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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.
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.
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 bet the local walmart will take on a subtle, eerie glow at night.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
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?
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.
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.
Tm
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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.
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.
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"...
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.