Slashdot Mirror
China Goes Nuclear
Rei writes "Wired reports that the People's Republic of China has announced plans to build 30 new nuclear reactors by the year 2020, and by 2050 have almost as much nuclear power as the entire world produces today. The reactors are to be pebble bed reactors, in which helium replaces radioactive, pressurized water. A Chinese research institution demonstrated the safety of their test reactor against meltdown by shutting off the coolant."
I hope that China can help show the world what a viable source of clean energy nuclear power really is. The "danger" stigmatism that is attached to it is rediculous. The worst nuclear disaster in history, Cherynobl, killed a total of 3,000 people. That includes long term deaths attributed to radiation poisoning and increased cancer rates. Coal mining on the other hand kills around 30,000 people every year in mining accidents alone. Not to mention the pollution and enviromental damage that coal power plants generate. As for the nuclear waste generated aftewards there are a number of clever idea's about how to deal with it including one which disposes of it in the giant fusion reaction that is our Sun.
;-)
Que unfounded paranoia
warning : sig contains ad you may not like, but i'll give you a gmail account if you sign up
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Now this is the last thing we need... a much larger chernobyl with 1.? billion people.
You're all bastards!
Didn't the russians do this in Chernobyl? Apparently the chinese version worked.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Yes, pebble bed reactors are very safe.
I just wish nuclear power wasn't politically dead in the USA. It's really the only way to replace all the coal and oil we burn to produce the huge amount of electricity we use.
China might actually be able to pull something like this off at a reasonable price. In the U.S. this would never get done. Between the "not in my backyard" protests, and over-regulation, the time and cost would simply be too great. Not that I like China's government, but there are certain advantages to their style.
Uhm, China is basically the second strongest nation on Earth in terms of military power. I don't think the US is going to be able to pull any tricks on them.
China is showing that it is forward-thinking enough to look beyond fossil fuels for its electricity. This can only be good for the environment and global warming in particular.
I hope this reopens the nuclear power debate in the West. The USA and Europe should seriously consider comitting to new nuclear power plants for both economic and environmental reasons.
Stick Men
I heard Nathan Lewis, a stanford researcher who studies solar cells, give a talk about the future of energy a few months ago. The thesis of his talk was that there are only two real options for the future of energy: 1) we put way more carbon in the air than has been there in the last x-thousand years or 2) we go nuclear. It looks like china is choosing the latter.
Isn't that what they call running a reactor without coolant until meltdown in China?
China's need for energy in the future is going to be enormous, and I'd much rather see it produced by nuclear fission than by buring coal. No matter how bad you might think nuclear power is, buring coal is even worse.
You think China -or- the US wants to duke it out over $100+ barrels of oil in the next few years?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
What does it matter? These are nuclear facilities for electricity not weapons. They already have plenty of those facilities and plenty of nuclear warheads on icbm's.
A Chinese research institution demonstrated the safety of their test reactor against meltdown by shutting off the coolant. ...thus creating in an explosive instant the second thing in China you can see from space. ;)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Don't feed the troll.
Hopefully the Chinese won't do something stupid to queer it for the rest of us.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
And what would have happened (other than the obvious) had done had their safety system failed?
Physics makes the world go 'round.
One word: Godzilla.
So someone will eventually find a radioactive fortune cookie with a message inside that reads:
"You're fucked?"
Quick, America, threaten to bomb China for daring to indulge in using nuclear material! Quick, quick, do it before they make some of it into bombs! OOOPS ... wait, wait, China can kick America's ass. Never mind. Back to threatening Iran.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
How long until George W. goes and bombs them because he doesn't like the idea of China having something better them him.
...China syndrome. At least this way, the sizzling ball of radioactivity won't have to burn all the way through the earth's core to get there.
come for the naked robots, stay for the zombies
What do call it when one of their reactors melts down, eats its way through the earth, and pops out the other side?
I think this is good. If it weren't for Three Mile Island there would be a whole lot more nuclear reactors in the US supplying a whole lot more power and we would depend less and less on coal and it's pollutants. Although; I don't believe Three Mile Island was all bad in that you learn from your mistakes, not from you victories. Nuclear energy is far and away better, cleaner, and overall safer in the long run. With nuclear energy being used more heavily more technologies for it's safety will come about and how to contain it's waste.
At least in China dumb people can't bitch about how dangerous nuclear energy is. I'm not saying communism is good, but in this case it is. Plus i'm sure oil lobbyists would play a role in the US, not so in China (I think).
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Nonsense.
China has long been one of the five (now sevel with Inida and Pakistan) admitted nuclear powers. They don't need to build new reactors for secret nuclear programs because their nuclear program isn't secret.
There is a good writeup as well on wikipedia
-- the cake is a lie
.. the econo-nuts would let the US build more nuclear reactors within the United States in order to reduce our dependency on foreign oil...
Nah, that would never happen!
Instead, their socialist buddies claim the Bush administration liberated Iraq for oil, althought Bush-Chenery energy policy has been, since the 2000 election campaign, to increase the number of nuclear reactors.
We're still in the Bushes era.
We had Helium cooling here in Colorado, USA. It was down more often than it was up. Problem was that Helium does a lot of leaking unless everything is absolutely right on.
Though, I do wish them luck. I hope that USA will re-examine nuclear power combined with energy storage.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Are they all to be owned and operated by one Montgomery Burns?
-Randy
...here's a Wikipedia article about pebble bed reactors.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
After Chernobyl, all the RBMK design reactors were retrofitted to guard against the same disaster.
Probably, the most elderly nuclear reactor designs (which were also made to help enrich material for weapons) are now largely in Western hands.
We should be replacing and improving our own designs, not scoffing at the now superior reactor technologies of China.
Sure, the West has come up with some brilliant reactor designs in the last 20 years but because of the NIMBYs, next to none of the designs have been implemented and we're practically stuck in the 60's on technology.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Chinese......
Way too many already
Next we should put some reactors in india
another cockroach race
"Look, it can go without the cooling. It's really THAT cool...holy sh**!".
Not sure, but there was a link somewhere from folks overclocking their AMD in a fridge. It lasted about 12sec. before it fried. It was funny, but you had to be there...
Honestly, china seems to be just as great a thread to our environment as a chance for new markets. We better come up with some real good alternative enery sources we can sell them or our planet will be a dump in no time.
Or, is this just a means of generating nuclear material for creating nuclear weapons?
On the topic of growth, I have spent a total of 10 days in China in the last two years. Last year there were more bikes than cars in Shekou in the Shenzhen area, but now I swear there are an equal number of cars to bikes. The real kicker is that these cars are BIG and expensive. We are talking about full-sized Volkswagens, Buicks, minivans, and wagons. Yes, there are Mercedes too. You'd think that they'd be looking at little Euro-boxes given money and space constraints, but status and face (mianzi) are too important I guess.
For a full report, I suggest you take a look at my trip notes:
China Observations
(How many guanxi points do I get for this posting?)
How to Download YouTube Videos
These are a completely different design (which is the whole _point_) than regular reactors. Pebble bed reactors have small 'pebbles' (billiard ball-size) with little flecks (0.04", if I remember correctly) of Uranium in them - putting them in the pebbles keeps them spread apart, and makes it (dare I use the word) 'impossible' for a meltdown to occur, such as Chernobyl. There is no radioactive water or cooling rods in this design, and the pebbles are designed for a million year life, plenty of time for the radioactivity to lose its lethality, so storage of the used pebbles is _much_ easier than with current nuclear reactor waste. The university in Beijing that has been developing this has had a plant running for around ten years, with no problems, and, as mentioned, shut down the cooling system to prove that it's safe.
This is a really great development, and I hope it gets presented accurately in the press. The Wired article is very well written, though the blurb on the cover about the relationship between these plants and hydrogen is completely bogus. There is no more relationship between these plants and hydrogen than there is between any other power source and hydrogen.
Um... no, you fucking retard.
But do they have a plan on where to store the waste? With all the problems, both scientifically and politically with storing our own waste (Yucca Mountain), they need to find a repository to handle that much potential waste.
And then he popped the spent waste from the core into his mouth, rubbing his tummy while patting his head. Clever Chinese, their nuclear reactors run on bubblegum! And so many volunteers to store the old bubblegum in their glorious patriotic towns. Meanwhile, in Oilmerica, Monkeyking Dubya has announced even niftier newkular reactors, that will send us to Mars, to convert their heathens!
--
make install -not war
One more country will now be classified as "nuyulur" by George Bush...
$> man woman
$> Segmentation fault (core dumped)
What about earth based sling-shot-style launchers. I thought that I had read something a while back about developing this sort of thing to put satelites into orbit. At least removing th explosives from the package might improve safety a bit.
Charlie
China is certainly learning lessons on development from the failings of her neighbour, North Korea. Back in the day, NK went through a rash of development, building new capital goods and buildings. They intended to pay for the new capital goods/buildings with the profits the machinery, etc would earn. However, oil prices spiked and NK was left unable to keep their machinery running, making it impossible to pay for their expensive infrastructure upgrades.
China is in the middle of an enormous boom, and it's excellent to see that they have learned from the mistakes of their neighbours, and aren't heading down the path that the rest of us seem intent on going down.
I hope this is at least quasi-relevant. Just how much potential energy is there stored in nuclear waste. I've heard that there is still a lot, it is just harder (or requires too much energy input) to get as much a payoff from it.
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
It's `nucular' not `nuclear'...
Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/
"No matter how bad you might think nuclear power is, buring coal is even worse."
Yeah, and how many cities did you go through in SimCity to learn this precious tidbit of knowledge?
Great analogy since coal is so environmentally friendly too. How many people are killed each year in clean energy accidents? The problem is a lack of efficiency with current solar and wind technologies. Perhaps we could focus on that problem. Then again, if all of you pro-nuclear advocates would volunteer to store the waste in your basement, I would take your lack of safety concerns more seriously.
Man. I'm glad I saw you spell it that way, but you surprised me by not writing 'nucular'. 3,000 killed? In case you didn't noticed there's a large dead zone and tens of thousands more, including downriver and downwind areas have been affected.
Ok, blame it on the people who ran the plant, their practices, the old graphite reactor, etc, but don't play the tune that nuclear power is safe. These are among the most toxic substances on earth and half-lives are in decades if not centuries. All it takes is an accident.
Storage of waste is also a serious issue, probably easier for the Beijing governement to handle as they have a way of handling protesters that US administrations can only fantasize about. The Hanford site, in Washinton state is a damn mess and we still don't have Yucca mountain or anything else permanent. All waste in the US is 'temporarily housed' and piling up. Touchy stuff to transport, too.
Better hope the chinese do an excellent job on those, all it takes is one Oops and another thousand square miles is dead land for centuries.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They want to have world monopoly over the electric power. They will sell it cheap, and make the world depend on them, so they can stop the reactors, leaving us in the dark. I am going to buy a UPS tomorrow, I won't have my computer depend on the Chinise Electric Power World Monopoly.
So what's your flipping point? So people should go get their asses kicked on a daily basis?
With news like this and China's tremendous GNP growth & population is China set on the course to displace the USA as the major superpower in the 21st century?
The US seems to be getting mired in reactionary legislation which is restricting technological creativity (eg. ban on stem cell research).
Jeez, have we learned nothing from Sim City 3000? By the time they finish this thing, the rest of us will have fusion power.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The word nuclear is as frightening to adults as the boogie man is to children. It's a sort of manic paranoia about anything nuclear. Depleted Uranium, etc., you name it. "Nuclear paranoia is what got Nuclear Resonance Imaging renamed to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI.)"
normally (ok, at least sometimes) there is a balanced discussion here on slashdot.
but on this surprisingly un-interesting topic (at least for the regular slashdotter) we see very strong opinions how good and bright nuclear power is.
have we been invaded by the nuclear power mafia or are just the people with mod points biased towards this topic?
Only morons moderate based on a sig.
i bet the local walmart will take on a subtle, eerie glow at night.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Uh, yeah. China is a NWS (Nuclear Weapons State) under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. So they get to have nukes, along with France, Russia, the US and the UK.
Everybody else has to forgo, except that India, Pakistan, and Israel never signed the treaty, and North Korea, who did but has nukes anyway.
" It's efficient, safe, and the "pollution" it produces isn't dumped into the environment, it is collected and delt with."
Yeah and Mr. Burns even ate part of the 3 eyed fish.. oh wait he spit that part out nevermind.
> On the other hand, Iraq was a tyranical dictatorship, whose leaders
/. users share the above bigotry.
> and citizens are ignorant, anti-american religious zealots.
Not all of them. It's the same everywhere - for instance, not all
Iraq was a threat to United States interests, if not security, but the threat that China poses on every level makes Iraq look insignificant to any person with a lick of sense. The difference is that China is not fractured like the Arab world is. We cannot just go in and strategically invade Manchuria with some flimsy excuse about preemption.
What will they do with the waste?
(pay America - who will gladly store it because we'll need the cash after the neocons get through with us).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Here's the wikipedia article for pebble bed reactors, including a discussion of their safety.
-jim
In the UK, BNFL are busy going bust (read as; getting bailed out by the taxpayer) trying to save up to pay for the decomissioning of current plants and disposal of the waste produced.
Course, what BNFL really should do is just dump it all in the Irish Sea and then the fisheries would automatically distribute it over the rest of the world in their exports... Oh... Wait... Guess what....
You don't eat Scottish or Irish salmon do you?
Apparently the next World Power (aka Greatest nation of the (world|galaxy)) will be China. So it's high time I started learning some Chinese at least to be able to communicate the basics. You never know...
With the current self-destructive pace of the contemporary World Power (aka USA) this might well happen within my life span, especially if W wins the elections and we go for a second round of brilliant interventions.
Time for the Chinese to laugh back at the round eyed stupid westerners...
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
The energy crisis surrounding oil, aka "peak oil" will affect any nonrenewable resource, which includes uranium. I don't know about any estimates when this might happen - they're not bound to be any more accurate than peak oil estimates, anyway. However, the price of uranium already doubled (or so I heard briefly on the news this morning, but only 'cause Canada, my wee little home, is the second largest "producer" of uranium in the world, after Australia) over the last year, which is a greater increase in price than was seen in oil. Add to that the enormous cost of building and operating nuclear power plants, and this venture seems more like a wasteful attempt at showing off, much like the Yangtze Dam, where it's been suggested that many smaller dams would be equally effective, cheaper to build and less environmentally damaging. I guess it's arguable whether the pollution from nuclear power plants would be more or less harmful than what China currently puts out in coal-burning byproducts.
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
Incorrect, the former leader of Iraq was quite anti-religious. He steadfastly held against the rising Islamic tide in the region. Having said that, he was a brutal asshole through and through.
the antinuclear crowd doesn't seem to understand how advanced nuclear technology is today
these pebble bed reactors just can not melt down, the design is such that their no possibility of a run away self-sustaining chain reaction taking hold
do antinuclear types like the alternative? middle east conflicts fueled by oil prices? air pollution and smog?
and proponents of green energy do not seem to understand their science: you can't scale up geothermal, wind, solar, tidal, ocean thermal gradient, etc, to meet one tenth of the modern world's energy needs
the much vaunted vaporware hydrogen promise: where do hydrogen proponents think the hydrogen comes from? i don't know why people don't understand such a simple concept: you need to spend more energy freeing hydrogen from water or hydrocarbons than anything you gain from using it as an energy medium
biodiesel sounds interesting to me, and fusion is always the holy grail, but these are unproven technoogies today... if you are a true green energy believer, then get to work here, and roll up your sleeves working on fusion or biodiesel: this is where the most promise lies for your efforts
and of course, the "just use less energy" crowd: when you figure out how to tell people to stop using gas and nuclear and start riding bikes, get back to me
meanwhile, i applaud the chinese, they see the writing on the wall: an overactive economy, demanding more and more gas and coal, and skyhigh oil prices and a volatile middle east... for the chinese, a pebble bed reactor commitment is a no-brainer
now if only the nimby types in the us could understand the wisdom of embracing pebble bed nuclear energy to combat reliance on middle east oil
but of course, simple fear of the unknown and ignorance of simple tech means the us will be left dependent on volatile undependable oil and gas and coal, while the chinese enjoy a safe, stable, cheap energy source
apparently, the nimby crowd in the us sees less risk in sending their sons and daughters to iraq than building a nuclear reactor of new design without any chernobyl or 3 mile island implications
this is not silkwood or the china syndrome folks, the stakes are accutely high in today's world: adjust your antinuclear opinion appropriately please
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And South Korea too, apparently.
Unlike most people I'd actually trust the safety system, especially if they're willing to demonstrate it publicly. In fact, I wish I could have been there when they flipped the switch.
It would have been fun to yell out "Boom!" when they did.
Stirling engines driven by radiant solar heat kick nuclear's ass on the following criteria:
1) Polution.
2) Manufacturing cost of power plants.
3) Cost of fuel extraction.
4) Cost of fuel transport.
5) Accident Safety.
6) Terrorism Safety.
7) NIMBY politics.
8) Greater fuel availability.
9) Decentralizability of power plants.
The only thing nuclear has over radiant solar is energy density and that can be aleviated by many decentralized power plants which also reduces transmission losses lowering the total energy consumption.
Like any self respecting science geek, I think nuclear physics is cool, but radiant heat solar is more practical.
I think this is a much much better solution for them, both economically and especially environmentally. There were stories that they could only ramp up the turbines from stop(a process that took about 6 hours) at night, because the resulting ploom of yellow sulfur smoke couldn't be seen. Once the burner was at full temperature by dawn, no more yellow smoke, and thus no more concerned citizens.
I expect this enormous undertaking to go as well as China's other well-known massive construction project.
Nonsense. Many in the former Iraq gov't were ignorant, anti-american secular zealots. Thus proving that they would never, ever, ever, ever attack the U.S. or give aid to terrorists.
</lefty>
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Nah, China just flies their planes into ours....
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
While American Greens advocate, we all switch to bicycles en masse, China is going to drastically cut its emissions and oil consumption with these plants.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Didn't China build a huge dam recently? What happened with that?
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
There is no Helium in our atmosphere, anything we put in zips out into outerspace real fast. Oil drilling produces helium as a byproduct, which will cool the pebble nuclear recators and produce hydrogen, our clean burning fuel source. If cars are then powered by hydrogen, we'll need a new helium source.
>On the other hand, Iraq was a tyranical dictatorship, whose leaders and citizens are ignorant, anti-american religious zealots.
True. However, an attack of killer armadillos is a greater threat to the US than Iraq ever was. At least until we invaded them and took over their country. Up til now, Iraq saved its bombs and invasion armies for its fellow Muslims in Iran, and Kuwait. Sadam's slavering screeds aside, they had never done a damn thing to us.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
> On the other hand, Iraq was a tyranical dictatorship, whose leaders and citizens are ignorant, anti-american religious zealots.
And Kansas isn't?
No one has seen what you have seen, and until that happens, we're all going to think that you're nuts. - Jack O'Neil
We are talking about power generation which does not use weapons grade materials. Power generation is a non-evil use of nuclear power.
The place which falsified QA records for years and dumped waste into the Irish Sea?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki was planned disasters...
Particularly in the context of the concern over the part rising CO2 levels play in global warming.
One of the big worries is what effects the industrialization of behemoths like China and India will have on the global environment. This will help reduce these effects considerably.
While other countries download wide ranges of media over 10 mbit 'net pipes, the US bickers and fights over "Intellectual Property" and "interstate communications".
While other countries install the latest and greatest nuclear reactors, the US blathers on about "deregulation" and "no nukes".
Sooner or later things will be different enough overseas that we'll look up and realize that the US has no vision except what we consume and how much government cash we can use to do the consumin'.
Wha?!? A little more specific, please?
Will these be installed into their moon base too? Does China hire their publicists from a pool of former tech. company sales execs?
1/67 people develop skin cancer. Stil think the sun is so safe. And, i couldn't help but notice our friend 'the wind' taking otu a big chunk of florida the other day AND coming back for more. Geothermal? sure if you don't want your lava tv exploding! Hydro? do you know how many people a year drown?
don't worry, there is an answer. we can rocket all our water into the sun and, with a bit of luck, put that thing out (okay... we might need a bit more water... but it can't be that much more). no sun would mean a constant earth tempreature which would mean no wind. we could power everything with nuclear power and live happy knowing our children won't blow away.
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
Not that I like China's government, but there are certain advantages to their style.
I think Bush is pretty much on track on implementing this style.
i knew that diesel himself pioneered his engine with peanut oil i believe, so the very concept of a diesel engine is friendly to organic sources
i also know that diesel engines are more popular in europe than the us
but does it scale? in other words, is it just a curiosity? or can they produce enough biodiesel to make a significant dent in fossil fuel sources of diesel... and the price?
and what of air pollution? diesel, by the very nature of how the engine works (pressure induced ignition driving a chambered turbine rather than spark induced ignition driving a piston) tends to produce a lot more particulates in the exhaust... and unfortunately, these diesel particulates are the most worrying for things like lung cancer
so it would seem that the very technology of diesel itself needs to be overhauled (or an easy way to filter the exhaust) so we have less air pollution in our cities rather than more if we develop a dependence on biodiesel, which, in and of itself, is not a bad thing in terms of energy security and renewability
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
While I prefer cleaner energy sources (like water) and am not a fan of nuclear reactors (I experienced some of the Chernobyl 'magic' cloud a couple of decades ago), what the hell is China supposed to do?
Not so long ago, Slashdot carried a story about the gigantic hydro power plant built by flooding the three gorges canyon, and everyone cried how bad that was, how heritage and natural beauty is being lost etc. But China is growing at an enormous pace and they have to provide electricity to their population.
China builds a dam, evil China. China builds a nuclear reactor, evil China. China builds 100 coal-burning black-smoking power plants... I don't even want to imagine the backlash.
And you my friend are a complete dolt and one of the many Americans that think Iraq had ANYTHING to do with 9/11 let alone *gasp* WMD. Ph34r Iraq's aluminum tubes!!! Iraq wasn't planing anything against America period. Hell Sadam was too buisy makeing sure he stayed in power and kept that country in one piece. Gawd I want outa this shitty country. Land of the free and home of the nitwits too complacent to pay attention to anything outside of thier own unimportaint life.
turn something sitting on your desk upside down,
it says: 32 ounce.
aw crap.
Chernobyl and TMI happen to be worse than the proponents tend to make them. In the case of TMI, if a few more things had gone wrong it'd been about as bad as Chernobyl. We still don't know what damage Chernobyl is going to have caused. Isotopes of Cesium, Iodine, and Thorium in dangerous dosage levels were released with Chernobyl. There's places in that area of the country that are technically uninhabitable because they're still too hot to be safe to live in.
Chernobyl is a catastrophe- one brought about with carelessness with an extremely dangerous process for producing energy.
Now, having said this, we're contaminating the environment with equally nasty contaminants with the current generation schemes. Nuke power, if designed with the hazards really and truely in mind is going to be better and safer than the fossil fueled processes. Pebble Bed reactors are the first such design.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The nuclear plants are wonderful. But it's an even MORE daunting task to setup the transmission network. The reactors are fairly easy compared to the transmission, simply because you have a relatively small area to work in. You can concentrate trucks along pre-formed roads, and the plants themselves are constructed to withstand tornadoes and small monsoons. Whereas when you put up transmission towers (or lay it underneath the ground), you are generally making the roads as you go. And only Allah knows what the hell kind of natural forces those poor towers will come up against over a 10 or 20 year lifespan. If people made their cities where it was easiest to lay power lines, we'd not be having black/brown outs across the world.
I am impressed, but I'd rather hear about their plans for their transmission network. If they annouce an underground, high temperature (+300 Kelvin) superconductive conduit, THEN I'll be really impressed.
Actually, fucking-amazed-in-disbelief...
The last time I checked, the U.S.A. owned almost all of the world's sources of helium. In fact, since WWII, the U.S. government has controled the sale of it. This will be yet another reason for China to maintain friendly relations with the U.S.A.
Yangtze Dam
** A Sketch a Week **
http://www.sketchplease.com
China goes nuclear?!?
That doesn't make sense. You'd think they'd be happy about getting all that energy...
--
Just because you don't get it, that doesn't mean you have to mod it down.
Watch out for those GLA tunnels, they always pop up near your reactor.
Nuclear power has a lot more negative consequences than the current science knows about. For instance, there is reliable statistical material that shows correlance between sun flare activity and nuclear bomb testing. Nobody has a good explanation, but exotic particles/waves may have some with it, but for modern science, as long as nobody has a good explanation, it's just a statistical "coincidence".
My gut feeling tells me nuclear power is very, Very Bad. Quite strongly in fact, and I usually regret going against my gut feeling.
But most people today are stuck up in their head and fail to flow with nature. Time to integrate spirituality with science before it's too late and there's too much power for us to handle..
Having said this, I personally believe the chances of an accident in a modern reactor are very low. If they could be sited in useless land (e.g. desert) as well, they benefits would outweigh the risks.
:-)
That would have to be the most coveted career choice for young and aspiring Chinese youth! Go work in a nuclear reactor. In the middle of a friggin desert where nobody wants to live!!!
Besides, the deserts of China are mostly populated by ethnic minorities. Can you imagine the backlash if they stored them all there?
Planning and _doing_ are different. I'd personally put the odds of these 30 plants actually going live at 50-50.
What also needs to be mentioned here:
China, like France has a rather centrally controlled government that is assuming substantial risks as part of this nuclear program. I suspect that getting private insurance for plants like these would be _very_ expensive-if such insurance could be obtained at all.
Firstly, I'm on your side with regards to nuclear power - In my opinion, the horror scenarios spouted by fearmongers, while not impossible, are unlikely, and are far less damaging than the real, 100% probability of horror we inflict on the earth with other forms of energy generation such as coal - I think it's probably worth the risk. So much anti-nuclear rhetoric is nothing less than FUD. We on Slashdot should be familiar with that.
The worst nuclear disaster in history, Cherynobl, killed a total of 3,000 people. [...] Coal mining on the other hand kills around 30,000 people every year in mining accidents alone.
On the other hand, these numbers are really quite disingenuous... apples and oranges. After all, uranium has to be mined, too. I don't think it's constructive to put it in such inflammatory terms as human lives. I'd prefer to talk about dollar cost, value for money, environmental impact and risk. Not that I have such numbers... I'm not an expert.
On the subject of catastrophic failures such as Chernobyl, I understand that AECL's Candu reactors (which is what China is looking at, I believe) are designed in a fashion that it is virtually impossible for that kind of meltdown to occur. I don't know the details... something about how the control rods are engaged in the reactor, I think.
As for the nuclear waste generated aftewards there are a number of clever idea's about how to deal with it including one which disposes of it in the giant fusion reaction that is our Sun.
I suspect the cost of such a disposal scheme would make it an absurd option.
Even if we have to sequester all our waste until we figure out how to dispose of it safely (or reuse it in some other fashion - more likely, IMHO), I would still prefer that to dumping our pollution openly into the air.
On a related, but more ominous note, I've heard that waste from Candu reactors are excellent weapons-grade fissile material...
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
...there has never been a fatal casualty in the French civil nuclear program, which has been running for at least thirty years. End result? We are the only major EU country to produce more energy than we need, and make quite a lot of money selling it to our neighbours. Our biggest client? Germany, forced to import electricity from us after declaring the country a nuclear free zone... lol.
As for the whole "yeah but you don't want to live next to one", true enough but on the whole I would rather live close to a nuclear power plant than close to a coal or oil one.
What do you know about World Politic? Find out in this quiz
Q. What does the Chines Government call a reactor meltdown. A. Population control.
You may or may not know this little tid bit, the US stationed nukes in many other countries, including my own country, Holland (hello Volkel). While the weapons are technicly only armed after US permission, the F16's (suicide mission) deploying them are from the nations where they are stationed.
I keep hearing stories about the Japanese working on some type of orbital projectile launcher, same type of thing Gerald Bull was working on before his untimely death. I don't know if they are true, but this would provide a safe way of getting non-human cargo to orbit without the risk of explosion. Encased blocks of radioactive waste could be shot to orbit, then nudged towards the sun by an orbiting sat.
How about the space elevator I keep hearing about here on Slashdot?... No explosive danger there either! Small/medium sized containers could be hoisted to orbit, then directed towards the sun with just a little force. Could make the containers or lift cars with some type of balistic parachute too, so if the cord breaks, the containers land safely in the sea where they can be recovered without exposure.
I'm not too fond of the idea of exploding radioactive bottle-rockets, but the way things are going, we may not have to think like that for too much longer. There are lots of new technologies that could help us safely get our waste to the sun. Best part about that...it's not on earth anymore! No need to worry about theft from the terrorists now and no need to worry about warning the the rabbit-people 50,000 years from now. Yucca mountain may just become a "low-level" waste type site for materials that just don't need to be hoisted to the sun, like all those slightly used Tyvec suits and minimally contaminated whatnot.
The idea of putting our nuclear waste on the sun isn't so far fetched. We just need to come up with a safe way of handling it until it gets there.
Who said Iraq was involved with 9/11? No one. Iraq had ties with Al Qaeda. That's been proven. Read the 9/11 Commission report.
"Gawd I want outa this shitty country."
OMFG, dood... the feeling is mutual. By the way, I hope you get your dyslexia worked out.
We can't live without it at this time.
REALITY 2:
All the plants in this country have run past their intended design lives, AND are 30-40 years out of date with modern technology.
REALITY 3:
Modern bead reactors of the type the chinese are building are VASTLY less likely to meltdown than any reactor currently running in the US. The coolant in a bead reactor actually catalyses the reaction, so without coolant, there is no reaction.
People in this country are totally irrational when it comes to nuclear power. We need this stuff, if only to replace the seriously aging reactors we already have. This is one place where I want to beat the snot out of all the left-wingers who won't be happy with anything that doesn't run on fairy dust and pot.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but I thought if the entire world switched over to uranium nuclear power, it would exhaust the worlds uranium supply in around 50 years? (In less time mind you than the world's oil supplies are current being depleted.)
Don't get me wrong. I think nuclear power is unfairly stigmatized in the US and should be reexamined. I'm just staying it's far from a long term solution. And maybe the money would be better spent on researching and building an infrastructure based around renewable energy like solar and hydroelectric?
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
The President's National Energy Policy says:
...
...
"We have a similar opportunity to increase our supplies of electricity. To meet projected demand over the next two decades, America must have in place between 1,300 and 1,900 new electric plants. Much of this new generation will be fueled by natural gas. However, existing and new technologies offer us the opportunity to expand nuclear generation as well. Nuclear power today accounts for 20 percent of our country's electricity. This power source, which causes no greenhouse gas emissions, can play an expanding part in our energy future."
"Radiation exposure from nuclear facilities is extremely rare. In fact, roughly 82 percent of human exposure to radiation comes from natural sources: radon gas; the human body, which contains radioactive elements; outer space; and rocks and soil. Radon accounts for about 55 percent of our exposure to natural sources of radiation; radioactive elements in our own bodies account for 11 percent; rocks and soil account for 11 percent; and outer space, including the sun, accounts for 8 percent. The remaining 18 percent of average human radiation exposure comes from man-made sources, primarily medical and dental X-rays and consumer products."
"There is potential for even greater generation from existing nuclear energy plants. Experts estimate that 2,000 MW could be added from existing nuclear power plants by increasing operating performance to 92 percent. In addition, about 12,000 MW of additional nuclear electricity generation could be derived from uprating U.S. nuclear power plants, a process that uses new technologies and methods to increase rated power levels without decreasing safety."
See page 85 for specific policy recommendations. All of this was wrapped up and passed in the House in 2000, and now sits in the Senate, waiting for a party to get majority to move the bill. It's a shame that the Democratic half of the Senate refuses to do anything that might actually help the Republicans, but that's the divided times we live in... Something I wish more people would remember when they punch the ticket this November, to kick the asses out of office.
A Chinese research institution demonstrated the safety of their test reactor against meltdown by shutting off the coolant.
Similar in concept to inventor of the pistol who put a gun to his head, flipped the "safety" switch, and pulled the trigger. He survived, but sadly, many of those who followed him did not.
It's my understanding that many of the people involved in Chernobyl aren't done dying yet.
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
Does anyone know a smart-alecky, hysterical, cyberpunk author who can correct the obvious errors of Chinese nuclear engineers and point out the fallacies in this article?
Here's another link with information about PBR nuclear reactors since the one in the post is dead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
They will develop overlord tanks and overrun the USA's bunkers!
C&C:Generals.. *shrug*
At least I thought it was funny.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
You are both wrong. The danger Iraq posed to the US was/is the same to the danger China poses to the US. None.
Yeah, Communist China has so much more incentive to use a nuclear weapon on the US than does Iran. China has religious ties with fundamentalist Islamic terrorists and Iran does not? Oops, I guess poor little Iran does pose more of a threat than big bad China. Sometimes its more than the US being a big bully, so get some perspective and decide which team you are on.
Just ask Illinois residents (like me) who pay more than anyone for electricity because of the over-nuclearization of a coal state.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
I'm disappointed Australia can't get elbow-deep into nuclear technology. We've got the best disposal sites, high-yield uranium sites and the second worst rate of greenhous emissions per-capita behind the USA. We could have centres of excellence in nuclear technology in universities around the country, turn Whyalla into a boom-town by importing and disposing nuclear waste, build energy plants in the middle of the desert and export green-house-friendly energy around Asia. Yet every time anything 'nuclear' comes up people have a hysteric response against it.
:)
For more than a decade, the federal government have been unable to create low or medium-sized respositories for nuclear waste anywhere in the country. Every time the issue comes up opposition parties (including of course so-called green parties) hammer it for all its worth from the most superficial angles imaginable. Even the South Australian Liberal government got in on the act a few years ago, chanting "Not in *our* back yard" despite the middle of the Australian desert being no closer to Adelaide than high-level nuclear stores in France are to Prague.
So instead we have low-level nuclear waste scattered in sites all around the metropolitan area of several cities, which leads to situations like that of us having substantial waste stores sitting in the bottom of the university of Adelaide and Royal Adelaide Hospital, both of them right next to a river. This inconsistency is one of many that shows up scum political forces who harvest stupid people's irrational fears about nuclear issues.
If Australian green politicians were genuinely passionate about our global environmental responsponsibilities they'd be comfortable with the idea of Australia as a major player in nuclear power and as a site for waste disposal.
The above opinions guarantee I would have no hope of ever making it in politics.
Believe with me, my saplings.
whose leaders and citizens are ignorant, anti-american religious zealots.
Leaders, probably. But have you ever met an average Iraqi? Probably not.
It's that sort of attitude that makes people - not just Iraqis - anti-American.
Did China finally figure that the world is running out of oil and they don't find an alternate source of energy to hydrocarbons, their economic development will soon grind to a halt.
I wish the US was so forward thinking.
For one, the US is much more vulnerable to economic threats than military ones these days; so yes, I'd say it is a substantial threat. For example, if the world economy becomes less dependant on Oil and more on Nuclear power, it makes the entire US middle-east strategy less of a strategic move.
look at the energy density in one gallon of gasoline: the energy released when burned in a short time span
;-P
now calculate how much of an area of earth's surface and how much time is needed to harvest that same amount of energy from the sun's photons with the latest, most efficient solar tech
take into account cloudy days
and remember about the gas: we just dig that stuff up
what are you going to do? coat the entire earth's surface with solar panels? build an installation the size of west virginia in orbit? when you beam the energy down from space from your space installation, will the microwaves have no effect on the atmosphere? how much energy are you going to lose in the conversion from: solar->panel->microwave->atmosphere->transforme r
each of those steps is a step where the majority of energy is lost
sorry, solar doesn't cut it for fullscale dependence
however, in sunny places with lots of space, solar is absolutely wonderful: in a place like scottsdale arizona, i can see a major dent in energy consumption happening
but don't try that in london
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yes, the tie is irrefuteable:
IraqAl Qaeda
Current Karma Status: Roadkill
We can't practically extract helium from the atmosphere since most atmospheric helium just boils into space. Most helium on the planet is a byproduct of natural gas mining. And we waste it in children's toys (shakes head).
Eventually we will have a helium shortage.
Next term, the president will decide that China has WDM, declare war, and liberate the reactors^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeople.
i was reading somewhere recently how some of the algae biodiesel researchers are now applying principles of genetic engineering to increase harvest from the algae
;-P )
i believe it all came from the fruits of a serious hardcore effort by the us govt started after the oil crises in the 1970s to harvest biodiesel from algae (programs since shut down in the early 1990s i believe, but not without creating a lot of interest and data)
now that's some great stuff: if someone can boost yields from something like ponds of algae, my gosh, that is some cheap renewable energy
and if you think about it, it's really just solar energy tech with a very handy energy storage medium (as fossil fuels can be considered too i guess
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Which is whe the parent said disarm, unstead of prevent-from-arming. The current china with nukes isn't even much of a threat because they're quite far behind technologically. If advances like these can advance their economy and technology as well, their nukes become much more of a threat to the US. Disarming the nuclear powers before their technology advances to have delivery systems that can reach the US would definately be important.
Just the other day I heard the news that "The hunger for coal is rising again"; the point was that China's economy is increasing at such an incredible rate, and their economy relies so heavily on coal, that they are now increasing coal imports (and China itself has a lot of coal mines already). So much so, in fact, that a giant new coal terminal (that's right, just coal, at a ginormous scale) is being built somewhere in southern England.
So, hearing these news, I got quite upset, knowing that the amount of CO2 generated is the highest in the history of human civilization already. Flash floods, disappearing ice-sheets and disappearing islands flashed in front of my eyes.
But these news, about a lot more nuclear power, really are lifting up my hopes quite a bit. The sooner the better, I say.
I do like the USA, but objectively, China is taking over. It seems likely that one day (and it's coming soon), China will have a more advanced energy structure than the USA, which also heavily relies on that antiquated, very polluting fuel - coal.
BTW, coal is not only bad because it produces a lot of CO2, or because it produces a lot of SO2 either. It's also bad because, get this, produces quite a bit of radioactive waste in the form of aerosols. Just that these are more difficult (impossible) to contain, unlike in the case of nuclear plants. So, there, for the misguided green activists that oppose nucelar energy.
Sigged!
Please note, it isn't a majority in America that stands against Nuclear power. It is a very very vocal minority that has backing by a bunch of rich nut cases who amazingly blow things out of proportion nearly all the time.
Look at the case surrounding the Yucca burial of waste. Here is a prime area that for a long time was the agreed best spot for it. Now we have politicalization of the subject which will KEEP countless of people at risk who live surface stored wastes!
The only way to go forward with nuclear power in the US is for the government to streamline the application process and remove the ability for groups to sue at every step or for unrelated issues. Finally we will have to admit that some states will be lost to the wayside simply because they are too overly regulated.
Bogus? I thought they tied it up pretty well. They said that high temp Hydrogen generation was showing 60% efficency. These are high temp reactors.
Instead of running a turbine and transmitting electricity to a hydrogen generation plant, you could just use the reactor as a direct heat source.
What does this button d$#%* NO CARRIER
Um, the US military outspends countries 2-5 by vast amounts. If the US wanted to, they could easily pull tricks, like bombing their embassies
Many people here think these newer bead reactors are the way to go, and I agree. So, are you slashdotters prepared to hold your nose and vote for Bush to get it done? Not a troll, I swear. I really would like to see what its worth to you people. Its not going to happen under any other candidate in the next four years.
...some big scary hills and signs intended to outlast the current civilization and language on top of the holes.
Yeah, it's a little weird.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
When you are talking to somebody on the Internet, the phrase "this country" is ambiguous.
The US needs to immediately respond to this by building our own power plants. The economy of today and tomorrow will be driven by energy. The country that can produce the most energy for the lowest cost will have the strongest economy. This is a smart move for the Chinese, lets hope the US government and the liberal anti-nuke folk get out of the way allow PBRs to be built in the US.
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
...Homer says yes to Nuclear!
Wasn't there an article not long ago about a bacterial organism which causes nuclear particles to attract to the heavier elements?
I remember seeing an article about this somewhere I just can't remember. If a organism could do that though wouldn't that work really well for breaking down toxic waste?
I worked at General Atomic in the 1980s. At that time, they had a complete high temperature gas-cooled pebble reactor design, but were having regulatory troubles building and deploying one in the U.S.
Now the Chinese nuclear physicists will eat their lunch. Sorry, guys. Here's hoping that you'll finally get to build 'em here.
Pebble beds may be the safest thing in the world, but I'm not about to take your word, or anyone else's word, on this subject. I'm old enough to remember 30 years ago when sloughs of "experts" swore that a meltdown could never happen. Furthermore, you can always count on for-profit corporations to cut corners and lobby for laxer regulation at the expense of safety.
Test 1 2 3 4
mmmm... fairy dust and pot...
these soldiers are much more of a threat to US citizens on US soil than either the chinese military or the rest of the axis of evil's militaries.
Well, that's why we shouldn't let Mr. Burns run a power plant.
The main purposes of regulation in a bureaucracy:
- cover your ass
- pin the blame
- profit via corruption
- look busy
2020? roaches will rule the world then. humans? what humans?
You need people like me so you can point your fuckin fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So what that make you? Good?
How else are they going to power their Nuclear Overlords and Propaganda Center? What of their Helix's nuke napalm? This is a great step for China's Nuke Generals.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why send it to the sun? It would require some percision, and a satelite nudging it on course is illogical. Just launch it randomly out of our solar system, or in the direction that those signals that SETI discoverd yesterday where coming from.
Even the safest Nuclear Powerplant is still vulnerable to terrorist attacks or sabotage attempts. And you know how paranoid the US goverment is...
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I, for one, welcome our new Chinese Nuclear Overlords.
seriously though, if it weren't for ignorant, dirty hippies, and poor reactor design, we would now have power to cheap to meter by now. with the little downside of radioactive waste. Sure this waste is toxic and lasts a long time, but look at it this way: oil/coal waste is also toxic, but is put into the air we breathe. wouldnt it be smarter to have that waste concentrated instead? And if the million year life of pebble feul is even half true, then waste become a non issue, since hippies wont be around then, and there should be much better tech in place.
If 3000 people die as the result of a nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl then people say that if that's a worst-case scenario then nuclear power is worth the risk. If, however, 3000 people die when a plane crashes into the World Trade Center in New York then we must declare war!
I'm not saying that it's the same individuals espousing both viewpoints, but it sounds kind of hypocritical, nonetheless.
You can say this is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Maybe. But which site will be rebuilt and re-populated first: New York or Chernobyl?
-Rich
If we use any nuclear reactors anywhere, then we'll all get cancer when it explodes like every reactor does! We've had those two - Chernoybl and three mile island, and there's still mutants there waiting to eat people! It would be nice to have extra arms, but not if I could only eat brains!
We have to keep using coal and gas because those are safe and have no bad effects on the environment at all!
Plus, the terrorists will steal all the uranium and use it to make dirty bombs! It doesn't matter that it's a totally different kind of uranium! They will use their secret terrorist powers to make it into the right kind! If we build even one nuclear plant, then the terrorists will have won!
Anyway, back to reality. People panic whenever they hear the word "nuclear", but don't give a crap about greenhouse gases. It's very strange. I would have no problems whatsoever living next to a nuclear plant. It's not perfect, but it's better than any alternative that I've ever seen. It's cleaner than fossil fuels, has less environmental impact than hydroelectric, and is way more reliable than wind / solar power.
IEEE Spectrum had an article a few years ago about how there aren't any more nuclear engineers being trained. I guess they're all in China now. Hopefully with free trade, we'll be able to get little household reactors at Suck-Mart in a few years.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
circletimesquare hits some very good points on the anti-nuclear movement.
In order to create the hydrogen for our proposed hydrogen fueled vehicles where is the energy going to come from? Currently, it would come from petroleum. This would mean that you would have more pollution.
Biodiesel will require acres of plant material to produce enough to support a few vehicles. I forget the numbers, but we just don't have a viable solution to this right now.
The NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) crowd has effectively taken over California to the point that they cannot make any power plants. They have to buy power from Nevada, Utah, and a few other places, just to meet current demand.
Nuclear power is, right now, the only scaleable power source that we have. And if we want to break our dependence on oil we will have to switch over sometime.
Right now there is some real interest in bioreactors by the Gov't. One of the requirements of producing energy via these is to make other by-products. Biological synthetics, bio-polymers, bio-plastics that can be used as replacements for our current petroleum based products. It's going to be a very hot field in the next few years. Hmmm, maybe I might want to think of doing a doctorate in that field....
Now, China's nukes are, realistically not a threat to the US because they'd lose in any meaningful nuclear exchange. By that I mean that in military terms they'd kill a few million people and then their country turns into a sea of glass and they lose 1/3rd of their population. In human terms of course these concepts are not readily expressable, especially if you're one of those few million. But still, that's reality.
China has nuclear weapons, but they are part of the nuclear club, unlike, I presume you are trying to so hilariously suggest, Iraq or Iran.
In the case of North Korea, for example, their nukes (all six of them or whatever) are essentially useless militarily. Their 3,000 artillery pieces pointed at Seoul are not quite so. Even if theoretically the US would want to march to Pyongyang, they still need to deal with the reality of an estimated half million South Korean civilian casualties.
The classic "oh you did it to X so you must do it to Y as well otherwise you're a big fake" argument doesn't quite pan out when you recognize there's something called "reality".
Netcraft confirms it: You're not funny.
I don't see the appeal of subduction zones for waste storage. We would be putting dangerous materials in a high pressure, corrosive (sea water) environment, and where a leak would contaminate 11/16 of the earth. All this so subduction would move the wastes some three inches farther away each year.
I think an interesting idea is for above ground storage of vitrified wastes where we could keep an eye on them and monitor for potential leaks. This would also keep them available for reprocessing, should we decide to do so in the future.
The long term danger of nuclear wastes is exagerated. The really bad stuff decays within a few centuries, so that what is left after a thousand or so years isn't much worse than high grade arsenic ore. Not nice stuff, but easily managed in moderate amounts.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
I think there comes a point in resource management when things can get to a state of emergency. Under such a scenario, it might just be in the peoples' best interest for the government to step in and take charge of things. Democracy is a luxury the people of China just can't afford.
With our addiction to oil and inability to convince people not to sprawl their communities and drive SUV's, I'm not sure how long into the future we'll be able to afford democracy, either.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
It just happens there's a gray area between "banning something" and "allowing something to occur without oversight".
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
No, the fundamentally unsolvable problem is: how do we stop a country, with nuclear power, from extracting the plutonium and building bombs? This is a political problem, and there's no way we can stop it. When you get right down to it, this is the only real issue with nuclear power. I wish I had a solution to it; if I did, I'd be able to make a fortune on the world circuit (and then I'd turn my attention to Israel/Palestine, world hunger, and supra-light-speed travel... ;-)
I've read the artical and there are errors.
1) the 1st reactor was built under Stagg Feild statium as I recall and not in the metallurgical lab. Can someone else verify this?
2) Leo Szillard's name is somehow not mentioned in the History.
now to the meat of the artical...
They talk about the number of reactors but I don't see the size mentioned. As I recall pebble bed reactors are small - about 165 MW in size. (this is the Eskom design). The HTR-10 is a prototype and produces only 10 MW. There are plans for a 200 MW plant for 2007. If this is successful then by 2020 we could see 30 of these little reactors for a total installed cpacity of 6,000 MW.
The enriched reactors in the USA like those at Three Mile Island are about 1000-1300 MW. Again - can someone confirm? Most of the operating reactors in the US are licenced for 2500 to 3500 MW. For example the Arkanas Nuclear I reactor is 6 miles WNW of Russellville and is licenced for 2568 MW.
Candu style reactors are about 750 MW.
Total installed capacity in the USA is about 100,000 MW. Total installed capacity in China is about 6,000 MW with about 2,600 planned. China has 8 reactors now with 3 under construction. The USA has 104 reactors.
In terms of MILLION TONNES of oil equivalent the USA increased its nuclear energy production from 145.4 to 181.9 during the period from 1993 to 2003. Meanwhile China went from 0.4 to 9.8.
At this point the total installed capacity in China is about 1/4 of the increase in production of the USA. China produces about 1/20th of the amount of nuclear power the USA produces. Source: BP statistical energy review June 2004.
In any case, pebble-bed reactor "pebbles" are pretty safe. You could handle them with gardening gloves.
Sad to see so many people still believing the fairy tale of nuclear power. It's a source that has never been competitive, and there's no reason it will ever be.
Don't pull the "so why are they doing it" argument, Stalin had a astrologist too in his staff during world war 2.
So, if you search in scientific journals (with that thing called "peer review"), you find this article:
Read that. It basically proves that any economic advantage from nuclear plants is highly unlikely. It's also a common understanding among energy researchers that the energy you put in building and maintaining a plant is often more than what you get out of it in its lifetime.To me, hearing "China builds nuclear plants" sounds like "China to educate nuclear engineers" and "China to have a lot of people who need little training to start assembling a bunch of nukes, and facilities that can be adapted/converted to that".
China is probably just taking its place as a superpower, and big boys have big toys.
A final note: I noticed that attacking nuclear here is worse than supporting al-Quaeda. I noticed impressive pro-nuclear flaming in previous occasions. Maybe nuclear fission has a geeky aura that makes it look cool, yet science says you don't get a penny out of it. If this plan of China's really is a plan with economic or energetic focus, it will go down with Mao's Great Leap Forward.
Please look what Wikipedia says about Pebble bed reactors: under "Stationary designs and History" I read many prototypes, the first in 1966, have been built. Not a single real, industrial unit. Does it smell vaporware?
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
As you have noted, Cheranobyl was entirely avoidable. It happened because of poor oversight, poor practices, and poor funding, all due to the fact Russia's government was basically falling apart brick by brick at that point.
At this point the Chinese government is relatively stable. However, it is hardly trustable. Corruption is common, and the response to failures of governmental systems is-- as was attempted with SARS-- to cover them up rather than attempt to fix them. The seeds of the fundamental problems in the USSR that made Cheronobyl possible are certainly present in China.
I'm very much pro-nuclear power. However I'm rather concerned about the prospect of more nuclear power plants in the hands of zero-transparency stalinist governments.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
You can bury it in the Canadian Shield. They've studied it and 10,000 years is miniscule compared to how stable that is. Solid granite for thousands of meters. Drill, Drop, fill it in. It won't go anywhere for eons.
It's really sad when you hear about china making these ambitious pans and really moving forward.
When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me to eat all my food because there were poor kids in china dying of starvation.
Technologically and economically we used to use china as an example of what is wrong with communism. Now china is growing.
1. A space Program
2. A nuclear power program, based on the safest design available.
3. An economy that is growing
4. More land mass
5. and more people.
It is obvious that the grandchildren of todays china will be telling their children to eat all their food because of the poor starving children in America. People will look at America with pity and revulsion. And our country will probably no longer be a superpower (we'll probably be speaking mandarin).
WHY
because.
Like fahrenheit, 451 this country is being torn apart by petty monopolistic groups bent on dominating each other.
If were lucky this might happen.
Nuclear replaces coal not oil. Unless you plan on putting nuclear reactors in planes, automobiles, and heavy machinary nuclear will not put the slightest dent in our oil use.
I can't belive how many uninformed oil posts have been moded up in this thread.
- jackson
Everybody knows, that only privately owned companies are able to deliver quality goods at affordable prices to consumers. That is why the Chinese Communist experiment must fail. They will over-regulate the business process and drive costs into the sky. It is inevitable.
Only an agile managment that has a profit oriented agenda can reduce the overhead of overemployment in profit un-generating activities. (There was a focus on production, established by management, combined with taking minimum action to meet regulatory requirements that resulted in the acceptance of degraded conditions." )
Obviously, Captains of Business must take calculated risks when they try to compete with other entrepreneurs. (An unexpected leak of boric acid has eaten through nearly six full inches of solid high-grade metal in a critical internal component. Only 3/8 of an inch of carbon steel protection was left in tact when the hole was discovered in February. Soon thereafter a second hole was discovered, raising widespread fears that the reactor could be riddled with untold other seriously deriorated sites.)
What the industry does not need is Big Government mendling and fumbling in the day-to-day activities of the managment. A government employed beaurocratic overeducated engineer obviously can not have anyidea what a prospering production company needs.( Bush administration is moving to replace government safety requirements at federal nuclear facilities with standards written by contractors -- after Congress directed the government to start fining the contractors for violations. Long-established government minimum standards at the more than two dozen nuclear weapons plants and research labs around the nation would become unenforceable guidelines under the Energy Department proposal.)
When regulations are needed, the power industry will put in place voluntary requirements aimed at preventing blackouts. ( administered NAERC, which lacks the ability to hand down penalties. Many reliability rules were ignored during the outages.)
A rigid, self-regulation regime in the form of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will prevent any security anomalies. ( NRC says there is no real danger. But in the same releases it pointed out that the acid has compromised an extremely important safety
feature common to all pressurized water reactors. The NRC gets its funding from the industry it regulates.)
Only private companies are able to deliver the constantly needed supply of electric power at affordable prices.( in its interim report, the task force largely blamed FirstEnergy Corp)
That is why free market will rule, and big government must fail.
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
The point isn't that we should be recycling our coal waste in nuclear reactors, it's that nuclear reactors -- particularly modern ones -- are better in almost every way, including environmentally, than coal plants.
There's plenty to be concerned about with nuclear power. What always boggles me is that we ignore the giant radioactive-smoke-spewing elephant in the corner known as "coal".
The enemies of Democracy are
"A Chinese research institution demonstrated the safety of their test reactor against meltdown by shutting off the coolant."
Okay, no matter how safe this design is, that sounds a little stupid. Looks like China didn't learn much from Chernobyl - demonstrating safety of nuclear powerplants isn't always a particularly good idea. Stick to computer simulations in the future, thanks.
That was radiologically *worse* than Chernobyl, although the latter was far more dramatic. When TMI blew, the US was still a democracy.
I've been doing a lot of research on China's economy for an investment essay recently, and the biggest question that comes to mind is how will they fund such an expensive project? with 50+% of the outstand loans being bad, substantially underfunded retirement fund (in terms of % GDP, it's 25% of social security reserve here in the US, and everyone here's crying bloody murder already), 55 yr old retirement age, and pretty much a big failure in power company investment in the late '90s, you gotta wonder, WHY?!?!?
When oil hits $75/barrel in several years, Americans are going to look at China's cheap nuclear power facilities and say "Why didn't we think of that?".
It will hit $75, and we have thought about it. Lots of us lament over lack of nuclear power, and alternative fuels like methanol.
For all the anti-US sentiment in the Middle East, the oil nations have tremendous influence on the US government's energy policy.
After September 11, one of the biggest energy decisions my government did was give $20,000 tax breaks on Humvee H2's. Yeesh! Oh yeah, the Bush family's most productive oil wells are in Saudi Araia and Kuwait.
Talk about backward's priorities. I woulda pushed to get at least the automotive industry onto corn-based methanol.
Methanol's not cheap, but it would at least it would create a new US industry (and help the American farmer!!). AND...
It would also put a dent in the US trade defecit. MOST of all.. it would deny terrorists an important source of income.
Sigh.
Fuck off.
In the UK we're not as sickly unaware of the rest of the world as you are. People like you are going to die a lonely lonely death. It's only your own insecurity that requires you to continually reaffirm your own 'greatness' to all who will listen.
China had delivery systems that could reach the US many, many years ago. Panicking about China and nuclear power is like panicking about Russia and nuclear power.
China is showing that it is forward-thinking enough to look beyond fossil fuels for its electricity. This can only be good for the environment and global warming in particular.
And it seems to be the cleanest and cheapest way to generate all the hydrogen that our hydrogen powered vehicles are going to use in the next several decades.
-5 Ludite on the MQR standard
For reasons other responders have clearly and concicely stated.
In my book, people who go on and on about the nuclear waste disposal "problem" are either flat-earth-level ludites or fosil fuel astro-turfers. I can understand a brief "but the waste problem!" post being a case of ignorance, but to go to such lengths to be wrong indicates a deeper problem.
Go peddle your pro-fosil-fuel FUD elsewhere.
-- MarkusQ
Don't forget about genetic mutations. Cherynobl victims and their children, and their chldrens children, and on, and on, and on are all ticking time bombs. Some may go off, some may not. Cell division is a tricky thing. We use it to fight cancer with Chemo, but in small, controlled doses. With Cherynobl, well, who knows exactly who was exposed to how much?! My point is, there is good cause for the "danger" stigmatism, because if your mother or father were near the "hot" zone, chances are you would be living in fear that someday your silent congenital abnormality decides to say, "hello and...goodbye."
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
I seem to recall that the administration put forward an energy bill that offered substantial tax breaks on the next 8,000 MW of nuclear generating capability built, and was dedicated to moving Yucca mountain forward- and having someplace to stick all that waste is very important to the nuke industry.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
The parent post was taken verbatim from the following website: http://www.alternet.org/election04nv/19519/
if a meltdown occurs in the states and has the potential to burn a hole all the way to china, does the same law apply vice versa?
Isn't that what they said about the Titanic?
We have very few oil power plants. The majority of our power comes from coal which is cheap and very abundant within our own borders. Natural gas and oil are also used (as well as nuclear) but coal is the main non-nuclear source.
That, combined with the scare factor, is the reason the US is so bleh about nuclear power. We have coal, more than we can use in a long time, so why not just keep burning it? I mean nuclear is all evil and scary and shit.
But no, oil going up won't crunch our grid, it'll crunch our cars.
You don't fuck with countries with nukes. That's why everyone wants them. Not to use, but to deter. Crazy as it is, MAD works.
You'd have to be insane or a Presidential cabinet member to think Iraq was more dangerous to the U.S. than North Korea, but you don't see us doing anything but offering them cash in exchange for a promise to disarm.
Our chances of convincing China to disarm are zero. It would be impossible without us leading the way, but once we did, what would be our lever to convince them to follow suit?
The enemies of Democracy are
Copyright C2004 Rebecca Solnitd =1674
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pi
dumbass
I have seen many conversations about plants, and the strange thing is that people who are normally very questioning and cautious--tech people every one--go completely dogmatic when it comes to Nuclear energy.
I don't have a strong opinion one way or another, but I do know that nothing is 100% safe, yet otherwise intelligent people are claiming that on this very thread.
What is it about this topic that is so attractive to techies that they choose to turn off all intelligent filtering.
Or is it just that they are so used to encountering strong resistance in others (about this subject) that they feel they must be extreme to get their point across?
How exactly is he a luddite? According to wikipedia a luddite is someone who protests a certain technology in fear of said technology undercutting their job. It originated, according to wikipedia, from nitters and textile worker being in fear for their job as the industrial revolution took hold in england. The grandparent is simply fearing for his safety. This is not the same as luddism! Personally, I would call the industry behind nuclear power luddites - they constantly lobby against researching real green, sustainable technologies for fear of losing what's left of their foothold in the western power community. Burrying waste is NOT a technological innovation, it's a kludge!
That said, I'm all for research more efficient re-seeding nuclear fission plants. I'm not for nuclear fission as an end-all solution, rather a bridge between our current non-sustainable mode of energy production and whatever future technologies we figure out (fusion, hydrogren-based power infrastructure, etc). Keep in mind, nuclear fission is just as non-sustainable as coal, oil, or natural gas - there are finite supplies of fissionable material on earth.
When I was in Nanjing recently, I drove a little under an hour from the city to spend some time at the home of a student (more an accepted practice than it is in the states, and a good way to get some extra education for your kid.)
My homestay family told me that a power plant by the side of the road with a long system of pipes snaking around the far perimeter (the part away from the plant and nearer the road) was an oil refinery, I believe or somthing related to fossil fuels. The tower looked for all the world like a nuclear cooling tower. The whole 'thick spindle' shape.
I'm curious, does anyone know of any types of cooling towers that normally resemble nuclear cooling towers? Or was I being fed what people wanted me to hear.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
The reactors are to be pebble bed reactors, in which helium replaces radioactive, pressurized water.
Now that's the most reasonable explanation I've heard yet for those damn Oompa Lumpas - radioactive helium. Sure, huffing that stuff is fun, but what about the consequences!
funny!
I can't be bothered to do the maths, but, around the Earth, orbital speed is 17,000 mph, and escape velocity is 25,000 mph. So to land a thing from orbit requires slowing by 17,000, escaping the Earth, speeding up by only 8,000. So oddly, it is easier to escape the Earth than to land - it's the same with the Sun. (The reason NASA finds it so easy to land is that it just dips into the atmosphere and lets friction do all the heavy work - you can't do that with the Sun at this distance.)
It doesn't matter which ape activates the Monolith
With that much cheap energy, more manufacturers are going to relocate to China. The U.S. may suffer more than just envy.
And it looks like the U.S. is losing the battle for the north to Canada (out of the dispute of territorial boundaries), so what's it going to be: dig up Alaska? Conserve energy? Go Nuclear? Rely on the rest of the world?
I truly hope the best for everyone. We're all in this together.
Where are all the atom smashers? Any flying cars too? We were promised flying cars!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I'd be interested to know how the Chinese have addressed the following problems with PBR technology (from http://www.tmia.com/pebbles.html)
1. It has no containment building.
2. It uses flammable graphite as a moderator.
3. It produces more high level nuclear wastes than current nuclear reactor designs.
4. It relies heavily on nearly perfect fuel pebbles.
5. It relies heavily upon fuel handling as the pebbles are cycled through the reactor.
6. There's already been an accident at a pebble bed reactor in Germany due to fuel handling problems.
Lacking our silly and irrational hangups about nuclear power, that place is going to be a 1+ billion person industrial powerhouse that'll put the US to shame.
Having said that, however, I do have a problem with nuclear power plants: waste. As many have stated, France generates 70+% of their electricity from nuclear. What is not being said is that the French still don't know what to do with the waste. Sure, they recycle it (very clever, IMO), but you still end up with waste that's radioactive.
From Frontline:
Basically I see two ways to solve the problem:
1) This first option is easily in our reach: get it off the planet. We can easily shoot the stuff into space at either the Moon or Sun (even Jupiter could be a good place, but the asteroid belt would probably make it slightly more difficult). But there is already tons of fear over launching probes with nuclear power centers even though those basically can't contaminate even in an explosion (at least that's my understanding). I do not really see this as a viable option unless something happens which would change the entire mindset of most of the population.
2) We figure out something to do with the waste. This is a vague option because we're talking about stuff that can only be theorized at this point. Maybe we'll develop bacteria that can somehow digest the radioactive isotopes and excrete non-radioactive isotopes. Or maybe we'll figure out another way to get energy from the waste. I don't know what we may think up. This option is probably the best way of solving the problem, but it's the bigger unknown. While I'm certain we will eventually find something to do with the waste, I could never say when and time is the key with this problem.
As sort of an offshoot to this post: my libertarian ideas (and ideals) conflict with how much government intervention is deemed necessary for nuclear power. If insurance companies don't insure reactors, maybe the government shouldn't either. And the costs of sending waste into space would still be huge. If the private nuclear power companies paid for the disposal, I'd have no problem, but I have a feeling the government would take over. Either for "national security" reasons or just more government corporate welfare for industries that face "unique obstacles" that only governments can handle.
Sorry for the long post,
TSage
The Integral Fast Reactor is a brilliant solution to the "problem" of all the 'waste' from nuclear power. It really really needs to be better known. Heres some info: Would it benefit the United States to share IFR technology with other nations? There are arguments both ways. Using nuclear energy instead of energy from burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) will reduce carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, which is almost certainly a good thing. Using breeder reactors makes the supply of nuclear fuel larger. However, nuclear waste is very unpopular politically in many coutries including the United States, so many people may be angry with the US if it helps other countries use more nuclear power. Is it likely that other nations would use it? IFR is a better, safer reactor design than most reactors now in use. There are many new reactor designs that are better and safer than anything now in use for power production. Nations that build new reactors will probably use some of these newer designs, possibly including IFR. Is the IFR considered renewable? It isn't renewable in the sense that you can plant seeds in the ground and grow nuclear fuel from them. However, as a "breeder" reactor, it does make plutonium 239, which can be used as nuclear fuel, from uranium 238, which cannot be used as a nuclear fuel. Can it recycle its wastes? Just the plutonium and heavier elements. Some wastes, such as fission products, need to be removed and disposed of. However, this is a tremendous advantage over conventional nuclear power plants, as the components of the spent fuel that are the most hazardous over the long term are used as fuel, converting them into less hazardous materials and getting energy from them is the process. Is the IFR safe? What safety tests have been run? (I have copied the following two paragraphs directly from the Web site http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/ifr/ifr3.html, "The Unofficial IFR Home Page.") The passive safety characteristics of the IFR were tested in EBR-II on April 3, 1986, against two of the most severe accident events postulated for nuclear power plants. The first test (the Loss of Flow Test) simulated a complete station blackout, so that power was lost to all cooling systems. The second test (the Loss of Heat Sink Test) simulated the loss of ability to remove heat from the plant by shutting off power to the secondary cooling system. In both of these tests, the normal safety systems were not allowed to function and the operators did not interfere. The tests were run with the reactor initially at full power. In both tests, the passive safety features simply shut down the reactor with no damage. The fuel and coolant remained within safe temperature limits as the reactor quickly shut itself down in both cases. Relying only on passive characteristics, EBR-II smoothly returned to a safe condition without activation of any control rods and without action by the reactor operators. The same features responsible for this remarkable performance in EBR-II will be incorporated into the design of future IFR plants, regardless of how large they may be. Can IFR wastes be used in nuclear weapons? The IFR recycles all the elements it makes that can be used in nuclear weapons, so they don't go into the waste stream. What is usually used? Nuclear weapons require "fissile" nuclei, which split apart, releasing energy and neutrons when contacted with slow-moving neutrons. Thge three "fissile" nuclei that I know of are uranium-235, uranium-233, and plutonium-239. Uranium-235 is obtained by painstakingly purifying ("enriching") it from natural uranium which is about 0.71% uranium-235. Uranium-233 is made from thorium-232 by bombarding it with neutrons. Plutonium 239 is made by bombarding uranium-238 with neutrons. This happens in nuclear reactors, because most of the uranium in nuclear fuel is uranium 238. If not, could it be processed to be usable for weapons? The actual waste from IFR would be useless for making weapons. However, IFR fuel must be removed periodically to be reprocessed,
Smoking is an expensive, slow, and unreliable method of suicide.
But I do have a problem with the pebble bed design: it's a graphite-moderated reactor. That means that sooner or later they are going to have a graphite fire, with a lot of dispersal of radioactive material as a consequence. The pebble-bed may not be prone to a conventional melt-down, but if they ever have a leak and air gets into the reactor (which is probably at 1000+ deg C) then you'll have a fire. And they thing is that you can't put out such a fire with water - the water would act to moderate the neutrons and set off a nuclear reaction. Graphite-moderated reactors also have other issues, such as Wigner energy, which caused at least one reactor fire...
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
The title of this article should have been, "China Goes Nuclearer".
No comment.
"That said, I'm all for research more efficient re-seeding nuclear fission plants. I'm not for nuclear fission as an end-all solution, rather a bridge between our current non-sustainable mode of energy production and whatever future technologies we figure out (fusion, hydrogren-based power infrastructure, etc). Keep in mind, nuclear fission is just as non-sustainable as coal, oil, or natural gas - there are finite supplies of fissionable material on earth."
That much we agree on. BTW Luddite is also a term used to denote some who rejects technology on the basis of preconceived notions. I stand by my usage. Wikipedia is a good resource but English is a living language. It changes, daily.
Hopefully, China wont assign it's farmers to be Nuclear Engineers.
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
2. One who opposes technical or technological change.
The meaning of that word has evolved since the XIXth century. By opposing the nuclear industry, you are only helping the coal and gas-fired lobby, since the other energy sources cannot compete with fossils (wind and hydro are not economically viable everywhere, solar is ludicrously expensive).
Sorry, is it just me? AFAIK, the other factor apart from the environmental issues (or non-issues, you decide) are that it's really really expensive to build and maintain the stations themselves, let alone the costs of disposal/re-processing. I mean, maybe when it's really cheap to get stuff into orbit it might be possible but at the moment rocket launches are EXPENSIVE...
China, with these reactors, will now have a decided technological advantage over Europe, US, everyone for one simple reason.. it's safe, efficient and most importantly *cheaper* than anything we've got.
No nuke plants have been built in the US, not only because of the NIMBY factor but because their cost runs into the *billions*. So, China engineers a design that has the laws of physics working *for* them instead of against, gets tons of cheap reactors and laughs all the way to the bank when everyone else is fighting over the last scraps of fossil fuels in 20 years.
-
As soon as you write this, it's clear that you are Not Paying Attention. At all. The disposal plan is to mix the waste into molten glass and/or ceramic, and cast solid lumps of this glass or ceramic. This can not corrode (natural glasses (tektites) are known to survive unchanged for over a billion years in sea water) there's nothing to rupture, and if it does crack, so what? You've just got two little lumps of impervious radioactive glass instead of one big one.
What everyone else said about the silly hyperbole of it being dangerous for "a quarter million years"...
"Hey! It's all ball bearings nowadays. Now you prepare that Fetzer valve with some 3-in-1 oil and some gauze pads, and I'm gonna need 'bout ten quarts of anti-freeze, preferably Prestone. No, no make that Quaker State."
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The Flinstones really were ahead of their time.
The reactors are to be pebble bed reactors
Stoneage technology rocks.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
didn't you ever watch space 1999
where the moon got ripped out of orbit and sent hurtling through space
after nuclear waste exploded.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Aha! Mine says 'Made in Taiwan'! Gotcha there!
A plant doesn't do you a lot of good if you don't have a uranium supply.
didn't you ever watch space 1999
I was about to say exactly the same thing. Funny how 1999 was supposed to be that futuristic. Then there was 2001:Space Oddyssey. So much for space colonisation.
> Yeah, and how many cities did you go through in SimCity to learn this precious tidbit of knowledge?
Since I doubt any of us will live to see a major U.S. city rip up all their roads and replace them with
railroad, I don't believe SimCity rules will save us. =)
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Hehe, the day America goes to war with China, the day the earth will end, I guess, just guess :)
Well, I think politicians will do their job to keep the balance of things..
Let's hope that day would never come, it's bad for both countries, and the world.
Well, you know, if you got three Purple Hearts, and you didn't spend a single day in the hospital as a consequence of getting them... something smells awfully fishy.
Some guys who got a *single* Purple Heart got scars, some walk with a pronounced limp, some don't walk at all, some are missing one of more limbs. I don't see anyone rushing to accuse them of faking. No one accuses Daniel Inouye of having gotten a fake one. No one accuses Bob Dole of having gotten a fake one.
Maybe if John Kerry had half his face blown off no one would rush to accuse him of having been improperly awarded a Purple Heart. But the thing is, he hasn't had half his face blown off. He's got all his arms and legs. He doesn't limp. He doesn't have a plate in his head. He doesn't slur his words as he speaks. Yet somehow he has not one, but *three* Purple Hearts.
If John Kerry could show us even a half-inch scar or a small pucker from a healed bullet wound this would all go away. But he can't.
I'm Chinese, on the Cental Comittee website... the actual number is 27.
Everybody is talking about how safe nuclear power is and I agree, but I would think that the plants are very good targets for "terrorists"
If you blow up one of these power plants won't that kill a lot of people?
Hitler's in the fridge.
You seem to know your stuff.
... but am curious as to know why?
Now, I'm not pretending to know ANYTHING about nuclear waste, the disposal of or what not... so this might be an incredibly stupid idea...
but I was wondering none the less (as stupid people oft' do)...
What would happen if your simply dropped the said waste into an active volcano?
I assume this wouldn't work
Eliminate population growth. Shrink the population by at least 50%. 75% would be better.
Unfortunately, people are difficult to convince that in order to save the planet they have to die. However, that is the situation, do not doubt it for a minute. That is all it would take for pollution and gobal warming to be solved overnight. Bring the population down to about the 1850 level.
"Wired reports that the People's Republic of China has announced plans to build 30 new nuclear reactors by the year 2020, and by 2050 have almost as much nuclear power as the entire world produces today."
Not that I would ever question China's resolve on such an undertaking, but this wouldn't be the the first time China has made such a claim. One might even wonder what their political structure will look like in 50 years, let alone suspect the resolve to stay the course they're outlining for this massive project. Not that China would ever tell us something that wasn't true, right?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
if you look at the examples of "good" nuclear countries like Japan or France they have little or no MILIITARY interest involved in their nuclear programs...so they design to be easy and safe... and are very successful at it. kinda makes you wonder who the "real" good guys are in all this nuclear mess.
So when a Chinese reactor melts down, do they call it America Syndrome?
In Soviet Russia, spies in China give nuclear secrets to YOU!
Sorry. Burn, karma, burn...
It occurs to me that the most sensible place to consider disposal of something dangerous is a place where civilization is unlikely to go. I mean, why even think of Yucca mountain when people lived less than a mile away from it? Why not a remote part of the desert, or someplace around the polar ice caps? Surely we can make better use of the areas people find "unusable" for many traditional things?
Many people completely missed what I was doing with that word spelled wrong, I was quoting the parent.
'Nukular' was what W. said a few times and even still has a tendency to stammer on the word, trying to remember how to say it correctly.
My dictionary is where I left it -- 6.5 feet below the cookie jar.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
what's with the persecution complex?
;-P
your energy scheming is a little... manic depressive
i half expected you to recruit maxwell's demon in your pie in the sky back of the envelope calculations lol
but that being said, we agree pebble bed reactors are the way to go
so what's the problem?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
don't comment on what you don't understand
you are armed with hyperbole from another technology, it does not apply to a discussion on pebble bed reactors
don't try selling your fud here: you are ignorant about what you are talking about
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Once the top floors came loose, they pancaked and took the entire structure down.
Just as they were designed to. That way when one of the towers falls, it collapses against itself instead of taking out an entire city block.
People like you are the reason why our country is losing its technological edge on the world.
Go dunk your head in a fucking toilet.
Perhaps, if and when, the space elevator gets built, risks of sending waste into space could be minimized? No?
Linux at home
Unless you have to mine 5,000 (liberal estimate) to 50,000 (conservative estimate) times as much area to get the same amount of material, uranium mining wins. Add in the available nuclear material gained from reprocessing existing spent fuel that would otherwise be buried and the amount that actually needs to be mined in the first place drops dramatically. You can "reburn" uranium and many of its byproducts. You can't reburn coal.
...unlike your long coal veins.
This of course is ignoring little things like the fact that uranium mines don't catch fire and burn for decades at a time.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
diff ac
ps
in the future don't title a post "math" if you aint gonna do any
with a breakdancing movie title?
ok...
(snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Risks! I say, Risks! This new thing is RISKY! We'd be all for it if it didn't make insects get real huge and glow and stuff. But since atomic energy is so RISKY we'd better stay with fossil fuels, shall we?
After all, burning coal and oil is perfectly safe!
-- MarkusQ
Don`t forget the progress of technology. We don`t need to build containers to last 10000 years or whatever ridiculous amount of years proposed.
If they last 100 years, that`d be good enough. 100 years ago, we didn`t have manned flight, or the internet, or *insert favorite technological invention*. But we did have pollution, from the coal and oil that powered the Industrial Revolution.
100 years from now, I expect elevators to space, deep-bore mines in the Earth crust, and oceanic hydroculture. Dealing with nuclear waste should be relatively trivial.
The choice is between more pollution through fossil fuels, or nuclear power, which generates a limited amount of very dangerous waste. If you were alive 100 years from now, which would you prefer - global climate change, or radioactive waste, stored in a large underground warehouse?
Well, China already has a patent on the use of tanks against the Chinese population so that might make any land based invasion an interesting legal affair.
Im not sure about you guys, but if I were to buy a nuclear waste storage bin, I wouldn't buy one that says "made in china" on a little gold sticker on the bottom !
*Yes, its a joke!*
"Comedy's a dead art form. Now tragedy, that's funny."
That must be 30 new reactor GROUPS. 30 pebble bed reactors would produce way too little amount of electricity. One pebble bed reactor doesn't generate very much electricity by design, the idea is to build cascades of them.
It is also funny how all kinds of "experts" here started commenting on the security of various matters very fast after the Slashdot story was out.
I bet not all of the commentators did ever do any research into the pebble bed reactors or what we could today do in case the ridiculous fears were gotten rid of.
The technology and human organizations around it has evolved greatly. Nuclear power is the only way how humanity has the possibility to create enough evergy for its needs without destroying the environment as the USA is primarily doing at the moment.
Pebble beds are also very secure. Even if a whole cascade was blown up you got to get grip of the reality. All the nuclear testing and other radiation leaks combined haven't killed as much as... Burning COAL. Check the statistics, kids. A common cold has killed more people in the Chernobyl area than the radiation if you bother to check it out.
Btw, pebble bed reactors are old and been tested from the late 60s already. Scientists know them perhaps even better than the other types of reactors.
So stfu whiners.
The worst nuclear disasters to date were, in no particular order:
1. Hiroshima
2. Nagasaki
- and probably a few others before Chernobyl. It makes no difference that those were intended - it was still a disaster to those harmed. The fact that it WAS intentional just adds guilt to the picture.
BTW, I remember hearing something about a techniqe to immobilize plutonium-based radioactive waste in glass beads, supposedly rendering it less harmful. Does anyone remember anything about that?
It is a common concept, not only for radiactive waste, but for other toxic waste too. The goal ist to prevent the substance from being washed into the ground.
Obviously you need a fair amount of energy to melt the waste into something and you have to take care that evaporated substances do not escape during the process.
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
Surely China, the country that kept quiet about the SARS epidemic, that does not care to destroy full ecosystems to build more damns (whose usefulness is being seriously questioned, specially in the pharanoic proportions the Chinese are building) and that does missile testings by sending a few rockets close to Taiwan shores is the best country to shows us the way to go nuclear.
It is mindbogling unbelievable that somebody would post such drivel with a straight face.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The question of whether or not the US could hold out in a land war in Asia is certainly debatable, however, the question of whether or not the US _would_ hold a land war in asia is definately no. Being a civilized republic, "spending" thousands, perhaps millions of people to fight a far off nation would be incredibly unpopular. Just look at Iraq: 2,000 casulties (a handful compared to the mass loss of human life in the world wars) and it already has become more or less unpopular.
... environmentalist wackos?
That is a new one....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Now tell me how do we ensure that your method is constrained to the territorial waters of the pollutant country.
Oh no shit Batman, do you mean countries that don't pollute will have to share any risks of nuclear waste as you propose, in spite of them not polluting?
Great solution that of yours...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It is well documented how in several companies in both the US and UK corners have been cut in order to save money and as a consequence safety has been compromised.
Mindless nuclear advocates want us to believe that all the companies and institutions handling the nuclear industry are trustworthy when in reality they are not. Unfortunately the nuclear lobby (and for the population at large) we will need one"I told you so" scenario before nuclear energy is condemned to where it bleongs, almost great but no usable.
Now, if you are going to put your hands in the fire for the corporations managing these reactors you are more foolish than what it seemed.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I don't suppose anybody noticed that the PBMR referred to in the story was developed and made in South Africa? No idea if this is actually the PBMR system China is going to use, or if they developed their own. At any rate, the design was originally German, but they've moved away from nuclear power.
Eskom, the South African energy parastatal, is actually building one of these things at Pelindaba, although it's fairly small (~165MW, I think). If it's a success, I expect we'll see a lot more of these.
Read any publication from *outside* the US about the extent of the radiation leak at TMI. The building and surrounding area are *still* too radioactive to go near.
Hiroshima. With an uncertain population figure, the death toll could only be estimated. According to data submitted to the United Nations by Hiroshima City in 1976, the death count reached 140,000 (plus or minus 10,000) by the end of December, 1945.
Health Card Holders. Persons qualifying for treatment under the A-bomb Victims Medical Care law of 1957 received Health Cards; holders as of March 31, 1990, numbered 352,550.
Nagasaki. The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki exploded at 11:02 A.M. on August 9. Using plutonium with an explosive power of 20 kilotons of TNT-equivalent, it left an estimated 70,000 dead by the end of 1945, although both population and the deaths are uncertain.
Don't ever forget.
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It's the WASTE, dumbasses. And the safety; but mostly the waste. Anyone simplifying or discarding the issue as "simple" or not of extreme concern, is simply a tard, unable to rationally discuss the seriousness of this issue.
It is certainly a major issue. There is a set of answers..
First, reprocessing. The plutonium generated has to be recovered and burnt in reactors; this is much easier and safer then burying the stuff, and by definition reduced the amount of uranium mining.
Second, fission products. Luckily, all of these have half-lives of There are also small amounts of other actinides. Those that are unsuitable for inclusion into the batteries mentioned above - because of their long half lives - are certainly safe for burial, by definition.
And of course all of the above is just a stop gap on the way to fusion.
It is always sad to see an articulate person make the case for something that has no hope.
Lets carefully debunk such nice diatribe:
the antinuclear crowd doesn't seem to understand how advanced nuclear technology is today
Yeah, all the people with issues against nuclear energy are uneducated idiots. Nice start with a blanket generalization.
do antinuclear types like the alternative? middle east conflicts fueled by oil prices? air pollution and smog?
Of course not, but you are advocating to go for second worst solution at best.
and of course, the "just use less energy" crowd: when you figure out how to tell people to stop using gas and nuclear and start riding bikes, get back to me
That is nonsense.
Honestly, you could do better.
The countries that use fossil fuel do so mostly for their cars and their industry. In those fronts there are many things that could be done: get off your fsckin SUVs! Honestly, you don't need them. Use all that US ingenuity to buy European or Japanese cars that are more efficent, or cpy them, they will not mind. Oh no, sorry, I am infringing in the God's given right of the US people to use 1km/litre of petrol. Sorry, my bad. And what about insulation in USian homes? No sorry, my bad again, you need to use either heating or air cooling equipment 24x7 to keep Polar temperatures in your humble abodes. My bad again. But surely you heat your water with solar energy! I mean in other countries goverments subsidize solar powered water heating? No? Sorry my bad again.
Silly me thinking that pharaonic prestige projects could be replaced by common sense measures. Oh yes, and riding bycicles in many instances would be a reasonable solution (most car trips are completely unnecessary). Lets not talk about public transport. In the US Public=Communism and we know where that leads.
meanwhile, i applaud the chinese, they see the writing on the wall: an overactive economy, demanding more and more gas and coal, and skyhigh oil prices and a volatile middle east... for the chinese, a pebble bed reactor commitment is a no-brainer
Lets see if you keep clapping when a nuclear accident is detected in the West and we see in our TVs the Chinese goverment acknowledging the problem hours or even days after the disaster. Like SARS. If there was a goverment I would not like using nuclear energy is a secretive, unnacountable, one. And surely, China, a country with no environmental controls will dispose of all that waste in a responsible manner.
but of course, simple fear of the unknown and ignorance of simple tech means the us will be left dependent on volatile undependable oil and gas and coal, while the chinese enjoy a safe, stable, cheap energy source,
What about mistrust of the coporations and institutions handling nuclear power? DO you trust them? Great, I would like to see how you react if one reactor wold be in close proximity to where you live.
And of course there is no terrorism concerns regarding attacks to the reactors or nuclear waste finding its way in the worng hands. If nuclear becomes widespread the system will break somewhere, and you will not be there to fix the problem, too busy clapping for the Chinese.
this is not silkwood or the china syndrome folks, the stakes are accutely high in today's world: adjust your antinuclear opinion appropriately please
Yeah, great, trust the same idiots that got us in the fossil fuel mess to now deliver nuclear,
Thanks for the great idea.
The solution is in our hands, we have to reduce consumption and we have to make choices that will force the people in positions of power to consider other alternatives. Your are suggesting to jump from bad to worst without trying to change habits from both people (consume less) and goverments (pharaonic pet projects don't scale, people sometimes have to be coherced in a certain direction) solves nothing. We are facing a real problem that demands real solutions: we need to adjust power consumptions to renewable means that do not damage the environment or people.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I know people who replace their PDA frequently - but hardly use it for anything but as a badge of honour. The people I know who are organised are still using a Palm III, an old Psion or a paper diary.
There's some figures about off-road vehicles in the UK - one in 8 has EVER been off-road. So, people are driving a hunking fuel waster to go and get their shopping.
If people focussed on the important stuff - family, friends, coffee, sunsets, music and beer, we'd probably consume half what we do.
Nuclear reactor in places like the UK are closing because they are not aconomically viable.
That is the little dirty secret that the nuclear fan boys will not admit but thankfuly economic reality will eventualy level heads.
You should ask why nuclear energy is only popular in countries who borrow heavily and with deficits on the increase. Fiscally responsible countries avoid nuclear ike the pset it is.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
china is already a booming market for gas guzzling prestige cars
why?
because they can
people do what they can do, and this is not because of government, or big business, but because of elemental human nature and psychology itself
so: you can yell at me and talk snooty to me all you want, but hey dude: i'm not the one driving the hummer
i want you to go up to the driver's side window of the next guy you see driving a big hummer and convince him to drive a bicycle
go ahead, i fully support you on your naive endeavor
when you convince him to do that, you get back to me, and i will bow before you in prostate and abject awe
but what i think you will find instead is that he is going to laugh in your face
sorry dude, but this is not mr. evil circletimessquare warping the world to fit his pov, this is mr. sober and rational mr. circletimessquare accepting unfortunate and ugly facets of human nature that you don't seem to be able to accept or process
don't shoot the messenger
i'm the messenger of something you don't want to hear, but of something neither you nor i nor big government nor big corporations have any control over whatsoever: simple human greed and pride and ego
go ahead, fight it all you want
i don't think you'll be the one making much of a difference in the world then
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
- The "Chinese Communist experiment" is nothing of the sort. China tried to force an agrarian society into socialism, screwed up (as they should have expected from day one given how it failed in Russia, and given that this is exactly what Marx' claimed would happen to under developed countries that attempted socialism), and started moving towards a market economy. Today it has one of the largest private company based economies in the world, and is quickly privatising more and more of the state companies.
- Big government failing is a central theory of communism. Go read "State and the revolution" by Lenin, which very clearly summarizes the marxist theory that the state is an apparatus for class oppression and that a transition to comunism would make it necessary for the state to "wither away" and be at most maintained only in the form of an organisation with purely administrative support functions.
Looking at Marxism, there is even nothing contradictory between communism and a free market (if you're looking to Leninism or Maoism, then yes, they were both very much about planned economies, but then they've failed too). The difference being between a capitalist society with private ownership of the means of production and a communist society with public ownership of the means of production.
Competition about a free market is about much more than profit - it is also about survival and keeping control of your destiny, which is why so many people run their own businesses even when they could have made wastly more money by working for a large corporation in a less stressfull position. The money factor would to some extent be absent in a communist free market system, but the remaining factors that cause people to want to run their own companies and compete would still be present.
Puh... It sure gets tiresome reading all these I-love-nuclear-power posts in this discussion. Seems lots of people are such technophilias that they completely ignore the issues at hand:
1. Nuclear fuel extraction
2. Nuclear power plant running
3. Nuclear waste storing/processing/whatever
So, this type of reactor address #2 above. Big deal. Unless you're living in Russia, Ukraine or so, the main issues are normally #1 and #3.
Then there are all these deus ex machina arguments that seem to pop up all the time - transmutation, sending stuff to space, etc. All fine sci-fi suggestions, but mostly completely unviable for economical, environmental or political reasons. Not to mention that most suggestions have not been tested or are not yet practical on a large scale.
So the myth of cheap nuclear energy still prevails.
I read a lot of positiv remarks about nuclear power.
The 'Club of Rome', an organization of scientists that tries to evaluate global problems and come up with possible solutions came to the conclusion that due to the green house effect we will have to build many nuclear power plants fast, because at the moment there is no viable alternative. Since nuclear waste presents a big problem their report also states that we need to develope fusion reactors as well, but since that will take a long time we first have to get going on the short term solution to save our asses.
Apart from that I still have to caution all that blunt optimism. Some newer studies hinted, that low radiation over extended periods of time are a lot more dangerous to the human body than high radiation over very short periods concerning cancer. And there is a steady pollution coming from nuclear power plants. So we still need to study and evaluate the causes of cancer and the effects of radiation.
The common fear and paranoia about readiation is well founded IMHO. You can't smell it, can't see it or feel it, but it still steadily erodes your health. That is something I, personally find frightening. But writing to an audience that spent a major part of their youth 30 cm away from a CRT I am probabely alone with that feeling.
Sure, nuke energy plants can be as safe as pussy cats.
But what about the waste?
Dumping it, in a save place (-If- Them canadians allow it) might work (in glass and shit) but HOW TO GET IT THERE?
Transport...
Well I dont want to live next to a railtrack that carries this shit around see...
Burning the waist can theoratically work, IF we can do it efficient AT THE PLANT.
Can we? (Answer: not yet)
Another consideration: Nuke enery is not "sustainable" there will be an end it its "fuel". It is a dead-end road (abeit, a really long road)
"/Dread"
How about this :)
instead of using a rocket, wait until the technology exists for an orbital evelvator
then just carry it on up and fire it into the sun
So it's no longer Russia that has the nyuklear wessels?
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
well it's in china,s o we don't really have a say ... ... sheesh. ... the "give back" principle, maybe.
so anyway.
i just want to point out, that maybe building one
of these "advanced nuclear reactors" and testing
it a few years before commiting to so many
reactors at once
further more waste is still a problem. with coal
and oil we at least know what's going on:
"microscopical dust particles". but heck what the
hell is radioactivity? some kinda of weird heat
from a distance or what? it's like the ashes from
my cigaretts, but glowing for a few million years
further more 95 % (guess) of electrcity produced
still employs a methode that uses up resources
generated by nature millons of years ago, be this
uranium, coal, oil, natural gas. well ladies and
gentlemen, some day we're going to run out of it!
to term it differently (this is not my invention)
we are using the "explosion" priciple. we just
"blow up" stuff to get it to work for us. now
consider the "implosion principle". look at
a hurrican. a hurrican used the "implosion"
priciple. if we could (somehow) generat a
artifical (but real) hurrican in a tower or
soemthing and keep it, we could harvest alot
of energy straight from the atmosphere/sun.
also fusion would use the "implosion" principle,
but these ideas are not easy to understand, since
we grow up in a consumer mentality. to understand
the "implosion" principle we would have to learn
to tend a garden
It's unlikely you'll see this, since we're late in the game, but good job -- the world needs more rational people like you.
I wonder if these balls could be made into neutron diffraction mirrors to focus the neutrons and further reduce the load of radioactive elements and increase the absorbtion by the remaining fission load. Also the mirror could defocus at or above a certian temperature and below a certian temperature "really" shutting down the system.
... TMI could easily have been significantly worse than Chernobyl. It was carefully kept quiet in the US.
How much "energy" is needed to produce the fuels (plutonium/uranium)?
Last time i checked Helium is still rather expensive to get as well.
Would re-processing coal to burn cleaner offer as much fuel with less risk as nuclear fuels at a lower cost of energy in its full life cycle?
You have to consider that storing spent rods in glass cylinders is very costly in energy as well. From mining the materials used to making the glass to actually milling out the storage and securing the materials..
Sounds to me like Wind, Sun and Water are the best energies to harness
Yo, you physisists, yo dumb asses don't realize no body on the f'ing planet wants to pay enough attention to guard your equation proofed safe nuclear plants. All of them are gonna trouble humanity cause you ain't ever gonna find people's to keep the shit going smooth, aye? Fucken, too educated numb nuts! Don't use nuclear power cause nuclear is too hard for people. Maybe in a couple of millenia, iff humanity's mode, median, mean gets to such high standards. shit.
sorry you go mod'd down, that guy really hgad it coming. Next time you respond to a troll, post AC.
You don't want the Moon to be blown out of orbit by a nuclear waste dump explosion, do you?
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
It's pronounced "New Q Ler"
Why do I keep typing pythong?
News Flash braniac... FIVE coal miners have been killed thus far in the United States. Where do you people come from?
I'm sure that there are other reasons that I have not mentioned here, but for just for the reasons I listed, I do not see too many more nuclear reactors being built in the U.S. in the near future. Although I do not support China's form of government, this is where they have a huge advantage over the U.S., in that they can do what is best for the majority without dealing with all of the problems of U.S. polotics.
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Iran has no need for electricity? Furthermore, given the actual threat here is an Imperial military stomping through the Middle East, it would only be sensible for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons to resist invasion.
There was no rationale for invading Iraq except the bullying that goes along with being an Empire. The "team" I'm on is the non-Imperial one, Ace. As a perspective, I grew up expecting to be the citizen of a Republic, not the subject of an Empire.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Over regulation isn't just expensive, it's dangerous. The larger and more incomprehensible and contradictory the Huge Book of Safety Regulations written by people paid to cover their own ass is, the less Brainpower is left for those who run nuke plants to use to exhibit 'common sence'. I want people running nuke plants to use their own brains, not just follow a bunch of rules designed by Cover-your-ass-thought-process.
A nuclear reactor is basically, a compost pile. You heap up a bunch of the right isotopes, and they start to decay. Instead of turning it with a fork to aerate, you add neutron moderating substances to make sure there are enough nutritious thermal neutrons to keep the whole thing going.
Like any other compost pile that's working right, it gets warm, or even hot to the touch. By using that heat to drive a fluid through a turbine, we use it to generate electicity. Nuclear power is natural. It's just composting of isotopes.
When the first flush of decay is over, and the U235 is starting to be depleted, it leaves behind other shorter lived isotopes.
The compost pile has not finished decaying when new fuel is introduced. The half-decayed fuel rods are like half rotted tomatos and fish heads in your compost pile at home. They still stink, and they are no good for growing a garden.
In the case of breeder reactors and certain isotopes of plutonium, the continued composting can still produce enough heat to make electricity, but for the even shorter lived isotopes, that isn't yet done.
Now short lived isotopes are analogous to that moldy fish head. Producing high amounts of radiation, they are at the peak of stink. Because decay has totally set in on the fish head, it reaks, but because of that very decay, it will soon be completely gone, leaving perhaps an innoffensive skeleton behind, and nutritious soil for your garden. After 5 years, half of your Cobalt 60 is gone. What it leaves behind is either more or less radioactive than before. If it is less radioactive, it is less dangerous, if it is more radioactive, then IT will be gone even sooner. Radioactive waste wants to become less radioactive over time. Eventually it will not be much worse than the U235 fuel it started as.
But even if it is a little worse, so what? It's still neutronisious and full of vitamins. Properly diluted, it contributes helpfully to the natual random genetic mutations that have brought life up from plankton to mammals.
Once your grass clippings, and rotten tomatoes, and cow manure, and fish heads have finished composting, the soil is great for your garden. But while you might take a drink from a cool mountain stream you wouldn't drink from a puddle in your compost heap. There will be traces of the Cow Manure, and rotten fish head in the water. It is those traces that make the composted material more nutritious for your garden than the continually washed gravel comprising that mountain stream bed, but nutritious for plants is one thing, eating composted fish heads and manure is another. Better to let the plants make use of the nutrients and then eat the plants.
So spreading radioactive waste around the planet seems to be the solution. As it decays it's neutrative neutrons will fertilize natural selection with new mutations, and it will never become much of a problem because the stinkiest radioisoptopes decay away the fastest, leaving the wholesome longer lived radioisotopes behind.
What about dropping the nodules into a mid-ocean subduction zone? They would be sucked into the mantle (which is pretty radioactive itself) to be recycled into new land long after the radiation has minimized. This seems less risky than a launch.
The reactors are to be pebble bed reactors, in which helium replaces radioactive, pressurized water.
God damn it, we (um, that would be the US) should be building 30 new pebble-bed reactors! Why are we so crazy and stupid on this subject?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
I call FUD. Have you *seen* the containers that they've created to hold the nuclear waste. They've taken them and rammed them into walls at 80 MPH on the top of tanker trucks, dropped them on large iron spikes, fired SAM missles at them - all to no avail. Hardly made a dent in them.
This is the type of arrogance that gets people, esp engineers in trouble. According to the DOE the containers will be able to withstand %99.9 percent of all "hypothetical" accidents. This is probably analogous to the promise by oil companies that all oil ships would be double hulled if they were allowed to make the Alaskan pipeline. The Exon Valdeez was an accumulation of cut-backs and false promises that ended up costing a lot.
These things are multi-million dollar containers that are about an order of magnitude thicker than your average tank. Given that they are going to be escorted by police and military convoys, I sincerely doubt that anything serious is going to happen.
I sincerely doubt that every shipment from every temporary storage facility in every town with a reactor will have an escort. Even the shipments that are currently being sent via truck don't have military escorts, why would the ones by train? And by military escort, if any, I think that would ammount to maybe two national gaurd, if even that.
I live in a town en route to Yucca Mountain, and a truck recently came through leaking fluid. They had to shut down a stretch of the highway until they were able to figure out what it was. Another trucker noticed the leak, no escort, not even the driver himself. It turned out the stuff leaking was only the shielding fluid for the nuclear containers, not the actual nuclear material itself. Wohoo!
I truly worry about the US if we let ourselves fall behind on this - misplaced anxiety is really going to do us in in the next century. I can only hope that calmer heads prevail.
I have worked on simulations for Yucca mountain, the tunnels and containers are built to minimize leakage when it occurs. I say when, not if, because it will eventually leak. When it does it will seep through many, many, many, layers of rock deep into the ground. But guess what, it is a mountain, so the deep into the ground will be where the ground water is for everyone else eventually. The reservations around the area already have enough problems with radioactive material in their ground water from all of the mining that occured here many years ago.
"Calmer heads will prevail" does not mean "we gotta beat China or we will be left in the dust". Americans are so fucking stupid in trying to get the competitive edge we don't care who we fuck in the process. I can easily see China turning into the next cold war, Commies vs. Freedom bullshit. How about we let someone else beat us to the punch for once and worry about the problems we already have.
If a civilization in 10,000 can't solve the problem with technology that can properly dispose of radioactive material then I have no pity for them because obviously they weren't spending their time wisely.
That may sound crass, but you'd think in 1,000 years we'd have inter solar system travel and various other developments. The only two reasons that radioactive material would still be a problem in 10,000 for a civilization is that either:
A.) Humanity just up and left the planet without cleaning it up (due to laziness) and something else evolved into primitive society (which shame on us)
Or
B.) Humanity has blown itself to kingdom come, asteroid impact, and various other global life ending disasters, but I think at that point there is much more to worry about than underground radioactive waste.
don't pursue more environmentally friendly energy sources because poor countries don't have nuclear technology
and the it's... a "weapon"
how the heck is it a weapon?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
1. China has supplies of low sulfur coal. However, the plan on using these reserves for the booming metallurgical market. Added advantage, they can strip this coal
2. High sulfur coal (used for electrical generation) is deep. Expensive to mine.
3. Do you think they have scrubbers on their plants?? NO!
4. Clean coal technology is a reality and we are already starting to see this in the United States. Coal is far from dead in the US!!
... there's this idea, which I've always been rather partial to.
Put the stuff back where it came from. What could be more environmentally conscious?
+++ATH0
Again, the definition does not fit. I addressed that. Burrying waste is not a technological advance. The only advance that could come from that would be improved long-term storage containers, or maybe a faster fork lift to move them. I'm all for advances in power generation methods in nuclear reactors, use of fuel more efficiently, etc. But I am against sticking radioactive waste, that will be around for quite a while, in an area that shows geologic signs of a past water table which was higher than the yucca mountain site. That's not luddism, that's rationality. Nuclear power will be needed as a bridge to future technologies, no doubt about that...but climates change. Green belts shift. What happens if the greenbelt shifts south from oregon, idaho, and wyoming down towards nevada? It's happened before, and with the half life of waste to be stored in yucca mountain, it's fairly probable that it will happen again.
Here's a lesson in Soil Physics for you, to help you understand my skepticism:
Soil is a highly complex medium, with a net negative charge. Positive ions adhere to soil, negative ions break up soil (called flocculation, why sodic and saline soils suck for agriculture - the negative ions in the salt complexes destroy soil structure). Clay, part of a soil, tends to be quite negative - generally -90 to -20 mmol/kg. It has a pH dependent charge, gernally getting less negative as pH decreases, with a few clay types actually becoming positive as pH dips below 6. This is pretty rare. Right now engineers in yucca mountain are counting on the clay (Primarily smectite and clinoptilolite) to stop any potential nucleide leak. However, according to my chemistry text book, Plutonium-239 is one of the main waste isotopes from nuclear fission. The movement of nucleides through clay is still fairly unknown. Will it sorp? Will it floculate the clay? It only takes one hole in a clay layer to facilitate the free movement of water through it.
Lucky for us this this a pretty damn pressing question, and there are scientist working on it. Personally, I DO hope yucca mountain is a viable site, but I haven't found enough evidence to convince me of that yet.
As far as solar being prohibitively expensive - if it had as many government subsidies as nuclear power does, it most likely wouldn't. The cost per killowatt hour for nuclear fuel that i found is around 5 cents. The cost cited on the same site for solar power was 12 cents. I have to wonder if this cost is the actual or the subsidized cost. What subsidies, you ask? these . Googling for "Nuclear Subsidies" brought that up. I googled for Solar Subsidies and only found a page citing californian subsidies for home owners.
In 2000 64,000 tons of Uranium were consumed, while 3,600,000,000 tons of coal were produced. Even if Uranium and coal posed the same danger to miners, there'd be about one-fifty-thousandth the deaths.
Think about the lost jobs though. Who would you prefer to have angry at you; A) 10,000 pissed-off, tough-ass miners that work underground in a horrible environment or, B) a million computer people who are mostly out of shape, relatively used to creature comforts and still are angered by BtVS's cancellation?
Even though I'm making a completely invalid comparison in order to whore points, I think the anti-nuke attitude is best, politically.
Unfortunately in a capitalist economy, he inevitably will. And in a weird whatever-it-is post-neo-Confucian society like China, he pretty much will too.
The eyes are the best part, of course.
As I previously explained in a post about The Causes of the Chernobyl Accident, PWR reactors also require coolant for any reaction to proceed. This is because they require a relatively large number of slow neutrons to be absorbed by relatively averagely refined fuel rods.
Pebble bed reactors tend to be safer because of a simpler design, more modern failsafes, a better ability to quickly scale power generation, and chemically unreactive coolant. Furthermore, a PBR can't support a chain reaction at the required higher temperatures due. Those are some reasons why I agree that they have a better design.
However, nuclear fission reactions in both a PWR and a PBR tend to "fiss out" with loss of coolant. They just do it each by a different mechanism.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
Why's everybody so eager to invest in old technology? In my opinion our best fusion reactor is safely stored away in one astronomical unit distance but if you have to have nuclear energy in earth couldn't you all just wait for ITER (http://www.iter.org/)? What's so great about fission?
Americas strength came from panicking about _all_ comunists w/ nuclear power. According to republican ideology, China needs to be contained just as Russia was.
I forgot where I read, seen, or heard it from, but we supposedly already have the technology to use, I think, lasers to break down nuclear waste in a matter of minutes/hours in the lab. We just have to get it into commercial hands.