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Europe Warms to Nuclear Power
FleaPlus writes "The CS Monitor reports that for the first time in 15 years a European nation has started building a nuclear reactor, with six more likely to be built in the next decade. France is also planning to develop a safer and more efficient "fourth generation" reactor by 2020. This is in light of rising fossil fuel prices and a desire to reduce CO2 emissions. Still, a majority of EU citizens are opposed to nuclear energy, primarily for environmental reasons, even though nuclear power releases less radioactive material than burning coal."
in Collie, Western Australia, Muja #1 plant burns 4 million tonnes of coal per year. Coal which is 3 parts per million Uranium. Simple arithmetic says that 12 tonnes of Uranium goes up the stack or into the ash every year. Muja has been operating for many years.
Tell me, O Zoltar, what would happen if a nuke plant mislaid 12 kilos of Uranium?
Yes, nuclear power plants suck. But they suck an awful lot less than any of the currently viable alternatives. If sticking in nukes now makes for a far-less-painful transition to solar or whatever in two decades, then I'm all for it. Even if it doesn't, I'm still all for it because of the coal, oil and gas plants (and mines, refineries, tailings dumps, transportation facilities etc) which won't get built because they weren't needed.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
True, and today's cores are not self perpetuating. Due to the construction and materials, the core will die out when the plant is abruptly shutdown. The core will even die when the coling systems shutdown or fail. Which was a (if not the) large problem in the design of the old reactors.
And since when conventional power plants are safe? Even if you count just accidents alone, more people die per year in coal plants than the total death toll from Chernobyl.
Not to count the amount of pollution. This very article shows that radioactivity alone is a lot bigger when burning fossil fuels -- and then add all chemical-based emissions, which are none for nuclear power.
Nuclear power is like having a vial of concentrated poison in a closed bottle, fossil fuels are like taking a bucket of the same poison and spraying it thinly over a city. In the first case, the poison is more visible, that's all.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
France is set to generate 76% of its power needs through the nuclear option. Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reac tion/readings/french.html
"He who throws mud, loses ground." - proverb
Exactly. Nuclear power is not what it used to be in the 70s and 80s. The reactors are quite safe nowadays, especialy the N-type (which the Chinese are also developing). I am for safeguarding the environment but we have to be rational about this, nuclear is efficient and cleaner. Nuclear power has been "labeled" as evil and dangerous but other energy sources, such as coal, tend to cause a lot more damage which is difficult to measure. For example, coal mining alone, is the cause of lung illnesses and lung cancer among people who are exposed to the dust. But when burned (and if the mining is not done properly) this same dust spreads among a larger popullation. I come from a country where the main source of energy is coal. Not only is it insufficient for our energy needs but it also causes unimaginable polution. Totaly opposite with nuclear, where the reaction environment is contained, unless human error causes meltdown (such as in Chernobyl or the Three Mile Island).
--gks
The idea that nuclear waste might need to be protected "for thousands of years" has driven a lot of the debate. This is unfortunate, since it doesn't turn out to be particularly true.
One of the fundamental laws of radioactivity is that elements that are highly radioactive lose their radioactivity quickly, and elements whose radioactivity lingers a long time don't emit much radiation. The danger, of course, is those things that are in the middle along both axes. But as a point of comparison, it turns out that there is essentially no radiation left from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
It is true that the concentrated fission products and neutron-activated junk from current fission reactors would still be pretty hot after 20 years, but I suspect they'd be way less dangerous to climb around in than a 20-year-old dioxin spill. I think the evidence suggests that dumping the stuff deep-ocean in 50-year barrels would be a perfectly reasonable disposal method; it would be hard to convince the general public of that, though. Kind of sad, really—in many ways, nuclear power is our safest and most environmentally friendly energy alternative.
Not to mention that those two disasters (3-mile and Chernobyl) are irrelevant in in many other ways.
Chernobyl was because they ignored repeated safety mechanisms while doing an experiment with intentionally making the reactor in a Bad State - even repeatedly turning the failsafes off (I don't recall the exact number, less than 10 more than 5). This was mainly due to failure of the different experts to communicate (not really thier fault - it was illegal for them to do so). The engineers who "caused" the disaster had no idea what was going to happen, had the nuclear engineers been there things would have most likely been different. In the free world I imagine those nuclear engineer would have done something fairly drastic to stop it. Nor would that type of expirement ever have been allowed, and that is especially true now (no nuclear engineer would allow it to happen).
Three-mile was a true accident of a nuclear reaactor. The reason it is irrelevant is that the danger was exxagerated. A great example of this was the fear about a possible explosion because of the reactor filling with hydrogen. Reporters reported what would happen if that amount of hydrogen were to ignite, pointed out that a simple spark can cause it too. However, there was no oxygen present - it was designed to work in that manner. No engineer was worried about it. Problems with cameras was also a big story, but yet again was greatly exagerated (most of the ones that were out were tertiary systems - the engineers and disaster crews was never in the dark about what went on in the reactor). But I suppose "We are gonna dieeeeeee!!!!" made better news than "It's being contained, working like it is supposed to, don't worry". Not that everything was perfect, but there was little real danger to surrounding people and the environment. Hell, I'd be more worried about some of the high energy physics experiments out there - at least they are pushing the envelope, nuclear reactors are a pretty mature technology.
It's not even so much that reactors are much safer now (true none the less), but that reactors were *never* as dangerous as public opnion has them. Only if multiple layers of failsafes along with intentional criticality (such as Chernobyl) is there any real danger from an accident. Plus we can recylce much of the waste produced now into other isotopes so that is slowly going away, even then it has less impact overall and easier to contain than coal.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
People keep bringing up the "point" that hydrogen takes too much energy to generate. It DOESN'T HAVE TO BE done with electrocity! There are ways of doing it biologically.
, 00.html. html?pg=5
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,54456
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.04/mustread
It's basically using solar energy to make hydrogen, but without the trouble of solar cells.
The sun delivers several thousand times more energy to the earth in every second than we are currently using. Increasing use of hydroelectricity, wind power, and direct solar power (e.g. photovoltaics) are all means of making more use of that non-depletable energy source.
Burning or fissioning anything that we have down here on earth is, by comparison, very short-sighted.
As to how quick we might switch over to those "alternative energy sources", you have to keep in mind that nuclear energy was heavily subsidized when it was initially developed, and nowhere near as much money has been put into the research of the other energy sources.
It's a question of priorities, and lining up your priorities with physical realities.
What a perfect example of why most of the public is so afraid of nuclear power....sheer, unadulteraded ignorance.
A nuclear reactor is in no way a nuclear bomb, for starters the enrichment of a commercial nuclear power plant is ~3% while a nuclear weapon requires an enrichment of around ~90%.
A nuclear power plant is in no way a nuclear weapon...not even close. They CANNOT create a nuclear reaction like that of a nuclear weapon that results in a massive explosion.
And as for terrorist stealing the "fuel", there's not a real possibility of that either. Do you think a group of terrorist is going to enter a facility, spend days pulling fuels rods, loading fuel rods that can be 40-100 feet long onto a semi, trucking them back to their home country and then spend months if not years processing them without being noticed or stopped?
Welcome to reality, I home you enjoy your stay.
> Yet it has displaced more people than any other power source.
As opposed to coal which "displaces" 30,000 people into their graves each year for just the US alone?
France has a huge leading technocracy. The decision to go mostly nuclear for electricity distribution was facilitated by there existing only one state-owned electricity producer (Electricité de France a.k.a. EDF) and by a mostly non-democratic decision-making process.
On the other hand there were never any huge, organized anti-nuclear protests in France, which was hit very hard by the first oil price hike in 1973. Anti-nuclear protests in recent years have been confined to sites where nuclear wastes were due to be dumped. However protesters were able to convince government to stop building new plants for many years, probably as there were enough capacity anyway.
As a geologist I can safely say that sticking it into a subduction zone is damn near ideal. Melting in a subduction zone is not caused by heat but by the water saturation of the rock carried down. You have to get quite deep before this happens as well. High level waste decays quickly as these things go, and the time between something starting subduction, at maybe a couple of meters a year, and starting to melt, at maybe a few kilometers down is more than enough for a considerable amount of the radioactivity to dissapear. Combine that with the fact that the magma itself is radioactive (magma is molten partially due to it's actinides and transuranic radionuclides) and you can see a small barrel of waste is not really any real problem. The biggest problem is missing the subduction zone and having the barrel sit on the sea floor. Since you would have to engineer it for this eventuality it's simpler and safer to just engineer it to those specs and stick it in Yucca mountain or a similar site in Europe and let it decay there instead.
This is largely due from the incredibly rapid decline of the North Sea oil and gas fields.
d =630622
Britain developed the North Sea oil and gas in the 70s, this largely saved its economy by providing three decades of cheap oil and natural gas. However, the good times are now about to abruptly end. Oil production is down dramatically- nearly 50% since 1999.
In fact it fell 13% in just the last year! http://realtimenews.slb.com/news/story.cfm?storyi
In fact the North Sea is now well down on its peak production, and the UK will now be reliant on Russia and the various OPEC countries, many of whom are in decline themselves. The global competition for oil and gas is immense.
Unless the UK can commit to a new generation of nukes, the future here will be very dark indeed.
France imports electricity in the summer because they have problems cooling their nuclear power plants. (Low water in the rivers.)
>uranium is as finite as oil and gas
No it isn't. You should learn about BREEDER REACTORS. They make more fuel than they consume! There are several trillions of tons of otherwise useless Thorium-232 and Uranium-238 that can be turned into reactor fuel for essentially free.
Breeder reactors, however, can be dangerous and also politically sensitive because of military applications potential. Not many countries built them due to these concerns.
I believe you. There are a few problems however.
The first problem is that a planet relying on nuclear power for its long term energy needs is going to need a large number of reactors for a long time. The more reactors, the more chances for the odds to come up; the longer we use them, the more likely a failure. Reactors could be much safer than ever before and still be unacceptably dangerous over time and widespread deployment.
The second problem is that the consequences of failure are so severe. A bad reactor incident could render some european nations uninhabitable in their entirity. With stakes like that, some people are disinclined to roll the dice at all.
The thrid one is that, as already observed, there is a perceived shortage of trustworthy information. Salemen are, of course, going to say the risk is vanishingly small, politicians have a tendancy to to present as facts anything they think will serve their political ends and scientific reports that don't report the results desireced by those who commissioned them rarely see light of day. It seems as if the only way any of us can ever really have any confidence in reactor design would be to get a PhD and a job working on reactor design. Sadly, that's not an option for most of the populace, while those that do are contractually prohibited from sharing their findings.
The lack of trust is, assuming the figures add up, the showstopper. It's hard to see how we can have confidence in any design review, to say nothing of operational procedure after a plant is commissioned. Come up with an answer to that - and I don't mean a bug ad campaign - and we might get somewhere. In the meantime, I can't help sympathising with the NIMBYs
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Nuclear energy and Hydrogen are two effective ways to counter the diminishing fossil fuels. Once the heavy industries and transportation shifts to these alternative fuels, the world doesn't have to depend on Middle-East anymore.
A more immediate solution to dependance on oil and the middle east is actually by making petroleum from coal (or natural gas). The Germans widely used the Fischer-tropsch process during the second world war, and was later used by South Africa during the oil embargo against the apartheid regime.
If sharp increases in oil prices occur, which they will, demand for coal and gas will subsequently sharply increase as well, because the world needs petrol. Unfortunately most power stations in the world use these fuels as well; this could easily make nuclear the most economical option in the long term.
- It's way, way more expensive than anything we're currently using, including wind power. That's why wind farms have been going up all over the place, not solar arrays.
- We can't store energy cheaply enough, and on a large enough scale, to run an electricity grid.
- Neither of these problems are going to be solved quick enough to prevent China and India, particularly, building the biggest set of coal-fired power stations, belching lethal pollutants (which will kill millions of their own citizens) and greenhouse gases (which might just send the US and Europe into an Ice Age, flood much of Bangladesh, send Australia into perpetual drought, and so on...), the world has ever seen.
Nuclear energy is the only thing that's available now that can replace coal and gas at anything like a comparable cost and without releasing greenhouse gases.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The last time I brought this up here some brainwashed loony started going on about how fly ash should go into some sort of nuclear waste repositry instead of building materials, automotive putty etc.
Remember, anyone that talks about a one true energy source is selling something or has been conned.
You didn't even read the very Wikipedia article that you linked to yourself did you? Search it for "Doppler broadening" and try, please please try, to wrap your mind around the concept that far, far smarter people than you have done the math on this.
Just in case you're too lazy still to go read, I'll quote for you:
"When a pebble-bed reactor gets hotter, the more rapid motion of the atoms in the fuel decreases the probability of neutron capture by 235U atoms by an effect known as Doppler broadening..
A pebble-bed reactor thus can have all of its supporting machinery fail, and the reactor will not crack, melt, explode or spew hazardous wastes..
These issues are not just theory. This exact test was performed (and filmed!) with the German AVR reactor (See link below). All the control rods were removed, and the coolant flow was halted. Afterward, the fuel balls were sampled and examined for damage. There was none."
Now just accept that you were wrong and move on with your life.
It probably will happen though, as our existing nuclear plants (especially Pickering and Bruce) are nearing the ends of their lives, and the govt. wants to phase out our fossil fuel plants because they contribute to the smog problem in southern Ontario every summer. And with increasing electricity consumption, especially during the hot summers, we are faced with the threat of rolling blackouts and having to buy electricity off of Quebec and the US in order to meet demand.
This was in the alternator, not the reactor. An alternator is basically a simple electromagnet spinning at 3000rpm {in civilised countries} inside a coil of many turns of thick copper wire. Two brush contacts are required to supply DC to the electromagnet. The excitation current initially has to come from an external power source but once the machine is up and running, it is had from the output {this is no perpetual motion machine, most of the input work comes from whatever is turning the spindle, and exciting the magnet needs very little power}.
The fact that the engine was turned by a nuclear reactor really is irrelevant and only adds "scare value" to the story. The worst that could happen would be for the spindle coupling to shear off safely as it was designed to do, and the engine would run free until the speed limiter cut in as it was designed to do.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
That's why we shouldn't be building old-style slow reactors that do only a single reaction on the fuel. The US government has been against breeder reactors because they can be used to generate munitions-grade plutonium, but there are newer types of breeder reactors which generate contaminated plutonium, perfectly useful for continuing the reaction, but not for building bombs. And re-reacting the fission products will get rid of long-lived nuclear waste, which means less uranium is needed to begin with, and there is no need for 10,000-year waste dumps when you have waste half-lives measured in decades.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Cities block wind much more than wind farms ever could. The concerns you raise are simply ridiculous.
It has become a fashionable trend to look for downsides to all new solutions, equating tiny and/or unknown downsides of the new solution with the large and known downsides of the existing ones. It is a lot like Luddism.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The Malthusian concept that there can only be a limited population is no longer relevant because a key requirement, that technology cannot make food farming more efficient, does not hold today. For a good analysis, see Julian Simon's info.
For example, most people in the US were farmers just 100 years ago, but today barely 2% of Americans are farmers, yet they are farming more food. The amount of food produced per area has tremendously increased as well. Technological advances to allow this include pesticides, better crop types, better irrigation, more efficient irrigation techniques, better soil planning, GPS-based maximization of resources, and much more.
Already the Green Revolution has saved a billion people from starvation based on seeds from first-generation genetic engineering (using radiation and mutagens).
Across the planet, hunger is mostly a function of bad economies, and occur in countries where economic freedom is low and corruption is high, as well as during times of war. While famine events are set off by environmental issues, when these same issues happen to countries with well-developed economies they are easilly shrugged off.
There is plenty of food in the world, and as more people become richer and can acquire new technology, these people will produce even more food.
Do me a favour. Have you any idea how large the oceans are? (about 1.37 billion km^3) Besides, they are already about 45,000 commercial vessels at sea, each using on average, say, 10MW's for propulsion. If only half of them are at sea at any one time, they're still pumping over 200GW into the oceans, and have been for years. Also the energy in the sea is renewable as it derives from the Sun (heating) and the Moon (tides) so we can never deplete all its energy.
Would this be like the effect buildings have on airflow? Do you think it would be any worse than building a town? Besides, how big is a wind farm going to be? The atmosphere continues up to about 90km (the mesopause). In reality a wind farm has no more effect downstram than a small forest would, so perhaps it would be a good thing as so many forests have disappeared. As for cooling the air, the effect is minimal, but hopefully it would make up for all the heat we are pumping into the atmosphere from other sources.
Plus the article that asserted this in the first place is crap and only has been cited in the media and not other scientific papers (prove me wrong someone).
Peer reviewed science:
Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants J. P. McBride, R. E. Moore, J. P. Witherspoon, R. E. Blanco
Science, New Series, Vol. 202, No. 4372 (Dec. 8, 1978) , pp. 1045-1050
Abstract
Radiation doses from airborne effluents of model coal-fired and nuclear power plants (1000 megawatts electric) are compared. Assuming a 1 percent ash release to the atmosphere (Environmental Protection Agency regulation) and 1 part per million of uranium and 2 parts per million of thorium in the coal (approximately the U.S. average), population doses from the coal plant are typically higher than those from pressurized-water or boiling-water reactors that meet government regulations. Higher radionuclide contents and ash releases are common and would result in increased doses from the coal plant. The study does not assess the impact of nonradiological pollutants or the total radiological impacts of a coal versus a nuclear economy.
You've never been to Iceland, have you? Distances in Iceland are pretty huge, at least once you get out of the rather miniscule towns.
Tidal energy comes from the kinetic energy of the spinning earth. The daily rotation of the earth is slowing down (hence the leap second added to 2005) due to "friction" from the tides. Harnessing the tidal energy might increase that drag slightly, or it might not. Jury is still out. In the mean time, the moon recedes by a couple of centimeters every year. This process stops when both the earth and moon have the same face pointing at each other all the time -- a day and a (lunar) month will be the same... at around 40 of today's days, IIRC.
Waves are created by wind, so harnessing wave energy is indirectly harnessing wind energy.
THe whole "Energy Sink" argument is stupid anyway. We aren't in a closed system, so we can afford all the energy sinks we want, as we get enough solar energy in a day on this planet to feul our civilization for the next 1000 years. It's about packaging the energy into useable forms.
I'm not going to stop charging my cell phone battery simply because it's a "net energy loss". The fact that I have transformed the energy into a nice chemical bundle is well worth the loss of energy in the process.
Graphite burns. Shit, there goes the reaction moderator. Oops. What's that you say? The temperature is now over 1100 degrees centigrade. Darn! That's the melting point of uranium. Looks like the balls, already disinegrating, will now all flow into a big puddle at the bottom of the reactor. Reaching... critcal mass? Will there be an explosion now? I'm not nuclear physisist, but this all seems so potentially..... unsafe....
YES! The moderator is gone! Oh, wait you apparently don't know what a moderator is for. It is there to slow down the neutrons, so they can initiate another fission reaction if the neutrons are not slowed down the U-235 doesn't absorb them, resulting in a halting of the fission reaction. So, burning off the graphite moderator will halt the fission reaction. Melting the Uranium together will also halt the fission reaction for the same reason.
Oh, and the fuel is not metallic uranium it is uranium oxide with a melting point of 2800C. Not likely to happen. Oh and if you read more of the wikipedia entry you would have noted the layer of inflammable silicon carbide in the pebble that is not flammable, and thus acts as a fire break.
So, basically the entire danger in the pebble bed reactor is a chemical fire. And, said fire would occur on the outside of the pebbles, the pebbles and the grains within them would likely be mostly intact due to the silicon carbide layer. Even if the pebbles broke down the grains inside would not leave the reactor as they are too big to float on air. And, have not melted let alone vaporized. And, the loss of the graphite results in the halting of the fission reactions. So, basically a chemical fire near radioactive material, which while extinguishing by menas other than waiting for the fuel to burn off may be difficult does not result in the release of radioactive material... Well no more radioactive material than any other fire.
This is the key to newer reactor designs. The goal is to require constant intervention to keep a reaction going, if any or every human intervention is removed (moderators, coolants, etc...) there is no reaction.
It is amasing how much disinformation and outright lies have been told over the years. Without a firm grasp of the facts many solvable problems are viewed as impossible. In part - this was the objective of the disinformation campaigns.
First some terminology:
Natural uranium......... 99.3% U238, 0.7% U235
Depleated Uranium....... 99.7% U238, 0.3% U235 (varies: 0.2%-0.4% U235)
Reactor grade uranium... 96.0% U238, 4.0% U235 but this varies also.
Slightly enriched(CANDU) 99.1% U238, 0.9% U235 (varies: 0.9%-2.0% U235)
Spent fuel.............. 95.0% U238, 1.0% U235, 1.0% Pu, 3% crud (varies)
Reactor grade here refers to Low Enriched typically used for the USA light water pressurized reactors.
In the spent fuel, the U235 fraction can be as low as 0.4% and the Pu fraction is composed of Pu239 and Pu240. The Pu isotopes are practically impossible to separate and the Pu240 is so reactive that it is questionable - although probably possible - to have use as a bomb. A dirty weapon is possible.
The Candu fuel cycle starts with 99.3% U238 and 0.7% U235. The spent fuel is about 0.23% U235 and 0.27% Pu.
The Thorium fuel cycle converts Th to U233 which is as good as U235 for weapons and which can be easily chemically separated from the thorium.
---------------
It should be painfully obvious to just about everyone that only about 3% of the mass of the spent fuel is crud. This is the nuclear waste and it _can_ be burned up several ways including spallation. The _other_ 97% is fuel. Furthermore the spent fuel from a light water pressurized reactor would generally be considered enriched for a CANDU reactor.
Fuel reprocessing removes the "crud" and allows over 97% of the "spent fuel" to be elegible to be stuffed right back into the reactor.
So why isn't reprocessing used? Well - in Europe it is. The USA in a magnificent display of stupidity and circular thinking decided to go it alone and proclaim that a once through fuel cycle is the _only_ way to go. Part of of the political support for this stems from the build up of stock piles of "spent fuel" which the public is told has no use. It does - its future reactor fuel. By analogy - if someone were to dump a litre of crud in a barrel of oil we certainly wouldn't call it "spent oil"! We'd figure out a way to remove the crud. However I can remember my father dumping "waste oil" on the ground - hopefully we now collect it and re-refine it.
So one faction of the anti-nuclear crowd realised that keeping large stockpiles of deemed "waste" around gave them something to point their fingers at. Another faction perhaps with some justification just didn't want anyone to develop the technology to recycle the fuel because this does involve building plants that can separate the Plutonium. Also - by shortening the exposure time of the fuel mix the ratios of Pu 239 to Pu 240 can be controlled with the Pu 240 fraction reduced to under 7%. This is weapons grade plutonium. Yet another faction didn't want competition from a viable nuclear industry so they supported anything that generally doesn't make much sense.
Now the thing is to look at the issue of depleated verses natural uranium. The enrichment process is expensive and still leaves about 1/2 of the original U235 in place.
As such - there is very little difference in radioactivity between natural and depleated uranium. To say one is "safe" and the other is "unsafe" is splitting hairs. They are about the same.
In fact - if we look at "spent fuel" and reprocess it to remove the highly radioactive fraction - then what is left over is very similar to both "natural" and "depleated" uranium... it just has a little plutonium. The 1/2 life of plutonium makes it more radioactive than uranium. However one must also realise that since both uranium and plutonium are very heavy metals, they act as excellent sheilds for radiation... more effective for instance than lead.
What this all boils down to is that there is very little r
Everyone's aware that nuclear power accounts for 80% of electrical production in France, right? 16 countries get more than 25% of their electrical production from nuclear power.