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UK's Chief Scientist Backs Nuclear Power Revival
Timbotronic writes "The UK government's chief scientific adviser has sent his clearest signal that Britain will need to revive its nuclear power industry in the face of a looming energy crisis and the threat of global warming. In an interview with the Guardian, Sir David King said there were economic as well as environmental reasons for a new generation of reactors." From the article: "His remarks come in the build-up to international talks in Montreal on how to address the threat of climate change when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. He denied suggestions - sparked by comments from Mr Blair that he was changing his mind on whether international treaties were the best way to tackle global warming - that Britain was moving closer to the stance of the US, which has refused to back Kyoto-style emission reductions."
The US certainly does burn oil in quite a few generation plants. There are statistics for it all over the 'net.
To quote PG&E "Most electricity in the U.S. is generated using coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear energy, or hydropower. Some production is done with alternative fuels like geothermal energy, wind power, biomass, solar energy, or fuel cells."
To quote the DOE: "Coal was the fuel used to generate the largest share (50.8 percent) of electricity in 2003 1,974 billion kilowatthours(kWh). This is over one and a half times the annual electricity consumption of all U.S. households (1,273 billion kWh). Natural gas was used to generate 650 billion kWh (16.7 percent), and petroleum accounted for 119 billion kWh (3.1 percent)." They also list nuclear as accounting for 19.75% (764 billion killowatthours). The remaining 9.65% was mostly hydro (7.14%).
How much nuclear fuel is on earth. If we replaced all the fossil fuels we use, with nuclear fuel, how long would our supplies last?
There's about 50 years of uranium reserves right now, a bit over 2 million tons.
Reserves are ores that are economically exploitable. In other words, reserves increase when you find a less expensive way to get the ore, or when the price of ore rises. If the price of ore goes up by 50%, we more than double our reserves to 5 million tons. If it goes up much more than that, oceanic reserves come into play, and there are 4.5 *billion* tons in the oceans.
Now, that's talking about U235 burned in a PWR. There are other things you can do which vastly increase reserves. There are reactor designs that can breed U238 into U235. That presents a proliferation concern, but you can also just burn U238 in a CANDU reactor or other design. You can breed thorium into U233 and burn that.
And the thing is that nuclear fuel is so much more energy-dense than chemical fuel. Coal has an energy content of about 24 MJ per kilogram, assuming perfect conversion to electricity, and I think good coal plants with top-of-the-line turbines and boilers and everything can get up to about 70% overall thermal efficiency, but hell, let's say 90%. Figures I found for the US in 1982 indicate that all the nuclear power plants in the US consumed 540 tons of fuel and produced 1.1E12 kilowatt-hours of electricity, which means *after* all those efficiency losses (PWRs are less thermally efficient because you've got to transfer heat across coolant loops), we were getting 8 million megajoules per kilogram of fuel.
8 million megajoules per kilogram, versus 21.6 megajoules per kilogram. What that means is that your *fuel* cost can rise significantly, but your cost per kilowatt-hour at your meter will see only a very small rise.
So to sum up, there's a hella lot of nuclear fuel available.
It depends on what kind of process is used to make power. Most reactors use U235, and there's only enough of that in the current uranium mines to last 50 years. If a plutonium process were used (turning the U238 into plutonium) the same amount of uranium could power the world for around 1000 years. There's also about three times as much thorium, which can be turned into U233 to produce power.
So that's around 4000 years mining the uranium and thorium that is economical to extract at todays prices. With higher uranium costs more could be extracted.
A nuclear plants worst case scenario...
It's physically impossible for a pebble-bed reactor to meltdown. It does not have cooling rods. It does not have heavy water.
Cleaner? Coal and gas give off Carbon oxides and other nasties. Yes this is a problem.
Coal also gives off quite a lot of radioactivity, and it's going straight into the atmosphere. In 1982, US coal power plants released 800 tons of radioactive uranium and 2000 tons of radioactive thorium burnt straight out of coal directly into the atmosphere. Nuclear power plants, as a rule, don't do that. We need to shut down every damn coal plant as soon as humanly possible.
Other coal nasties include sulphur dioxide, the thingie that reacts with water in clouds to drop a lovely rain of sulphuric acid on our heads. Yay!
Oil and coal are obviously bad. Natural gas releases a fair bit of carbon dioxide, and it will run out sooner rather than later if we keep building more plants. Hydroelectric power drowns whole ecosystems. A pretty giant lake where there was no pretty giant lake before is very environmentally unfriendly.
Look, I support solar and wind power. I would support a proposal to make rooftop solar power panels mandated by law for all buildings. Windfarms are a good idea, even if they seem to be evoking silly NIMBYism out of some people. But we need nuclear power in the triptych, at least until we get fusion figured out.
You can't produce a lot of megawatts with solar and wind in a single location without using up a ginormous amount of space. That space isn't magically appearing out of nowhere. Something is being displaced, be it a forest, a field, or some sort of human usage. Nuclear power is relatively compact by comparison. In many cases, the choice is between either compact or nothing.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
A coal plant's worst case scenario is a giant smog cloud.
Not to mention tons of radioactive waste. For a given amount of energy out, there is more waste uranium in coal than nuclear power.
A nuclear plants worst case scenario is the permanent evacuation of the highly populated region surrounding Chernobyl, and a significant rise in lukemia rates, etc, etc.
If you use stupid designs like Chernobyl the above is true. If you use intelligent designs that cannot happen. Nuclear power plants are governed by the laws of physics, not your imagination.
But nuclear power gives us all that lovely radioactive waste which quite simply has to be thrown in big holes and the lid sealed up for over 40,000 years!
Only if you are stupid and throw it into a big hole. France doesn't throw their waste into a big hole, they recycle it.
Oh, but oil and gas are contributing to the greenhouse effect! Well yes they are, but does that justify building more reactors,
Well you can go back to a hunter gather lifestyle if you want. I've considered it, and I don't want to. Nuclear power is the only long term solution so long as we remain on earth.
generating more nuclear waste,
Not a problem, see above.
AND more nuclear warheads?
Where did that come from? Nuclear warheads are a very different subjects. Governments that want one will get them, with or withour nuclear power plants.
There' this thing called the sun. Provides loads of energy. The Wind! Water? Is nothing else viable?
Well yes, the sun does provide loads of energy. Most of it is not directed at the earth though. Even then it is hard to deal with. Many question if enough strikes the earth for our use, even at 100% conversion efficiency. 40% efficiency is the max we have got from a solar cell, and to get that much required a lot of special effort which does not scale to large scale production. Everything else is much worse than that.
Modern reactors are far safer than their more temperamental counterparts of the 70s and 80s (Chernobyl? Three Mile Island?).
It's ridiculous to even mention Chernobyl and Three Mile Island in the same breath. What people seem to ignore is that the reactor at TMI functioned exactly as designed in the event of a meltdown - it shut itself down. I'd also point out that Three Mile Island is still in operation. Only one reactor was affected. The rest of the facility has been humming along quite nicely ever since.
Three Mile Island isn't an example of how dangerous nuclear technology is, it's an example of how safe it is.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Grrr I can't stand it any longer.
e _Emissions_of_Nuclear_Power
We're still constructing the site but here it is anyway...
http://nuclearinfo.net/
That German Green person is way out to lunch. We prove it on the site. Scroll down to:
(There is some bug in our twiki that prevents direct links..)
http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower#Greenhous
Nuclear Power emits less Greenhouse Gases than any other form Energy generation including Hydro and Wind. There are far less invisible costs in Nuclear Energy than anything else precisely because it has been so thoroughly studied.
Yeah, we periodically hear of the big breakthrough that will reduce the cost of PV cells. This has been happening for decades, but PV sales are still overwhelmingly conventional silicon (and may be getting more expensive now that PV production has exhausted the surplus Si byproduct feed from fabs.) So don't be credulous about the latest claim; judging by history it will very likely go nowhere.
Nuclear has gotten a lot of money from the government, but then nuclear has provided a lot in return to the government, like bombs and nuclear propulsion for warships and subs.
Uranium is quite a bit more abundant than is often depicted; remember that at today's U price the cost of the natural uranium itself is a very small part of the cost of nuclear energy, so its price could go up a lot without significant impact. When and if that happens, we can build powerplants with improved breeding to extend the resource even more.
If you can dispute that, please provide a reference for your pesonal residential grid electric supplier you use -a URL is fine- and what the contract terms are
This is the Chicago are; we're supplied by ComEd. Residential rates are 8.75 cents/kWh (plus a fixed service fee of $7.13/month). There are also taxes, IIRC, but I don't remember what they are.
According to this page, PV electricity is still about 30 cents/kWh in the sunniest locations. Chicago is far from the sunniest location; let's say 50 cents/kWh here. So solar is not competitive with grid power for my by about a factor of five.
thank goodness i know how to build a solar cooker, to use the same solar cooker to create ice at night time, and know how to create fire from wood for heat, how to convert virtually any vegatable oil into biodiesel, know how to build a simple electric generator, know how to build a windmill, that turns said genenrator, and know how to build batteries from mason jars, lead, a strong acid and purified water, how to distill and purify water, and/or strong alchohol, basic first aid medicine, etc etc...
and most important of all, i know how to hide from the crazy sob who doesn't know how to do any of that and who would gladly try and kill me for all that i had in a post apocyliptic world. Still I would have to agree, people seem to be seeking the 'short sighted' solutions of fossil/non renewable fuels, when 2/3rds of the earth's surface is already covered in water, and could sustain enough algae 'energy' belts to convert about a thousand times our 'current' global energy reserves every year from solar energy into renewable natural oils... that when burned provided the carbon dioxide needed by the floating tracts of algae.
What's worse of all, is that we spend triple what it would cost to build an infrastructure of 'algea' belts in a year to provide all our 'renewable' energy needs in just trying to find and exploit new 'non-renewable' energy resources.
Why? in part because the economies of scale required to 'bring' the cost of algea farming down to 'reasonable prices' would virtually require completely replacing coal electric production, and oil refining combined. but it's also because 'energy' companies are run by fools who don't 'get' it. maybe con agra will 'get' it someday, and develop practical algea farming so they can crush the fools behind fossil fuel exploitation.. seriously 'growing' the entire world's energy supply is probabbly the biggest possible market anyone could 'dream' of creating and most of the technology has been developed, but they're scattered like a jigsaw puzzle now.. no one has put them together to bring a fully realistic method of 'growing' all the enegry the world needs.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I'm guessing you don't mean breeding U238 into U235. The breeding reaction with uranium, that I'm assuming you meant, is where the neutron is absorbed in the U238 which makes U239 which will beta decay into Np239 which beta decays into fissile Pu239 and then upwards with each subsequently absorbed neutron. There is no way to breed U235 effectively and in great abundance. You could have a high energy neutron that knocks a neutron out of U236, but the cross section for that is on the order of nanobarns whereas the XS of first chance fission has resonances near that of the total absorption XS, so it's not too likely. You can run a thorium cycle which can produce U233 which is also fissile, but has many reprocessing steps to remove the U233 from the thorium if that's the desired fuel type, and if reprocessing is the desired route, then breeding U238 into plutonium and reprocessing the fuel into a high burn up MOX would work best. I don't quite agree with your number of 50 years of nuclear fuel either. It's more like 150 years with the gen4 reactors that have the better flux profiles and can utilize high burnup fuelsmore effectively than the modified current versions. That fuel will last even longer once reprocessing becomes economically viable. Technology-wise we can reprocess spent fuel with very little loss of burnable fuel, with Cogema's diamex or JAERI's DIDPA solvent extraction processes that can get 99.97% of U, Pu, and minor actinides with very little contamination by some of the more annoying fission products. In short, you're right, there is a whole helluva lot of nuclear fuel available for many generations
If you dont think there are legitimate concerns about nuclear energy, then you need to look a little closer:
1) proliferation - so its fine for the US and the UK to go nuclear happy, but you still reserve the right to hold a gun to the head of coutnries you dont like (such as Iran) if they try to follow suit. How does that work exactly? How will Iranian citizens feel about that policy? do we really need to generate more anti wetsern feelings there?
2) Centralisation. Nuclear requires huge concentration of power production. distributed power generation is more resiliant to attack and failure (like the USA blackouts recently), such as small scale solar and wind.
3) Security - protesters have got inot nuclear power stations often enough. you dont think AQ or some other bunch of terrorists arent planning it? I'd sleep safer at night knowing that Osama Bin Laden wasnt giving a TV interview from a nuclear power station control room.
4) Economy - nuclear generation costs a fortune. the Uk had to spend 400 million to bail out its nuclear energy industry and stop them going bankrupt. This was after the claims that nuclear would be 'too cheap to meter'. No change there.
5) Waste - heres the big one. You can probably solve the other problems, but the waste one is the biggy. You dont want to transport this stuff all over the world for security reasons, and you need somewhere to store it for a LONG time, we are talking tens of thousands of years here. Thats so long it almost seems like fantasty. If the romans had used nuclear, we'd still be guarding their waste now, long after their whole civlisation ahs crumbled. We lecture kids about not getting big debst in their teens that might take 5 years to pay off. we get scared about taking on 25 year mortagges, but we are happy to dump a serious waste problem on our descendents for the next ten thousand?
As with all nuclear power discussions, slashdot is overwhelemed with pro nuclear people dismissing everyone who opposes the technology as nutters, often in the most arrogant and dismissive way. I'm a programmer, certainly not a luddite, but I have serious and justified concerns about investing in nuclear power. Only a resoned debate will change minds on this issue.
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Nuclear power yields little to no energy, once you consider the enourmous amounts of energy needed for mining, processing, enrichment, building a reacter, discommisioning the reactor etc. They looked great when oil was cheap.
Um, no wrong. No more so for nuclear than coal.
True that gas diffusion enrichment is horribly energy intensive, but modern centerfuge processes are much more efficent. The main reason many countries who make nuclear fuel aren't currently using centerfuge processes are due to large capital costs.
The rest of the energy consumpttion for building, operating, and decomissioning a reactor is similar to a fossil fuel plant.
As for decomissioning, it is clear that many plants have more than a 20 or 30 year useful lifetime. I suspect, depending on the specifics of the plant, the lifetime is probably more in line with coal plants (50-60 years).
Even when using low-grade ore and gas difussion enrichment a nuclear plant produces far more energy over its lifetime than is consumed by building, fueling, and decomissioning the plant.
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