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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.
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
Last time I checked, there were'nt a lot of opertunities for employment for Nuclear Engineers. Why go into a field with no jobs?
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.
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!
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...
..."WNU's Not a University"?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
World Nuclear University Launched???
This giant University will destroy us all!
T-minus 15 minutes 'till impact!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
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
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.
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?!
Where are the "WNU" t-shirts..... Damn...that'd be sweet...
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 #!