Slashdot Mirror
New Nuclear Power Plants in the next 5 years
Guinnessy writes "As oil, coal, and gas become increasingly expensive, energy utilities take another look at nuclear power. The nuclear reactor builders are jostling for business as more than 26 plants may be ordered or constructed over the next five years in Canada, China, several European Union countries, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and South Africa. Companies in the US and UK may order an additional 15 new reactors. Physics Today magazine has a global roundup of the new plants on construction, and how the builders are getting around some of the potential road blocks in their path. I'm sure many slashdot readers would be surprised to know that some new plants will be coming online so soon."
Yeah, they probably want nukes too, but given we contained Mao and Stalin, who had a lot more of them and hated us as much for our "bourgeois capitalism", as the Iranians do for being the "Great Satan", it's not a big deal.
We will soon enough run into the same problems with nuclear power that we're running into with coal power. Such plants still consume very finite, non-renewable resources
We have a finite supply of nuclear fuel, sure. On the other hand, if we reprocess nuclear waste and take advantage of existing Thorium reserves, our finite supply will last over a hundred thousand years.
Considering that ice ages tend to disrupt hydro power generation and occur rather more frequently than once every hundred thousand years, I'd say that nuclear power is less finite than hydro power.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Also, nuclear plants to not produce pollution comparable to coal power. Nuke plants take in relatively small amounts of fuel and produce a relatively small amount of contained waste. Coal plants take in a huge amount of coal and produce a huge amount of waste, some of which is contained and some of which is vented into the atmosphere.
Nuclear waste is scary, but it is very possible that the CO2 released by burning oil is more dangerous. Global warming is at a minimum decently probable, and at the very least our CO2 production is significantly affecting our atmosphere in ways that will take a long time to understand. The only difference is that unlike the atmosphere, which is inconceivably large and complex, we can wrap our heads around the idea of nuclear waste, so it seems scarier. Chernobyl is much more dramatic than melting Antarctic icecaps, but he latter is probably more serious.
If all of America was powered by breeder reactors, we could fulfill current energy demands for over a hundred years by running them off the nuclear waste we have in storage right now. Isn't nuclear power cool?
I'm really sick and tired of breathing heavy inversion air every winter, hydro-chloric acid in our acid rain. With those and the coal plant shut down, maybe my chronic breathing problems would lessen. It sure would make it easier to breath when I exercise too!
Nah, people will just blame that I'm fat on being lazy, it's not like there could be other contributing factors.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Sorry ... that's just not true, although it's a fallacy oft-repeated by anti-nuclear types. Most coal fields exhibit a substantial degree of natural radioactivity, and when burned in a power plant it goes right up the stack. Fact is, you've been breathing those radioactive byproducts your entire life. Get used to it, or accept the only viable alternative.
... and if you don't, that's making a decision. Enjoy your cave.
... after all, in space solar power is something. But we're a long, long way from that.
From the Wikipedia article on the subject of coal:
Coal also contains many trace elements, including arsenic and mercury, which are dangerous if released into the environment. Coal also contains low levels of uranium, thorium, and other naturally-occurring radioactive isotopes whose release into the environment may lead to radioactive contamination.[6][7] While these substances are trace impurities, enough coal is burned that significant amounts of these substances are released, paradoxically resulting in more radioactive waste than nuclear power. [italics mine]
As Cecil Adams, author of the Straight Dope once said on this topic: "It would give me great pleasure if the Teeming Millions could learn to think rationally about these things." High-energy, technic civilization is realizing that it needs more energy dense solutions to its power needs, not less. The only two power sources capable of meeting our near-term needs are coal and nuclear, and coal is far from safe. It's time for us Americans to fucking get over our mindless, 1960's-era "no nukes, no nukes!" anti-tech knee jerking and start making some realistic choices. Do we want the lights on and clean air, do we want the lights on and lung cancer, or do we want the lights off? You decide
Perhaps if NASA and Russia had been able to go on with their early space programs and had followed the success of Apollo-era projects by building a substantial, continuous manned presence in near-space things might be different. That might make a network of orbiting power satellites practical
And before all you pro-solar, pro-wind, pro-tidal, pro-{insert alternative energy system here} get on my case, I have one question: do you know what a terawatt-hour is? Do you truly understand that most sophisticated maufacturing processes absolutely require reliable power? The industrialized countries are long past the point where they can survive without dependable electricity in mass quantities. To paraphrase Tim Allen: "We just need more power, that's all we need." More power, and lots of it. At our current state of technological and scientific advancement, there are very few ways to get it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Uh, I think you drank the kool-aid. Nuclear reactors works fine, and overall are much safer than fossil fuels. You actually got what you were promised. But along the way the fossil fuel industry got serious about controlling public perception, so that everybody knows that nuclear power is deadly dangerous and coal and oil are sweet, kind and friendly.
They do this in all sorts of ways, but here are a few examples:
Nuclear power may not be perfect, but even the horror stories are better than what we're drifting into by letting the fossil fuel industry lead us down the garden path.
--MarkusQ
Every megawatt you pull from a wind or water current is a megawatt that won't be available to sustain the current on the other side of the tapping point. What will that do to the wind and sea current patterns over time? Nothing is free.
"Where would we put it?"
As compared to where we are putting the waste from burning fossil fuels -- which is straight into the air?
Except that the worst estimates say that if we switched over to 100% nuclear today, we'd have about 100 years of fuel for the most basic power plants.
At, and here's an important bit, present fuel costs.
As fuel costs increase, reserves go up, because stuff that wasn't worth exploiting before now is. Fuel costs don't even have to increase too much before uranium extraction from seawater becomes economical, to about $400/lb. The amount of uranium in the oceans at this moment is enough to power the entire world's current energy demand for 7 million years, about 5E9 tons of the stuff.
There's enough uranium around that by the time we run out of it, we'll be able to construct large-scale solar power satellites and ginormous groundside microwave rectennas. And we don't have to confine ourselves to uranium; there's even more thorium around than uranium, and while that won't sustain a chain reaction, it'll fission just fine in an energy amplifier, and you can breed more fissile fuel in the process.
It's doubtful that we'll ever get fusion working, but there's so much fission fuel around capable of driving one plant design or another that if we haven't figured out solar collection satellites by the time we start feeling the pinch of running out of it, we'll deserve to go extinct.
Details.
"He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a renewable resource."
Uranium recovery from seawater.
Most coal fields exhibit a substantial degree of natural radioactivity, and when burned in a power plant it goes right up the stack
No it doesn't, 99.5% of the thorium and uranium gets caught by the fly ash precipitators. Radon gas is released, but then wikipedia gets stupid: if it's released, it's not nuclear waste. The proper claim is that, while operating as designed, coal plants will release more radioactivity than nuke plants. "[...] the maximum radiation dose to an individual living within 1 km of a modern [coal-fired] power plant is equivalent to a minor, perhaps 1 to 5 percent, increase above the radiation from the natural environment."
Moreover, as for radioactive material, with the coal plant, that's it. There's no need for the whole decommisioning process with lots of radioactive material, because the plant itself and the fly ash isn't particularly radioactive. Same source: "One extreme calculation that assumed high proportions of fly-ash-rich concrete in a residence suggested a dose enhancement, compared to normal concrete, of 3 percent of the natural environmental radiation."
And before all you pro-solar, pro-wind, pro-tidal, pro-{insert alternative energy system here} get on my case
Ya gotta have a better argument than that.
On-demand plants like coal-fired ones can help smooth out the peaks and valleys. (I'll admit ignorance on whether any current nuke plants can operate in an on-demand mode and would have any benefit -- such as the fuel lasting longer -- in doing so.) And there are plenty of systems for storing and releasing power, batteries are by no means the only ones. Moreover, lots of industries are perfectly capable of adjusting their output as grid power waxes and wanes, and thus the price falls and rises. Large numbers of windmills in the sparsely populated Midwest could produce a good portion of our power needs, and are nearing cost-effectiveness, even without subsidies like Price-Anderson and the money spent on Yucca Mountain.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Coal power is still dirtier by pretty much any metric but waste toxicity by density. And that simply means that it's easy to contain nuclear waste.
but then wikipedia gets stupid: if it's released, it's not nuclear waste. The proper claim is that, while operating as designed
Ah, it's not waste, it's POLLUTION. Nuclear power plant waste isn't pollution because it's not released into the enviroment. Coal pollutes, because it releases a good portion of it's waste products into the atmosphere, including hazardous ones.
Here's the deal: You take the 24 tons of nuclear waste produced by a nuclear plant, grind it up, and mix it with 200,000 tons of something more or less inert, like sand.
Now compare it with the 200,000 tons of fly ash contaminated with such things as toxic metals, including arsenic, cadmium and mercury, organic carcinogens and mutagens (substances that can cause cancer and genetic changes) as well as naturally-occurring radioactive substances.
Which is more dangerous at that point?
There's no need for the whole decommisioning process with lots of radioactive material
How often have we extended the life of current nuclear reactors? Most of them seem to have a longer actual service life than their rated 20-40 years. Think of it like a driver's license. They operate for that long, then are re-examined before an extension is granted. Besides, it's just an additional expense. It's not like coal mining that both destroys the enviroment, pollutes, and costs hundreds of miners their lives each year.
Large numbers of windmills in the sparsely populated Midwest could produce a good portion of our power needs, and are nearing cost-effectiveness
I'll tell you what, we get some new nuclear plants up, multiples of the same type so we can get some economy of scale going, and we'll see how competitive windpower, and solar for that matter, is.
Oh, and Lincoln, NE's power company, right in the middle of the Midwest, decided to stop expanding wind power, because their mills were only producing usable electricity about 25% of the time. So it's not like it was saving them generation capacity.
As for Yucca Mountain, that's what you get when you let the government mess with the economy. They're horrible at it. Let the power companies figure something out. For that matter, let them reprocess the stuff.
I don't read AC A human right
For use in the most common reactors you need to have a 5:95 mix of uranium-235:uranium-238 , but uranium ore is only 1% U-235, and the rest is U-238.
True for plain water reactors (most common outside of Canada and a few other places). The Canadian Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactor uses a heavy water moderator that will let it burn unenriched uranium. The tradeoff is that the lower temperature of a CANDU means slightly less thermal efficiency, but you don't have to worry about enriching the uranium (energy intensive) in the first place. You can harvest plutonium from the "spent" fuel rods.
The rest of the uranium-238 is depleted uranium waste; it's not pleasant stuff
It's not that bad -- sure it's toxic like any heavy metal but it's only mildly radioactive. The stuff is used as counterweights for control surfaces of large aircraft (lead is used on small aircraft). It's also used in armor-piercing ammunition, where it is nasty, because the impact tends to break the bullet into small pieces which burn easily and leaves uranium oxide all over the place.
But yes, using various breeder reactor cycles the energy supply is pretty unlimited. The biggest argument against same hasn't been so much the waste issue, but the nuclear proliferation issue. Given the state of the world, I'm not sure that that's really a valid argument anymore. (Sure, it's a concern, but that genie is already out of the bottle -- and sending tons of money to unstable regimes because of their hydrocarbon reserves isn't helping either.)
-- Alastair
Hydropower, wind, solar, tidal, etc. There are lots of possibilities. I doubt there is any magic one size fits all solution, but there are plenty of existing non-nuclear technologies if we want to use them.