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China to Pioneer Melt-Down Proof Reactors
pease1 writes "FT.com reports China is poised to develop the world's first
commercially operated "pebble bed" nuclear reactor. If successfully commercialized, the pebble bed reactor would be the first radically new reactor design for several decades. It would push China to the forefront of development of a technology that researchers claim offers a new "meltdown-proof" alternative to standard water-cooled nuclear power stations." This was mentioned in September of last year but now looks as though the plan is moving forward.
Funny how it is, generally speaking, the same group of people who berate the US for our dependence on mideast oil, while at the same time vehemently protesting any movement down any path that might actually allow us to realistically release ourselves from some of that dependence, e.g., new nuclear plants. But no: must ... be ... scared ... of ... anything ..."nuclear" (including things like Cassini...)
Face it: from a standpoint of physics, wind, water, and solar, and the mechanisms for extracted energy from them, are NOT ENOUGH to sustain any semblance of the current lifestyles, right or wrong, without drastic and dramatic changes that would have far-reaching economic and social implications. We need to REPLACE the power sources we aim to wean ourselves from. And nuclear is the answer. Yes, there can be conservation. Yes, there can be debate. Yes, there can be compact fluorescents and LEDs. But those will only affect so much. Our energy requirements, as well as those of the rest of the world, are growing, and we should be leading the fucking way on the front of nuclear power, INCLUDING fusion, building new plants, and making a lot of investments in this area.
And we're simply not doing that. Fuck it: people say Social Security is the "third rail" of American politics? Energy policy is the power plant that electrifies it.
Perhaps China's communist regime has an advantage after all: they can actually do things that will be GOOD for their country, like building nuclear power plants without endless ranting and raving from protesters, and storing waste safely in places like Yucca Mountain (because having waste at ~150 temporary, insecure facilities is certainly better than having it at one site, imperfect as it may be).
While this is a worthy achievement, and will certainly ease a lot of fears about third world countries operating reactors.
Unfortunately these reactors will still produce quite a bit of waste, and will still need to be decomissioned. Given how poorly the western world handles these issues, i can't imagine how well it'll be done elsewhere...
"If you don't like this nuclear facility next to your rice paddy, you can go to jail."
As China's growth continues to surge, there will be more examples of China taking the lead in things- both good AND bad. When the government can tell you what to do (or else), things get done.
I am not an alarmist and I do believe that nuclear power can be safe BUT does anyone else get that deja vu, creepy music in the background, the monster is RIGHT behind you feeling whenever any one says something is *-proof?
Just me then? OK.
I don't think, Therefore I'm not.
So would the worse-case scenerio in a meltdown in China be called "The America Syndrome"?
Somedays I'm convinced that China will become the sole economic superpower in the world in our lifetime. The US may still have a powerful military decades from now but it really looks like the Chinese want success more than we do. The fact that they are moving ahead with nuclear power is an example. Here in the US, you just can't get any kind of nuclear power plant built. We continue to use rediculous amounts of electricity but resist any attempts at becoming self-sufficient. The Chinese are hungry to improve their country while we Americans have become complacent and feel like we will always be on top. Once our debt gets to the point that other countries will no longer invest in us, we'll sink like a stone and China will take over (economically). They just want success more than we do.
GMD
watch this
This is truly sad. Not to be a troll or anything, but the only reason we are not seeing a massive reduction in the amount of foreign oil we depend on, or improved air is because of the stigma attached to the world "nuclear".
So, we continue to use oil and coal.
For those of you who don't know, pebble bed reactors will allow for the increased use of the radioactive elements until they pose no significant threat. To use an analogy, the battery is almost completely drained. Also, they are inherently safer due to improved design. Their default position is one in which the reactive elements are in no position to cause any sort of melt-down.
But hey, it has the word "nuclear" in it, so it has to be bad, right?
Buncha tree-hugging softies.
I'm out.
In my opinion, one of China's greatest assets is its lack of current infrastructure. Imagine being able to design roads, dams, bridges, electricity generating plants, etc with 2005 technology without having to support an existing infrastructure.
We're going to hear more stories of bullet trains, monstrous dam projects and now advancements in nuclear energy production.
Good for China - start investing in them now.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Judging from how many McDonald's french fries have to be eaten to produce a tank of biodiesel, nuclear energy produces no waist at all.
For alternative fuels this century. While the United States continues its 'fight' for fossil fuels in the middle east, they will be spending their budget to completely remove themselves from the shackles of fossil fuels.
just IMAGINE where we would be if we spent that $280 BILLION on the Iraq war funding technology to develop alternative fuels? When will we realize that fossil fuels are such an impediment and where we could get if we got real about losing the middle east (oil)?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
> net negative sources of fuel
:P
God, when will this myth stop propagating? They haven't been net negatives since the 1970s; and of the dozens of studies done since then by everyone from the DOE to various universities (essentially all except anti-ethanol crusader Pimental) have shown a 30-50% positive energy balance, and with current tech it may be able to scale up as high as 70%.
Furthermore, even if it were a net negative, this is completely irrelevant. Example: During WWII, the Germans made petroleum from coal. This was a costly process that used many times more energy to produce the oil than the oil contained (they burned much of the very coal that they were converting in order to power the conversion). And yet, it largely fuelled the Nazi war machine.
The issue is converting a *non-mobile* source of energy to a *mobile* source of energy that you can put into your gas tank. If an ethanol plant takes in grid power, it's eating mostly coal. If it doesn't use grid power, it's most likely burning ag waste or other local non-mobile sources of energy. It's not like they're burning ethanol to produce ethanol
Of course, this is all irrelevant: Ethanol *IS* a net positive.
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
Not in my backyard and all that.
So you're saying, then, that it's better for our nation as a whole to have waste stored in unmonitored, insecure, and in some cases failing, storage containers and sites at over 150 locations randomly scattered around the country, indefinitely, than in one place that is at least quasi-permanent?
And why do I have to live within visual distance of a nuclear power plant to (correctly) say that it's a very compelling answer to our power problems? Possibly because nuclear power has been so vilified by some people that others are irrationally deathly afraid of it?
Your argument is extremely poor, because:
1.) It's based on "non in my backyard", and,
2.) You make a fallacious argument that living closer to a power plant somehow makes one more able to comment about nuclear power.
The fact is, the city where I live doesn't have a nuclear power plant. Frankly, I wish it did.
Good job using nothing more than scare tactics to frame your argument. Why, exactly, would it be bad to live close to one of the 104 operating nuclear plants in the United States?
Because of irrational fear and nothing more?
Or perhaps we should eliminate nuclear power altogether! I'm sure that would help us down the road to solving our energy problems!
Well, you'll be glad to know that the Chinese pebble reactors will, more than likely, not encounter any icebergs.
--- Ban humanity.
Calling pebble beds "meltdown proof" is really a stretch.
First off, meltdown aside, their moderator is *graphite*. Their emergency cooling scenario is that air will cool the reactor. Nice, except for the fact that even nuclear grade graphite will burn in extreme conditions quite fiercely (it was the burning graphite, more than anything else, that spread the radiation from Chernobyl). Hot graphite also produces explosive hydrogen gas in contact with water (in fact, many of these plants are going to be designed to produce hydrogen from water, so we know it will be present, even if in a different loop).
The very concerning thing is that they're so confident about them that they're not planning to build containment structures. Pebble beds are a nice design, mind you, but they're not *that* safe. A single graphite fire starts, and you've got another chernobyl that destroys a large swatch of land (it's not the casualties from nuclear events that are the problem, but the land rendered uninhabitable). Nuclear accidents have been, unfortunately, surprisingly frequent; it's the containment structures that have kept the danger that they pose limited.
Then, there's the problem with the pebbles themselves. Even in normal conditions, the German prototype experienced pebbles jamming. The safety against meltdown for the pebbles is that their expansion coefficient is designed to reduce the rate of reaction of the fuel; however, if the pellets jam against the sides as they expand, this safety won't help. This may or may not to prove to be an actual problem, of course.
I'd much rather see them go with a lead-bismuth breeder. It's a breeder (so you can utilize more fuel), it produces less waste, the waste is easier to handle, it's anti-proliferation, there's no graphite, there's no pellets to jam, etc.
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
...nuke waste can, for the most part, be recycled. The media, however, is too busy playing boogeyman, and leading us down the path to being a 4th world country with horse drawn wagons and biomass generators providing citizens enough electricity to light a 20W bulb.
--- Ban humanity.
I think the CANDU reactor is inherently more meltdown-proof than this design. The CANDU reactors use heavy water as both the moderator and the coolant - if you lose the coolant, you also lose the moderator, so the reaction stops. The only bad situation would be if the coolant pumps stopped moving the coolant, but then you could dump the heavy water manually, or just wait for it to flash to steam and get sucked into the vacuum building that sits beside the containment building. Either way, the reaction stops before it gets to a "meltdown" point.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Fortunately I just read about the term "unsinkable" as it was applied to the Titanic. The boat-maker never used the term. The dock-workers never used the term. The buyers never used the term. The only one who used it was a marketer for a travel agency booking berths aboard the Titanic. No one, the captain included, thought the ship was unsinkable. The very idea is ridiculous. Pour enough water into the ship, and it will sink.
On the other hand, pebble-bed reactors do not rely on making it difficult to meltdown, they rely on the fact that the natural state of the reactor bed is a "safe" condition. (No, that doesn't mean you can stick your head in it, just that it will not maintain a chain reaction.) So, in the case of a pebble-bed reactor, if you take away all the coolant, the reactor shuts itself down. The coolant (or more accurately the heat-transfer media, since it's used to move heat from the reactor core to the heat exchangers to make steam to turn generators) is integral to the design of the reactor.
To have a sustained reaction, there must be coolant present. If the coolant is present, then the reactor cannot melt down, because it's covered in coolant. If the coolant were to be allowed to boil off, then the reaction cannot be sustained and the reactor shuts off. So, Coolant=no meltdown, no coolant=no meltdown. Please find the way to make the reactor meltdown in the above scenario...
Give up? That's the difference between engineering and physical law. I can engineer a damn tough ship, but physical law says that if I add enough weight, it'll displace more weight than an equal volume of water, and it will sink. On the other hand, if I have a pebble and it releases X number of neutrons, nothing I can do will increase that number of neutrons or moderate them in such a way as to cause a chain-reaction, except adding a moderator, which, in-turn controls the chain-reaction. It's like claiming that I can make a light bulb that's hot get hotter and melt-down by turning off the switch.
Pebble-beds have been built and tested in the harshest ways, and no reaction can be sustained when the pebbles were "exposed" without the sustaining material. The only way to make a pebble-bed melt down is to take the pebbles, grind them down, extract the fissile material and make a regular nuclear reactor out of them.
And that's the whole point.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
First off in a pebble bed design the graphite is encases in a ceramic, usually SiC. For a fire of the type you are describing all the ceramic coating of all the pebbles would have to fail. And I do not mean just a few small cracks but big chunks of it would have to fail.
Second the hydrogen production is not going to be from hot graphite in contact with water. The Hydrogen production will not be in any loop of the reactor but will be at the ends of power lines coming off the generator. This is not a safety factor with the reactor.
Third as far as lead-bismuth goes I only know of one production reactor that used that. The power plant for the Alpha class sub. Guess what it was a disaster. All of them have been withdrawn from service.
Should they still use a containment dome? I would say you bet. Seems like very cheap insurance to me. If nothing else it could help to protect if from terrorist attack or even milliatry action.
All of you points though are just not issues except for maybe the lead-bismuth breeder. I would have to do more research to see what the state of the art is with those.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The reason that the U.S. is not innovating in the area of energy production has to do with politics. America controls (directly and in the case of Saudi, indirectly) world oil production and therefore world energy. Alternate energy sources, especially those that free nations from the oil addiction reduce dependence on America and therefore reduce America's power.
China, knowing this, is actively persuing alternate energy policy including nuclear, hydrogen and more novel approaches. They want to detach themselves from the oil addiction so that they have independence from the U.S. and U.S. controled energy interests.
Again, politics.
But, the results are inevitable: As a result of these politics, the Chinese will inevitably control more advanced and more important energy technologies (both economicaly and ecologically). So the conclusion to this will be exactly the opposite of that desired by the status quo (America controlled energy). However, the administration doesn't care because they will be retired, rich, fat and happy (or dead of old age) when China turns it all around on America and effectively takes control of world energy production.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
The problem with nuclear power isn't the big scary scenarios that the mainstream anti-nuclear community put about. The problem is that economics suck, and probably always will. "Successful" national nuclear power programmes are propped up by artificial means--either direct government investment, or special-needs laws like the insurance liability cap, or both.
Sure, coal plants pump out a lot more garbage into the environment than nuclear plants, but coal plants have two big advantages: relatively small events don't wind up writing-off the whole plant; and you can take the damn things apart and fix them relatively cheaply because they aren't radioactive.
It isn't just "unreasonable regulatory burden" that makes nuclear plants expensive--it is the fact that the available energy density is extremely high, and any departure from equilibrium can result in sufficiently high energy density to result in plastic deformation of components of the core. Once that happens they're hellishly expensive to fix. Even relatively routine maintenance is extremely expensive due to the real safety requirements of doing engineering work in a radioactive environment.
"Inherently safe" design for fission reactors is an interesting area of research, and much progress has been made, but it isn't clear that any of them are really as safe as their designers would like to believe. And again, it isn't the possibility of catastrophic, world-ending melt-down that you need to prevent, but relatively minor excursions that will leave the containment intact but make a mess of the core.
Older designs, such as the CANDU (which has a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, if memory serves, meaning a temperture spike will damp the reaction down) are already more-or-less "melt-down-proof". But they have also proven to be bloody expensive to maintain--far moreso than coal-fired plants run by the same utility.
These are all reasons I got out of the nuclear engineering business many years ago--the core physics of fission power is such that it is very hard to create reactors that are going to be economic to operate over the lifecycle of the plant.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
When people talk about breeder reactors as "producing more fuel than they burn", what they mean is that the reactor is run on either U-235 or Pu-239. It produces heat energy which is converted into electricity.
At the same time, excess neutrons from the reaction are reacted with an otherwise inert blanket of U-238 around the reactor, converting the U-238 into Pu-239 which can then be used to run the same reactor, or other reactors. It turns out that Pu-239 production is faster than Pu-239 or U-235 consumption.
It is relatively easy to use chemical methods to separate the produced Pu-239 from the leftover U-238 in the blanket, certainly MUCH easier than separating U-235 from natural uranium.
So it's not a perpetual motion machine because a resource is used up, i.e. the natural U-238, but that resource is plentiful and the overall process is easier than the conventional method of getting fissile fuel.
The reason that breeder reactors aren't widely used is partly technical, because they're fairly complex things to design and operate, but mostly political because the Pu-239 produced can relatively easily be used in bombs.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
Americans, 5% of global population, produce over 30% of the output on 20% of the energy. We're very productive, and very efficient, compared with most of the rest of the world - vastly more efficient than any comparably sized group in either of those three measures. Of course, we're too wasteful, too - our economy hides the cost of our energy consumption. When we reduce our energy consumption, our economy will benefit, and lead the rest of the world to a more sustainable production system. But trashtalking our relative efficiency isn't the way to lead us there.
--
make install -not war
You think just the same way that Timothy McVeigh used to on Usenet. I thought he was a dangerous nut before he murdered close to 300 people in his attempt to do exactly what you suggest. Try a google search and look for his posts on Usenet.
Bin Laden and McVeigh are both cut from the same cloth. The most powerful tool you have for changing your government is the Web.
Bin Laden has changed nothing, achieved nothing. The IRA achieved nothing. Mao and Stalin ultimately achieved nothing.
Ghandi won India's freedom without a shot being fired. Lech Walensa in Poland, the Velvet, Rose revolutions, far more is achieved with the power of speech than has ever been achieved with guns.
The East Germans I met in the 1980s never asked for guns, they wanted photocopiers and type writers. They knew what they needed.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The "too cheap to meter" comment is addressed later in the comments, and was from one guy talking to a group of science-fiction writers in the 1950's. But yes, a real nuclear scientist said it, so I'll give you that.
On the other hand, in the U.S. Nuclear Reactors have killed how many civilians? So far as I know, the number of civilians killed in nuclear accidents at power plants is... zero. Yes, there have been deaths of workers, yes, you could argue that a few plants have leaked radiation here and there, but when you consider that the CDC is claiming 30,000 deaths a year from coal plants in the U.S., it makes for a hell of a weak argument.
Besides, the "safe" claim isn't even being made by the U.S. government, it's coming from China. As for me, I think nuclear is a great idea, and I'd rather be living 10 miles from Yucca Mountain than the 10 miles I currently live away from a coal plant that's rated one of the cleanest in America.
As for your "dirty bomb" statement, yeah, give it a try. Start by walking into a nuclear power plant, past the six layers of security. Then enter the core, ignoring the fatal dose of radiation you'll be bathed in. Grab hold of a few dozen pebbles, ignoring the heat that burns the flesh off your hands and arms. Take them home. Grind them up, again, ignore the fact that the fumes of the uranium or plutonium are among the most powerful and fastest acting poisons known to man. Use fluorine (a controlled substance also instantly fatal if breathed) to create UF6 to separate the Uranium from the graphite gas. Then use a million dollars of platinum to catylize the UF6 back to uranium metal. Stick it to 100 pounds of C4 and detonate it in downtown New York. Of course, the fact that you'll set off every airborne neutron detector that homeland security and the air force (and a half-dozen spy satellites) have before you leave your house might slow you down. Not to mention the continous man-hunt looking to find you.
You may not trust the government with this stuff, but consider the alternative. If there's one thing I'm not worried about in this country, it's how well our fissile material stockpile is guarded. When you realize that it takes three semis, twenty secret-service agents, the FBI and the army to move 20 grams of *spent* material to be used as the thermal warmers for the Pathfinder rover, you realize that the government is very serious about the security of this material.
story from "Managing Martians" by Donna Shirley
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Why don't *you* RTFA? They're not building a CANDU, they're building a PBMR. Furthermore, pebble beds run in the 900C range, not 900F. Their "loss of coolent" scenario is as high as 1600C - plenty to burn graphite. I can skip all of your comments about "covered in water", because CANDU uses water as a moderator, not pebble beds (strange that you would think that CANDU uses graphite, however...)
AFAIK they are building THTR-Type Devices. That are Pebble Bed Reactors which are cooled by Helium.
This type of device is inherently safe from meltdown because
which is absolutely inert
The german THTR-300 at Hamm-Uentrop has been a demonstration reactor at commercial size (300 MW). It was shutdown after proving to work well.
The reason to cancel the further development and building was completely political because there is no chance to get public acceptance for any Nuclear Powerplants all over Germany after Tchernobyl and Three Mile Island.
The reactors themselves may be safe, but the problems of the required fuel production and handling, especially the waste disposal, are nowhere in the world sufficiently solved. Thats a truth whatever the Nuclear Industry and there political gofers may say.
CU
From the ORNL:
I first heard this fact from a professor of mine, and it made sense at the time as coal is ultimately a source for uranium as well as radium. (That's where the Curies got their uranium from, after all.) This is the first time I did a web-search to verify his statement, and I wasn't surprised to see that it agrees with other people's calculations (Google for "coal radiation").
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?