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."

Comments

Nuclear energy works!

[(54)T-Dub]

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 ;-)

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[sneakers563]

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.

And we all know that rockets never blow up or otherwise fail on launch.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[radixvir]

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[filth grinder]

And we all know that rockets never blow up or otherwise fail on launch.

That is why we have Superman to fly the waste up and out of our atomosphere and fling them at the sun.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[kaan]

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Pi_0's don't shower]

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!"

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Camel Pilot]

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?

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[owlmon]

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[br0ck]

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."

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[bobbis.u]

Part of what scares people is the far reaching and long lasting effects of any disaster. An enormous amount of land was affected by Chernobyl (as far away as Cumbria in England, see here) and could remain unusable for 100's of years.

It is also almost impossible to carry out any "clean up", even if the money was available.

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Rei]

You don't want that. The uranium is normally safe largely because it is trapped in the ground. What you'd be dispersing would be far more dangerous than having powdered uranium ore sprinkled on your house, as well, because the half lives are far shorter.

I'm surprised that noone has mentioned subduction zones yet... I mean, most of the dangerous isotopes are heavier than iron and will sink, so what is the big problem? We don't need to drill down to the mantle; just down to where the crust starts to soften.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Rei]

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Matt Perry]

So you are saying that a death of 3,000 people is not enough to force us to turn conventional wisdom on its head, start seeing all forms of nuclear technology as part of a larger nuclear bogeyman, and start a massive campaign that attempts to demonize, attack, or otherwise thwart the spread of nuclear technology?

Nope, not at all. What you should see is that 3,000 deaths were caused because of a poorly planned test in a nuclear reactor. These test were performed by tired operators who disabled all of the security checks that would have helped prevent the disaster. The design of the Chernobyl wasn't as safe as some of the reactors that we can build today.

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Rei]

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?

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Comrade64]

What happens if a nuclear bomb is detonated in Nevada? Will people flee from Las Vegas? Ever hear of Voyager, Pioneer and etc...they had "radioisotope thermoelectric generators" or RTGs. Also, China isn't new to the nuclear power scene. They've been doing it for years and years. It's just that they're taking it a step beyond what the US did. Face it, our (the US's) current nuclear power infrastructuce is marginal.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[mrchaotica]

If you armor the hell out of the container, it becomes much more expensive to launch.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[holysin]

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.

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. ;-) Then again, china is *very* bad at the whole upkeep thing, so this could get ugly.

We'll see I suppose.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Jeffrey Baker]

Talk about disingenuous. Coal power needs a contiuous feed of billions of tons of coal. Nuclear power needs tiny batches of fuel periodically.

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[ArbitraryConstant]

Their government has no choice. Their oil imports are expanding a lot, and oil is expensive enough as it is.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Cecil]

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)

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[moreati]

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

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Ralph Wiggam]

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

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[silverbolt]

You have cheap power right now. Electricity and Gas are amazingly cheap in the US, compared to most of the world.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Proc6]

It depends. If the fallout grows second sets of arms on everyone, cleanup will take half as many people!

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[mlyle]

I think you're mischaracterizing things a little bit. Without reprocessing, typical reactor fuel waste is only 10x as radioactive as the original fuel after 300 years or so. Active cooling in most scenarios is required for 100 years or less, and outages of a few weeks can be tolerated because of the thermal inertia available in most storage facilities.

you need to put it somewhere where it's pretty likely to stay undisturbed for 50000 years or thereabouts, which, while probably possible, is not all that easy, especially with the special handling it needs at every stage.

I agree keeping the waste secured for 10000+ years is nice, as that's the timeframe necessary to end up with waste that's less hot than the input fuel. However, it is not a necessary condition for it to be safer than other methods of energy production (including their fuel cycle). And most of the long-term repository solutions I've seen, like Yucca Mountain, don't involve continuing to handle the fuel after it's stored. You stick it in its containers, put the containers in place, attach the drip covers, and provide electrical power to the fans for 60 years, and that's it, basically. (Though if you wanted to maximize the repository capacity, after the waste has cooled some you could place it closer together). And the geologic barriers alone are likely to provide protection for the water table in excess of 10,000 years, not counting all the manmade mechanisms that are being put in place.

Reprocessing makes things much better, as the "seriously nasty high level waste" also has very short half-lives by definition. With reprocessing, your waste very small in quantity and actually comparably radioactive to the fuel within that 300 year period. But I worry about the chance of proliferation from reprocessing.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Hentai]

You'd be surprised what sorts of disasters can happen with coal mining.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[mpcooke3]

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[MarsDefenseMinister]

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[demachina]

"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

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[stevelinton]

The basic reaction in a standard reactor turns Uranium into highly radioactive isotopes of various much lighter elements (fission products). There also loads of parasitic reactions that make Plutonium, turn bits of the reactor into radioactice isotopes of this and that, and so on.

Once about 3% of the Uranium has fissioned, the fission products and the things they have decayed into become a problem -- they absorb neutrons when you don't want them to and generally mess up the chain reaction. The build-up of other radioactive isotopes is also a bit of a problem -- they can affect the structural and chemical stability of the reactor.

So, anyway you have to pull the fuel elements once they reach this state. Then you have two options. Firstly, you can write them off, and just try and keep them cool while the more radioactive elements decay (10-20 years) and then look for a way to get rid of them. Alternatively you can chemically separate our all the various elements present. This is a somewhat tricky and hazardous process, on its track record, but produces recovered unburnt uranium, some plutonium, various inert things and a relatively small quantity of highly radioactive concentrated fission products, which you then have to store or dispose of.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[crackshoe]

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Woody77]

Salt mines. Stuff the crap under detroit. It's not like it's going to do any more damage, and very few things are as stable, geologically, as a salt mine.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[afidel]

Old school plants were built NEAR rivers because the river provided a thermal sink. Environmentalists (correctly) complained that much damage was being done to aquatic life by in influx of 80+ degree water into cool rivers. So all American plants (and most plants worldwide) were converted to continuous loop designs where an isolated, snaking series of pipes was used to cool the water, kind of a reverse heat pump. France on the otherhand built the reactor spanning the river, so the support columns could be undercut by the river and a structural collapse would place the plant and contents into the river.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[sploxx]

Another idea I once heard about(*) about was to dilute the radioactive waste in the earth's magma. The earth is pretty big and even if we would switch to 100% nuclear energy, it would hardly be noticeable that volcanic eruptions get a bit more radioactive.

The only problem is that research needs to be done how, where and if it is possible to use steady downward magma flows which would take the stuff with them. But this research would be probably worth it, considering all the geological information you would also get from it.

For the anti nuclear nuts here which even dislike such a solution: Did you know that that magnetic field depends on the natural radioactivity in the inner earth? Yes, the Kalium 40 keeps the earth's core molten and therefore able to generate the currents which cause the earth's magnetic field, which shield us from dangerous radiation... :-)

(*) - I can't find the source now... maybe it was a /. post.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Rei]

Yeah... I mean, pebble beds do have a risk of the graphite catching fire, which could release radiation. Of course, that's what fire suppression systems are for; it's not like it's hard to build an effective inert gas fire suppression system.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[ikegami]

I must agree! And so does the wildlife: There's about a dozen deers living within the fenced area around the Bruce "B" nuclear power plant here in Ontario. And why not! the radiation levels around nuclear power plants are *lower* than those found in cities.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[bmwm3nut]

"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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[aardvarkjoe]

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.)

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[normal_guy]

Never, ever mention Mother Jones in an argument. Instant loss of credibility, regardless of content.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Ohreally_factor]

Firstly: It appears we have some of the stuff wrapped in aluminium foil and aren't entirely sure where it is.

Try one of these.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[demachina]

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[demachina]

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[yiantsbro]

"...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...."

Hell, in America screwing future generations of humans is a primary operating principle...and we like it that way :)

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[SEE]

Yeah, amazing.

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:

1. They're depending on a huge scientific breakthrough (portable cold fusion, say);
2. They've discovered a Saudi-sized field of easily accessed petroleum;
3. They're ignorant;
4. They're lying.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[vashathastampedo]

Where do you think the fuel for nuclear reactors come from? Could it be the ground?

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Mikkeles]

'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.'

This looks like a job for goatse.cx!

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[demachina]

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Danny Rathjens]

Natural uranium is only slightly radioactive. It has to by mined in huge quantities and purified to produce weapons grade uranium and reactor fuel.

If that were true then I doubt that we would be seeing naturally occuring nuclear reactors. :)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/1 6/167237&tid=134&tid=14
That link to APOD should actually have been:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021016.html

I also just found this page with some interesting information about natural radioactivity with stats like Annual estimated average effective dose equivalent received by a member of the population of the United States:
http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Woody77]

In order for an area to form with enough salt in it to be a good salt mine (such as detroit and cincinatti), it has to be very geologically stable, and have no groundwater, as the groundwater will quickly pull the salt out of the area.

And there are materials that aren't concerned about exposure to saltwater (titanium oxide, for one).

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[demachina]

Most of the wastes sites I know about are from uranium mining and weapons manufacturing like Rocky Flats in Colorado and Hanford in Washington. Most of the waste from commercial reactors, spent fuel rods mostly, are sitting in pools of water to cool and shield them, usually at the reactor site, waiting for the feds to transport it all to Yucca Mountain. Something they've been trying to do for decades.

During the 40's and 50's in particular the U.S. was in an extreme hurry to develop the bomb before Hitler did and to build more bombs than Stalin so they were more than a little messy while they were in a hurry. They also processed small mountains of Uranium and hefty quantities of plutonium. Rocky Flats and Hanford were a plutonium reprocessing facilities which are especially messy. If I recall Hanford has a plume of radioactive waste working its way towards the Columbia river which is a water source for major cities in the Northwest. It is a study in A. how hard it is to store radioactive waste safely and B. the danger of letting it just get dumped in the ground as some here have proposed.

There are horror stories about Rocky Flats where they apparently mixed low level waste with water and pumped it into sprinklers to water the grass in out of the way parts of the facility.

I think Rocky Flats is being turned in to a wildlife park as we speak. It is in close proximity to the cities of Denver and Boulder.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Anonymous Coward]

And you go to Stanford?

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[cheesybagel]

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.

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[aardvarkjoe]

Energy generation is not the same as electricity generation. The correct stats:

Coal 52%
Nuclear 20%
Gas 16%
Hydro 7%
Oil 3%
Non-hydro Renewable 2%

(Source)

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[dcmeserve]

"Burying it is perfectly safe"

You gotta be kidding.

You should take a look a the links. From pbmr.com: The PBMR will generate about 19 tons of spent fuel pebbles per annum, of which less than one ton is depleted uranium. The spent fuel is much easier to store than fuel rods from Pressurized Water Reactors, because the silicon carbide coating around the fuel particles will keep the radioactive decay products isolated for approximately a million years. This is longer than the activity of any of the radioactive products, including plutonium.

The PBMR system has been designed to deal with nuclear waste efficiently and safely. There will be enough room for the spent fuel to be stored in dry storage tanks within the PBMR building. All the spent fuel that the PBMR generates during its 40-year life will be stored on site. This means that no spent fuel will have to be removed from the site. After the plant has been shut down, the spent fuel will be safely stored on site for another 40 years before being sent to a final repository, where the following factors will ensure safe storage:

Firstly, the fission products are encased in a layer of silicon carbide. This layer forms a protective shell around the fission products, and prevents environmental contamination.

Secondly, the fuel has been packed in a graphite sphere. Graphite is an inherently stable material. This means that the spheres will not break or disintegrate, and thus the configuration of the spent fuel will not change.

Finally, the density of spent fuel in each sphere is so minimal that the repository can be packed as efficiently as possible.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[sexecutioner]

"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"

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[AJWM]

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.)

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[The Sith Lord]

Yes, burying it is safe, but there was a means of disposing waste that makes it even safer. Synroc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synroc/) essentially crystallises the waste, making it impossible for radiation to leak. Its just a shame that it hasn't had widespread adoption, as it will quell all the fears of burying nuclear waste.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[demachina]

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

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Derek Pomery]

I'd like to see *that* repeated.
Fact is my car is suppoed to achieve 35 on their test track, and I routinely do better than that, even with a fully loaded car.

Lot of factors that result in unusual speeds.
Wind, pump precision, terrain...

But the idea of everyone moving 55 I find quite amusing. I've often toyed with the idea of start a protest of "civil obedience" where people would obey *every* traffic law (proper number of car lengths driving no more than the speed limit, slowing down if someone cuts into that space, etc).
Ah, the chaos that would result...

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[slipstick]

Yeah sure.

http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionE.htm#v2

Check out the natural uranium reactor, and of course the most naturally radioactive site currently known(right in my own back yard, I live in the province where this site is located).

The Cigar Lake site is so radioactive they haven't figured out a way to mine it yet(last I heard).

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[cerberus4696]

The waste from Rocky Flats is part of what's supposed to be going to Yucca Mountain. You're right when you say that it's in close proximity to Denver and Boulder. It's depressingly close. Worse, some of the most densely poppulated areas of Denver are directly to the west of the site, meaning if there was ever an incident involving an air release of radioactive materials, the prevailing winds would push the plume directly over them. Whether Yucca Mountain or somewhere else, this stuff has to go somewhere. For those interested, Rocky Flats has a website.

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?

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[kcbrown]

Natural uranium is only slightly radioactive. It has to by mined in huge quantities and purified to produce weapons grade uranium and reactor fuel.

So what would you wind up with if you dilute the waste by the same amount that the original uranium was?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[demachina]

"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 what happens if someone makes a mistake, not that people ever do, that results in a critical mass or a heat buildup that leads to a fire, especially when the facility is full and there are thousands of tons of waste in it.

How impervious to heat and fire are the ceramic/glass casings.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[Snaller]

Now if only you'd stick to screwing your own people ;)

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[andr0meda]

You people lack some imagination. Really.

For starters "burrying nuked waste is perfectly safe" sounds great but is a lie, because *you* deny future generations (and I'm talking millions of years) to use that part of earthy soil, because *you* need your energy to be cheap. Of course you have to think for 2 seconds longer, and about consequences which are in the future.

Reprocessing means a lot of traffic, a lot of vulnerability to criminal activity, a potential risk of dissipation. It also means more waste, and the merrits of reprocessing are really not that big compared to other sources of energy.

Re-ignition of the whole atomic powersource industry would be harmfull for our industries (and our planet, mankind, yadeyade..) which are trying to innovate with fuelcells, engines that consume less, vehciles that weigh less, in fact, the bulk of the tech industry is primarily focussed on progress on many fields, with efficiency and performance as the main goal. These solutions exist today, but the manufacturing costs are still too high for mass consumption, however, slowly, progress is being made in this direction as well.

Re:Nuclear energy works!

[cheesybagel]

Chernobyl's left a dead zone that shows what Three Mile Island could have done if it had gone only slightly further.

A dead zone? A nature preserve is more like it. Since the place was irradiated and people don't go there anymore, the place is turning into a forest. Sure, the animals and plants are irradiated and that will shorten their lifespan and cause cancer, etc. Well, if people were still there most wouldn't even be living there. I wouldn't be surprised to see people living there again in 30 years once the more dangerous short half-lived elements decay. Just like in Hiroshima.

People go to spas for health reasons, yet spas are usually pretty radioactive.

Regarding Pu toxicity, I quote:

The latent effect of exposure to 239Pu was the subject of a Los Alamos National Laboratory study. This paper provides an update to an ongoing study of the health of a group of 26 young males who worked on the Manhattan Engineer District's Project at Los Alamos in 1944 and 1945. During this time, these men experienced significant contamination of 239Pu. Of the 26, 21 had left Los Alamos by 1946, one left in 1948, and none had significant additional plutonium exposure after 1945. Exposure was primarily by inhalation, though some also were exposed through cuts in the skin. The internal plutonium deposition ranged from 50 to 3,180 Bq and the effective dose ranged from 0.1 to 7.2 Sv. The median deposition and dose were 565 Bq and 1.25 Sv, respectively. The mortality of this group was compared to the mortality of U.S. white males. The standardized mortality ratio (STR), calculated by comparing the mortality of the subject group to the U.S. white male population, indicates that the exposed Los Alamos group experienced statistically significant fewer cancers and longer lives. Since this may be due to the education level of the Los Alamos group (these 26 had attained a higher level of education than the average U.S. male and this generally correlates with a healthier life style), they were also compared with a population of unexposed Los Alamos workers with comparable hire dates and general education levels. This comparison indicates that the general mortality, as well as cancer-induced mortality, of the two groups were statistically similar. Thus, the exposure of these 26 men to 239Pu did not significantly affect their health over their lifetimes.

So yes, Pu is dangerous (what isn't?), yes it should be carefully handled, but I still find it funny that some people think we should outright ban it, while its sitting in containers at special facilities, while cheerfully getting injected with Botox (botulism toxin) to remove a wrinkle...

ummm

[mrbcs]

Didn't the russians do this in Chernobyl? Apparently the chinese version worked.

Nice

[GypC]

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.

Re:Nice

[Neophytus]

I read a statistic once. Had we been able to harness all the uranium released from burning coal for fuel since 1970 and created reactor grade material, we could have created approx. the same amount of electricity as the coal burning itself.

Re:Nice

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

"Assuming 10% usage, the total of the thermal energy capacities from each of these three fissionable isotopes is about 10.1 x 10E14 kWh, 1.5 times more than the total from coal. ... Consequently, the energy content of nuclear fuel released in coal combustion is more than that of the coal consumed!"

"Coal Combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger" -- Alex Gabbard

Couldn't be done in U.S.

[Talondel]

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.

Re:Couldn't be done in U.S.

[Naffer]

I'm all for nuclear power, but overregulation is the only way I'll let it happen. I'd rather have more expensive pwower and a regulator for every employee then risk a disaster related to negligence or other preventable failures.

Re:Couldn't be done in U.S.

[mrchaotica]

But the point is that a pebble bed design doesn't risk a disaster! From Wikipedia:

he primary advantage of pebble bed reactors is that they can be designed to be inherently safe. As they get hotter, the fissionables' molecules move faster, widening the range of speeds of the nuclei. The neutrons are less likely to interact with very fast nuclei, and the reactor's criticality falls. The reactor vessel is designed so that without mechanical aids it loses more heat than the reactor can generate in this idle state. The design adapts well to safety features (see below). In particular, most of the fuel containment resides in the pebbles, and the pebbles are designed so that a containment failure releases at most a 0.5 mm sphere of radioactive material.

Re:Couldn't be done in U.S.

[Talondel]

That's the kind of mentality that keeps us from making any progress away from fossil fuels in this country. You don't worry about how many regulators or regulations they have at FF plants? Why? Do fewer people die in accidents at FF plants? No. Do they pose less risk to the enviornment? No. Heck, coal fired plants even release more radiation into the enviornment than a Nuke plant does, but no one notices that. Even for non-nuclear alternative fuel plants we can't get past these irrational fears. We can't build geothermal plants because we can't get transmision lines built due to all the regulation.

Excellent news

[turgid]

This is wonderful news for China, the environment and nuclear scientists and engineers the world over.

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.

Re:Excellent news

[meowsqueak]

Well there's no doubt that the Earth experiences periods of warming and cooling, sometimes very quickly, but I think what you meant to say is that the theory of Global Warming predominantly due to the burning of fossil fuels is false, to which I agree.

Re:Excellent news

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Well, you could do worse than the documents linked to from the first site. These look like particularly relevant ones (adjust as needed for /.'s URL-breaking behavior):

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/pdf/WG1 _T AR-FRONT.PDF

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/pdf/TAR -0 7.PDF

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/pdf/WG1 _T AR-FRONT.PDF

If a site calling itself environmentaldefense.org seems a bit leftish to be trusted, you might want to consider the current official study by the US government. When even the Bush White House acknowledges what's going on ...

Oh, here's the URL for the full report:

http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/ocp2004-5/o cp 2004-5.pdf

Re:Excellent news

[cdrguru]

Come on, face it. The "real" solution to both all our environmental problems and global warming is to simply scale our use of resources back to the point at which it wasn't a problem.

I believe if the Earth's population was at the level it was in 1850, there would be no environmental problems and no global warming.

It might be difficult to convince the rest of the world that this was the solution, however. It seems like the "solution" proposed by most is that "those guys" are using too many resources and need to be "scaled back", sometimes drastically. Sort of how Dresden was "scaled back" in WW II. We need to take the initiative and show the rest of the world that we are forward looking enough to address the problem unilaterally.

Of course, this means we need 75% of the US population to report to euthanasia centers, but what the heck, we are talking about the survival of the planet here.

USA syndrome?

[MrMr]

Isn't that what they call running a reactor without coolant until meltdown in China?

Hopefully they stay the course.

[Foggiano]

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.

Good!

[American AC in Paris]

Take a look at the current fossil fuel situation We're bumping right up against maximum output, and China's energy needs are growing rapidly--and showing no signs of letting up any time soon. (Same goes for the rest of Asia, for that matter.)

You think China -or- the US wants to duke it out over $100+ barrels of oil in the next few years?

Re:Good!

[stevelinton]

Depends if you reprocess, or even better (from this perspective at least) run breeder reactors. Also, we have not put a fraction of the effort into looking for uranium that we have put into looking for oil.

Re:Good!

[antifoidulus]

True, true.
Nuclear power is great(I'm a liberal, but I cringe when the hippies start protesting about it), but it's not an end all to all of our energy problems. THe world really needs to diversify, that way if something happens to one source of energy, there will still be other sources to tide humanity over till more alternatives are found.

Re:Seems much more of a threat to the US than Iraq

[dnixon112]

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.

Space

[daeley]

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. ;)

Re:great...

[mrchaotica]

I know the article's slashdotted, but could you at least RTFS[ummary]?!

A Chinese research institution demonstrated the safety of their test reactor against meltdown by shutting off the coolant."

Safety test

[marco0009]

"A Chinese research institution demonstrated the safety of their test reactor against meltdown by shutting off the coolant."

And what would have happened (other than the obvious) had done had their safety system failed?

Re:Safety test

[Tmack]

Go read what a pebble bed reactor is and then you probably wouldnt ask that question. Pebble beds use pebbles of a radioactive fuel mixture thats part uranium and part mediator. Where most reactors use fuel rods of highly concentrated uranium, with mediator rods between them that are moved in and out of the core to control the reaction, these pebbled basically have the control rods built into the fuel. They are designed such that they increase power only if the coolant is flowing, thus they are inharently safe. If the temperature goes up, the reaction slows and the reactor gives off more heat than it creates. The only "safety device" would be a failure to turn off the coolant, in which case the coolant would be taking the heat away from the reactor anyway, but might heat some other areas of the plant unexpectedly (heat exchangers/turbines/etc).

Tm

Re:Safety test

[Clueless Moron]

Oh fine, but what happens if somebody strolls by and accidentally knocks the whole PBR into a vat of heavy water (D2O), which somebody earlier clumsily spilled a subcritical mass of plutonium into, and the vat also happens to be an excellent neutron reflector, and then a fifty-ton lid then suddenly falls over the whole thing???

It's a disaster waiting to happen! I've got you there, admit it.

Will they never learn?

[Azathoth!EDC]

One word: Godzilla.

This gives all new meaning to the term...

[tuxlove]

...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.

Communism is good for something

[ThomasFlip]

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).

Re:Communism is good for something

[mrtroy]

I hate to be a critic but i really think you meant

At least in China 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).

I dont mind dumb people bitching about things they have at least a little knowledge of, but I hate ignorant people who bitch about things they have no clue about.

Re:Communism is good for something

[globalar]

OT, but China is not so much communism as authoritarianism. Yes, the communist party is in control and yes the propoganda is alive. But communism implies more than simply a government - it's a social structure.

You ask who cares?

Well, China is playing a game of accepting limited market economy while still controling many economic things, including some prices, as it sees fit. China is accepted by business interests because it has made committments to the WTO and other institutions. However, it is still classified as a developing country and therefore gets a lot of slack from the WTO. This also means it gets a lot of development loans at great rates and other things. If all it did was preach communism, it would not be in this position. There have been real changes in China, some incomplete, but many progressive.

Regardless, Lenin, Mao, Marx, etc. would probably not consider current China (PRC) communist. If communism to you means a socialist state controlled by one party of elites and the military interactive in the market economy, then yes it is. Otherwise, I wouldn't so easily label it.

Re:Seems much more of a threat to the US than Iraq

[crow]

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.

The link for pebble bed reactors is a bit slow...

[MarcoAtWork]

There is a good writeup as well on wikipedia

Now only if...

[isa-kuruption]

.. 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.

Re:Now only if...

[Stevyn]

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.

Helium.

[WindBourne]

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.

"Pebble bed" article is slow, so...

[mrchaotica]

...here's a Wikipedia article about pebble bed reactors.

stop comparing these to Chernobyl

[Tumbleweed]

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.

Re:stop comparing these to Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

good long-term energy policy

[vectus]

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.

Misspelling

[acidblood]

It's `nucular' not `nuclear'...

rediculous

[ackthpt]

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.

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.

Re:rediculous

[kacymartin]

and half-lives are in decades if not centuries Try 4.5 billion years for Uranium...

Re:rediculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if your description is accurate to the tee, what matters is comparison to the alternative, say, coal plants that China is using otherwise. There are plenty of areas with environmental damage surpassing that of Chernobyl; say, the peninsula where Murmansk is located. It's a wasteland now, mostly thanks to energy production for the mines up there (nickel etc). No nuclear material needed, just good old sulphuric acid and NOx. And you'll find plenty more in Siberia.

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.

Re:rediculous

[Tackhead]

> If those of us in Nevada have our say, you'll never have Yucca Mountain. We don't have a single nuclear reactor in the state and yet,

Hey, hey.

Nevada has had hundreds of nuclear reactors in its history. Of course, they were all of the prompt critical variety, and only ran for a few microseconds, but that still probably adds up to more nuclear reactors than the rest of the country put together!

China on its way to becoming #1 superpower??

[smaksly]

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).

2050?

[FlipmodePlaya]

Jeez, have we learned nothing from Sim City 3000? By the time they finish this thing, the rest of us will have fusion power.

prediction

[flacco]

i bet the local walmart will take on a subtle, eerie glow at night.

wikipedia link

[j1m 5n0w]

Here's the wikipedia article for pebble bed reactors, including a discussion of their safety.

-jim

this is a very good thing

[circletimessquare]

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

Better than what they do now...

[dykofone]

I did some work designing steam turbines for power plants, and one of our main customers was China. They were hitting an industrial boom and needed power like crazy, and also happened to have ridiculous amounts of coal. Problem was, this coal was considered poor quality because of the large amounts of sulfur, so it wasn't fit for exportation. Instead, they bought a bunch of 30 year old inefficient turbines and would pretty much throw the shitty coal out of the ground and into the burner.

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.

Like the Sellafield reprocessing plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

The place which falsified QA records for years and dumped waste into the Irish Sea?

Nuclear not Nature

[Psymunn]

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.

Re:Seems much more of a threat to the US than Iraq

[glsunder]

turn something sitting on your desk upside down,

it says: 32 ounce.

aw crap.

It does, and as far as I know...

[Kinniken]

...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.

How about supergun or space elevator?

[Dr_Marvin_Monroe]

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.

Re:How about supergun or space elevator?

[Sylver Dragon]

I'm all for the "get it off the earth" idea, but why is everyone so dead set on sending it into the Sun?
Dump it on the Moon. It's still safely out of the hands of bad people, it still won't get into the ground water, and despite Jules Vern's stories, there is nothing living there to care about the radiation. Plus, this has the added benefit of being retreivable. Who knows, in a few hundred years there may be a good use for all of that stuff, or a good way to recycle it. If it's on the Moon, all it requires is a short trip, and a nice stroll in a spacesuit, to get it back; if it's in the Sun, its a further trip, a more difficult landing, and the stoll in the spacesuit is far less comfortable. <bad joke>Unless we go at night, but landing in the dark would suck.</bad joke>
In the end, I think nuclear power is inevitable. Sure, solar, wind, and geothermal have their place, and maybe a big one, but we are still going to need nuclear to fill in the gaps.

Re:How about supergun or space elevator?

[WhiteBandit]

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).

Re:How about supergun or space elevator?

[Caseyscrib]

I'm disappointed that no one has mentioned that we can cut our energy demand by at least 30-50% by simply *saving* energy. On my way home from work I see lights on all over people's houses and nobody is using them. People don't carpool to work, instead they take their 12 MPG SUV. People waste an incredible amount of everything, and instead of asking "how can I use less", the question is, "where do I get more?"

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.

REALITY

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:REALITY

[cft_128]

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.

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

Re:REALITY

[Madcapjack]

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.

Re:REALITY

[jeffkjo1]

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.

Re:REALITY

[SatanicPuppy]

I consider myself to be pretty liberal, maybe especially in environmental issues. On the other hand, I think a lot of the far left are complete assholes who really lower the level of the discourse. I'd far rather have safe, reasonably clean, nuclear reactors than the giant foul coal/oil plants we have now.

I toured a closed nuclear power plant on the Savannah river once. Like most nuclear reactors, it sat in the middle of a big swath of gov't owned land. When they closed the plant (which they did because it was leaking radioactive coolant), they let the land surrounding it do its own thing.

I was amazed at how healthy everythign looked. Sad to say that, as long as we're not dropping nukes on them, it's better for the wildlife to live next radioactive waste than it is for them to live next to people.

Re:REALITY

[ChumpusRex2003]

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.

The coolant in a pebble reactor has no effect on the reaction - the helium is totally transparent. This is in contrast to a conventional PWR where the water coolant is a catalyst - boiling or loss of coolant causes collapse of the nuclear reaction.

The safety of the pebble reactors come from 3 things:

1) thermal expansion of the fuel as it heats up causes 'dilution' of the fuel and 'doppler broadening' both of which shut down the nuclear reaction when operating temperatures are exceeded.

2) Very high melting point of the fuel (>2200 C) means that massive temperature excursions of the fuel are safe

3) the very dilute fuel embedded in large volumes of graphite has a very low power to volume ratio. This coupled with a tiny reactor (with large surface area to volume ratio) means that convection of air around the outside is sufficient to cool the fuel.

So, in the event of loss of coolant - the fuel temperature will rise from it's nominal 1000C towards 1600C. As the temp rises, the heat production will fall, eventually at 1600C the heat production will equal rate of heat removal by natural air circulation and the system will stabilise.

The same passive safety principle as in point 1, is used in modern water cooled reactor designs - together with the water acting as a catalyst. This dramatically lowers the risk of meltdown accident, and improves the stability of the reactor. However, because the fuel is very concentrated and dense with very high power density, good quality cooling must be maintained at all costs - so sophisticated backup systems are still required despite improvements in stability.

The disadvantages of the pebble reactor are: 1) that the pebbles are made of flammable carbon - if the helium coolant is lost, and air gets into the reactor, it will burn with great vigour. 2) it relies on the microscopic coating of each tiny fuel grain to contain the radioactive waste. Early prototypes of this type of reactor had intractable problems with waste leaking out of the fuel and contaiminating the reactor. 3) the fuel is very bulky which can pose storage problems. Reprocessing of this fuel form to retrieve unburned uranium or reduce bulk is also unlikely to be practical.

Australia missing its mark

[The OPTiCIAN]

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. :)

Re:While we clang our cymbals....

[fireboy1919]

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.

Re:Squandered U.S. technical lead...

[spacerodent]

yea it's really sad how we've let eco freaks control the technological curve in this country. We used to lead in this kind of technology only now we just follow well after everyone else makes it safe. Same situation with medical treatments. It's getting really sad how easily the stupid people in society can play to the media and other people just eat it up with no idea what really happened. Whenever I hear three mile island compaired to chernobyl I want to smack someone. Nuclear power IS the future. Period. The sooner the idiot masses get over their hystarical fear of somthing they don't understand the better. It sickens me when I see "an expert" (ie someone who is really a business major and giving a psudoscience speech on nuclear power) trying to argue with someone who's spent their entire lives working with and designing nuclear rectors. And of course the media will side with the eco freaks because they love to create panic and anger so you'll watch their channel more.

See, the thing is

[mcc]

It just happens there's a gray area between "banning something" and "allowing something to occur without oversight".

The Canadian Shield

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The Canadian Shield

[gnuman99]

Some of the rock is solid (no cracks) for cubic kilometres. It dates back a over billion years.

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.

Re:The Canadian Shield

[demachina]

Does any of the Canadian Shield extend in to the U.S.?

What do you think the chances are Canadians are going to tolerate the U.S. and the rest of the world shipping their nuclear waste to Canada for disposal. The problem with nuclear waste is the stigma is so bad no one wants it near them even if someone does figure out a safe way to store it or reprocess it.

I'm a little skeptical any mine shaft will prove long term viable. Its extremely hard to keep them dry, especially if you allow for the possibility that the civilization that has to fund maintaining the storage site may not last as long as the waste.

Re:The Canadian Shield

[ifwm]

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.

Re:The Canadian Shield

[Anonymous Coward]

Canada has been testing re-processing weapons grade materials from both the US and the ex Soviet Union in it's Candu reactors.

See: http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/mox.htm

Re:The Canadian Shield

[antiMStroll]

This Canadian suggests Redmond.

Why?

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Why?

[dave420]

Coal is the most polluting fossil fuel you can burn. It chucks out shitloads of nasty gasses, and if we don't want to be breathing a thick pea soup every day, it needs to be reduced drastically. Sure, it provides electricity, but it's doing more harm than good.

Damn I sound like a tree-hugger.

Re:But we'll all DIE!

[Dr. Zowie]

I know you're being sarcastic, but that reminded me of the reactor I used to work at -- the Reed Reactor Facility. It was a TRIGA, designed by General Atomic in the late 1960s (and the console technology showed it -- imagine a bulletproof pinball machine...). TRIGAs were designed to be virtually indestructible. Many of them were used in "pulse mode", where the reactor was actually sent prompt-critical by blowing the rods out of the core with compressed air! The fuel had such a strong prompt-negative temperature coefficient that the reaction would shut itself down to "reasonable" (few-tens-of-megawatt) levels in a millisecond or two. Then the rods would fall back into the core (timescale: a few hundred milliseconds).

My point: GA really do know how to design safe reactors.

(Background: nuclear reactors operate in a so-called "critical" state, where exactly enough neutrons are produced by nuclear reactions to balance those lost by escape or absorption. In a working reactor, about 0.7% of those neutrons come from spontaneous decay of fission products; they're called "delayed" neutrons, because you have to wait for the fission product to decay over the next few seconds before the neutron comes out. Those few delayed neutrons make all the difference, because the time scale for fission-and-moderation is measured in microseconds. The other 99.3% of the neutrons are called "prompt", and you usually want to make sure you don't make a prompt-critical assembly, unless you're in the business of making nuclear weapons. Blowing the rods instantaneously out of a reactor core is one of the more dangerous things you can do with it, unless the core was designed specifically for that use.)

Honest question about Nuke Plants

[bill_kress]

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?

Re:Helium is not a renuable resource

[colinemckay]

From another Wired article:

"At our current rate of consumption, Cliffside will likely be empty in 10 to 25 years, and the Earth will be virtually helium-free by the end of the 21st century."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/helium.htm l

Title

[Phleg]

The title of this article should have been, "China Goes Nuclearer".

Please inform yourself.

[Mike Van Pelt]

As soon as a container corrodes, cracks or otherwise ruptures that waste is going to be headed for the water table

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"...

Shutting off the coolant?

[sharkey]

"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."

The Flinstones really were ahead of their time.

[Mathness]

The Flinstones really were ahead of their time.

The reactors are to be pebble bed reactors

Stoneage technology rocks.

Re:-5 Ludite on the MQR standard

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

China's Fusion... Or lack thereof.

[Mulletproof]

"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?

Warmonger problem!

[mabhatter654]

The REAL problem is that all of the US efforts at nuclear energy are mearly thinly-veiled efforts to beef up the weapons program...they haven't put any serious effort into building reactors that contain the nasty stuff because they want to "play" with it. here in the US they've got everybody so scared they haven't built new technology in 30 years.

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.

I shouldn't, but I gotta

[Threed]

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...

Re:Three Mile Island?

[AJWM]

When TMI blew? When TMI blew!?

When did that happen?

TMI had a minor release of very slightly radioactive steam. It never "blew".

And because of the reactor shutdown, coal-fired plants had to step up their output, requiring more coal. More people died when a coal train collided with a car at a RR crossing during the TMI incident than ever have because of that steam release.

One good reason at least

[MarkusQ]

But that antipathy rose for a couple pretty good reasons.

One good reason at least: starting in the 1950's, the coal-and-oil industry put a fair amount of money into "public education" (FUD) to make sure we didn't shift to another source of power without understanding the impact on their bottom, er, no, I mean understanding the..., uh..., uderstanding the risks! Yeah, that's the ticket.

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

Re:One good reason at least

[demachina]

"Risks! I say, Risks! This new thing is RISKY!"

Unfortunately Three Mile Island and Chernobyl proved they were right. They are risky. They are extremely complex and very fallible.

"After all, burning coal and oil is perfectly safe!"

Obviously it isn't but coal fired power plants don't leave huge uninhabitable dead zones like Chernoybl did and have the risk of killing large numbers of people all at once, or make people flee their homes...forever.

Fossil fuel pollution is a slower and harder to quantify risk. Maybe in the end if the Greenhouse effect proves to be real fossil fuels will prove to be even more dangerous and threaten the whole planet, but by the times its an undeniable problem it may be to late to stop it.

Re:One good reason at least

[demachina]

"TMI is dramatically overblown. The plant contained the radiation. There was a small and intentional release of contaminated water afterward during the cleanup."

It wasn't overblown. They just got lucky and stopped the meltdown before they had a reactor breach. If they hadn't there would have been a massive radiation release. Just because the consequences were mild doesn't change the fact that it could have easily been a major disaster. Three Mile Island completely shook confidence in the safety of nuclear reactors long before Chernobyl showed the worst case scenario.

From the NRC report:

"Because adequate cooling was not available, the nuclear fuel overheated to the point at which the zirconium cladding (the long metal tubes which hold the nuclear fuel pellets) ruptured and the fuel pellets began to melt. It was later found that about one-half of the core melted during the early stages of the accident. Although the TMI-2 plant suffered a severe core meltdown, the most dangerous kind of nuclear power accident, it did not produce the worst-case consequences that reactor experts had long feared. In a worst-case accident, the melting of nuclear fuel would lead to a breach of the walls of the containment building and release massive quantities of radiation to the environment. But this did not occur as a result of the Three Mile Island accident."

Re:One good reason at least

[joib]

They just got lucky and stopped the meltdown before they had a reactor breach.


No, they didn't "just get lucky". In a light water reactor like TMI, when the moderator (=water) boils off, the nuclear reactions grind to a halt. This helps prevent Chernobyl style accidents, which happened in part because the RBMK reactor is graphite moderated and has a positive void coefficient, i.e. when the coolant boils off, the reaction rate increases. See the difference?

Coolant boils off, heat output of reactor increases = bad. This can't happen in a light-water reactor.


If they hadn't there would have been a massive radiation release.


Even if the core would have melted through the pressure vessel, the TMI reactor (and thus core) was still within a containment building. Again, as opposed to Chernobyl.


Just because the consequences were mild doesn't change the fact that it could have easily been a major disaster.


Umm, no. Physics makes it impossible for TMI to have become a Chernobyl. TMI is about a worst-case scenario for a light-water reactor. TMI shows that while a light-water reactor accident is a financial disaster for the company owning it, it won't kill thousands of people.

Re:One good reason at least

[demachina]

"Umm, no. Physics makes it impossible for TMI to have become a Chernobyl. TMI is about a worst-case scenario for a light-water reactor. TMI shows that while a light-water reactor accident is a financial disaster for the company owning it, it won't kill thousands of people."

I didn't say it was going to be another Chernobyl exactly but you are simply BS'ing everyone if you are trying to claim everything was within the parameters of the design and there was no danger.

In particular you are leaving out the wild card which was a 1000 cubic feet 1000 PSI Hydrogen bubble that formed in the vessel from the breakdown of the superheated water. It had an explosive potential of 3 tons of TNT which would have been enough to breach the vessel and containment if it had exploded.

There was also a significant chance the Hydrogen bubble would have continued to grow. If it had it could have uncovered the entire core. If so the core might well have done a China Syndrome and melted through the floor of the vessel and containment building.

There was enough water pooled at the bottom of the vessel there was also a significant chance of a steam explosion when the melting core hit it and that could have also breeched the reactor.

All in all you seem to be claiming certainty about a situation that was unprecedented and anything but certain.

Re:One good reason at least

[joib]

I didn't say it was going to be another Chernobyl exactly but you are simply BS'ing everyone if you are trying to claim everything was within the parameters of the design and there was no danger.


That's why I'm not saying that. It is well documented that several parameters exceeded their design limitations during the accident. And yes, there was danger and the reactor could have been even more destroyed. But it wasn't danger of blowing skyhigh and then continuing to burn for days, a la Chernobyl, e.g. danger of spreading significant amount of radioactivity into the environment.


In particular you are leaving out the wild card which was a 1000 cubic feet 1000 PSI Hydrogen bubble that formed in the vessel from the breakdown of the superheated water.


No, I'm not leaving it out. While it was a cause of great concern at the time, it was later determined that there was not enough oxygen in the vessel which could have caused the hydrogen explosion (one reason for this is of course that the superheated water didn't simply "break down" as you imply, rather it is a reaction with the Zr cladding where the cladding is oxidized).

For more information see e.g. this report sumamry.


It had an explosive potential of 3 tons of TNT which would have been enough to breach the vessel and containment if it had exploded.


See the link above. There wasn't enough Zr in the reactor to produce enough pressure to break the containment building.

Additionally, Westinghouse (the manufacturer) did some calculations where they concluded that the pressure vessel and high pressure system itself would perhaps have been able to contain the estimated 3000-4000 PSI blast pressure from the hypothetical hydrogen explosion.


If so the core might well have done a China Syndrome and melted through the floor of the vessel and containment building.


Yes, it was certainly a very real risk that the core would have melted through the pressure vessel, but how did you imagine it would melt itself out from the containment building? Gravity pulls the core downward while it ought to go sidewards if it is to reach the containment walls.


There was enough water pooled at the bottom of the vessel there was also a significant chance of a steam explosion when the melting core hit it and that could have also breeched the reactor.


Perhaps. But again there's the containment building preventing further catastrophy. OTOH, as the core was partially submerged in that same water, there was little possibility of a sudden big clump of molten core dropping into it as the water constantly cooled the core. And if the water wouldn't have been there in which case the core would have melted more dramatically, well there wouldn't be water there either to cause the steam explosion, now would it? ;-)


All in all you seem to be claiming certainty about a situation that was unprecedented and anything but certain.


I'm claiming that TMI couldn't have developed into a Chernobyl. They were radically different designs, so spreading FUD about light-water reactors on the basis of Chernobyl is totally ridiculous.

Re:One good reason at least

[demachina]

"I'm claiming that TMI couldn't have developed into a Chernobyl. They were radically different designs, so spreading FUD about light-water reactors on the basis of Chernobyl is totally ridiculous."

The only thing thats ridiculous is that, after that list of "possible", "very real risk", "further catastrophy", that you are still trying to contend that TMI wasn't extremely dangerous.
I'll say it again, they were lucky. They pretty obviously didn't anticipate what happened in their design.

I should add that the PBMR reactor everyone is pitching as the next generation reactor here, not light water reactors, apparently does contain large quantities of graphite. If there is a breach in the coolant system and air or oxygen hits the pebble bed there is at least a chance its going to burn like Chernobyl. The graphite in their reactor burned for the better part of 9 days and was the main source of the plume.

Progress of Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Nuclear power plants as strategic targets

[Ziviyr]

I imagine you'd have to blow it up pretty hard to do that. Nuking it would work, but, ahhh, redundant I'd say.

Made in China

[mesmartyoudumb]

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!*

Corrections

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

OK, you convinced me.

[jotaeleemeese]

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...

Re:OK, you convinced me.

[dasunt]

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?

Perhaps you don't understand the current system of power generation. Coal power plant exhaust is radioactive, as well as polluting in other ways, and, last time I checked, doesn't remain in the airspace of the country that generates it.

The infrastructure for wind power? Pollution. Water power? Pollution, and water resource issues. Solar? Pollution. Sorry, but all systems of power generation pollute.

As for non-nuclear countries, they already import from nuclear countries. They are using nuclear power, even if it is indirectly.

But hey, since you are so quick to criticize, show me a system, with working technology now, that will scale to power a world of 9.2 billion people (projected 2050 population) that is growing more and more developed, and thus requires more and more power.

Then show me how that working system will result in less disease and deaths then nuclear power.

Re:Bah! you think too hard

[Ohreally_factor]

Uh, what the hell are you talking about?

Why would you need to decellerate it? Who cares what speed it crashes into the sun at?

This isn't like landing a lunar module.

Basic orbital physics. Were you educated in Kansas or something?

Alternate Methods

[AstroMWB]

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.