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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."
Somebody realised that existing nuclear reactors account for 10-15% of production in Europe and they're pretty much all due to be decommissioned within the next 15 years or so. With solar and wind power still impractical and increasing oil supply a risky prospect what else was going to happen?
We could get rid of waste by burying it deep in oceanic subduction zones, where the plates are moving downward. 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).
Recycling at it's finest. Nuke materials under miles of seawater + about 100 feet of mud, getting deeper all the time.
Just put it in a casing shaped like a torpedo, beefed up with an armor penetrating nose, and drive it to the sea floor. It'll be going fast when it hits, and it'll keep going down a long way.
Good luck digging that up again.
hanzie.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
2. Waste storage. Where do we put the waste products after burning it?
The waste material isn't actually that much of a problem. It's dangerous stuff, and you can't really "dispose" of it, I.E. leave it somewhere and forget about it. You've gotta live with it. Hundred of thousands of tonnes. But actually, it's not that much. Almost all of France's waste for the past 40 years sits in a place the size of a large warehouse.
The real concern, IMO (I studied electrical engineering), is more with the irradiated powerstation components. Older plants are virtually impossible to dismantle; your only option is to basically bury them on site.
The UK Windscale nuclear plant - now the Sellafield reprocessing plant, and soon probably to be re-badged the Ravengalss Wildlife park or something like that has a pipeline that put dissolved low-level waste into the sea. At first this sounds like a really, really bad idea. However, the Atlantic has about 10^13 curies of mixed radioactive stuff in it - a lot of it a duterium, tritium, C14, and a mess of heavy metals. You could dump all the waste that had ever been produced into the Atlantic, and provided you mixed it in well, you would never be able to detect the difference. The 1950's solution was to stick a pipe far enough into the ocean to get the waste into some of the fast currents in the north Irish sea, which should sweep it out into the Atlantic. It has been argued since that this did not qork quite as designed, but at the time this bit of the Irish Sea had been surveyed as well as anywhere. The other UK solution was to stick the stuff into drums and drop it into the mid-Atlantic. The drums were designed to burst half-way down, again dispersing the material into the fast ocean currents.
Compare this to the US idea of chucking solid waste into a concreted drum, and sending it right to the bottom. The bottom of the oceans are often quiet places where the water hardly moves. Fish and crustacea live in the rusting cans, and lay their eggs on the concrete. We are trawling for deep sea fish like grenadiers these days as the cod has virtually gone, so we may be getting it all back again - we don't know.
We seem to have lived through an age when Science was trusted to do anything, and the nuclear budget could be underwritten by weapons work; then through an age when Science was not trusted at all, and anything nuclear was controlled by evil warmongers. We might actually be heading for a balanced view. Coo!
I have now changed my mind twice about the issue of nuclear power. At any given time, I like to think, my opinions have been knowledgable, well-reasoned, and justified by current circumstances. Still, facts and circumstances change.
As a young science geek (I was born in 1952), I was excited by the possibilities of nuclear technology - power generation, of course, but also less obvious things like, say, canal excavation or spacecraft propulsion. Those were heady times, looking forward to the atomic age.
A few years later, we had developed a better understanding of some long term problems, most seriously the storage of radioactive waste. (High-level wastes are small in volume, but pretty much inimical to life; there are in addition large quantities of low-level waste and irradiated materials to deal with). I had also learned a lot more about the gulf between idealized science and the behavior of those governments and large corporations who were actually capable of building nuclear installations. I decided the risks were just too great to accept.
Today, with much more sophisticated reactor technologies, and at least a glimmering of real solutions to the waste storage problem, I think the risks of operating nuclear plants have become justifiable. And faced with the worsening consequences - moral, environmental, and political - of our world-wide petroleum addiction, nuclear power is the best alternative we have.
We have one reactor in Australia which is a lucas hights research reactor, for developing amoung other things, the radioactive isotopes used in medical diagnoses.
The story goes, my next door neighbor is actually a Safty analyst up there. Whenever he comes around for the odd cup of tea he enlightens me on a few facts, which i feel speak fairly generally for most of the western nations with reactors. A few of the major points are
1. The nuclear industry has grown up ALOT since the cold war era, and today there are rewards in place for safty record tracks, rather then being able to maintain the highest production levels.
2. A literally massive portion of the nuclear waste is infact harmless, various items used not even close the the reactor have to be carefully disposed off under government legistlation, even though they contain little more radiation then that absorbed by a shirt from a day on the beach.
3. The disposal methods avaliable for the classical highly radiactive waste have matured greatly without much public notice. The whole "to the moon theory" is as much of a joke as it is an insult to the industry in the 21st century, for one theres simply not enough waste produced to warrant it economically, let alone the safe risks involved in useing space dumping. Alot of people ignore the fact that alot of todays waste is going back into the earth from whence it came, and is as dangerous to people as raw amounts of uranium are if dug up intentionally. It comes out radioactive, it goes back radioactive. And in the proces generates electricity, industrial and medical materials. My neighbor is far more concerned about the pollution levels effecting peoples asthma.
4. My neighbor also conceeded at nuclear technology might not be as economical as other forms of energy production, but we both came to this conclusion. It is worth going that extra mile to ensure that we no longer produce greenhouse gases adversly affection the worlds environment and also, that in many circumstances renewable energy fails in terms of practicality and maturity.
So, for a more energy hungry world, that even having africa covered in wind farms couldnt feed, nuclear power seems to be the practical, and *arguably* economical choice for decreasing our reliance on fossile fuels and our harm to the environment. At least until *possibly* reaches maturity in the next 50 years or so.
In the case of tides, the energy basically comes from the earth's rotation. The intertial moment of earth is about 10^38 kg m^2, and the rotational speed is of course 2pi/day, which gives a total rotation energy of 2.6*10^29 J. Or put differently, a Terawatt energy production would correspond to a slowdown of about 10^-23 seconds per day (about 4 attoseconds per century).
That's of course assuming that energy would otherwise remain in the earth's rotation. Given that the water actually is stopped by the continents anyway, I doubt that. After all it's a fact that earth's rotation is slowed down through tidal forces about 5*10^-8 s/day (2 ms/century), i.e. the tidal forces dissipate about 5*10^15 Terawatt (well, actually part of that energy is not dissipated, but used to move the moon away from earth; I'm now too lazy to calculate that).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.