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Uranium Pebbles May Light the Way
kristy_christie writes "According to Wired News, South Africa's state-run utility giant Eskom and its international partners want to build the world's first commercial 'pebble bed' reactor, which, instead of using fuel rods, 'is packed with tennis ball-size graphite "pebbles," each containing thousands of tiny uranium dioxide particles'. To developers, the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor promises a rebirth of nuclear energy. Proponents insist that the reactor's design features make it 'meltdown-proof' and 'walk-away safe'."
However, coal power plants release more radioactive waste into the enviroment than nuclear power plants and still provide most of the power in the US.
There's big money in keeping things the way they are. Nuclear power is so heavily regulated that it is too expensive. Thats the only reason we don't have more of it. If the other types of plants were regulated just as strictly we'd switch over as quickly as we could build them.
19 tons of heavy metal radioisotope doesn't take up much space. These elements are quite dense.
I remember seeing a demo of this stuff in school.. It's so safe to use in a reactor it's crazy; they referred to it as "walk-away" safe. Lose _all_ cooling in the core, leave it over the weekend, fix it on Monday. It was going to bring about a revolution in safety WRT nuclear power generation. It's nice to see this finally coming to fruition.
Africa's state-run utility giant Eskom /rant
I'm going to pop a vein! Afirca is not a country, it's a continent . South Africa, the country where Eskom resides, is a country in Africa (easily confused with South America by Americans. South America is a continent south of North America, the continent with three different countries on it, including the USA). There are 54 independent, different countries in Africa, each with their own government. Africa is not simply a big ol' jungle where everyone speaks Swahili (only 50 million of the more than 700 million people in Africa speak Swahili).
OK, now that I got that off my chest: Eskom has been talking about this for a while now, and they are facing some resistance to the idea. The problem being the general conception that "nuclear is evil".
Nuclear power is a subject that is near and dear to my heart having spent a part of my life working in the industry for Uncle Sam. There are three real issues with Nuclear power that keep it a hot button issue:
* Proliferation of WMD. Widespread use of nuclear power creates huge opportunites for people to get their hands on fissile material or highly radioactive material. A "dirty bomb" consisting of a few hundred pounds of waste and a few hundred pounds of explosives could do incalcuable damage. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons are NOT high tech. It's technology from the era of propeller airplanes, black and white movies, radio and vaccum tube electronics.
* Economics: widespread use of nuclear power would render a large sector of the global economy useless. There is a substantial interest in keeping the world dependent on our dwindling supplies of fossil fuel -- remember suply and demand? What happens when the supply decreases and demand increases? Many nations, corporations, and ultimately individuals stand to get very, very rich by monopolizing the resource (OPEC is a benign example compared to what we'll see in the future)
* Finally, there is a more practical issue: much of today's power challenges are demand side issues. Most people are blissfully unaware of what it takes to supply a couple of killowatt hours to their homes and especially businesses.
-- $G
The problem with radioactive waste is that its half-life is in the tens of thousands of years.
We don't know who's going to be blowing who up even this time next year.
Very little of the waste produced by power plants has this sort of a half life. Even so, the less radioactive a substance, the longer the half-life. Those elements that do lasts tens of thousands of years simply aren't producing that much radiation.
Highly radioactive substances, on the other hand, have shorter half lives, and aren't much of a worry after a few decades.
-josh