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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."
I personally don't see a problem with this. What with modern technology, it seems like we should be able to build nuclear power plants much safer and more efficient than anything in the past. The threat of the radioactive biproducts is an issue, but it is a much less immediate (and, in the long term anyway, less of an actual threat) than dumping tons of smog in the air until we're out of coal and oil.
Reactor designs have progressed a long way from the 50's. Pebble bed reactors are an inherently safe (being relative) design... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor Couldn't we just make these into sealed units and run them until they stop being radioactive?
Is that a ding I hear? GET BACK IN THE MAGIC HOUSE!!!
Yeah, that's such a bullshit statement. We generate orders of magnitude more radioactive waste with coal than we do with nuclear. And that radioactive coal waste is put out into the air.
BTW, if you have air scrubbers, where do you think the harmful removed by-products go? Do you think they're annihilated or something? You still have toxic waste to dispose of after you pull the pollutants out of the air from a hydrocarbon burning plant.
the world stops it's need for oil? We are starting to see many alternatives, natural gas, nuclear, current solar tech, new solar (e.g. nano-solar), fuel-cell, etc. Even harnessing the oceans waves are becoming practical. France already gets about 80% of its energy from Nuke power.
. php, 270 international patents in 20 years). There are approx. 270 million Arabs in the middle east and the majority living off of oil profit. If things like Britain's initiative spill over into all the world's nations, the Middle East could very quickly loose its primary source of income within the next 20 years. Cars are quickly moving to electric engines wich will feed fuel-cell, and I can't imagine new jet tech is far off. The new scientist has pieces on projects to conserve up to 80% fuel costs.
At present the Middle East doesn't do anything but sell oil (http://www.tompeters.com/entries.php?note=006683
Since the middle east (for the most part) doesn't make anything, do you think they will turn into a society similar to the warring African nations or step up to the plate and joining the world in creating/innovating?
I have no problem with nuclear power, modern plants are safe and quite useful.
However, I do not exactly trust the upper management of such facilities to always do the right thing, after years of shoddy practices by some owner/operators. In the past, I've encountered many stories of rather remarkable safety oversights and downright irresponsible decisions that have made certain reactors unnecessarily dangerous. Sure we have the NRC, but history has shown that they are not always on the ball...or quite far from it.
As with virtually every major reactor incident that has ever occurred, the human element is the potential problem, not the technology.
So fellow nuclear power supporters, please understand when some of us have genuine concerns about construction of new plants, and please do not lump us all in the "OMG ATOMS!!!!" category. In fact, fellow environmentalists here in Florida are only asking for a large exclusion zone around a new plant that is being considered. Obviously, they are going to get the zone for a variety of reasons, theirs being that it makes a fantastic nature preserve.
Almost all of France's power comes from Nuclear, and it's the one thing they seem to be better than us in ;)
I would probably replace the word 'better' with 'more reckless', given the population density of the nation... there really aren't safe (ie uninhabited) places to put reactors in Europe. Nuclear seems to make more sense for the US/Canada/Russia/etc.
If you want a model energy grid, look at Iceland's geothermal plants or Denmark's wind generators... not France's half-assed solution.
Besides, in terms of pollution & fuel supply, the gasoline infrastructure is a much bigger problem.
Because every none method of creating fusion reactions takes more energy than is produced. We are still a long way from any sort of economically viable fusion energy source. It would be nice of course. Here is some info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power
Because it's fucking hard. There's a big test reactor that's going to be built in France, and that's *still* not going to get us to commercial fusion power, simply because of the material issues involved. In DT fusion, *every single atom* in your reactor vessel is going to be displaced by flying neutrons *hundreds* of times over the life of the reactor, and that does really bad things to all known materials. Right now, we don't even have adequate neutron sources in order to begin exploring that regime; there's also supposed to be another research facility dedicated to that purpse, tagging along with the reactor in France, but it's not even on the drawing board yet.
There are aneutronic schemes, but those seem to be impossble to actually generate net energy from, because the hot fuel loses too much energy to Brehmstrahllung losses.
Fusion is very very difficult.
I generally class problems into three categories: theoretical, materials, and engineering. The theoretical problems are killers: "We don't know if this is even *possible." The materials ones *can* be killers: "We know how do to this, but we don't know how to make it, and the stuff we need to make it may be unobtainable." Engineering ones are ones that can be cured by throwing enough money and time at them, like the Manhattan project: we knew a bomb was theoretically possible, we knew how to make the materials, we just had to crank a lot of numbers and actually build the fabrication infrastructure and the device itself.
Fusion is *all three*. I find it entirely plausible that we'll never develop commercial fusion power, bootstrapping right from mass nuclear fission to solar collection satellites. There's certainly enough fissile fuel around to keep us going until we can build large-scale orbital structures.
Greenhouse gases are a big problem and getting bigger.
A ton of uranium yields as much energy as 16000 tons of coal. We bury the nuclear wastes in a small hole. (Work out the size of a ton of metal.) We bury the much larger coal wastes in the atmosphere, where they change the radiative properties of the planet, not to mention various other toxic side effects, including radiation emissions.
It's really a no-brainer. Of course, sometimes it seems that society has no brain.
The right doesn't want to admit it was wrong about global warming and the left doesn't want to admit it was wrong about nukes. So we go on merrily pursuing a thoroughly avoidable catastrophe.
mt
If your breakeven point is $45/barrel (earnings=costs, selling at $45) and *worst case* all of your costs are due to oil at current $60/barrel, then you will make a profit of $15/barrel if you use your own oil.
This means that a self sustained system would be less expensive, not more.
The error in your statement stems from "cheap oil pumped from the ground" Hint. It is not cheap now. This means that either a) it is not economical at $45 any more (ie you are wrong) or b) a self sustained system is now less expensive than other oil (ie you are wrong) or c) $60/barrel outprices your average suburbanite. (possible, but has nothing to do with tar sands)
If you have more information than you posted to make sense of this mess, please post it, 'cause as of now, you are wrong.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
They can run on thorium, prototypes have run for years, they use 1/100th the fuel, and they produce 1/100th the waste. Economic studies show them to be cheaper than light water reactors and even coal, they dont require fuel fabrication, and they're safer than any other breeder reactor design and all light water reactor designs. But no one seems to know about them. They keep repeating pop-sci stuff that they read about, like pebble bed reactors or the integral fast reactor.
There is a reactor designed called an advanced breeder reactor. It's as close to an energy machine as I've ever seen... This type of reactor uses U238, which we (the US) are currently storing as waste (at huge expense). As a by-product of the consumption of this fuel it creates plutonium (the downside), as well as enough fuel to 'seed' another reactor (breeding, in a sense). This reactor was slated to be built, but due to the weapons-grade plutonium by-product, it was deemed unsafe and discontinued. According to people that I know (I used to work at the Idaho National Lab-- a cornerstone of US nuclear reactor design and development) there is enough U238 in storage-- as waste-- that we would could provide the energy needs for the US for several hundred years.
So, to answer one question, there's plenty of fuel. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as far as I'm concerned. This technology has been known for 30 years. There are bound to be technological leaps and bounds in the science of nuclear energy, but collectively we're afraid to try. As evidence of our collective fear, I point to the, IMO, over-zealous regulation/legislation, which makes it impossibly expensive to investigate making nuclear power *more* safe (I believe that it's safer/healthier than coal now).
Okay, having said that... there is a problem with our ability to improve our nuclear technology. That problem is the last 30 years-- where nothing was done in the field (due to FUD). In those 30 years the leading minds have forgottem and gotten old and sometimes have left the US in favor of work in more reasonable countries. In essence, I'm not sure that we have the expertise any longer. It will be expensive and difficult to get the US nuclear programs working again. I only guess that the UK is the same.
Is it worth it for the US, or any country? Yes. I think so. However, you've got an oil industry crony in the W.H. and trillions of lobby dollars spent by US energy corps and, according to many, the old KGB and other foreign govs, which have instilled a real fear about nuclear energy (according to the stories the old USSR didn't want us to develop *infinite* energy to feed our economy).
There is currently an initiative to build what they call the Gen 4 reactor. There has been some discussion as to which design to try. 'Pebble Bed' was discussed, but there are cooling issues to overcome (I can't speak intelligently on that... I wrote the software which tracked the nuclear waste-- IANANE). El Presidente seems enamored with hydrogen reactors, last I heard. My bets on whether we actually do it are placed on 'no.' The current project is woefully under-funded and crazily mis-managed.
Regarding waste... I know a bit about what is stored as waste... Mainly, it's PPE (personal protective equipment-- rubber gloves and the like) and junk. Anytime something even remotely (and I mean REMOTELY) connected with nuclear fuel, or waste, or contamination is discarded it becomes waste. The VAST majority (99%) of waste isn't nasty. Quite a lot can be permanently disposed of in a safe manner, but people start to freak out (FUD again). The other 1% can be stored until we figure out a cost-effective manner to send it to the sun. Right now, we store it all, and that contributes to more FUD.
I probably sound a bit like a fanboy... maybe I am. There IS an energy crisis. Renewables are nowhere near (at least as far as I know) ready to produce the amount of energy that nuclear does/can; it has been operationally tested worldwide.
Solving the political problems... That's another matter.
In fact, the Chernobyl reactor should never have done what it did. A whole bunch of safty interlocks were deliberatly disabled to allow them to conduct the spin-down test, and that, coupled with the flux problems and gravity driven control rod design issues, was what caused the reactor to run dry and explode.
I'm politically of a greenish hue and while I used to be anti-nuclear, it is now my belief that nuclear powers going to be the only way that we can realistically cut C02 emissions in the medium term while other technological fixes kick in. I feel passionately that anyone who is truly green will have to support nuclear power soon if we are going to avoid global environmental catastrophe.
Your point 5 about the difficult of handling nuclear waste is right on the money, yet 180 degrees out of wack. Yes nuclear waste is difficult to contain and is very dangerous. Yet it is an absolute walk in the park compared to handling the waste being pumped out by our fossil-fuel-based generators. You can't contain CO2 (yes I know there are some fancy plans to sequester it, but those are years out).
Nuclear waste has the potential to kill people living in large areas if something goes wrong. The threat and danger is apparent. People worry about it. C02 goes up a chimney and people don't worry about it at all, yet the threat is (in my opinion much much greater) we're not talking about large areas being contaminated for 100s of years - with C02 we are talking about the globe being 'contaminated' for millenia, possibly irreversibly.
Personally, as a London resident, I';d like to see a nice big nuclear power station built in the middle of London, and other major cities. "When you reduce you energy consumption sufficiently that we don't need it we will decommission it."
In answer to your initial point - yes, I also believe that we will have to promote peaceful nuclear proliferation. It's nasty stuff, but not as nasty and pervasive as the alternative.
Oh - scrap the manned Mars mission, put the money into fusion research.
Et voila, I've transformed myself into an Internet kook.
I'll try to respond to your points in order.
(full disclosure: I work in nuclear power)
1) I honestly don't have a good answer for this. Hopefully the new generation of reactor designs will permit more widespread use. If my information is correct, the new PBMR designs significantly decrease the proliferation concerns.
2) Centralization is not necessarily a bad thing. There are efficiency gains from economy of scale, and maintenance on one or two units is a hell of a lot easier than maintaining 10,000.
3) It's one thing to get to or even past the front gate. It's another thing entirely to get into the protected area. I haven't seen reports of this, but I would be interested to read articles if you have them. (links please?)
4) Nuke plants are base loaded. They run at 100% ouput as much as possible. The reason for this is that they produce the cheapest power we've got. It's the fossil plants that actually follow the load throughout the day.
5) The waste is initially dangerous. However, we don't need to store it for 10,000 years. The really dangerous stuff is dangerous because it decays off at a fast rate. Thus, the more dangerous the material, the faster it peters out. The longer the half-life, the less dangerous the material is. I would be more afraid of the heavy metals than the radiation in many cases.