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China Goes Nuclear
Rei writes "Wired reports that the People's Republic of China has announced plans to build 30 new nuclear reactors by the year 2020, and by 2050 have almost as much nuclear power as the entire world produces today. The reactors are to be pebble bed reactors, in which helium replaces radioactive, pressurized water. A Chinese research institution demonstrated the safety of their test reactor against meltdown by shutting off the coolant."
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
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"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Yes, pebble bed reactors are very safe.
I just wish nuclear power wasn't politically dead in the USA. It's really the only way to replace all the coal and oil we burn to produce the huge amount of electricity we use.
China might actually be able to pull something like this off at a reasonable price. In the U.S. this would never get done. Between the "not in my backyard" protests, and over-regulation, the time and cost would simply be too great. Not that I like China's government, but there are certain advantages to their style.
China is showing that it is forward-thinking enough to look beyond fossil fuels for its electricity. This can only be good for the environment and global warming in particular.
I hope this reopens the nuclear power debate in the West. The USA and Europe should seriously consider comitting to new nuclear power plants for both economic and environmental reasons.
Stick Men
Isn't that what they call running a reactor without coolant until meltdown in China?
China's need for energy in the future is going to be enormous, and I'd much rather see it produced by nuclear fission than by buring coal. No matter how bad you might think nuclear power is, buring coal is even worse.
You think China -or- the US wants to duke it out over $100+ barrels of oil in the next few years?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
A Chinese research institution demonstrated the safety of their test reactor against meltdown by shutting off the coolant. ...thus creating in an explosive instant the second thing in China you can see from space. ;)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
And what would have happened (other than the obvious) had done had their safety system failed?
Physics makes the world go 'round.
One word: Godzilla.
...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.
There is a good writeup as well on wikipedia
-- the cake is a lie
.. the econo-nuts would let the US build more nuclear reactors within the United States in order to reduce our dependency on foreign oil...
Nah, that would never happen!
Instead, their socialist buddies claim the Bush administration liberated Iraq for oil, althought Bush-Chenery energy policy has been, since the 2000 election campaign, to increase the number of nuclear reactors.
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.
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.
Jeez, have we learned nothing from Sim City 3000? By the time they finish this thing, the rest of us will have fusion power.
I 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.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
i bet the local walmart will take on a subtle, eerie glow at night.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Here's the wikipedia article for pebble bed reactors, including a discussion of their safety.
-jim
the antinuclear crowd doesn't seem to understand how advanced nuclear technology is today
these pebble bed reactors just can not melt down, the design is such that their no possibility of a run away self-sustaining chain reaction taking hold
do antinuclear types like the alternative? middle east conflicts fueled by oil prices? air pollution and smog?
and proponents of green energy do not seem to understand their science: you can't scale up geothermal, wind, solar, tidal, ocean thermal gradient, etc, to meet one tenth of the modern world's energy needs
the much vaunted vaporware hydrogen promise: where do hydrogen proponents think the hydrogen comes from? i don't know why people don't understand such a simple concept: you need to spend more energy freeing hydrogen from water or hydrocarbons than anything you gain from using it as an energy medium
biodiesel sounds interesting to me, and fusion is always the holy grail, but these are unproven technoogies today... if you are a true green energy believer, then get to work here, and roll up your sleeves working on fusion or biodiesel: this is where the most promise lies for your efforts
and of course, the "just use less energy" crowd: when you figure out how to tell people to stop using gas and nuclear and start riding bikes, get back to me
meanwhile, i applaud the chinese, they see the writing on the wall: an overactive economy, demanding more and more gas and coal, and skyhigh oil prices and a volatile middle east... for the chinese, a pebble bed reactor commitment is a no-brainer
now if only the nimby types in the us could understand the wisdom of embracing pebble bed nuclear energy to combat reliance on middle east oil
but of course, simple fear of the unknown and ignorance of simple tech means the us will be left dependent on volatile undependable oil and gas and coal, while the chinese enjoy a safe, stable, cheap energy source
apparently, the nimby crowd in the us sees less risk in sending their sons and daughters to iraq than building a nuclear reactor of new design without any chernobyl or 3 mile island implications
this is not silkwood or the china syndrome folks, the stakes are accutely high in today's world: adjust your antinuclear opinion appropriately please
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
The place which falsified QA records for years and dumped waste into the Irish Sea?
1/67 people develop skin cancer. Stil think the sun is so safe. And, i couldn't help but notice our friend 'the wind' taking otu a big chunk of florida the other day AND coming back for more. Geothermal? sure if you don't want your lava tv exploding! Hydro? do you know how many people a year drown?
don't worry, there is an answer. we can rocket all our water into the sun and, with a bit of luck, put that thing out (okay... we might need a bit more water... but it can't be that much more). no sun would mean a constant earth tempreature which would mean no wind. we could power everything with nuclear power and live happy knowing our children won't blow away.
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
turn something sitting on your desk upside down,
it says: 32 ounce.
aw crap.
...there has never been a fatal casualty in the French civil nuclear program, which has been running for at least thirty years. End result? We are the only major EU country to produce more energy than we need, and make quite a lot of money selling it to our neighbours. Our biggest client? Germany, forced to import electricity from us after declaring the country a nuclear free zone... lol.
As for the whole "yeah but you don't want to live next to one", true enough but on the whole I would rather live close to a nuclear power plant than close to a coal or oil one.
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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.
We can't live without it at this time.
REALITY 2:
All the plants in this country have run past their intended design lives, AND are 30-40 years out of date with modern technology.
REALITY 3:
Modern bead reactors of the type the chinese are building are VASTLY less likely to meltdown than any reactor currently running in the US. The coolant in a bead reactor actually catalyses the reaction, so without coolant, there is no reaction.
People in this country are totally irrational when it comes to nuclear power. We need this stuff, if only to replace the seriously aging reactors we already have. This is one place where I want to beat the snot out of all the left-wingers who won't be happy with anything that doesn't run on fairy dust and pot.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
I'm disappointed Australia can't get elbow-deep into nuclear technology. We've got the best disposal sites, high-yield uranium sites and the second worst rate of greenhous emissions per-capita behind the USA. We could have centres of excellence in nuclear technology in universities around the country, turn Whyalla into a boom-town by importing and disposing nuclear waste, build energy plants in the middle of the desert and export green-house-friendly energy around Asia. Yet every time anything 'nuclear' comes up people have a hysteric response against it.
:)
For more than a decade, the federal government have been unable to create low or medium-sized respositories for nuclear waste anywhere in the country. Every time the issue comes up opposition parties (including of course so-called green parties) hammer it for all its worth from the most superficial angles imaginable. Even the South Australian Liberal government got in on the act a few years ago, chanting "Not in *our* back yard" despite the middle of the Australian desert being no closer to Adelaide than high-level nuclear stores in France are to Prague.
So instead we have low-level nuclear waste scattered in sites all around the metropolitan area of several cities, which leads to situations like that of us having substantial waste stores sitting in the bottom of the university of Adelaide and Royal Adelaide Hospital, both of them right next to a river. This inconsistency is one of many that shows up scum political forces who harvest stupid people's irrational fears about nuclear issues.
If Australian green politicians were genuinely passionate about our global environmental responsponsibilities they'd be comfortable with the idea of Australia as a major player in nuclear power and as a site for waste disposal.
The above opinions guarantee I would have no hope of ever making it in politics.
Believe with me, my saplings.
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.
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!
It just happens there's a gray area between "banning something" and "allowing something to occur without oversight".
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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.
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.
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"...
The Flinstones really were ahead of their time.
The reactors are to be pebble bed reactors
Stoneage technology rocks.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
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.
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.
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
I imagine you'd have to blow it up pretty hard to do that. Nuking it would work, but, ahhh, redundant I'd say.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!