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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.
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...
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!
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...
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
..."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.
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.
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.
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...
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
My uncle worked at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. Nasty stuff. You can't say it's a safe method for generating power until you start asking the workers how many of their friends have cancer. It's really scary to hear this people talk about getting forms of cancer that the doctors have never seen. This is not B/S. My uncle has been fighting a rare form of cancer for the last 4 years. It's nothing you can link to work, but it certainly doesn't look good.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
He didn't say "nukyular"
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.
>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?
Why does this AC make no sense? Maybe it's just me. Seems to be the "it's bad because I don't like it" and "I have no facts to back up my claims" argument. Why are these anti energy independence and anti progress enviromentalist so religious that they come off looking so ignorant? Face the facts you can never be in opposition to their ignorant religious enviromentalist anti energy independence convictions and be correct.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
No one is asking then green lobby for proof that plants are unsafe: we all know that. The problem with the green lobby is that they do not want anything proven or disproven, not by them nor by anyone else. They do not want nuclear power, period. They also do not want the technology to be developed further.
Personally I think a better approach would be to see how we can improve safety procedures in nuclear plants so that accidents are less likely, and to see how we can limit the damage if an accident does happen. Researchers are making progress in both these area's... though they're not done by a long shot.
As for economics... let the market work that one out.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
That's absolutiely right. Has anyone noticed what's been snuck under the radar recently. Nuclear power plants managed by the Tennessee Valley Authority have begun to produce tritium for the USA's stockpile of nuclear weapons. I couldn't make this stuff up.
-- Who am I? How did I get here? My God, what have I done?!
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
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.
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!