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."
Not only does nuclear energy work, but it is a major source of power all over Europe. For instance, France currently generates 75% of its total power from nuclear sources (from this BBC story). Like many things, nuclear power can be a good thing if it is generated safely, and it can be very dangerous if not. The key is to be safe in how the nuclear power plant is built, operated and maintained.
Coal releases more radioactivity that nuclear power anyway.
From this article, "the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
Read up on the reactor design they're using, Pebble Bed Reactors.
These are not your traditional nuclear reactors, they don't suffer from a run-away failure mode, they're designed such that even if all control rods are removed and the coolant gets shut off the increased temperature itself slows down the reaction to a stable idle - below the temperature at which the fuel or reactor melts. Ie they inherently can't blow up or go into meltdown.
Additionally the coolant used is helium, an atom that has very low neutron absorbtion, meaning in the case of a leak there is no atmospheric or groundwater contamination.
Additionlly-additionally the nuclear fuel is at a much lower density, compared to a conventional reactor, greatly simplifying refueling and disposal. Each 210 g pebble contains 9g of uranium grains, sealed inside an exetremely tough ceramic casing that doesn't burn or break - hence no radioactive dust or smoke in an accident.
These things seem very safe and very clean. My main concern will be the lack of public criticism and independant oversight in a country such as China.
Alex
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
It's also important to note WHY it's safe to shut off the cooling system. Pebble bed reactors are LESS reactive without the coolant, therefore they 'starve' themselves if they overheat (yeah that was for the layman). Thus it is safe to remove the coolant from a pebble bed reactor.
"Burying it is perfectly safe"
You gotta be kidding. You must go to the ostrich school of nuclear waste disposal, just bury it, out of sight out of mind, trust us it will be OK.
I'm 100% for nuclear power because its ones of the few ways your going to produce power for this planet once fossil fuels run out but you either need to develop clean fusion power or figure out some way to really deal with the deadly waste from fission reactors. As some have pointed out China's government can probably sweep it under the rug for a while, they can store it wherever they want and imprison anyone who complains, but it is a problem that for all practical purposes never goes away.
Most of the high level toxic waste that was supposed to go to Yucca Mountain will be lethal for up to a quarter million years. It will probably outlast civilization as we know which hasn't lasted 10,000 years yet. One of the study issues for Yucca Mountain is how do you mark deadly waste so that someone ten thousand years from now will deduce that is lethal and leave it alone.
There was marked low level waste in a UN sealed site in Iraq from the 1980's. As soon as anarchy broke out after the invasion looters went in and dumped it all over the place in order to steal the barrels, poisoning themselves and the whole area.
The only way you can bury it is to find container technology that will hold it for tens of thousands of years, unattended, and we simply don't have it. As soon as a container corrodes, cracks or otherwise ruptures that waste is going to be headed for the water table and when it reaches the water table it travels and it poisons everything over a wide area. There have been bad attempts to engage in short term storage of waste at most of the nuclear weapons sites in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R and they are littered with case of corroded and ruptured containers. We really haven't been able to store waste 50 years let alone tens of thousands of years.
The U.S. has spent billions studying Yucca Mountain and its failed miserably in meeting the criteria as a long term waste disposal site and in the U.S. there is no alternate sight in consideration.
From a Mother Jones article on the plight of Nevada and Yucca Mountain:
Repealing the Apocalypse
Once again, it was the water that was the problem, only this time it wasn't a shortage. Yucca Mountain, it turned out, was all wet, and a truly lunatic place to put seventy-seven thousand tons of high-level nuclear waste.
The government created the nuclear power industry with a promise to reactor operators that the essential crisis of the industry, the dangerous, exceedingly long-lived waste it produces, would be taken off their hands. In all the subsequent decades of nuclear power production, spent fuel rods have been piling up in "cooling ponds" onsite, while the operators waited for the government to make good on its promise to get rid of the stuff (mostly located in the population-heavy, resource-light East). Three New England reactors are already suing the government for failing to come up with a dump.
For more than two decades, the Department of Energy (DOE) has done everything it can to create one of the most scientifically dubious dumpsites imaginable, at Yucca Mountain, about ninety miles north of Vegas on the northern edges of the Nevada Test Site, where all those nuclear bombs were detonated (and will be again if Bush has his way).
The initial plan was to compare sites in three western states and choose the safest one, but two of the states -- Texas and Washington -- had the political clout to get out of the competition. So the "comparative study" never studied anyplace but Yucca Mountain, and yet the longer it was studied the less suitable it seemed even for the mandated 10,000 years it was supposed to keep us and the waste apart (forget the quarter million years the stuff would actually remain dangerous). Somehow, this never seemed to stop plans from proceeding. For a lot of geologists, the fact tha
@de_machina
In the short term, nuclear power is a coal-killer, not a oil-killer -- oil only accounts for something like 2-3% of electricity generation in the US; coal accounts for 50%. In the long term, however. nuclear power can reduce the need for oil. (For instance, it can provide the cheap energy needed to create fuel cells, charge batteries, and other alternative methods of powering vehicles.)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I know a bit about Yucca Mountian. My uncle was a concrete engineer working on lining the whole damn place with spray concrete. (got some awesome pictures), and I know the guys the designed those containers to be stored there, and I also know the guys the designed the filters to trap those heavy metals, once they become water borne.
MOST of the stuff disposed there is cleanup stuff. Cloths. Rags. Containers. ***REALLY*** mundane stuff. The next biggest percentage is those filters that I mentioned earlier. Every ounce of radioactive non-volatile fluid to be buried is first run through what basically amounts to a HEPA filter for water. So, those particulates infact become solid waste. What's left of the water is boiled off, and the remnants get packaged too (mostly regular mineral deposits)
The high level wastes are encapsulated in glass or copper in such amounts that there is not enough for that material, or it's decomposited forms to cause a situation of critical mass. Lots of radioactive stuff in one spot can cause quite alot of heat, right? So they limit the quantities of high level radioactive waste to a certian amount PER CONTAINER. Fortunately, Very very very very *VERY* little of what is buried is this form of waste. Less than 20%, and maybe 2% of any given container is highly radioactive... And quite honestly, most of the stuff they treat like this does not at all really need to be treated so carefully.
If Carter's nuclear recycling ban was lifted, that 20% number could be easily dropped to 5% or probably less.
Chill friend. First off I was pointing out the insanity of someone saying we can just bury it, and the insanity that is Yucca Mountain which is basically just burying it.
Reprocessing it is a whole different and more complicated thing. The issue with reprocessing are so complicated and varied you aren't going to do it justice in a Slashdot thread.
Depending on the methods you choose you still get waste of various forms, different waste sure, but there is still a lot of waste from reprocessing. In particular you are going to get plutonium of various grades from weapons grade to plutonium suitable for fast breeder reactors. The only way you get rid of the plutonium waste in the near term is to put in bombs or burn it in reactors designed to burn it.
A key reason reprocessing has such a stigma attached to it is its historically and still is in some places used to harvest weapons grade plutonium. It is a key avenue for nuclear weapons proliferation and weapons grade plutonium is far more dangerous in the wrong hands than the waste so its not like you want every country on the planet doing it.
There is some value in the way reprocessing its being used in France, India and Japan to recycle the fuel and reuse it in fast breeder reactors but there a whole set of issues with that path two.
Pyroprocessing is the new holy grail and it might prove to be a better route than the current PUREX and UREX reprocessing but its not exactly a proven process and it a potential accident waiting to happen too.
Here is a technical brief on the methods though its written by a pro nuke group and needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
You might be able to reduce the dangerous lifespan of a of of waste to 500-1000 years, and burn some of it in reactors but to hold it out as the final solution to nuclear waste is a stretch at this point.
@de_machina
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.
Natural uranium is only slightly radioactive. It has to by mined in huge quantities and purified to produce weapons grade uranium and reactor fuel.
Most of the waste we are talking about here isn't uranium, its plutonium and a host of other exotic metals and isotopes. Plutonium is lethal in extremely small quantities, and with reprocessing its highly sought after to produce nuclear weapons or dirty bombs. You can't just dump it back in a whole in the ground. Like most things you dump in the ground there is a high probability some of its going to end up in the ground water which people drink, and is used in agriculture to grow food for people to eat.
@de_machina
> This is startlingly good news for Nevada.
> Scientists have always said that Yucca Mountain
> was a disaster-in-the-making, even leaving aside
> those 50 million Americans living within half a
> mile of the shipment routes the Yucca-bound
> nuclear waste would travel on for decades to come,
> or the 90 to 500 estimated accidents of unknown
> scale that statistics suggest would take place en
> route over the years. (Who needs terrorist dirty
> bombs when our own tax dollars can supply them?
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.
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 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.
horos
Geez. Another one. Please get an education in physics or read the radiation hazard page at Wikipedia. The worst part of the waste is not the one with the long half-life elements (i.e. Plutonium, Uranium). But the short half-life elements (Iodine-131, Strontium-90).
Usually the faster something decays, the more radiation it releases per unit of time. Something that takes a long time to decay is usually just somewhat warm to the touch. Like plutonium.
The ultimate proof of course, is that elements with an infinite half-life (want even higher half-life than that?) like Au-197 (plain Gold) emit zero radiation.
If you just leave the waste in a pile, it will eventually be a very pure tolerable radiation hazard uranium + plutonium mine and a very valuable resource. The shorter half-life elements will have decayed already.
Regarding Plutonium toxicity, it is way overblown. Sure it is a heavy metal, so is Lead, yet we don't get into a hissy fit about it. Last I heard, they still used Lead to make solder. You aren't going to be allowed to make plates and forks from the stuff, or have it in easily inhalable or drinkable powdered or soluble form (like they used to have in Gasoline), but as long as you use proper procedure it is not that big a deal.
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"...
I stand somewhat corrected. Though here is a source that suggests wikipedia is downplaying its danger somewhat. Excerpts are below.
I guess I'll chalk my wrongness up to media and public antipathy to nuclear power. But that antipathy rose for a couple pretty good reasons. Fission reactors have in fact proven very dangerous numerous times so no one trusts them any more, or the people that build them and advocate them. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl killed fission reactor credibility. Three Mile Island was noteworthy because they came close to a Chernobyl scale accident and the people involved were lieing about the danger and what was happening throughout. Chernobyl's left a dead zone that shows what Three Mile Island could have done if it had gone only slightly further.
The problem is maybe the new designs are safer but at this point no one believes it or is going to trust them. The nuclear industry assured us the old ones were safe and they weren't so they've burned their credibility. The fact is most existing reactors are complex systems, they are extremely fallible and they've proven themselves to be extremely dangerous. How are you going to convince people they are safe at this point. China can do it because they don't have to convince anyone, they can just build them and deal with anyone that complains.
From the LBL source above:
Ingestion of plutonium
For acute radiation poisoning, the lethal dose is estimated to be 500 milligrams (mg), i.e. about 1/2 gram. A common poison, cyanide, requires a dose 5 times smaller to cause death: 100 mg. Thus for ingestion, plutonium is very toxic, but five times less toxic than cyanide. There is also a risk of cancer from ingestion, with a lethal doze (1 cancer) for 480 mg.
Inhalation of plutonium dust
For inhalation, the plutonium can cause death within a month (from pulmonary fibrosis or pulmonary edema); that requires 20 mg inhaled. To cause cancer with high probability, the amount that must be inhaled is 0.08 mg = 80 micrograms. The lethal dose for botulism toxin is estimated to be about 0.070 micrograms = 70 nanograms. [1] Thus botulism toxin is over a thousand times more toxic. The statement that plutonium is the most dangerous material known to man is false. But it is very dangerous, at least in dust form.
How easy is it to breathe in 0.08 mg = 80 micrograms? To get to the critical part of the lungs, the particle must be no larger than about 3 microns. A particle of that size has a mass of about 0.140 micrograms. To get to a dose of 80 micrograms requires 80/0.14 = 560 particles. In contrast, the lethal dose for anthrax is estimated to be 10,000 particles of a similar size. Thus plutonium dust, if spread in the air, is more dangerous than anthrax Ð although the effects are not as immediate.
This source also has an interest section on breeder reactors:
Breeder reactors
The Pu-239 is usually not considered nuclear waste, because it can be used itself to run a nuclear reactor. It is nuclear fuel. Moreover, if you put it in a nuclear reactor, you get three neutrons per fission instead of two. In a reactor, operating at constant (not exponentially growing) power, you want only one neutron per fission to produce another fission. What do you do with the extra two neutrons? Answer: put U-238 in the reactor, and make more plutonium.
Thus a reactor can make (out of U-238) more Pu-239 fuel than it consumes! Such a reactor is called a breeder reactor. It has the potential of turning all uranium, not just 0.7% of it, into nuclear fuel, and thereby increase the available fission fuel by a factor of 140.
There has been public opposition to breeder reactors. The two most common objections are:
1. The plutonium economy. Breeder reactors would allow much greater use of nuclear power, but it means that plutonium would be widespread. Besides the fact that plutonium is ra
@de_machina