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'."

Comments

Sweet

[__aavhli5779]

I applaud this kind of work.

Nuclear Power, despite the cries of environmentalists, is possibly the cleanest mass power source. On a scale of power generated per ton of input material it is incredibly efficient (bested only by those power sources which require no nonrenewable input, like wind/tidal/etc.), generates no effluent or air pollution, and needs only a competent staff (and, unfortunately, security), to stay running properly.

Nuclear plants may be prohibitively expensive to build these days, but if "pebble bed" reactors cost significantly less, then they may lead the way back towards what I view as our ideal energy source.

It's time to give nuclear a second chance.

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sweet

[gl4ss]

the problem that most people have with nuclear power is tchernobyl(or similar catastrophy that would release radioactivity to a wide area).

'most people' don't know even the basics of how the energy is generated, all they know is that the place can explode and then there's going to be 3eyed fishes. the problem is that even if it's a 'failsafe'(won't explode) plant there's going to be hell explaining it to the people who are against nuclear power for mainly emonational reasons(and assume that people defend nuclear power for similar reasons because they hate the environment or something silly like that, or just for pure greed).

it's like that old joke... "what we need nuclear power for? i only need electricity"(dunno how the variation goes in english actually, but you get the idea).

around here there's a need for another reactor(industry needs the juice) but there's quite many people who are against it, yet they don't complain when we need to buy the same amount of electricity from russia(that is generated by nuclear reactor there, just over the border, at lower safety standards than what would be in place if the reactor were on our side of the border).

Re:Sweet

[Glock27]

Two words: Nuclear waste.

Two words: Lung Cancer.

That is the alternative, and pollution from traditional power generation plants is killing people every day, and sickening many more.

There is not a single permanent disposal site world-wide. no one can guarantee the safety. the U.S. government even has a website on _just this problem_. Ready-made dirty bombs are driven in trucks all over the country. GREAT IDEA.

If someone wants to kill a lot of civilians, all they need is a garage lab to produce chemical or bio agents. Much more effective, much easier to deal with, even more scary (1 gram of the right bio agent could kill millions). See the recent research on mouse pox for some really scary stuff (did that story make /.?). How 'bout a bio agent that'll only wipe out one ethnic group? The research is just about there. It is always hard to evaluate relative risk, but to me nuke power is way down the list.

BTW, as far as nuke disposal, there's a good reason for a lunar colony... =) Name another major energy source where the pollution could realistically be taken entirely off-planet.

Also BTW, I hope some of the recent solar energy developments lead (finally) to competitive photovoltaic power generation on a distributed basis (that'll tick off the power companies!). One of the more exciting developments is solar fabric, which can be used in curved building designs.

Re:Sweet

[joshv]

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

Re:Sweet

[Aglassis]

You said: "The history of nuclear power so far, however, doesn't leave one optimistic."

What metric are you using to say that nuclear power has historically been unsafe? The number of deaths caused per MWh produced? Deaths or injuries per reactor-hour of operation? Average deaths per year at a given plant?

Really, compare these metrics to that of any other power distribution plant and you will see historically, even with the huge publicized disasters like Chernobyl and TMI, that no other large scale power producer even compares in safety to nuclear power.

But since we're on the topic of nuclear power safety history, the website The History of Nuclear Power Safety is an excellent resource.

Re:Waste disposal

[netwiz]

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.

I hate ignorance!

[Rico_za]

Africa's state-run utility giant Eskom
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). /rant
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".

Environment/North Korea

[lostnihilist]

We (USA in the 90s) promised two of these (or very simiar to these) to North Korea so that they a) could have plenty of power and thus might spend money on economic growth/feeding their people and b) couldn't develop nuclear weapons from the material. but oops, congress wouldn't approve it. Now look where we are with them. big mistake

though many popular activists site environmental reasons as opposition to nuclear energy, disposing of nuclear waste really isn't that difficult. Most scientists (at least those in the field) object to nuclear power because of the potential of the spread and proliferation of weapons. while environmental issues ARE a concern (there's always some governmental dweeb that screws things up), it is something that can fairly easily be isolated given the proper precautions. Part of the reason that these reactors get so much attention is that these same experts have much fewer qualms with them precisely because they are so much more difficult to make weapons-grade uranium/plutonium from. (i cite Howard Margolis, Dealing with Risk as a decent summary of this topic).

Re:Meltdown isn't the (whole) problem

[Znork]

As far as I know there are no international treaties banning breeder reactors; the bans that exists in the US for example, are internal to the country.

Maybe it's time to reconsider those bans, as it is becoming quite apparent that there is no near term solution to the energy problem apart from nuclear energy and there is no other good way to handle nuclear waste.

The Three Real Issues

[salesgeek]

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.

Chernobyl was stupid

[cr0z01d]

Chernobyl had a lot of things that were just wrong.

The reactor increased in efficiency as temperature increased. This is a nice little feedback loop. Most reactors lose efficiency as temperature increases, meaning that it is difficult to try and overload the reactor, even on purpose.

The reactor was designed to be cheap, and it did not have a dome. Domes contain radioactive material very well. Tests have shown that an aircraft hitting a dome would hardly scratch it.

As another cost-cutting measure, the reactor didn't have any good backup power. It may seem silly to have a power plant that needs power, but nuclear power plants do need power to start up and in case of emergencies. Western plants have batteries and generators.

As if these technological blunders weren't enough, some bonehead transfered control of the power plants from the ministry that designed and built them, where all the trained personnel are employed, to the ministry of energy. There are reports of operators sitting on the control board and people showing up to work drunk.

Basically, in 1986, the Chernobyl reactor demonstrated a bunch of "don'ts" to a world that should have already known.

There will always be technology out there that can be misused. The amount of that technology will only increase. Do we ban knives because people get stabbed? Do we ban nuclear power because a couple of Russians cut costs?

The 'ball' nuclear reactors are basically foolproof. You put a bunch of balls next to each other and you get heat. This is not weapons grade Uranium.

I only see one problem with nuclear -- the small amount of waste that is generated needs to be handled properly. It can be done, but it just has to be done right.

Re:Partly true...

[Martin Blank]

Most of the re-use part of nuclear fuel is, as I understand it, prohibited by government regulation, something having to do with plutonium generation. My understanding of a possible use involving breeder reactors, though, involves using the plutonium's natural decay to enrich uranium fuel, allowing the plutonium to break down into less harmful byproducts while the uranium is enriched for fuel in the near future. This seems a more complete use of the fuel to me, and could result in less hazardous waste.

However, use of plutonium is rather taboo for some reason -- witness the furor over Cassini's radioisotope generator, which some environmentalists claimed could kill thousands in the event of an accident on launch in 1997 or during the flyby of Earth in 1999, with one site suggesting a 10-micron particle could result in the exposure of a person inhaling it to thousands of REMs. Their argument was that the release of the 72 pounds of plutonium would be catastrophic over centuries.

An article in a 1993 Oak Ridge National Laboratories Review states, "according to NCRP Reports No. 92 and No. 95, population exposure from operation of 1000-MWe nuclear and coal-fired power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants. ... For the complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining to reactor operation to waste disposal, the radiation dose is cited as 136 person-rem/year; the equivalent dose for coal use, from mining to power plant operation to waste disposal, is not listed in this report and is probably unknown."

Even factoring in mining -- where radioactive dust presumably goes into the air -- and disposal -- where various bits of radioactive dust and water are released -- nuclear plants produced only about a quarter of the average radiation dosage that coal plants do over their lives. I've seen the strip mines that are used to get at uranium, and while it's not pretty, it's not nearly as bad as the destruction of entire mountains in the Appalachians. There is also research going into extracting uranium from seawater for about $120 per pound, which, although about 10 times the current rate, could be more environmentally safe and could provide thousands of years of power, presuming we operated on nuclear power for that length of time.

I'm all for nuclear energy. While I am also a proponent of renewable sources, I don't like the environmental damage caused by hydroelectric. Solar has issues of night-time electricity use, and it is reportedly a messy thing to make, with some pretty dangerous chemicals involved, not including any batteries that would be needed for cloudy days and night use. Wind has issues of reliability, and tidal generators have a range issue, not to mention that I wonder how it would affect the beaches to have thousands of them operating.

I recognize the dangers of nuclear energy. I know that it's hard to clean up, and that there are significant security risks; I'd much rather be in a room with an exposed piece of coal than an exposed piece of reactor-grade uranium. But that piece of uranium will be useful long after the ash from the coal has been carted off and buried. It will have given off no CO2 or nitrogen or sulfur oxides during its use (save whatever transportation is used for it), and less radioactivity.

In balance, I believe that nuclear reactors are a far better source of energy than anything else we have at the moment.