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Floating Nuclear Power Station
angrysponge writes "
Russia to Build World's First Floating Nuclear Power Station for $200,000. I don't know what impresses me more, the engineering chutzpah or low-ball pricetag." From the article: "The mini-station will be located in the White Sea, off the coast of the town of Severodvinsk (in the Arkhangelsk region in northern Russia). It will be moored near the Sevmash plant, which is the main facility of the State Nuclear Shipbuilding Center. The FNPP will be equipped with two power units using KLT-40S reactors. The plant will meet all of Sevmash's energy requirements for just 5 or 6 cents per kilowatt. If necessary, the plant will also be able to supply heat and desalinate seawater."
What happens when there is a melt down? You can't stop water from spreading to the rest of the world.
Funny that I can't find the word "safety" in the whole article.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I beg to differ. Aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines would be the first...
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Can you build a cluster of these and feed the electricity into the power grid in instances like the US where our power grid is well developed?
un burrito me trampeó.
Three Mile Island was hardly a disaster, and Chernobyl was a plant with a horrifically poor design by modern standards.
Just because you say nuclear energy is a bad idea doesn't make it so -- and of the alternatives, they either do far worse environmental damage or cannot practically be scaled to meet demand.
Do you know anything about current nuclear technologies. You couldn't have a nuclear meltdown if you tried anymore. Plus, with pebble bed reactors, nuclear plants can be practically anywhere.
Many people are against Nuclear plants because of Chernobyl. Did you know that a coal plant releases more radiation outside its walls than a nuclear plant?
I guess it's people like you that are the reason no new plants (in the U.S.) have been built in decades.
How is that possible? You can't even buy a one bedroom condo for that in a major city! Must be a misprint, or due to government subsidy.
is actually very safe. Because of tremendous advances in both safety and efficiency, nuclear power is actually a very viable alternative to fossil fuels for power generation. However, due to very high profile disasters (ala 3-Mile Island and Chernobyl), the American public is deathly afraid of just the idea. In contrast, I know that France supplies a large part of the power through the use of these more modern generators, and to my knoweledge, there have been no problems.
We all know why it is that cheap...
They already have all the nuclear material floating or sunken in the area
Chances are any disscution on Slashdot will degrade into a flamewar about ID/Christianity within 14 posts.
Driving cars will never be completely safe either. The question is whether nuclear power can be made safe enough that the benefits outweigh the risks. Unfortunately, it is very difficult for the layman to evaluate those risks, so we either (i) say (rather illogically) that there are no circumstances where nuclear power can ever be justified; or (ii) have to rely on the word of experts who are usually not impartial.
Right now, in most countries, nuclear power seems not to be justified economically, and (while alternative energy sources usually also have a very negative environmental impact) nuclear power produces some seriously polluting byproducts. If those issues can be addressed, I would definitely be willing to consider the arguments as to the risks.
Nuclear power is not and will never be safe.
By your logic, you must have burned to death this morning when the highly-flamable gasoline in your car spontaneously (1) leaked onto you and your children, and (2) caught fire, killing you almost instantly - because, as we all know - "gasoline power is not and never will be safe."
Also, you can burn to death if you climb into the oven - so we'd better ban them all. Same for power drills, so you won't accidentally give yourself another lobotomy.
My point is that there are a great number of very well designed machines and equipment in our lives that have nasty reactions or principals in their operation. Those devices are, however, designed to contain or negate the hazards.
Coal power plants burn coal and release carbon dioxide, sulphur, soot and - yes, radiation - directly into the air that you breathe. (FYI, coal plants release more radiation from the coal they burn than nuclear plants, which are designed to internalise all radioactive materials). They pollute and contribute to cancer rates by design.
Strangely nobody (ie: you) seems to really care about coal pollution since burning coal on the fire is an understandable technology that someone can do in their own back yard and never killed nobody (except thousands of coal miners over the centuries, but who cares since we can't see them). Unlike nuclear technology which contains the world "nuclear" in the title and will therefore definitely turn large swathes of the country into a post-Little Boy Hiroshima within 15 seconds of being turned on.
But in reality, nuclear power plants are designed to contain radiation (duh). The old designs were still safe by most measures, but modern pebble-bed nuclear reactor designs take it to extremes. (1) they're far simpler than old pile designs and (2) they're *physically unable* to melt down and go critical - even if the cooling fluid is pumped out completely. The electrical output will drop off and will just.. sit there. Happily doing nothing. Aww, lookkit it. It's happy. Wave back.
If you jump naked into the nuclear reactor core, yes, you'd have some fatal health problems - but the same would happen if you jumped into a conventional furnace.
Please get over your irrational fears.
Russia spent the last few decades of its Soviet era dumping spent navy nuclear cores into the arctic sea. I've never heard of any accountability for that egregious poisoning of the most productive biome on the planet. So it's clear that they're learning from their successes.
And any reporter who doesn't realize that a "kilowatt" is a rate of energy over time has zero credibility - they're a PR agent. They're selling nuclear power that's "too cheap to measure", which we all know is the kind of like that sells nukes to people who spend the rest of our lives paying for the construction, security and cleanups.
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make install -not war
Meltdown requires heat, and water forms a pretty effective barrier against nuclear radiation. I'd guess that at the first sign of trouble, you sink the whole thing. It's only 200k, after all.
The ______ Agenda
And the subs can also defend themselves from pretty much anything, which is more than I can say for this Russian terrorist honeypot.
... Our subs have nothing to fear but fear itself.... ... well, that and running into underwater mountains at high speed...
... wait ...... I now understand the error of what I am saying ..... reading the article ... it's just not the Slashdot way ... *sigh* ... nevermind...
In other words, the cost of 200k is just the downpayment--your installment plan will kick in when the Chechens blow your terrorist honeypot skyhigh.
Yes, because, you know, terrorists could never attack a US military vessel
Besides, if you bothered to read the article
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I think New Orleans could use a half-dozen of those...
Totally, Hiroshima was bombed intentionally... There was nothing accidental about it.
Come to think of it, the US has had its fair share of nukular fuckups as well - Three Mile Island, or google for lost nuclear weapons ...
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
I agree with some of your points. However, Nuclear Energy is the absolute very least feasible on a global scale. That's all we need to do, is allow every third world country in the world to play around with nuclear material.
The quote fails to mention something. It says how many people the waste could kill. It doesn't mention how many would die if a bomb or meltdown went off, how many generations it would affect, how long the land would remain sterile, etc. It also doesn't mention how many people can be killed if the government of the plants in question use the material to make nuclear warheads. Last I checked, arsenic couldn't kill as many people as a nuclear warhead.
I don't fear nuclear material. I fear nuclear material in the hands of suicide bombers. Maybe chlorine is just as dangerous. That doesn't give any justification to nuclear material, though.
I've heard that argument before on other topics: "Well, sure X can happen to you, but so can Y, so why worry about X?" Either way, you are still left with X.
Besides, nuclear energy is a dead end. It's enough that we destroyed the climate, now we want to irradiate mountains with waste?
I don't have an immediate solution. I wish I did. I think we all wish we did. But, I believe solar energy is the only way to go, whether you are harnessing it from the wind, water, directly, or from fossil fuels, which are a long decended solar power. We have to realize that we have only real reliable power source is the sun. We just have to learn how to harness it better.
We will run out of space to put waste, or run out of raw nuclear material. Sure, it may look like we have plenty. Many thought the same about oil, and now even the oil companies will publically admit that we'll run out fairly soon. If nuclear power provided cheap energy to everyone, then energy usage, like car usage, would skyrocket, and what seemed like so much would become so little.
We have to think at least several hundred years into the future. Short sightedness is the cause of most of our current energy problems. And, we have no choice but to rely on the sun. Should it burn out, I think powering our cities will be the least of our worries.
A smarter man than me had some great ideas about society, economics, energy, etc. http://www.bfi.org/operating_manual.htm I just hope he was also right that man can't sabotage himself faster than he naturally advances.
I8-D