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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.