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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."
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.
And we all know that rockets never blow up or otherwise fail on launch.
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
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.
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.
except everyone is way too afraid to put anything radioactive on a rocket. what happens if it explodes and rains down radioactive waste upon a city? i agree however that fear of nuclear power is exaggerated. the only reason china is building plants and the US is not, is because no one wants one in their backyard. in china they dont have much choice in what the government determines for them.
And what would have happened (other than the obvious) had done had their safety system failed?
Physics makes the world go 'round.
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
Parent is absolutely right. Despite the demonization of nuclear energy (from Chernobyl to Three Mile Island to Mr. Burns), it really does have the potential, if implemented responsibly (which it looks like this IS), to be one of the safest and most productive energy sources ever.
And in China, of course, there won't be any of those pesky worker protests, singing:
"Come gather round children
it's high time you learned
bout a hero named Homer
and a devil named Burns.
We'll march till we drop
the girls and the fellas
we'll fight till the death
or else fold like umbrellas.
So we'll march day and night
by the big cooling tower
they have the plant
but we have the power!"
There is a good writeup as well on wikipedia
-- the cake is a lie
Yes, but it does scare me a little that China is a country that is a totalitarian regime with no free press or independent reporting/investigation, or accountability!
It took Eastern Europe to alert the world that there might be problem at Cherynobl. Do you think the Chinese govnerment will be seeking public input on were and how to store the waste?
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.
The cost of disposing of waste in this manner would be prohibitive. Burying it is perfectly safe and probably cheaper by a few orders of magnitude. Lifting the Carter administration's reprocessing ban would mitigate the risk considerably as well.
Quote:
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.
If you are going to consider the mortality caused by mining the coal, then you should also consider the mortality caused by mining uranium. That stuff doesn't grow on trees, you know. More nuclear power will mean more mining accidents. Different mines, though.
If it gives me cheap power, YIMBY (Yes, In My Back Yard)! I'm not afraid of the nuclear boogyman, no more tha I'm afraid of the terrorism boogyman. People have to get their fears in perspective.
I just invaded Grammar Czechoslovakia and duped Grammar Neville Chamberlain; now it's on to Grammar Poland.
There are plenty of things in this world which can cause far more than 3,000 deaths if the rules and procedures for operating them are not followed. Maybe you should educate yourself about what happened in Chernobyl.
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Please postulate how a pebble bed reactor will explode for me. I mean, people have known about the positive void coefficients of graphite modulated reactors since before they were built. They just figured (incorrectly) that they could avoid problems with them. What theoretical way are you picturing in which a pebble bed reactor would explode?
I just invaded Grammar Czechoslovakia and duped Grammar Neville Chamberlain; now it's on to Grammar Poland.
Exactly.
These people protest and call this a "war for oil". Well when they fight like hell to prevent expansion for nuclear energy, it doesn't leave Bush many options. Remember how Bush wanted to drill in the frozen tundras of Alaska? The Alaskans were on television saying what a good idea this was and that the land they were going to drill was just a frozen tundra anyway.
Bush and his cabinet have been pushing for nuclear power and moving off foreign dependency for oil all along and people who just jump on the eco bandwagon don't know what they're talking about half the time.
More radiation has leaked into the environment from burning coal then nuclear waste. More people have died as a result of coal mining and oil drilling than from nuclear power. We spent all this money years ago to develop nuclear power and now no new plants are being built because of these enviro-nuts.
If you armor the hell out of the container, it becomes much more expensive to launch.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Of course, you couldn't harness all that uranium, it being so highly diluted in the coal veins that you can't efficiently refine the uranium. So it's kindof a moot point, aside from illustrating that coal is extremely dirty.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Yes, that's what he's saying. He is in fact right, nuclear energy *CAN* be the safest form of energy. We'll see if it will be.
;-) Then again, china is *very* bad at the whole upkeep thing, so this could get ugly.
As far as terrorist attacks, good. We drastically over-reacted to the towers falling. Hell, I was living in NYC at the time and still think that. A bit under 3k people died once from the attack, oddly enough, more people in NYC die a little over each month in NYC (2000 figures from the NYC dept. of health) then were killed when the towers fell. Perhaps we're concentrating too much on the wrong enemy? Of course then again we still haven't caught the person who planned the attacks, we were diverted and deceived by our govt... Er, sorry. that slipped out. Anyways, the point is, with current energy needs we need to do something different then traditional means. If China is willing to be the test bed, then god bless them.
We'll see I suppose.
Their government has no choice. Their oil imports are expanding a lot, and oil is expensive enough as it is.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
I used to live near a wind power plant, what the hell are you talking about? Have you been watching too many cartoons? 40ft fan blades turning at 5 rpm make no meaningful noise whatsoever.
Any overclocker would know that the noise a fan makes is proportional to the rpm of the fan, or inversely proportional to the size of the fan if you keep airflow constant. Besides, the reason fans are loud, aside from the motors themselves, is because they are creating air motion, aka sound. Outside, there is already a hell of a lot more air motion than a fan could ever hope to make, we call it wind, and it's already loud.
Where does all this misinformation about wind power come from? (I'm from Alberta which is, from my anecdotal evidence, one of the most wind-power-friendly places in Canada)
Random and weird software I've written.
...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.
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Considering all nuclear accidents so far, nuclear power probably has saved considerable number of lifes, as well as large ground areas. Damage from burning coal and oil is generally spread over larger areas, but total damage is by far bigger, even when pro-rated with energy production (that is, smaller amount of nuclear power compared to total of coal-based power).
Just as with 9/11, big single bangs get undeserved amount of attention as tragedies. It's almost as if no people ever died due to terror attacks in Belfast, Beirut or Tel Aviv; mostly because those were couple of deaths here, dozen there. They still add up to similar figures, and generally are as bad tragedies, just divided over longer time spans. Similarly, nuclear accidents while spectacular, are no worse than every-day problems coal (etc) burning causes, over time.
IIRC, France is scaling back their nuclear power generation. The only countries I can think of with a serious commitment to nuclear power are France and Japan.
This is an incredibly smart move by China. They can clearly see the problems our dependence on foreign oil has caused. 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?".
-B
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.
You have cheap power right now. Electricity and Gas are amazingly cheap in the US, compared to most of the world.
As long as they keep sending their best and brightest to get their PhDs in the US, and a good portion of those continue to want to stay, we'll probably continue to have a good technological advantage.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
We have nuclear waste buried in certain places in the UK.
A few things worry me about it.
Firstly: It appears we have some of the stuff wrapped in aluminium foil and aren't entirely sure where it is.
Secondly: Some of this stuff will be dangerously radioactive for longer than any form of government has been in existence for. Realisticly this means there is no gurantee we can successfully pass the information on about where we have buried the stuff for the required length of time.
Possibly we are intentially hiding (read: losing) this information because the companies don't care or possibly to avoid terrorism. OR maybe both.
I'm downwind from a nuke plant. No big deal. The notion that you wouldn't want to live near a nuke plant is complete fiction.
Have you ever driven through Gary Indiana? Or downriver detroit? Or the Bronx? Or East LA? Or Washington DC east of the Capital? Or any number of smelly places near petroleum refineries? There's millions of people who live near things a whole lot worse than a nuke plant.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
and for good reason. we haven't started construction on a new nuclear energy plant since 3 mile island, thanks to absolute terror being drilled into the american people.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
Too bad the current conservatives in power are hooked fossil fuel. Maybe if the nuclear power industry had better lobbyists and got members appointed to cabinet positions then they could compete with big oil and coal on an even footing
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"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.
what about putting it back in the uranium mines that the fuel came from? it was just stitting there being radioactive before we mined it, so the land wasn't terribly useful. just put the unusable waste back where it came from.
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
I agree. I'm a left-wing liberal, but I think a lot of left-wing liberals are complete knee-jerk idiots. But then again, so are a lot of right-wingers- they're just less compassionate about it than the left-wingers. ( : For that matter, moderates are idiots too, because really moderate means 'Don't bother me, I'm making money' and/or 'I can't decide what to feel, but I'm not a ditto-head'. People who have both extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing political beliefs are not really moderates- though the 'average weight' of their beliefs is right there in the moderate middle. Hell- the left-right continuum is bull anyway, but it does shape our political discourse, doesn't it.
Logic, macros, and more
But the point is, why put it in long term storage? We might want the stuff in a hundred or two hundred years. Just look at what happened with the "useless" oil - was useless two hundred years ago.
Ok, so pebble bed reactors are not prone to meltdown. Fantastic. They could replace all of the Nuclear reactors in America that are a true risk. That is a good thing, however, it doesn't change the fact that we still have no place to put all of this stuff. The Yucca mountain plant is looking less and less likely every day (and the more I read about it, I think that is a good thing.)
When we have a permanent place to store nuclear waste, then I think that we can look to the future of Nuclear reactors in America, but until that point, it has to wait.
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?
First, an eight-mile-per-gallon improvement in the fleetwide CAFE is literally impossible with current technology, unless you go out and outlaw all vehicles that can have more than four passengers, and eliminate work trucks and the like . . . and unless you outlaw the ones on the roads already, it'd be years before that would even do it.
Second, we probably would import a greater percentage of our oil from the Middle East if fuel economy went up. The cheapest place in the world to extract oil is the Middle East, and the easiest oil in the world to refine is from the Middle East. Any reduction in oli consumption will reduce prices; any reduction in prices would shutter wells that produce the more expensive oil first, and increase the Middle East market share.
Third, since there's a world market for oil, the U.S. simply not importing any from the Middle East would in no way reduce the economic impact of oil shocks in the Middle East. Turmoil in the Middle East reducing the supply of oil to the rest of the world would cause a bid-up in the price of American, Canadian, Mexican, and Venezuelan oil, as the rest of the world tries to buy it in place of Middle Eastern oil.
If anyone today is telling you we can end our economic reliance on Middle Eastern oil in less than 20 years, one of the following four things is true:
Few things are more corrosive to most metal containers than salt, especially if it gets wet.
Set metal containers full of toxic waste in salt water and you will have a pool of uncontained waste in no time.
The key problem with all long term storage sites is you are looking at them in terms of the current climate and a very short historical record. Yucca Mountain is dry now but probably wasn't in the past and may well not be dry in the future especially at the rate our climate is currently changing.
@de_machina
I'd say that's proportional to how badly we need power. When fossil fuels run out, if nuclear is the only viable alternative, then yes they'll tolerate it.
Well, instead, why don't we just dump it in magma?
Probably cause it'd get shot right back up sooner or later (depending on where you dump it).
Some subduction zones move at roughly 4cm or so a year. The volcanic arcs near these zones are anywhere from 25 - 100 miles away (sometimes farther, sometimes closer). The radioactive waste can theoretically return in as little as a few million years. Depending on the half lives of the material, that is still a dangerous prospect, especially when a volcano explodes and sends all sorts of debris and particulate matter around the globe.
Granted, *we* probably won't ever have to worry about it again, but it's still quite a dangerous prospect (especially since the canisters would probably rupture/rust/corrode before they were ever fully subducted and spread friendly radioactive material all over the ocean floor).
1) You ask why the world's most spending government would spend billions on some random thing? Kindf a rhetorical question, if you ask me... This is the country that spends a few millions of dollars stydying the viscosity of ... KETCHUP.
On the other hand, perhaps some contractors needed work and the government "created" work for them.
Obvoiusly, there is a perceived threat. That being the potential for it to cause environmental impact, and most importantly that the 3v1L terrorists would get their grubby mits on it.
2) Plutonium, contrary to what you might believe is not especially toxic. It's hydride is pyrophoric (likes to burn in water), and that's the biggest danger, as far as I'm concerned. Compared to many things, it's downright benign from a psyological aspect. Radioactive potassium is far more worrysome--and boy does the body like to store that...
The thing you've got to worry about chiefly with Pu is inhalation of the dust. The body slowly transports it to the liver. And from there it goes to the bones and causes leukemia. Pu dosen't form solutions in water very well, and what does solute will most lilely be excreted by the body. You'd better worry about arsenic or mercury instead (of which ALOT MORE is dumped into our fresh water every year than there ever will be of Plutonium--think mines.)
The fact is that most of the stuff we'd ever bury isn't any worse than what's already out there. Yeah. Some of it needs to go underground. Like the potassium, among a few other truely nasty things. The rest of it is still potentially useful for power, industrial and medical use.
Why bury it? To make oil more valuable, naturally.
Sorry, wrong. We do have it and it's called "SynRoc" and has been around for 20 years.
It was developed at the ANU in Canberra, Australia, and is considered by many to be the "perfect" solution for disposal of Nuclear waste.
Read this.
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.
Firstly: It appears we have some of the stuff wrapped in aluminium foil and aren't entirely sure where it is.
;-)
A Geiger counter might help there. If you can't detect it, you probably don't need to worry about it.
Secondly: Some of this stuff will be dangerously radioactive for longer than any form of government has been in existence for. Realisticly this means there is no gurantee we can successfully pass the information on about where we have buried the stuff for the required length of tim
So? Human-built structures have been around for longer than any form of government has been in existence for. The Egyptian pyramids, or Stonehenge, among others. Just build a pyramid on top of the stuff, with appropriate warnings about it being cursed.
Besides, there's an inverse relationship between the intensity of emitted radiation and how long that radiation lasts. Potassium (K40) is radioactive with a half-life in the billion year range, but the intensity is generally negligible. (I once read that you'll pick up more radiation from sleeping with somebody (from their K40) than you would living next to a nuclear plant, but I haven't done the math.)
-- Alastair
So what would you wind up with if you dilute the waste by the same amount that the original uranium was?
And said plutonium can't itself be used in reactors to generate power?
If you can cause it to fission in a chain reaction (a requirement to build a bomb), you can use it to power a reactor, as long as you have an appropriate neutron moderator.
Sure. But that in itself isn't a problem. It's only a problem when it appears in food and water in concentrations high enough to matter. If the stuff is dilute enough, then that won't be a problem unless there's some sort of natural concentration process happening. Furthermore, it appears that the only toxicity danger of plutonium even worth talking about is that when the plutonium is inhaled. That can be prevented by using the proper method of processing said plutonium.
In any case, none of this is an issue if you use said plutonium as reactor fuel in a properly designed reactor, since at that point the plutonium in question would only present a danger to the people operating the plant or transporting the fuel.
That leaves the other exotic materials generated by the fission process, which obviously have to addressed on an individual basis.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
We have recycling and reusable goods, but its more convient to throw it in the trash. All of this trash has to go somewhere, and nobody seems to care. There's many reasons to conserve: You save money, the environment, and feel good about it. I'm not anti-science, but I feel like 95% of the crap we manufacture today is complete crap. We live in huge houses, own 4 cars per family, several TV sets and multiple computers. We've gotten all this stuff within the past century. Before that, we didn't even have electricity. Its disappointing to see that because we can spend more, we feel that we must consume more. There's a direct correlation between the two and I would like to know why.
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.
Damn I sound like a tree-hugger.
Now if only you'd stick to screwing your own people ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Basic orbital physics. Were you educated in Kansas or something?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.