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Toshiba Pushes Safe, Small Nuclear Reactor Design
core plexus writes "This article describes a proposal from a Japanese corporation that wants to thrust the Interior Alaska community of Galena into international limelight by donating a new, unconventional electricity-generating plant that would light and heat the Yukon River village pollution-free for 30 years. There's a catch, of course. It's a nuclear reactor. Not a huge, Three Mile Island-type power plant but a new generation of small nuclear reactor about the size of a big spruce tree. Designers say the technology is safe, simple and cheap enough to replace diesel-fired generators as the primary energy source for villages across rural Alaska."
Alaskan homes need a lot of heating.
And if something goes badly wrong, is anyone really going to trek through the snow and ice to check things out? Just kidding.
While the Japanese nuclear "industry" is one of the worst in the world in terms of safety, it's impressive that reactors are this small, and maybe this will eventually come to be the standard for electricity generation in places where the other fossil-friendly alternative - namely hydroelectric power - is not an option.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Remember the 'Foundation' series? This sounds like it came straight out of there. Minature Atomic Reactors. Of course Asimov assumed that 'Atomic' was the brave new future and was envisaging reactors the size of a walnut.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
But my hometown lies 15 miles from Waste Control Services, and the plant sits right on top of the Ogalalla Aquifer from which the entire region pumps its water. The "corrosion proof containers" are metal barrels buried in a cement-lined pit. Along with the radioactive material are "non-corrosive" substances like old batteries and various forms of chemical, petroleum and medical waste. To top all this off, some "stabilized" napalm has been added to the mix as garnish.
Taken separately, these things are not harmful. Properly encased by well-trained robots in impervious material, these things are not harmful. But... packaged by overworked, underpaid, undereducated laborers in the cheapest material available with security checks run by firms hired out by the company to be yes-men, dumped together en masse in a cement pit, I'd say these things have the possibility for a big ka-boom.
So... to answer your question -- avoid West Texas at all costs.
IAALS.
We're still burning fossil fuels because they're cheaper. Without regulations that force companies to pay for the pollution they generate, fossil fuels will always be cheaper than other forms of energy.
Nuclear energy is barely cost competitive now, and the only reason they are even close to competive is because of the heavy government subsidies that the industry gets. Without subsidies, nuclear energy wouldn't be cost effective at all, and the industry in every country is heavily subsidized. One of the biggest subsidies is governments acting as an insurer of last resort since regular insurance companies are not willing to offer policies against nuclear accidents.
I would rather see companies be penalized (via taxation) for the pollution they generate, which they can pass on to me in the form of higher prices, or they can switch to cleaner energy sources and offer me cheaper prices. At the same time, governments can stop subsidizing other forms of energy, which can be passed on to me in the form of lower taxes. As the markets rationalize, I suspect that I will see a net gain, while government tax income will be revenue neutral.
Sadly, this won't happen in America, since Republicans are mostly beholden to big oil, and Democrats are mostly beholden to the greens, neither of whom have my interests at heart.
it's impressive that reactors are this small
Accoring to the headline, the reactors are about the size of a big spruce tree.
Why is this impressive? US subs and aircraft carriers are powered by nuke plants which are in the same rough size, if not smaller as a spruce (which, according to this pages stats are roughly in the range of 30-60 ft tall and 20-30 ft wide). And the boat and ship nuke plants have been around for many years, too.
What would be impressive, though, is if they CAN indeed run trouble free for 30 years.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
TMI is a great advert for nuclear power! Everything that could go wrong went wrong, and the operators made mistakes. The core melted, but no-one was killed or injured. The same can not be said about coal mining disasters, Bhopal (a chemical plant in India which exploded) or oil rig accidents. If you have a social conscience you will support nuclear power. Other energy industries regularly kill its employees and members of the public. Alaska suffered terrible environmental damage when Exxon Valdez crashed. To prevent that happening again we need to embrace clean new clear power!
"Have no fear for Atomic Energy" - Bob Marley in Redemption Song
Yeah, but SL-1 had control rods. With the control rods sticking all the time, the fault was found to be that the crew had to manually pull out a control rod to fix the control rod drive mechanism when it stuck. Well, some guy ended up pulling the control rod out too much, and the core went prompt critical (same thing that happened in the 1999 Japan accident when their mixture of uranium achieved critical mass). The coolant flashed to steam and shot the control rod out with the guy pinned to the ceiling. Because of SL-1, the navy changed all their reactor designs so that they could be shut down even with the most critical rod fully withdrawn, meaning that prompt criticality with one rod could never occur again. Obviously, Toshiba's reactor won't have the same problem since they're not even going to have control rods nor will they have any reactor coolant pumps. I'd be more worried about their new idea of using the reflector to control the power, not having any pumps, or using liquid sodium as the primary coolant.
I used to work at a US reactor in IT. At the time I was both amazed and stunned by the 1960's erz technology in use in the plant.
Because it had to be "certified" and documented, the cost was outrageous. Each section of pipe had to come from a certified company built by a certified company and using materials (ore, etc) from a certified place, all documented of course. Makes you feel better about the construction, but costs a lot and requires lots of maintenance.
At the time I saw some specs for a new, simple design to be used in Asia and submitted to the NRC. It used less people, more gravity fed pumps and flows, and should have lowered the cost of plants from billions to hundreds or even tens of millions.
Nothing came of it and it was a larger scale than this, but it was a good idea. Nuclear has a place when built well and conservatively, which it seems this design is.
I love it when people don't read the article. I assume this small hand grenade is one of the "bunker busting" variety? If you read the article, you'd discover that due to the design of the reactor, it is virtually impossible to make it go critical. Even if you found a way (neutron enhancement ray?), the damn thing is buried underground, where most of the shock of an explosion would be absorbed by the surrounding dirt.
I read the internet for the articles.
He means that the amount of radioactive waste produced by a nuclear plant is less than the amount of radioactive waste produced by a coal-fired plant of equivalent power output.
And yes, coal is normally not considered radioactive. But it does contain traces of radioactive material, both in the coal itself and as waste rock from the mining process that isn't entirely separated. Not very much, of course -- but it takes thousands and thousands of tons of coal to produce the same power as a few pounds of uranium.
Of course, all radioactive waste eventually decays. We haven't even touched on the other stuff in coal ash that's highly toxic (like arsenic) that never decays.
I'll happily store the waste from the nuclear generated power I use in my backyard if you'll store the ash from the coal generated power you use in yours.
-- Alastair
Why has nobody thought of this before? Would this reall work?
Big article on this in Scientific American many years ago, in opposition to the Nevada waste site. Again the greatest danger is in transportation, but once entombed there is really no way for the material to harm anyone. You put a core dirlling ship in the ocean and dril a hole 2-3 kilometers into the ocean floor. You then drop barrels of waste into the hole separated by a few meters of the sediment. Even if the conatiners were to breach the material would at most disperse a few meters into the surrounding sediment over thousands of years. There is no worry of ground water contamination or even human contaimination once entombed, and eventually the material ends up melted into the mantle.
But, there is the threat of an accident during transportation, which is a worry for any nuclear waste disposal method.
Without regulations that force companies to pay for the pollution they generate, fossil fuels will always be cheaper than other forms of energy.
Those expenses are hard to enumerate. I'd go ahead and try to estimate them and apply a tax to gas accordingly, but there is another cost which is easy to enumerate. How about the cost of interventions in the Middle East? The only reason we launch cruise missles like they were practice rounds on the target range is because of the oil under the ground. If the cost of Middle East wars were tacked onto gas, you can bet that alternative energy would look more attractive.
It's a win-win too. Anti-war protesters can't complain about the wars over there if they buy gas for their car. If they want to set an example and use other sources of power, then they can rest assured they aren't spending their tax dollars on bullets. If the true cost of oil is high enough people will stop buying it, and we won't end up invading the middle east every 5-10 years. Without the huge flow of cash and the US state department pushing the status quo you can bet that democracy is a lot more likely to fluorish over there as well.
Plus, this would all be sustainable in the long run.
Let people buy oil, nuclear, or whatever. Leave it up to each individual to decide what makes the most sense. Just make sure each option is priced with all its associated costs factored in. If it costs less to clean up after one source of power, then make sure it is taxed correspondingly less.
As far as the heavy metal runoff from uranium mining, it is no worse than that at any other heavy metal mine. Or a gold mine for that matter.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
I'll have to ask my uncle. He helped Bechtel build an oil refinery in northern Alberta...
This is not my sandwich.
The town is only about 700 odd people. One possibility is that if this gets near fielding, there will be a call by the anti-nuke groups for people to move there and basicly take over the town in order to stop it. There will also, of course, be lawsuit after lawsuit to delay it.
It's a must win for the antinuclear movement.
They'll view with alarm the small size, and especially the very low installation cost which makes it hard for long delays to bankrupt by increasing the cost of working capital.
That no plant has been ordered in the US for decades is a huge political point for them, and they'd see this as the camel getting a nose into the tent. I expect a bitter fight by them.