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."

Comments

Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Future

[KrisCowboy]

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.

Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut

[Dance_Dance_Karnov]

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)

this is a longterm stop-gap

[montyzooooma]

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?

Re:this is a longterm stop-gap

[Mudcathi]

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

Re:this is a longterm stop-gap

[cliffski]

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.

Re:this is a longterm stop-gap

[Rickler]

Thx for the link. It's amazing that over 90% of France's electricity is nuclear or hydro. Maybe it's because they didn't grow up learning about nuclear waste by watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons.

The sad truth.
Part of their popularity comes from the fact that scientists and engineers have a much higher status in France than in America. Many high ranking civil servants and government officials trained as scientists and engineers (rather than lawyers, as in the United States), and, unlike in the U.S. where federal administrators are often looked down upon, these technocrats form a special elite. Many have graduated from a few elite schools such as the Ecole Polytechnic. According to Mandil, respect and trust in technocrats is widespread. "For a long time, in families, the good thing for a child to become was an engineer or a scientist, not a lawyer. We like our engineers and our scientists and we are confident in them."

Europeans

[liangzai]

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.

Re:Europeans

[Nicolas MONNET]

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.

Re:Europeans

[JanneM]

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.

That was made a lot worse by proponents greatly overstating their case, effectively arguing that any accident is utterly theoretic and could never, ever happen in reality. When it did - two larger accidents, in Three-Mile Island and in Chernobyl, and numerous smaller incidents (like the Darwin Award winners in a Japanese plant that carted radioactive materials in ordinary buckets) - that effectively destroyed the credibility of the nuclear industry.

When people today say that 1. "Current reactor designs are a lot safer than the 30+ ones we use now"; and 2. "The risk is very, very small", people will say that 3. "You lied through your teeth to get us where you wanted the last time, and we bet you're doing the same this time around"

Re:Europeans

[po8]

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.

Re:Europeans

[bm_luethke]

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.

Re:Europeans

[Renegade Lisp]

Relying on nuclear power in the light of dwindling fossil fuel reserves is a very short-sighted approach. At the current rate of consumption, there is only enough Uranium on the planet for the next 50 years -- somewhat more if you start using more expensive, lower-quality reserves. So the problem is really just shifted into the future by a very small number of years, compared to human history or the history of the planet as a whole.

At the same time, we have an energy source right in our vicinity which is, for all practical purposes, non-depletable and delivers several thousand times more energy to our planet in every second than we are currently using. It would be the most logical thing to switch everything over to that energy source as quickly as possible -- since before long, we'll have to do that anyway.

Re:Europeans

[greppling]

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.

Well, the problem is that you have to store it for some 10,000 years. That's 2500 warehouses of pretty dangerous stuff, that you have to protect for a very long time. Protect it from criminals, terrorists, natural disasters. Again for 10,000 years!

And that's only the dangers we think of at the moment. Are you really so sure we will have a stable enough government for 10,000 years to come to guarantee just the basic protection of the waste storage sites?

It is beyond me to estimate the dangers of running a nuclear power plant, whether it is worth the risk. But the nuclear waste problem is what makes me want to get rid of nuclear power.

(But then, I am from Germany, probably the country most critical of nuclear power all over Europe.)

Re:Europeans

[NickFortune]

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.

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

Re:Europeans

[Dastardly]

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.

Containing a catastrophic failure is the problem

[Derling Whirvish]

even though nuclear power releases less radioactive material than burning coal

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 ...

O well-named one... just south of here,

[leonbrooks]

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.

They Aren't Alone

[kid-noodle]

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.)

Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut

[Ralph Spoilsport]

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.

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

get rid of waste

[Hanzie]

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.

Re:get rid of waste

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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.

The russians are partly to blame

[lyberth]

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.

My two $ 0.02

[anzev]

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.

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 :-) ), 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.

Re:My two $ 0.02

[bmgoau]

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.

Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut

[Walkiry]

>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.

The Windscale pipeline

[Richard Kirk]

Well, exactly. Stick it in solid form a hole in an earthquake zone. It starts leaking before it's halfway gone. You can't dig it up and re-seal it. We are all stuffed.

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!

Re:The Windscale pipeline

[Vintermann]

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.

Bad idea: volcanoes

[SHiFTY1000]

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.

Re:Bad idea: volcanoes

[Gandalf_the_Beardy]

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.

A Little Perspective

[Lucidus]

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.

Re:Solar panels are no good either.

[agingell]

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 puhlease...

[scsirob]

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.

Re:About the article

[Mark Hood]

Yes, but that wasn't revealed in TFA until paragraph 3, and so no-one read that far...

Mark

A little radiation is actually good

[Molina the Bofh]

Low levels of ionizing radiation seems to be actually beneficial to human health.

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= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1150419 7&query_hl=3&itool=pubmed_docsum

http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v5/n1s/full/74 00222.html

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00019A7 0-0C1C-1F41-B0B980A841890000&catID=4

http://www.angelfire.com/mo/radioadaptive/inthorm. html

http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/2004/Hormesis-T heory-Toxins27feb04.htm

On the Feasibility of Coal-Driven Power Stations

[alanxyzzy]

My old boss Otto Frisch wrote a satirical technical report On the Feasibility of Coal-Driven Power Stations

Introduction
The recent discovery of coal (black, fossilized plant remains) in a number of places offers an interesting alternative to the production of power from fission. Some of the places where coal has been found show indeed signs of previous exploitation by prehistoric men, who, however, probably used it for jewels and to blacken their faces at religious ceremonies.

The power potentials depend on the fact that coal can be readily oxidized, with the production of a high temperature and an energy of about 0.0000001 megawatt days per gram. That is, of course, very little, but large amounts of coal (perhaps millions of tons) appear to be available.

The chief advantage is that the critical amount is very much smaller for coal than for any fissile material. Fission plants become, as is well known, uneconomical below 50 megawatts, and a coal-driven plant may be competitive for small communities (such as small islands) with small power requirements.

Design of a Coal Reactor
The main problem is to achieve free, yet controlled, access of oxygen to the fuel elements. The kinetics of the coal-oxygen reaction are much more complicated than fission kinetics, and not yet completely understood. A differential equation which approximates the behaviour of the reaction has been set up, but its solution is possible only in the simplest cases. It is therefore proposed to make the reaction vessel in the form of a cylinder, with perforated walls to allow the combustion gases to escape. A concentric inner cylinder, also perforated, serves to introduce the oxygen while the fuel elements are placed between the two cylinders. The necessary presence of end plates poses a difficult but not insoluble mathematical problem.

Fuel Elements
It is likely that these will be easier to manufacture than in the case of fission reactors. Canning is unnecessary and indeed undesirable since it would make it impossible for the oxygen to gain access to the fuel. Various lattices have been calculated and it appears that the simplest of all, a close packing of equal spheres, is likely to be satisfactory. Computations are in progress to determine the optimum size of the spheres and the required tolerances. Coal is soft and easy to machine, so the manufacture of the spheres should present no major problem.

Oxydant
Pure oxygen is of course ideal but costly; it is therefore proposed to use air in the first place. However, it must be remembered that air contains 78% nitrogen. If even a fraction of that combined with the carbon of the coal to form the highly-toxic gas cyanogen, this would constitute a grave health hazard (see below).

Operation and Control
To start the reaction one requires a fairly high temperature of about 988oC. This is most conveniently achieved by passing an electrical current between the inner and outer cylinder (the end plates being made of insulating ceramic). A current of several thousand amps. is needed., at some thirty volts, and the required large storage battery will add substantially to the cost of the installation.

There is the possibility of starting the reaction by some auxiliary self-starting reaction, such as that between phosphine and hydrogen peroxide. This is being looked into. Once the reaction is started its rate can be controlled by adjusting the rate at which oxygen is admitted. This is almost as simple as the use of control rods in a conventional fission reactor.

Corrosion
The walls of the reactor must withstand a temperature of well over a 1000oF in the presence of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon monoxide and dioxide, as well as

Re:Nuke power safety

[Solandri]

> > Nuclear power simply has not killed very many people in its 52-year history.

> 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?

Keep reeding...

[drstock]

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.

Re:Dear Editor ...

[rnws]

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?

That's all the *confirmed* *economic* reserves...

[Goonie]

We haven't looked for uranium nearly as hard as we've looked for, say, oil. There's almost certainly a lot more of the stuff out there that we haven't found yet. In any case, if there's a supply crunch either "conventional" breeder reactors, or thorium breeders, are perfectly feasible, and we could supply the world's energy requirements with them for thousands of years. As for solar energy, this is a nice piece of religion that doesn't stack up for three very simple reasons:

1. 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.
2. We can't store energy cheaply enough, and on a large enough scale, to run an electricity grid.
3. 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.

Re:Containing a catastrophic failure is the proble

[dbIII]

even though nuclear power releases less radioactive material than burning coal

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). You can spot the original article on the ORNL web site, but to sum up take the most radioactive coal you can find on earth (coal contains sediments as well as plant material), assume that all coal everywhere is like that, then conveniently forget about pollution controls designed to remove even GASSES and assume that all of those heavy metals end up in the atmosphere instead of being in low concentration in an ash dam at the power plant. Coal fired power has enough problems (CO2, lots of dead miners in China etc) without making some crap up just to make nuclear look better.

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.

Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut

[Gordonjcp]

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.

Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut

[amorsen]

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.

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.

Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:The real problem is not fossil vs nuke, it's..

[TheSync]

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.

Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut

[paving-slab]

...but what are the effects of absorbing that much energy from the sea? ...

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.

...Wind power has the same problem, where the airflow downwind of a windfarm is colder, slower and more turbulent...

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.

Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut

[maxwell demon]

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).

Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut

[ultranova]

Shipping refrigerated liquid H2 isn't exactly cheap, ya know.

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.

Re:Containing a catastrophic failure is the proble

[TheSync]

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.

Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut

[OwnedByTwoCats]

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.

Re:Tired old canard

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut

[Procyon101]

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.