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Europe Warms to Nuclear Power
FleaPlus writes "The CS Monitor reports that for the first time in 15 years a European nation has started building a nuclear reactor, with six more likely to be built in the next decade. France is also planning to develop a safer and more efficient "fourth generation" reactor by 2020. This is in light of rising fossil fuel prices and a desire to reduce CO2 emissions. Still, a majority of EU citizens are opposed to nuclear energy, primarily for environmental reasons, even though nuclear power releases less radioactive material than burning coal."
Nuclear energy and Hydrogen are two effective ways to counter the diminishing fossil fuels. Once the heavy industries and transportation shifts to these alternative fuels, the world doesn't have to depend on Middle-East anymore.
only if you are using that a non fossil-fuel energy source to get that hydrogen. It is currently cheapest to get hydrogen from hydro-carbons. (if memory serves)
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?
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
The current British government also appears to be cautiously in favour of building a few more nuclear power stations to replace the ones due to be decommisioned in 2020 - the major barrier being that about half of the population is against them.
(We worry about things like the increasing amounts of radioactive waste in our dumps, possible indications of higher incidences of leukemia and cancer in areas like Sellafield, and risks of a serious accident.)
fortune -o
Nuclear power has promise, though. Especially if we can get IFR reactors going. There is sufficient fuel to power IFR type facilities for many many years. This results because the IFR is a breeder reactor which can utilize uranium 238 and damn near anything else that's densely radioactive. There isn't much of a future for standard fission reactors, and fast breeders are politically insane - but Integral Fast Reactors could really be the ticket for quite some time.
Or, at least until the oil gets so expensive we can't build computers to control the reactors...
RS
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.
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.
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"
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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
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
>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!
The idea that nuclear waste might need to be protected "for thousands of years" has driven a lot of the debate. This is unfortunate, since it doesn't turn out to be particularly true.
One of the fundamental laws of radioactivity is that elements that are highly radioactive lose their radioactivity quickly, and elements whose radioactivity lingers a long time don't emit much radiation. The danger, of course, is those things that are in the middle along both axes. But as a point of comparison, it turns out that there is essentially no radiation left from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
It is true that the concentrated fission products and neutron-activated junk from current fission reactors would still be pretty hot after 20 years, but I suspect they'd be way less dangerous to climb around in than a 20-year-old dioxin spill. I think the evidence suggests that dumping the stuff deep-ocean in 50-year barrels would be a perfectly reasonable disposal method; it would be hard to convince the general public of that, though. Kind of sad, really—in many ways, nuclear power is our safest and most environmentally friendly energy alternative.
Not to mention that those two disasters (3-mile and Chernobyl) are irrelevant in in many other ways.
Chernobyl was because they ignored repeated safety mechanisms while doing an experiment with intentionally making the reactor in a Bad State - even repeatedly turning the failsafes off (I don't recall the exact number, less than 10 more than 5). This was mainly due to failure of the different experts to communicate (not really thier fault - it was illegal for them to do so). The engineers who "caused" the disaster had no idea what was going to happen, had the nuclear engineers been there things would have most likely been different. In the free world I imagine those nuclear engineer would have done something fairly drastic to stop it. Nor would that type of expirement ever have been allowed, and that is especially true now (no nuclear engineer would allow it to happen).
Three-mile was a true accident of a nuclear reaactor. The reason it is irrelevant is that the danger was exxagerated. A great example of this was the fear about a possible explosion because of the reactor filling with hydrogen. Reporters reported what would happen if that amount of hydrogen were to ignite, pointed out that a simple spark can cause it too. However, there was no oxygen present - it was designed to work in that manner. No engineer was worried about it. Problems with cameras was also a big story, but yet again was greatly exagerated (most of the ones that were out were tertiary systems - the engineers and disaster crews was never in the dark about what went on in the reactor). But I suppose "We are gonna dieeeeeee!!!!" made better news than "It's being contained, working like it is supposed to, don't worry". Not that everything was perfect, but there was little real danger to surrounding people and the environment. Hell, I'd be more worried about some of the high energy physics experiments out there - at least they are pushing the envelope, nuclear reactors are a pretty mature technology.
It's not even so much that reactors are much safer now (true none the less), but that reactors were *never* as dangerous as public opnion has them. Only if multiple layers of failsafes along with intentional criticality (such as Chernobyl) is there any real danger from an accident. Plus we can recylce much of the waste produced now into other isotopes so that is slowly going away, even then it has less impact overall and easier to contain than coal.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
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.
The UK Windscale nuclear plant - now the Sellafield reprocessing plant, and soon probably to be re-badged the Ravengalss Wildlife park or something like that has a pipeline that put dissolved low-level waste into the sea. At first this sounds like a really, really bad idea. However, the Atlantic has about 10^13 curies of mixed radioactive stuff in it - a lot of it a duterium, tritium, C14, and a mess of heavy metals. You could dump all the waste that had ever been produced into the Atlantic, and provided you mixed it in well, you would never be able to detect the difference. The 1950's solution was to stick a pipe far enough into the ocean to get the waste into some of the fast currents in the north Irish sea, which should sweep it out into the Atlantic. It has been argued since that this did not qork quite as designed, but at the time this bit of the Irish Sea had been surveyed as well as anywhere. The other UK solution was to stick the stuff into drums and drop it into the mid-Atlantic. The drums were designed to burst half-way down, again dispersing the material into the fast ocean currents.
Compare this to the US idea of chucking solid waste into a concreted drum, and sending it right to the bottom. The bottom of the oceans are often quiet places where the water hardly moves. Fish and crustacea live in the rusting cans, and lay their eggs on the concrete. We are trawling for deep sea fish like grenadiers these days as the cod has virtually gone, so we may be getting it all back again - we don't know.
We seem to have lived through an age when Science was trusted to do anything, and the nuclear budget could be underwritten by weapons work; then through an age when Science was not trusted at all, and anything nuclear was controlled by evil warmongers. We might actually be heading for a balanced view. Coo!
I have now changed my mind twice about the issue of nuclear power. At any given time, I like to think, my opinions have been knowledgable, well-reasoned, and justified by current circumstances. Still, facts and circumstances change.
As a young science geek (I was born in 1952), I was excited by the possibilities of nuclear technology - power generation, of course, but also less obvious things like, say, canal excavation or spacecraft propulsion. Those were heady times, looking forward to the atomic age.
A few years later, we had developed a better understanding of some long term problems, most seriously the storage of radioactive waste. (High-level wastes are small in volume, but pretty much inimical to life; there are in addition large quantities of low-level waste and irradiated materials to deal with). I had also learned a lot more about the gulf between idealized science and the behavior of those governments and large corporations who were actually capable of building nuclear installations. I decided the risks were just too great to accept.
Today, with much more sophisticated reactor technologies, and at least a glimmering of real solutions to the waste storage problem, I think the risks of operating nuclear plants have become justifiable. And faced with the worsening consequences - moral, environmental, and political - of our world-wide petroleum addiction, nuclear power is the best alternative we have.
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
> 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?
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.
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
- 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?)
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.
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.