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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."
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.
only if you are using that a non fossil-fuel energy source to get that hydrogen. It is currently cheapest to get hydrogen from hydro-carbons. (if memory serves)
Everyone knows that nuclear power is clean. Europeans are concerned about two other things:
1. Disaster. Nuclear engineers say that the chance of a meltdown is very small, but this argument is worthless after Harrisburg and Chernobyl. People in general are mathematically clueless, but they do know that the risk is real and not small after these two events.
2. Waste storage. Where do we put the waste products after burning it? People are afraid it might pollute the environment, perhaps not now but for furure generations. It will have to be stored for thousands of years. Shooting it out in space is not an option to most, having pictures of an explosing Columbia in the mind.
Attitudes are changing now because people have to choose between a rock and a hard place, in the light of tough economic times and rising energy prices, and nuclear power is thus the pragmatic way to go. People will still be afraid of it, though.
Generally anyway, when things work as they are supposed to. But things happen. People worry about a catastrophic failure of a nuclear plant. A catastrophic failure of a coal-fired electric plant would result in minimal environmental damage and could be easily cleaned up. A catastrophic failure of a nuclear power plant on the other hand ...
The current British government also appears to be cautiously in favour of building a few more nuclear power stations to replace the ones due to be decommisioned in 2020 - the major barrier being that about half of the population is against them.
(We worry about things like the increasing amounts of radioactive waste in our dumps, possible indications of higher incidences of leukemia and cancer in areas like Sellafield, and risks of a serious accident.)
fortune -o
Nuclear power has promise, though. Especially if we can get IFR reactors going. There is sufficient fuel to power IFR type facilities for many many years. This results because the IFR is a breeder reactor which can utilize uranium 238 and damn near anything else that's densely radioactive. There isn't much of a future for standard fission reactors, and fast breeders are politically insane - but Integral Fast Reactors could really be the ticket for quite some time.
Or, at least until the oil gets so expensive we can't build computers to control the reactors...
RS
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When the russians reduced the gas supply to Ukraine last week, many of the big european countries, that get the gas from rusia realised what a voulnerable situation they were in. many countries get a large part of thir gas from russia.
In the European union there is now a debate going on each country having to produce more of its own energy. also the need to form a Musketeer agreement to stand against potential energy-blackmailing or catastrophes. Nuclear power is for most of the larger European countries a very viable sollution. that will greatly reduce the dependency of other countries.
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So, I live in Slovenia (I doubt any of you know where that is). But we have a nuclear plant. And it's been running for quite a while now. Because I've also studied physics I've found out, during some lectures, that the measurments taken around the nuclear plant show, that the grass around it recieves the exact same amount of the yearly dosage of radiation as something located far far away. Therefore, this energy is very clean, much cleaner than cole.
:-) ), we'll have to face it that we live in a world we created. Maybe we should build reactors underground, or in a separate nation somewhere in the middle of nowhere... It's all a possibility. Anything is better than coal.
Right, so, then a disaster happens. Well, chances are very slim for a disaster. Today, we have a higher safety regulation for operating of nuclear power plants, and we are not competing on who gets to restart the turbines faster (check this) without using safety measures.
Besides disaster possibility, the problem is also waste dispossal as a poster pointed out before me. Where to put it. You simply cannot dissolve the waste, or this is to expensive. And I don't think the problem with space dumping is the image of Columbia blowing up. Waste baskets can be made that whitstand such blasts. It's more of the awarness that we can't already pollute the space, since we fuc*** up mother Earth. And it's becoming an increasing security concern too with all the terrorists roaming around. Imagine a break-in into the waste storage facility. It's easy to make a dirty bomb. Breaking into the plant itself is much harder, although it's still a possibility.
In conclusion, I think we have to accept the risks of possible danger (we fly with airlens, but those also crash don't they?) if in turn, we get back a possibility for a cleaner environment. And until we develop things than can use all the free enegry just lying around and as long as we use things that rely on our supply of power (computers among other things
energy efficiency. The amount of heat energy alone that we throw away is staggering. In winter time, most UK high street stores heat their shops and leave heir doors open 'invitingly' onto the street. Almost every business PC in the UK is left switched on overnight, over weekends, and even when the employee goes on holiday, ditto the monitors. Streetlights are dumb, and left on throughout the night even where nobody is to be seen for miles. Almost every consumer device you buy has a power-wasting standby mode, and wastes huge chunks of energy as heat and noise.
Like it or not, we throw most of our energy away needlessly. People make no effort to save energy, and the energy consumption is rarely a factpr is purchase deicisons for consumer devices. This needs to change, and the best way to do this is to shift more of the tax burden onto energy by means of a carbon tax.
Building nuclear power so we can keep on throwing energy away is madness. Lets do the sensible thing and clamp down more on our wastefull consumption of the stuff.
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>Nuclear Power will get us over for a while. but hydrogen is bullshit. It takes
>more energy to make H than what you get from burning it. Therefore it is an
>energy sink, esp. if you get it from cracking H2O. It's better to simply use the
>electricity you make to crack the water As Electricity to Do Work than to blow it
>on H.
Hydrogen has the potential of being a way of tapping resources that are otherwise not easy to exploit. Iceland, for example, has huge geothermal potential but it isn't exactly easy to export that electricity out of the middle of the atlantic. Making H could be a decent way of doing so.
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Sorry but this is simply not the case. Typical solar panels even in 1994 would have a production energy pay-back period of around 50 months.
http://www.ecotopia.com/apollo2/pvpayback.htm
More modern cells are even better, typical payback of a couple of years depending on location.
On the other had financially speaking you are talking about 25 years to recoup the cost of installation, which is why adoption has to be promoted by governments as very few people are prepared to think that far ahead!.
Ohh puhleeease.. Have you realy been brain-washed enough by your government to see potential terrorist actions *everywhere*? We have been dragged into an Orwellian world with thousands of camera's and undercover agents to report everything about everyone. It's getting totally disgusting.
Here in Holland it gets so far that today they are taking down an entire forest in the name of 'safety' for Awacs planes that take-of and land just across the border in Germany. They could have lengthened the runway 300ft to get the same 'extra safety' but reality is they are afraid a potential terrorist may hide in the forrest to shoot an Awacs down. How incredibly sick!
Let's hide all rivers under a concrete shield. Terrorists may try to pollute them upstream and make the water undrinkable... Let's forbid air travel entirely, a terrorist may slip through security and turn the plane into a bomb.
Instead of seeing terrorists everywhere and trying to avoid every possible 'attack', deal with the reasons for people to turn into terrorists.
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A guided drop would cause a penetration of about 100 feet or so into silt, then it goes down a few more feet each year (mostly due to sediment buildup).
This seems a little extreme, especially considering that enriched uranium waste becomes only as radioactive as natural uranium in only 100 years. Which is a fraction of the time it takes for material to sink into the mantle.
May the Maths Be with you!
Keep reeding that wikipedia article. Newer breeder reactors use U-238 instead of U-235. That's enough Uranium for thousands of years, even calculating the ever increasing power demands.
As a bonus, breeder reactors are much safer since the core can't achieve cain reaction on it's own and therefore can't cause a melt down.
My other comment is funny
Oh really? Pray, tell me Einstein, just where does the radiation go? "Oh it's in the ashes." you say. Ah, so now we have radioactive ash to deal with instead of it being spread as an aerosol into the local atmosphere. So now your clean coal plant is producing radioactive ashes that must be disposed of. Just where is Europe putting it's "clean" coal ashes? Are they dumping it in your backyard?
Ah yes, the radioactive technetium being dispersed harmlessly into fast ocean currents, that made the UK government very popular in Norway and Iceland. Especially since we were told that the Sellafield project was a huge unprofitable mess, just kept because our former colony-power neighbour wanted enriched uranium for their nuclear weapons.
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Tidal power, Wave power, Hydroelectric power. All nice clean sources of power with reasonably good efficiency, ideal for coastal nations. Hydroelectric dams are ideal for mountainous nations with high precipitation.
Well, they *sound* nice and clean, but for hydroelectric power you need a large valley with nothing in it that you particularly want to keep. Huge areas of Scotland were submerged in the 1950s and 1960s to form hydro-electric dams. No-one knows what may have been lost, because the areas weren't particularly closely surveyed.
For a lot of people the jury is still out on tidal and wave power. It works, and it works well, but what are the effects of absorbing that much energy from the sea? Don't forget - the energy has to come from somewhere. Wind power has the same problem, where the airflow downwind of a windfarm is colder, slower and more turbulent. That shows it has a very direct effect on the atmosphere. Whether it's a good one or not, we don't know.
Hydroelectric dams are not "clean." They are in reality far from it.
While they don't release toxic gasses into the atmosphere directly, the contribute to vast water pollution problems by blocking the natural flow and aeration of rivers. A quickly flowing river is like a sewage treatment plant -- you can dump quite a bit of organic waste into it upstream, and it will be clean by the time it runs into the ocean. However if you dam that river and make long stretches of it stagnant, the water flowing downstream of the dam will be much more polluted.
This is a significant problem in Maine, which has high amounts of organic waste from paper mills. This wouldn't be a big problem, and is not in excess of what could be handled by many rivers (e.g. the Androscoggin) except that hydropower projects have removed many rapids on the river and cause the pollution to remain. There are experiments to artifically aerate the water behind dams, just as you'd do in a fish tank, by pumping air down to the bottom and allowing it to bubble up, but they're not nearly as effective as rapids used to be. And of course you pretty much kill the native fish population overnight, if they are one of the species that swims upstream to spawn.
I can imagine in other areas that organophosphate pollution from fertilizers is a similar problem when you dam a river. Plus regular old sewage effluent can be problematic if the river isn't flowing quickly.
There is a public perception that dams are "clean energy" but in reality this isn't precisely true. There are huge ecological downsides to hydropower projects, which are not normally considered (and definitely weren't considered when many of them were constructed, in their defense). Arguing against nuclear power by saying "build more hydro dams!" isn't a particularly useful response.
To be perfectly honest, although nobody wants any sort of power generation facility in their back yard, I'd much prefer to have a nuclear power plant in my neighborhood, than to have my neighborhood be under 20' of polluted water.
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You are referring to Berkeley Power Station in the UK. You seem to be worried at 15 miles away. I work there and spend 25% of my life 150 meters from it, but I am not worried.
In fact I sat on the Berkeley decommissioning panel for a time. You seem to think there are great tasks involved in decommissioning but in fact most of it is a standard industrial demolition job. The high level waste (mostly the spent fuel) has long gone. The reason for the long time scales you mention is *not* because the tasks are huge or difficult, but to allow radiation levels of the components in the core to decay so the guys don't have to work in radiation suits. Not that it would hurt anyone to work for a time without suits now, but with guys having to work for months their dose would build up to non-permissible levels. There are also political reasons for the slow progess - local consultation, government indecision etc which we engineers find frustrating.
You seem to refer to what is called the "Safestore" scheme to cover the reactor core buildings with a tumulii and leave them for 140 years before final dismantling by which time there would be little radiation left to worry about. An alternative is to dismantle in the near future to a "green field". The decision is not yet made.
The BBC is not an authority on the costs. As I said there is no particular difficulty with dismantling but unfortunately both "sides" in this debate have an interest in talking up the costs. Nuclear opponents like yourself want to say "it's not worth it" and OTOH the nuclear industry wants as much as it can get from government for doing the decommissioning job. Don't quote me on that. In reality some of the figures quoted are absurd - as an engineer I do not know how I could begin to spend such money on a heap of iron and concrete.
And Oh! that concrete. Hard stuff to get rid of *if* they insist on a green field site. But nuclear power stations aren't special. Ever seen any estimates on what it would cost to get a motorway junction, hospital or airport back to a green field site? They won't last for ever either, but no-one seems interested in those costs.
The "tired old canard" : "nuclear power releases less radioactive material than burning coal" is perfectly relevant in the context of comparing normal operational background emissions from the plant, for example as ingested by a member of the public 15 miles away. Berkeley power station never created more than normal operational emmissions in its existence, and now it never will.