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Economically, none of the existing ones have ever turned a profit without generous government assistance. I humbly submit an interesting organizations' website to this discussion: The Rocky Mountain Institute. They are a think tank on environmental and energy issues, which strives not to have a particular agenda, but only to base their analyses on proven science and solid economic reasoning. They don't lobby governments, and most of their recommendations are squarely aimed at industries.
Also, the notion that solar energy generation could never provide enough energy without taking up too much space is absurd. A back of the envelope calculation shows that a desert installation of mirrors focused on heating towers (working prototypes exist) or photovoltaics with today's available efficiencies, can do the job. The USA's electricity demand could be met with an installation the size of Rhode Island.
Readers of The Industrial Physicist will also recall from a recent article (and discussion in the letters to the editor) that we are not limited to Earth-based generation. Within decades, we could be placing photovoltaic installation on the moon, and beaming the energy to stations on the Earth's surface by focussed microwaves.
-- Who am I? How did I get here? My God, what have I done?!
Where are the "WNU" t-shirts..... Damn...that'd be sweet...
And yet there is one, that requires far less R&D effort than has been wasted on nuclear energy over the past few decades - Space Solar Power. Read up on it - the economics are ALREADY better than for nuclear energy, and will catch up to traditional coal and oil for utility-scale power over the next 10 to 15 years.
It's time for the nuclear fantasy to end.
Energy: time to change the picture.
...is how little people read/learn/know before they open their mouths and stick both feet firmly in.
did you even bother to read any previous posts before you opened your pie-hole un pobre guey?
i'm guessing no, because your ignorance is truly astounding.
The problem the UK has is its reactors which are WAY past their use-by date and nobody has worked out how to switch the damn things off safely.
The dangers posed by waste leakage, meltdown or just realy stupid ideas are unimaginable and global (just to remind you that there is a world outside the USA) that is drowning in American shit.
Reprocessing is a joke (in the UK - other capitalist states too) being unprofitable and unreliable. not to mention the ultimate terrorist target.
When reprocessed fuel was sent to japan they sent it back because BNFL was cought out falsifying !SAFETY DOCUMENTS! sice then nobody wants our reprocessed waste.
So the reprocessing plant sends BNFL way into the red and they decide to cut their losses, but if you thought decommisioning a power station was hard - you should try switching off a reprocessing plant.
Other realy stupid ideas include nuclear powered satelites - if Columbia was carrying one we would all be dead by now. Do you trust NASA with your life?
and
Nuclear subs which sooner or later will leak into the sea and spread via bioaccumulation ito our food chain.
and
shipping waste across the world by ship or plane which are easy terrorist targets and risk crashing or sinking.
and
Burrying waste near a fault line - GWB does it again.
and
Allowing israel to develop nukes - triggering an arms race in the M.E
and of couse
Privitisation of the nuclear energy industry which puts profit above safety (see the Japanese incident above)
The onus is on citizens to waste less energy not the state to generate more - instead of that spangly screensaver TURN THE FRELLIN MONITOR OFF!
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
Why should the burden of proof be on the green lobby? The nuclear industry have lied continually about the safety and economics of their plants since the first ones were built.
The Western cape provincial government recently launched a proposal to build a pebble bed nuclear reactor in Cape Town, adjacent to the existing Koeberg nuclear reactor.
Public response has been violently anti-reactor, not because we don't want the reactor, but because we don't want the reactor near a major population centre. When Koeberg was originally built, it was located near Cape Town due to fears of saboutage of the power lines. It is not in a geologically stable area, and there have been several leaks in the last 15 years. There's also been one attempted saboutaging of the plant itself during the ANC led 'Struggle'.
I have several friends who were involved in the protest action against the proposed PBNR. Several of them were intimidated by the local consultation company that did the original Environmental Impact assessment for the proposed construction site.
Fortunately, the Cape Town city council has ordered a stay of planning while further public consultation is done.
I have a bachelours degree in Physics, so I have some understanding of how radiation and fission function. I know fission is inherently cleaner than fossil fuels, and I know that the long-half-life waste-products are very low-energy emitters. What I don't trust is the manufacturing process of the components for the reactor, and the process undertaken to do the EIA and site preparation - there is too much going on in the shadows.
Nuclear fission is a dangerous beast. Proper care needs to be taken during nuclear power plant construction, and unfortunately government contracts generally don't take the proper precautions. Given the nature of the PBNR, and the fact that the one planned for the Western Cape is a pilot project (if it is successful, the contracting company and the South African Government apparently have a joint contract for 20 reactors elsewhere in the world), I have little faith that the proper safeguards would be taken.
I hope I will live to see fusion power stations become a reality.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 -- The emergency cooling systems that are meant to protect nuclear reactors from melting down in case of a ruptured water pipe could fail after a few minutes of use at most reactors, according to a nuclear watchdog group that is citing a government study to argue that the problem makes a catastrophe at one power plant in New York 100 times more likely.
The group, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and a New York environmental organization, Riverkeeper, plan to petition the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week to ask that the two Indian Point reactors in Buchanan, N.Y., on the east bank of the Hudson River, should be shut until corrections are made. The problem, they argue, is that leaking water or steam would scour off pipe insulation, paint and other materials, forming debris that would clog the coolant pumps.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recognized the possibility years ago, and in September 1996 classified it as a serious problem, but does not anticipate that corrective action will be completed until early 2007. A commission official said, however, that the problem is complicated to solve and need not be fixed immediately because the accident that would require use of the safety system was unlikely in the first place.
David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, contended that the emergency core cooling system "is virtually certain to fail at some plants."
"Right now you're relying on a pipe not breaking," he said.
According to Mr. Lochbaum and to data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the problem involves 69 plants of a design called pressurized water reactors, in which the water that is used to carry off the useful heat, and to keep the fuel from over-heating, is kept at a pressure of about 2,200 pounds per square inch. If a pipe breaks and the pressure is released, the water would boil into steam because it is heated to more than 500 degrees. The steam could not cool the fuel, and the fuel would melt.
So the plants are equipped with an automatic emergency core cooling system. Drawing water from a tank outside the reactor dome, the system can dump thousands of gallons a minute into the reactor, making up for even a large leak.
In this design, water from a broken pipe would flow into the reactor basement. The outdoor tank typically holds 125,000 to 300,000 gallons, and when it was nearly empty, the system would start drawing water from the basement instead. The problem is that if the water picks up debris along the way, that debris could clog the screens over the pipes that lead back to the emergency pumps.
At the request of the commission, the Los Alamos National Laboratory studied the 69 plants, and found that for some, the risk of core damage was multiplied 100 times because of the debris problem. It ranked the plants but did not name them; Mr. Lochbaum's group used various detailed characteristics included in the report to determine which plant was which, and discovered that the Indian Point reactors were both in the worst five.
The plants' owner, Entergy, told the N.R.C. in August, in response to a letter sent by the commission to all plants, that it had analyzed the material available to become debris, including "failed paints," and would train its operators in ways to manage the problem, including pumping water in more slowly.
A spokesman for Indian Point, Jim Steets, said that he had not seen the petition, but that "the N.R.C. has attached some level of urgency, which we're complying with."
At the N.R.C., Sunil Weerakkody, the section chief for fire protection and special studies, said that in decades of nuclear plant operation, the emergency core cooling system had been used only eight times, and that no accident had reached the stages at which pumping from the basement was required.
"Our bes
you had me at #!
The results of a 1982 NRC/Sandia study into estimated consequences of a meltdown accident are summarised here. "Early fatalities" are estimated as high as 70,000 (Philadelphia) or 100,000 (New Jersey). "Early injuries" can reach the 100,000s.
you had me at #!
Correction: no-one starts a capital project in order to lose their own money.
If there's "green" subsidy on offer, you can make yourself money by losing the taxpayers money
That's just a general point. Renewable energy projects tend to attract subsidies or tax breaks, but not in every case, and it doesn't mean they're automatically a bad idea.
Hehe... it'll happen...
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
If I have time later, I might post some annotations to those articles you linked to. I plan to set up a site for explaining the facts about nuclear power some time. Nuclear power is too good to waste. The public needs to be educated.
Stick Men
Damn, there's a lot of uninformed opinions floating around on this topic.
A while ago I stumbled upon this great article which deals in detail with a lot of the issues concerning nuclear power: http://www.uic.com.au/ne.htm
Admittedly it comes from the pro-nuclear camp - I'd be interested to know if anyone can point me to information which contradicts what's stated (claimed?) in this document?
Remember that activity is inversely proportional to half-life. If you have a half life of 212,000 years, then the activity level is very low.
I have six vials of Tc-99 sitting right here on my desk. Their radioactivity is not even measureable (and, yes, I do have instruments capable of measuring to 10^-8 curies). They used to be vials of Tc-99m, which has a half-life of six hours. One of them used to be a full Curie, which can be slightly hazardous. I am much more comfortable with my 212,000 year half life Tc than my 6 hour half life Tc.
I didn't know the progress that the nuclear industry was making towards those ends. I only know of what has hampered the nuclear efforts in the past. That's great news! It is ashame that we have such an easy potential source of energy as a fission powerplant but do not take advantage of it.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
So is this really a "World" Nuclear University, or a "NATO and its politically correct friends" Nuclear University? Will they let in students from countries that don't have the Bomb, and might be trying to build it, or only countries that have it? Pakistan was asking the US for assistance with "peaceful" nuclear programs for about 20 years before testing their bombs, and before India was doing "peaceful" reactors for a long time before they tested the Mohandas Gandhi Memorial Nuclear Weapon.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
1) Old reactors suffer from old and bad design constraints.
2) These same old reactors also suffer from improper management which leads to the numerous problems such as sludge and accident potential.
3) All of this could have been avoided by adopting new nuclear technology and proper maintenance and cleanup.
4) New reactor designs such as the pebble bed and the Gas Turbine Modular Helium Reactor eliminate many of these problems while producing 50% more efficiency and less waste.
and 5) (a biggie) if the whole world used Nuclear power, Uranium reserves would be depleted in an estimated 50-100 years depending on the recycling technology.
The future of power generation is really either in de-centralizing power by using things like fuel cells in every home. Or, creating even bigger power grids hooked up to a Fusion Reactor. However, the fact of the matter is that if civilization is to continue for another 100 or even 200 years (not that long from a historical method), then great strides in technology need to be taken now. And it looks like they are. Fusion is ready for the first power generating beta reactor, fuel cells are ready now, its now up to business and society to see the work completed....
Right now Vermont gets 35% of it's electricity from Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power, an aging nuclear power plant in the southern portion of the state. It costs Vermonters from $0.12-$0.16 per kilowatt hour to get electricity from this plant, and is commissioned for retirement by 2010. The high costs include the extremely strict regulations regarding nuclear power, disposal of the waste, and protecting the facilities from terrorists, and these costs of $0.12-$0.16 are AFTER government subsidies.
The proposed new energy strategy (to take affect in stages before 2020) would involve the use of renewable sources like wind power which would only cost approximately $0.025 cents per kilowatt hour to run. Not only this, but it would only take approximately 20 wind farms to provide over 50% of Vermont's energy needs. Another part of the plan is to increase assistnace to consumers in purchasing energy efficient products for the home by helping to cover some of the cost. This summer I got a coupon from Efficiency Vermont giving me a $25 rebate for purchasing an energy efficient air conditioner, and each year I get free energy saving lightbulbs for the house that are more than adequate for lighting even the largest rooms (I live in a former Frat house, 11 bedrooms).
For Vermont, nuclear energy just does not make sense from any viewpoint. What is needed are wise policy-making decisions that provide realistic solutions to our future energy needs while using the energy we do have already more efficiently.
A wheat field is certainly no good if it's grazed to the ground by bison, antelope or prairie dogs; if you want to grow wheat (or most other things), they have to be kept out. Wheat fields cannot be habitat for a large number of other species; remove enough habitat and eventually the species is threatened. Heck, dozens of species which formerly held the web together between the Mississippi and the Rockies are in trouble, because they're interdependent and we've converted so much of the land for other purposes. We have to make efforts to preserve what little prairie we have left! In the face of this you cannot credibly argue that a big enough difference of quantity does not become a difference of quality, and thus enough "human effect" becomes damage by default.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
1) Jimmy Carter ( of the Nuc Navy Fame no less ) outlawed fuel rod reprossessing.
2) Question for all the rocket scientists? How much radiation comes from the material that used to illuminate watchs? Do you consider it dangerous?
- reason - I have worked at several of the US and Canadian Plants - Radiation 'rarely' gets out and the stuff that does is very, very small amount.
3) Radiation scanning machines all over the plants at access/exit points - I saw a temp worker get raked over the coal because of a dive watch... (see #2) The plants take this stuff extremely seriously.
4) Cost of the plants: Note: TMI allowed Nobel gas emissions only ( for all you non-nukes ) look it up - No radiation got outside the plant.
Primary systems, secondary systems and tertiary systems EVERYWHERE.
Coal fired plants emit RADIATION everyday - a different standard is used to test.
Canadian Plants are significantly different than US plants. For all the NIMBY arguments, It was amazing to drive past a park ( filled with people playing softball ) just down the road from many houses turn a left onto a road and appx 300 yards away, turn into the Darlington Plant. Right on the lake - excellent area to visit.
5) Any fisherman out there? The water(s) being released back into the water supplies at plants is extremely clean - enviro wacko Attys make sure - the temp is usually slightly higher than the standard water temp - the fishing near the water outlets is a known secret - warmer water = more fish. And no - ther are no 3-eyed fish there...
6) Nuc Plants have uptimes measured like *nix systems - hundreds of days before refueling outtages. Canadian Plants refuel online allowing even longer uptimes...
Anybody ever go outside ? Naturally occurring radiation ( from that big yellow sphere in the sky ) is being absorbed into your skin - hence the skins reaction to 'Tan'.
Any smokers out there? Everytime you inhale - you have voluntarily inhaled radiation into your lungs.. Alpha particles - those are the real nasties... ( Look it up..)
Anybody have a smoke detector in the house/dorm/office??
The radiation in a smoke detector is a HUGH qty by the NRC standards...
Beta Particles bounce off the skin.
Gamma particles ( notwithstanding B.Banner - the Hulk ) only penetrate a small distance into the skin...
Nutron Particles - Vary wildly across 9 Decades of energies - Also nasty.
Nuclear Medicines - Ever hear of that?
Nuc Plants have to account for ALL radiation sources - of face HUGH fines. Once a smoke detector is introduced into a Nuc Plant, it becames a tracable source..
Etc...Etc...
Educate before you prognosticate..
-Peace
What are these lies you speak of?
How would you compare the safety of the most modern PWR to AGR?
Stick Men
Stupid me. I meant research. I know that fusion is done with inertial confinement and tokamaks, not particle accelerators. I was trying to be mildly insulting.
Stick Men
You mean I can breate clean air, live in relative safety, AND sleep in later? Hot damn, I'm voting Green party in 2004!