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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.
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.
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!
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.
It's not just the USA. Unless you live in France, your country probably has a really negative attitude to nuclear power, which has been allowed to grow over the last 30 years. It stems from the serious nuclear accidents of the past (Windscale, TMI, Chernobyl) coupled wig public ignorance, "environmental" groups with political agendas and good old fasioned FUD and sensationalism in the press. People will tell you about the accidents, but they won't tell you about the benefits, the advances of the last 50 years and the potential for the future, including the huge environmental benefits. This new Nulcear University is the best news I've heard in 10 years, regarding the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Oh, I was a Reactor Physics Engineer at a nuclear powerstation in the UK until the lack of direction, investment and doubt about the medium-term future of the industry forced me to leave and become a software engineer... Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Stick Men
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.
I grew up in Harrisburg PA so I have a bias here. I watched Three Mile Island be built and I watched them take away the damaged reactor. From my childhood into my young adulthood. I believe in the theory of nuclear power as a clean efficient fuel source, I fear the economics that lead to companies cutting corners to increase profits. Until the American system of capitalism can include social, environmental concerns in the structure of a company that works with material as this the risk is too high. It is the human nature not the science that lets us down with nuclear power.
And the waste solutions.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
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.
IIRC, the solar and wind numbers you quoted are after large government subsidies of their own. I just googled for examples and found a site offering on-grid solar systems in California with 50% of the costs offset by state government rebates and tax credits.
Taking this into account, solar might be costed at 16 to 40 cents per kwh. Nuclear's 13-18 cents looks like it might be competative. And that is not taking into account how stupidly inefficient the US power companies have been by building custom reactors every time.
Please try to quantify the environmental impact of having lots and lots of nasty waste and workers exposed to high levels of radiation. The nuclear power industry has been very benign to the environment and the population, when one considers the incredible polution due to coal mining and coal burning, and the tens of thousands of coal miners suffering from black lung disease. Radiation is a bogeyman, but coal has probably caused orders of magnitude more damage and suffering.
It's certainly not cheap energy as it was touted to be in the 50s...
Very true, but I suggest because the industry was poorly managed.
Please provide evidence. How many people have died as a result of western commercial nuclear power accidents? (Yes, some military oriented operations were done wihtout much regard to public safety.) Chernobyl doesn't count, because our power reactor designs are different, and no less authority than the laws of physics say that such an accident is impossible. Furthermore, western reacotrs have a containment building that prevent the public form being exposed in such a situation.
It serves only to continue nuclear research that benefits weapons development.
I don't know that there is any aspect of nuclear power generation that has any impact on a weapons program today. The technologies have diverged that far.
For a technological advance example, TRIGA nuclear plants *cannot* melt down. Can't. Go ahead and pull out all of the control rods... the fuel itself dampens the neutrons and the reactor shuts down.
For a non-technological development, you'd think we'd want to reduce our reliance on a, shall we say, less-than-stable-region.
One would think that the altered political and technological realities of our world would lead to a resurgence in non-fossil power (similar to the 70s when rising oil prices made all of those hippie Californians put solar water heaters on their roofs). I guess we'll have to wait a generation or so for the memories of Three Mile Island to fade.
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.
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.