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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.
Radioactive waste can be contained. A trick we haven't figured out with air pollution yet.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Better to tackle the "looming energy crisis" head on and use human ingenuity to come up with a better, more environmentally friendly, solution. Simply settling for something that works but has problems is the same attitude that has gotten the world into this rediculous oil mess, all the while destroying the very planet we live on.
I'm not saying Nuclear power might not be the best answer for a short term emergency, but short term solutions tend to become long term ones when government is concerned.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
Nuclear power generation is safer and less polluting than burning fossil fuels to generate power. The new pebble bed reactors offer a significant safety improvement over the old fuel rod design that is in older plants lile Three Mile Island. It's time to use the brains we have and provide the safe and cheap power that nuclear fission can offer.
Have you ever been to Nevada? I'm pretty sure that's why God made it.
As nice as wind turbines are, you're never gonna get enough to gnerate enough power, nor are you getting enough people agreeing to have them built. Nuclear's our only option. At least, if you're that worried, build them to go on until we have enough other means of power generation. Unless, of course, Fusion becomes viable, which (I hope, at least) will probably happen in the next 25 years. Ah well. C'est la vie.
Any grammatical or spelling errors above are for comic effect, and do not signify imperfection in the writer.
is a nation wide awarness campaign on how nuclear power works, why it is BETTER for the enviroment, and how it will help allow
Talk about the new technologies.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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!!!
People around here always seem to fall into one of two groups on this issue: those that dance around talking about how clean nuclear power is, and those that shout "what about the fuckin' waste?"
What about the enrichment though? What about all the noxious chemicals involved in separating the fissile isotopes from the 99+% useless U-238? What about the huge piles of toxic and somewhat radioactive U-238 that you get at the end? Nobody ever seems to bring that up.
I'd like to see what the pro-nuke side has to say about dealing with the environmental effects of this part of the system.
I've been thinking about this for a long while. I wonder what would happen if the US (like some commentators have suggested) embark on a "Manhattan Project" for energy. If the US highly encouraged oil exploration, solar, wind, nuclear, hybrid (like the plug into your wall to charge the batteries), Sterling engine, biodiesel, thermal depolermersation (you know, turkey offal and sewage into oil), microwaves and mining the moon and Jupiter for fusion fuel. What would happen if through alternative energy initiatives we could drive the price of oil down to $10 a barrel. I'm not saying it will happen, or even if it could happen, but what would happen to the Saudis, Iran, Venezuela and all the other dictatorships that run on oil? What would happen if America could export its energy technology instead of importing oil?
A bad reputation is very difficult to eliminate. Whereas a good reputation is ruined by one bad action, the same cannot be said for the converse. Nuclear power has clear advantages as well as disadvantages; technology has improved. But if we can't deal with mercury, toxic chemicals, and other pollutants, what are we going to do with nuclear waste? If we have a plan and are ready, then go ahead, but we should still look for alternatives and improvements.
Fun Zoid RPG
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%).
The problem with nuclear power is that the nuclear industry is so enmeshed with top secret military programs that no one knows what its costs really are. They say it's cheap, but to what degree is it being subsidized? We'll never know. Also, nuclear power further encourages an overly centralized power grid, with too few, too-large power plants. For both national security and efficency, we should be moving toward a more distributed model. Smaller plants require less investment too, so they can be added/upgraded more easily as technology improves. I'm for millions of solar roofs; microturbines and fuel cells with co-generation; and everyone's meter able to run backwards.
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?
"Lovelock was among the first researchers to sound the alarm about the threat of global warming from the greenhouse effect. In 2004 he caused a media sensation when he broke with many fellow environmentalists by pronouncing that "Only nuclear power can now halt global warming". In his view, nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels that has the capacity to both fulfill the large scale energy needs of mankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions."
As an environmentalist, though not a proponent of Dr. Lovelock's Gaia theory, I endorse the development of nuclear power. Further, I think, environmenatlist should step up, admit their error in attacking nuclear power, and, actively push a nuclear power agenda.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
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.
So we must encourage Iran, North Korea and so on to build as many nuclear power stations as they like.
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.
The *planet* is doing just *fine*. The planet's survival is not at issue.
Absolutely correct. The planet will be fine.
Human beings, however, may not fare quite so well.
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
a few thousand m^3 of waist
I know obesity is a problem in the US, but that's just extreme!
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, but we're talking about the UK; the best they can do is Wales.
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.
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.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
we haven't demonstrated the ability to do that either.
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.