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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?
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.
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.
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