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Could Nuclear Power Wean the U.S. From Oil?
bblackfrog asks: "Is a Federal nuclear energy program viable? That is, can the USA eliminate our economic dependence on crude oil with a large scale federal program to build and maintain enough nuclear power plants to replace our current oil-based energy needs? The obvious political hurdles are (a) the left opposes nuclear energy, (b) the right opposes federalizing energy, and (c) the oil companies and Saudis wield a lot of clout. This makes a federal nuclear energy program far fetched I admit, however I'm more interested in the economics. Slashdot has covered advances in nuclear power technology. China's doing it." (Read more, below.)
"How much energy is required to replace our fossil fuel consumption? What are the initial costs of the program, and just how cheap could the electricity be? How expensive would it be for our industries to convert? How expensive for home and auto conversions? How much of this cost should be picked up by the government? Bottom line: is nuclear power cheaper than our current oil-driven middle-east policy, with all of its blowback?"
With respect to conventional nuclear energy, what many people don't realize is that Uranium is a finite resource which will run out way before oil. Based on what's on this page (this was just a quick google, there probably is better data out there), with 4 million t available and at the rate of 34K t per year, there is only 117 years of Uranium left.
So if it's going to be nuclear energy, it will need to be a process that does not require Uranium.
We could also eat fish from our lakes and streams again. Since the methyl mercury being dumped into the atmosphere from the coal plants and other industry has raised the mercury levels in all fresh water fish to high levels.
* can make in USA (no foreign dependence).
= UBB44
* runs in existing diesel engines.
* less toxic than regular diesel, in fact biodegradable.
* creates more demand for US soybean crop.
* no new infrastructure needed, just more diesel engines.
* emissions better in almost also cases than existing diesel emissions.
* can mix in any percentage with existing diesel fuel.
yes i know it would take *a lot* of soy crop to meet the US oil consumption - but check out some of the research on using algae for biodiesel production at a much higher land density.
overall there are a *lot* of pros vs. cons regarding this alternative fuel IMHO.
for more information:
http://www.grassolean.com/
http://www.biodieselnow.com/
http://forums.tdiclub.com/postlist.php?Cat=&Board
1) What will we do with the waste?
It should be reused for fuel. This allows a reactor to get more energy out of less nuclear material, resulting in both reduced cost and waste. The only reason why the US doesn't do this, is the concern over terrorists or spies obtaining bomb-grade materials.
2) Do we have enough fissionable fuel to accomplish this?
The estimates are that we'd have a ~100 year supply of Uranium if all power was switched to nuclear power today. This figure does not take reprocessing and non-uranium fission into account.
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1) We can recycle the nuclear waste we have. Yes, it is possible. What we essentially do is re-enrich and purify it. The problem with this is that it is that it is the same process used to create weapons grade material. I think that is the only reason why it is not done. If we start refining the waste, the amount of toxic material left over shrinks rapidly to less than 1% of the volume.
2) Nuclear power supplies about 20% of the total power generated in the US. There is a lot of uranium and plutonium in the world. We have enough in order to supply it. Epsecially if we start re-enrichment of the waste.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Personally, I think that we need to start getting a more balanced policy. That would include not only nukes, but more alternative as well as money to research on energy storage. Sadly, over the last few years, the US admin cut a lot of alternative research and has invested in oil all the way.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
saving resources upfront (minimal packaging) is much, much more effective than say recycling.
Exactly. What most people don't understand is that reduce, reuse, recycle is listed in that order for a reason. Reduction is the best policy; if you can't do that any further, reuse what you can; failing that, recycle.
Recycling is better than landfill, but it's not the best answer, either.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Sustainability and energy independence essay
No, you get about a ton of waste fuel from a ton of fuel. The mass->energy conversion is a tiny fraction of the fuel's mass. And once the U or P atoms are split, the daughters can't be split again.
And then you have the problem that the neutron flux inside the reactor makes _everything_ radioactive. And _everything_ in the fuel processing cycle becomes radioactive.
All that radioactive stuff is waste. It must be stored carefully, for long periods of time. And noone has a solution that works both politically, geologically, and medically.
That's just U-235. U-235 accounts for only 0.7% of the uranium available. The other 99.3% is U-238. U-238 can't be used as fuel in our current reactors, but can be used in breeder reactors. What's more, spent fuel from current reactors can also be fed into a breeder reactor. With breeder reactors that 100 years turns into about 100,000. And we haven't even touched on non-uranium fueled reactors yet.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Kilo, m? Don't mix Units. kw/m^2 is kilowatt per METER squared.
a square mile is 2589988 square meters? 1609 * 1609 meters roughly. That's 2,589,988 kilowatts per square mile. You have 114,006 sqmi, so . . . *taptaptap*
. . . carry the three . . . 295,274,171,900 kilowatts
Discuss.
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not mentioned before in this thread so I'll do it.
Per capita the US uses more than 12000 KWh per year, Japan ~7500 and Germany ~6000 (source) ). Same for oil: US per capita: 68 gallons, Japan: 42, Germany 33 (source: source). So we're comparing the three of the whealthiest and industrialized nations on Earth and one uses more than two times the energy. There's not a single reason for this depite the fact that the US wastes energy like noone else on this planet.
When atke into account that less than half of the US energy comes from Oil and that a not that small part comes from domestic sources, I guesstimate that by saving less than a third of the current energy usage the USA could become completly independent from foreign oil. And you would still use more energy than Japan for example.
This goal is reachable rather easy as you can see in Japan or Germany.
Sell your SUV, buy a Volkswagen/Audi TDI (will use less than half of your energy). Switch off your AC when you leave or when you don't need it. Change to energy saving light bulbs (will use less than 15% of your original energy usage). Throw away your old fridge and buy an energy saving new one (will use less than half of your old). Etc. pp.
It's doable. It's easy.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Well, the US just decommissions reactors once they've used up the pressure vessel. The pressure vessel (which holds the core) is removed, put into a big huge steel casing, and trucked across the country to INEL, Hanford, or Nevada. The spent fuel rods are kept on-site in water pools for long periods of time (20-30 years). The rest of the radioactive byproducts are shipped to some burial sites or, again, to Hanford, Nevada, INEL, depending.
You would think that such a huge chunk of high-strength steel would be impervious, but the neutron radiation does weaken all the parts over time.
Yes, it does, but let's see what led up to the explosion.
The Chernobyl reactor was poorly-designed. Any reasonable reactor designer would have been able to say as much: the design allowed each and every one of the safety mechanisms to be disabled at the same time. Worse, construction was shoddy at best: parts were often misaligned by several degrees, and when they needed more concrete but didn't have enough cement, they just added more sand, weakening the resulting mix. It was a disaster waiting to happen.
The #4 reactor was to be shut down for an experiment to determine what would happen in the event of a blackout. The reactor relied on power from other plants to maintain its basic functionality -- office lights, computers, and the cooling systems for the reactors. The reactors fed their own power off to the grid, and other plants were similarly dependent on Chernobyl for their basic functionality. Because of this dependence and the concern for how long they would have before a possible serious failure may occur, they wanted to see how long the inertia of the spinning turbine blades, combined with residual heat from the reactor, would continue to generate power. They thought that perhaps they might gain a little extra time to react in case all power from the grid was somehow lost.
The experiment was apparently the idea of the plant manager, who had never run a nuclear plant before (being an expert in turbines). His chief assistant had come from conventional power plants. Only a couple of high-level assistants had ever had any experience with nuclear power, and then only with small reactors. No approval for the experiment was ever recieved, but they went ahead with it anyway.
On the afternoon of April 26, 1986, the reactor output was lowered to about half of normal output, one turbogenerator was brought offline (the remaining one was to be used for the test), and the emergency core cooling system -- the automatic system that moderates the reaction in a critical situation -- was disconnected. A request soon came in to postpone the experiment until late night so that electricity demand would be lower. This was approved.
At 11pm, the experiment continued. The reactor was brought to its minimum output of 700MW. Above this level, automatic systems keep enough cooling water running through to prevent a runaway reaction. Below it, coolant may not be available in sufficient quantities, and another system will initiate a shutdown. This system was, of course, disconnected.
The output dropped to 30MW, and radioactive decay began producing excess iodine, which contaminated the fuel rods. This contamination interfered in the chain reaction, making it hard to bring the power back up to acceptable levels. The engineers had to either shut down the reactor or try to bring the power levels back up, and shutting down the reactor would mean that the experiment could not continue, so they tried to power it back up. This meant lifting more of the graphite control rods out to allow the reaction to increase by attempting to "burn off" the iodine contamination. Too many were lifted out -- over the initial protests of one of the engineers -- and the real problems began.
As technicians increased the flow of water over the rods, the reaction was moderated by the coolant, which meant less steam. Less steam meant less power, which meant more control rods were lifted. More water was also being pumped to prevent buildups in other areas of the system since not as much steam as expected was being generated. The whole system was balanced on a knife-edge.
Finally, the experiment began. The last safety system, linked to the remaining oeprational turbogenerator and capable of automatic reactor shutdown, was disconnected. Steam to the turbogenerator was blocked, and the turbine began to spin down. With less power, the pumps (already working beyond design capacity) slowed and provided less cooling water to the reactor. Steam, blocked from its normal exit path, built up,
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Bomb makers get rid of this problem by very short irradiation of a depleted uranium element; if the Pu-239 is not allowed to build up it cannot be transmuted. On the other hand, building up fuel is the purpose of a power-producing breeder reactor.
An excellent summary with a table of typical isotopic compositions for weapons-grade Pu and spent reactor fuel is here. It was the first hit I got with the search string "PWR fuel plutonium isotopes" in Google; what's your excuse?
Sustainability and energy independence essay