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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."
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?
Not to knock nuclear power...but you are simply wrong. Before a fuel rod goes into the reactor, it isn't really all that radioactive. When it comes out, boy it sure is! You see, there are neutron reactions besides fission that convert Uranium to Plutonium and that convert non-radioactive elements into radioactive elements. Also, fission products can be radioactive. Plutonium and a few of the other reaction products are more toxic and more radioactive than the Uranium ever was.
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.
Just waste that is very chemically toxic, emits powerful high-energy radiation, and has a half-life measured in millenia
You know, this is probably the most misunderstood aspect of nuclear reactors. Everybody is convinced that nuclear waste is so dangerous and that it is the worst thing that can happen to the environment because the radioactive nuclei won't stabilize for thousands of years.
The thing is, nuclear waste is composed of fission products, which are a lot of different things. There are short-lived isotopes, medium-lived isotopes, and long-lived isotopes. The long-lived isotopes that everybody likes to make a big deal about are only a percentage of the total waste (I don't remember the actual number, but I think it is something like 20%). Furthermore, you can observe an interesting trend if you look at a chart of the nuclides. The high-energy betas and gammas tend to come from short-lived and medium-lived isotopes. Long-lived isotopes tend to emit weak betas and alphas.
So what does this mean? It means nuclear waste becomes a lot "safer" after several decades (long enough for the short and medium-lived isotopes to stabilize). Then the longer-lived isotopes that remain suddenly become a lot easier to dispose of. Better yet, if those long-lived isotopes happen to be fissile, they can be recycled into new fuel and then they don't have to be disposed of period. Also, if you could separate the short, medium, and long-lived isotopes initially, the short-lived could be kept in a facility until they stabilize, the long-lived could be recycled, and then the only waste that you actually have to worry about disposing of are the medium-lived isotopes.
Personally, I don't think nuclear power is the perfect solution to every solution, but it is a good solution to many problems. If people would get over the stigma on radiation (leftover from the cold war) and come up with a good way to deal with nuclear waste, nuclear power would be a much better solution than the many gas and oil burning power plants we currently have in the US. And that's not to say that power-generating is the only good function for a nuclear reactor. A lot of really good science can be done with them that can't be done with anything else.
They've had a solution since the 70s, actually.
It's very simple. You reprocess the fuel to recover the usefull stuff out of it. Some of the U235 wasn't used up, so you can save that. Some of the U238 absorbed neutrons and turned into Pu239 and Pu240, which can also be used. Plus there's a smattering of other useful heavy isotopes, some of which (potentially of the Platinum group) would be useful to isolate and sell.
The problem is that you are creating Plutonium, which is bad on the grounds of nuclear proliferation. Although, the Plutonium produced isn't actually too useful for nuclear warheads anyways because the Pu240 contaminates the warhead-friendly Pu239.
The remaining stuff is generally not suitable for reactor usage but is occasionally reactive. It looks like you might be able to make it either a net-gain or, at least, not a substantial waste of energy, to bombard it with neutrons so that it will decay much faster.
The fun thing is that, once the nasty stuff that's very radioactive has had a chance to decay, you are talking about stuff that is actually less radioactive than the source rock. Even without reprocessing, you are talking about storing the stuff for maybe a thousand years.
The problem is that it's a bad word because we're trying to get all of the little countries of the world to *not* have nukes, and one of the good ways to do this is to build some reactors, put in rods of U238, and then isolate out some Pu239 before the Pu239 has a chance to absorb another neutron and become Pu240. Somebody got the bright idea that if nobody had access to a reprocessing plant that they'd never be able to get enough Plutonium to make a bomb. It's really kinda dumb and just makes us further beholden to the oil and coal reserves.
The problem is that there's so many whackos of every variety (including overzealous environmentalists) who oppose nuclear power, every single move, even it's a really good idea, is heavily argued about.
Gentoo Sucks
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?
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?!