Slashdot Mirror
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)
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?
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 ...
Right. Try telling that to the folks who used to live in Chernobyl.
Beautiful straw man there. Read this: How many died? Oh, and while we are at it, lets compare the number of deaths due to the mining of coal....
I think you will find that Nuclear power (as long as it is not used as a weapon) is considerably safer than coal on the whole.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
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
...even though nuclear power releases less radioactive material than burning coal.
If you've ever been near to a coal fire you'll know that it releases a LOT of radiation in the infra-red and visible light spectra. Scary but true.
For safety purposes, it's best to keep the room convection cooled and to wear dark glasses, to avoid the hazards of getting warm or being able to see.
This has been a public safety post.
I don't particularly want to see more reactors built but it is starting to look inevitable. But if we have to build them at least look at safer designs like pebble reactors which, unless anyone else on the board has more information, look like a better option.
Of course we could drastically reduce the power needs of the populace if we just saved more energy. Leaving computers on all night, and worse monitors, is shockingly wasteful and we need tax incentives to insulate the current housing stock and regulation on new building projects. I'm over in Finland a lot and they are the puppies packet at this sort of thing; the average modern home needs one or two wood stoves to meet most energy needs.
It's also important to remember that the major cost on nukes comes not in building the things, but in dismantling them and storing the waste - something that the pro-nuke lobby often forgets.
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
Well, I have relatives who live near Chernobyl's exclusion area. So I know a little more about the disaster, and it's not as bad as the press says. The actual number of casualities is 'only' 56 and estimated number of people with Chernobyl-related illnesses is about 5000.
That's bad. But not as bad as the number of lung cancers caused by soot from coal or oil powerplants.
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.
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
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
1) It's not cost efficient, even when compared to wind.
2) It's dangerous. (That's a really good article, by the way. It should be required reading for anyone commenting on this Slashdot story.)
We really need to look toward alternatives (wind, solar-thermal, solar tower, wave, tidal, biomass...) if we intend to keep consuming power at current rates. (alternatives are also great for generating hydrogen, because the hydrogen can be a storage medium to account for the unreliability of sources like wind.)
-Daniel
Ownyourphone.com. Custom ringtones, cheap and easy
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.
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
Finland as the nation which is building the new reactor. Was heavily critized for it when the decision went through to start the construction work...
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
There is no way to safely and durably sustain the energy consumption rates of the so-called Western civilization. We can go by with it only because we really are a very small minority. If the whole world switched to the same lifestyle ...
Really, it's all about consuming less, not producing more.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Damn... When will someone make a working Tokamak (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak)? Nuclear fusion is the future! Cheap, clean energy, from hidrogen plasma.
>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.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
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
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.
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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 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!
Generally the friction caused by the subduction creates immense heat, melting the rock layer that is subducted. When the rock melts, superheated steam causes volcanoes to form above the subduction zone. For an example, see http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~leeman/Cascades.gif
So unless you want volcanoes of nuke waste (!) it might be better to bury it in a geologically stable area, such as the middle of a continent.
Logically, if they started reprocessing waste, it would be such a small amount you would only need a single salt mine or similar.
A point I haven't read in this discussion yet:
I find it rather funny, when after the recent gas troubles German politicians proposed nuclear power as a means to make Germany independent from resource imports.
I realy would like to know where in Germany the uranium mines are located! The European countries have to import uranium as they have to import oil!
And even for those countries who have there own uranium sources, uranium is as finite as oil and gas, estimates range from twenty to sixty years. Considering the price for the development and building of new power stations and the waste problem (including the old plants!) I realy wonder if it is worth it!
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.
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.
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!.
Shipping refrigerated liquid H2 isn't exactly cheap, ya know.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Yes, but that wasn't revealed in TFA until paragraph 3, and so no-one read that far...
Mark
Liked this comment? Why not buy me something nice
Low levels of ionizing radiation seems to be actually beneficial to human health.
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This is called radiation hormesis. And this theory started after they found that people who lived in such a distance from hiroshima and Nagasaki that they received low radiation doses. And, years later, this population, exposed to radiation, had much lower cancer rates than non-exposed similar populations.
You can check some references:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v5/n1s/full/7
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00019A
http://www.angelfire.com/mo/radioadaptive/inthorm
http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/2004/Hormesis-
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
"What happened" was that throughout the 1970s, in the UK, trade union top brass -- everyone from shop stewards upward -- consistently and seriously abused their power, until ordinary employees ended up working for the Union and not the Company. All this came to a head with the Miners' Strike of 1984, and Thatcher took extreme measures to curb the power of trade unions.
Every one of the UK's coal mines eventually closed down, and every one of the UK's coal miners went on the dole. Coal was imported from abroad, and gas boilers were {secretly} subsidised to reduce the demand for coal as a heating fuel for buildings. Even some power stations were converted from coal to gas.
The coal mines can't even be re-opened as private concerns, because modern health and safety legislation -- and the hordes of ambulance-following lawyers with their "Blame and Claim" mantra -- effectively makes coal mining in the UK next to illegal. To do it "by the book" would make burning pound notes more cost-effective than buying coal.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The Simpsons are responsible for global warming on this planet. More than any other group the Simpsons franchise alone has turned the average person againt nuclear power. Once the Simpsons gets so boring the endless repeats finally die, then nuclear power stations will become acceptable again. Its simple really.
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.
This is misleading - naturally occurring uranium is much less radioactive than products from nuclear fission. I would quite happily pick up a fuel rod before it goes into a power plant but I wouldnt go near one once it comes out. The uranium from coal combustion is relatively harmless.
---
The point is that if you put uranium into a reactor, some of it undergoes fission into other substances. It turns out that a lot of these substances are very radioactive. OTOH anything radioactive in the earth would have decayed ages ago so naturally occurring stuff is not really very radioactive, relatively speaking anyway.
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.
Supplement that with wind, and nuclear to fill your power budget and you've reduced your reliance on the politics of oil-producing nations.
As for transportation, imagine the above power sources pumping electricity into a transport system where the vehicles pick up energy from the infrastructure. You've just imagined electric railways. Get lots of rail infrastructure, get the bulk of the freight onto rail, get more passengers on the railways.
Now all we need is someone to produce some sort of industrial complex that *produces* natural gas in a clean and efficient way, and we'll all be mostly happy when the oil and gas runs out.
Again I ask you, where is there a large-scale tidal power station in operation? How likely is it that coastal communities are going to allow their harbours to be choked with industrial machinery? Considering the difficulties in even siting a windfarm, I would say not bloody likely.
Solar towers are more pie-in-the-sky dreaming. Sure it might work in some places in the world, at fantastic cost; but not useful for 99% of the worlds population.
The supply of oil and gas is a huge factor- the price is about to rocket upwards as the supply gets tight, this is the reason new nukes are crucially necessary. The green movement with its cold-war-era anti-nuke stupidity is starting a movement alright- to coal and runaway global warming. Supreme irony that.
can anyone say "yabba dabba doo" ?
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
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.
"This processing does generate CO2."
Not if the electricity required to do it comes from a nuclear plant.
Besides which , last time I looked mining, transporting and refining
fossil fuels took energy too.
"One of the estimates for the amount of fuel left in easlily mineable conditions would give us nuclear power for some 50 years or so"
I would suggest you go read up on nuclear fuel reprocessing.
"Peak sun is in my personal guess still not for another 3.5 billion years."
Yeah , solar cells will work well in the artic circle in winter.
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?
Ha ha ha. Yeah , all those coal plants in eastern europe had managers just
jumping up and down to fit those filters and buy expensive "clean" coal as
soon as the russians retreated.
Get a clue.
- 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 nuclear issue can be summarised thus:
A) Do you want to take the small risk of radioactive waste leaking into the
enviroment in a few hundred years time which with an extra few centuries
of technology our descendents probably won't have an issue cleaning up anyway?
or
B) Do you want to take the very large risk of continuing using fossil fuels
creating CO2 and sending the climate on a rollercoaster to hell and us along
with it?
Seems to me its a fairly simple choice.
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.
Most of the electricity-using devices in the house are anachronisms and the discrepancy between what we actually use and what is practical will increase.
I'm wondering how long it will be before houses and other buildings will get re-tooled completely for energy efficient devices. A second set of wiring for 12 V DC or something similar would be one option, if done right. I'm seeing all kinds of power-eating wall warts that consume power as long as they're plugged in, regardless of whether the device they power is active or not.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
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.
From the article: He [Chirac] said the government will set up this year an independent authority to oversee the safety and security of France's nuclear power industry.
Probably a little off-topic but...
Europe warms to Nuke ? C'mon who's surprised ?That we are all gonna rely on nuclear power is no news, no surprise because simply said we (western folks) are too energy greedy to have any alternative providing sufficient power. This last statement is exemplified by Germany position: one of the most radical decision was made about getting rid of all nuclear power plant by 2020. Here we are (2006): there is no choice but to have nuclear, because it is today the only way to satisfy our sick demand. And Germany says "well maybe..."
The hijacking toward weapons... Chirac's statement is IMO *the* thing to be noticed because it relates to nuclear safety. Indeed today the main problem with nuclear power plant is human hijacking with goals of producing nuclear weapons. Mr. Charpak (physics Nobel price), Garwin and Journé explains well that the priority for now (I mean Monday 9 Jan 2006) is to set up an independent international authority with all powers: zero delay, unplanned inspections in all plants; no exceptions in every country. The priority is really to control precisely what happens with all nuclear fuel materials as well as waist materials.
Mr. Chirac wants to create a national authority ? Good. Not enough. Let's go for this international one which so much needed.
Go and read this book De Techernobyl en Tchernobyls (fr) (ref below). Pretty amazing things to be learned. To get a picture of how serious the problem is see the old The Russell-Einstein Manifesto. BTW discover the little known Pugwash organisation.
About availability of nuclear fuel. In the same book it is explained that sea water contains uranium. Precisely (page 195): Estimated 2.10^9 tones are available in sea water. By 1998 the Japanese estimated extraction cost at 100 USD per Kg. That could supply 2000 traditional nuclear power plant for 5000 years. So... it seams there is some FUD about fuel availability.
Reference: (fr) - "De Techernobyl en Tchernobyls" - September 2005 - G. Charpak, R.L Garwin, V. Journé - Edition Odile Jacob - ISBN 2-7381-1374-5.
Bye. Z.
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.
There's something that everyone seems to be missing: Every kilowatt-hour saved is better than a kilowatt-hour being generated. Instead of taking more resources and polluting more to produce an additional kilowatt-hour so that we can continue to use heat^H^H^H^H light bulbs instead of switching to LEDs or CF bulbs or just turning off the lights when you leave a room. Putting more people onto existing capacity is better than eating up land to build power plants.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
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!
Yeah, until the waste containers start leaking and leach material into water tables.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for nuclear power, but I'm not convinced that we've got a decent mechanism for storing the waste yet. Maybe we could team up with these guys.
Incidentally, is there a nuclear physicist in the house? How does the waste from pebble reactors compare to traditional rod reactors when it comes to waste disposal? --- SER
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?
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
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.
That's only because of the horribly inefficient way we 'burn' Uranium; if we did even the most basic, 50-year-old reprocessing of spent fuel, there would be more than enough nuclear fuel to last generations. And that's without fast plutonium breeders, which personally I think are one of the most brilliant inventions that nobody seems to care about (unless you're interested in building an atomic bomb). They really are like a car that you can fill full of water, drive 300 miles, and then pump out a tank full of gasoline.
Right now we use Uranium pretty much like we use oil: we put it in a power plant, split it into some waste components, extract a little energy from it, and throw away everything else. It's totally non-renewable, totally wasteful. It's nothing like the system that was envisioned for nuclear power back 50 years ago.
Frankly I think it's a mistake to build any new nuclear plants right now, when they would probably be of the old type. All we're doing is using up a finite resource (uranium) in a hideously inefficient way. It would be better for our civilization in the long run if we waited until we were really desparate and willing to break down the political barriers to the full fuel cycle before building new plants -- that way we wouldn't waste nuclear fuels in the same way that we wasted fossil ones.
Years from now, maybe generations from now, people are going to look back at the reactors currently operating for commercial power generation in the U.S. and cringe. The wasted potential energy in the fuels that they consume is just enormous, and some day, we're going to wish we hadn't squandered it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So don't refrigerate it. Fill balloons with it, let them float to mainland, drain hydrogen, and bulk ship the empty balloons back to Iceland.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Yes, there are too many nattering nabobs of negativity. Yeah right, like harnessing wave power is going to change the oceans....
I think one of the problems with these nabobs is they just don't have any idea of scale. The oceans are really, really huge. So is the Sun. It would take tidal powered installations many orders of magnitude larger than what could be built in the next hundred years to make any difference.
Wind power does have its drawbacks, but where it is used well it is quite useful. Off of Cape Cod, for instance, is a great place for wind turbines. I think Kerguelen would be even better, if it wer enot so remote.
What I am trying to say is we need to diversify our energy harvesting and distribution: oil, coal, wood, gas, nuclear, wind, tidal, solar, biogas as harvesting and electric, octane (gasoline), vegetable oils, biodiesel, hydrogen, organic gases, lithium, water, interia as storage and distribution. Probably more I've missed. Nuclear fission is a part of this: we need consistent and concentrated heat to do such things as smelt metals, and nuclear fission can do this with less pollution than the alternatives of coil and petroleum.
Fission plants become, as is well known, uneconomical below 50 megawatts,
Is this still true? My understanding is that many of the newer designs could easily economically satisfy small community needs, must like gas and coal plants do today.
Any know?
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.
Wind power has the same problem, where the airflow downwind of a windfarm is colder, slower and more turbulent.
You just solved global warming!
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.
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.
Or you could just use the electricity as electricity, maybe?
If you're plugged in somewhere, sure. I think the ancestor post was looking for something more portable; yes, there are batteries, but those have their own environmental concerns for production.
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.
That's completely ridiculous of course and so are most of the arguments against developing nuclear power it's interesting to note that more people were killed on 9/11 than at Chernobyl and unlike the Chernobyl figures, which have been spun into fantasy by anti-nuclear environmental groups we can actually say that around 3000 people died on 9/11 because we found dead bodies or pieces thereof unlike Chernobyl where most of the body counts are the result of statistical extrapolations. But enviros haven't called for a cessation of air travel, probably because so many of them are rich and white and like to fly to places like Costa Rica for their vacations.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
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
Europe Warms to Nuclear Power
But not exactly to glowing reviews.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
What percentage of energy is lost in the process of turning water into H2 and O2?
From what I understand, current methods are remarkably inefficient.
+++ATH0
Seeing as how France currently gets 76% of her electricity from nuclear power, it's hard to imagine how she could get any warmer.
How much are you willing to pay for that hydrogen? 'Cause producing it, compressing it, storing it, transporting it, then pumping it into your car (where it will again need to be compressed) is wasteful and expensive. Hydrogen is not a viable solution IMO.
How much are people willing to pay for Gas? 'Cause finding it, drilling it, pumping it, transporting it, refining it, transporting it again, then pumping it into your car is expensive too. I'm not sure how Hydrogen would be much more wasteful than Gasoline. As for the compression required, that all depends on the setup. Assuming we can measure the gas acurately enough, just having a highly compressed source in the gas station tanks, and a gas tank with little compression, should supply a large ammount of compressed hydrogen for a full tank. Put a valve in the car or gas station pump that keeps the car tank pressure from getting too high and you can have the gas station tank compressed at a much higher pressure than the car gas tank.
The only issue here is how much it will cost. Given that Hydrogen vehicles don't have to be piston based and could be turbine based, they can be more efficient (reducing effective cost). Couple this with electric vehicles as a generator (in addition to a battery) and you have a possible replacement for petrol engines.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars