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."
I am perfectly comfortable with nuclear power. Give me decent lease payments and I'll let you build a reactor in my back yard. (I want free electric in addition to the lease payments.)
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
It's about time. I agree that nuclear waste is currently a very real problem. However, I believe in the ingenuity of people and am confident that in the next 100 years we will have solced the nuclear waste issue. Just look how far we have come in technologically in the past 100 years. People think that this is a strange sentiment coming from me because I am an environmental scientist and am as liberal as they come. We need to reduce our CO2 output and wean ourselves off of petroleum and nuclear energy is currently our best bet. Hydrological power is clean but is an environmental disaster. Wind power shows some promise but is associated with bird and bat kills and can never scale up to meet our energy consumption. Solar is great for small energy requirements but scaling up requires hectares of land and is currently inneficient. Nuclear is the way to go for the time being. Temporarilly store the waste for a couple of hundred years until our technology develops to deal with it.
Long enough to allow us to develop fusion as an energy source. And there is so much tritium and deuterium that we will have plenty of time (millions of years) to develop fusion of ordinairy hydrogen into a feasible source of energy. Within 100 years, energy will become the cheapest of commodities and raw materials and technology will be the sought after resources. Why do you think the wealthy have been trying to convince the public that knowledge is not knowledge but intellectual 'property'? They want to establish through "stare decicis" that those who own most of everything today will continue to own most of everything when energy is limitless and raw materials are cheap.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
It all depends on how far we're willing to go.
Thing is, we aren't really prospecting for radioactives very hard. Oil's very profitable, so we're looking for it pretty hard.
Like any mineral resource, to include oil and such, there's several points for when you talk about how much is available. The two factors are the cost of extracting, and the difficulty of prospecting.
I'll use oil as an example. When you see figures for 'oil reserves' and remaining oil, it's generally the amount available at a certain price point. This is because it costs money and resources to extract. Certain fields almost spit it out, and then you have things like oil shale, where you have to really work at it. So it might cost $2 a barrel to extract from a Saudi Oil field, while it costs $60 a barrel to extract from Canada's oil shale fields. Thus, when they talk about the world's oil reserves, they generally don't include the shale fields.
Then you have prospecting. Nobody really looks very hard when Oil's at $10 a barrel, but when it's at $60 people tend to look very hard for additional sources.
As a third point, as the resource increases in value, technology for extracting the resource is developed. The very shale methods were developed around WWII due to the need for resources because fighting made many areas unsuitable. More recent innovations is being able to bend while drilling wells, thus being able to reach more fields economically.
As far as uranium and plutonium goes, we've discovered enough of it that we don't have to worry about it for the short term, due to a relativly intense search after WWII.
As price increases, more mines become economical, and prospecting increases. Uranium is relativly difficult to find compared to coal and oil.
Per This site using known sources they figure that we could last for almost a thousand years using conventional reactors. If we go to more fuel efficient reactors such as breeders, this can be extended into the tens and hundreds of thousands of years.
It's just that you might have to accept $500/kg uranium rather than $40/kg as it was as of the survey. This would translat to a few more cents per kw/hour of electricity. Fuel for a nuclear plant is actually one of the smallest expenses. Labor is the largest. Going with breeder reactors would, of course reduce the fuel cost.
For that matter, we're looking into reprocessing the waste from our current reactors again. The older stuff has had enough time to cool down to make this alot easier.
I don't read AC A human right
Okay this is going to be a bit of a long post but if you're unfamiliar with breeder reactors this is worth a read:
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. So out of a batch of 100kg of ore you'll get ~1kg of U-235, so only ~10kg of reactor fuel.
The rest of the uranium-238 is depleted uranium waste; it's not pleasant stuff and we've got a whole bunch of it (the US alone has hundreds of thousands of tonnes) lying around. Going at the rate we're mining uranium ore we have, apparently, around 50 years of enrichable uranium ore left.
But uranium-238 isn't waste, at least not to a breeder reactor; when it accepts a neutron it becomes plutonium-239, which is a fissile fuel. In fact 1/3 of the power generated, even in conventional nuclear reacors, is from fission of plutonium-239 produced from uranium-238.
Basically put lots of uranium-238 into a reactor with a radioactive fuel which gives off a load of neutrons, and you're turning nuclear 'waste' back into nuclear fuel!
Fast breeder reactors use plutonium as the initial charge to get non-enriched uranium going (remember plutonium is produced in the reaction, so no worries about plutonium running out), and thermal breeder reactors use thorium, which is about as abundant as lead, to keep it going.
Using breeder reactors we've got all the nuclear fuel we'll possibly need; apparently in the range of 10,000 to five billion years worth. Also because actinide waste products are reprocessed and reused the spent fuel is less harmful, either being stable, or very unstable and having a short half-life (thus decaying and becoming stable).
This isn't science fiction either; Russia is using a breeder reactor at the moment, and India and China are planning to build their own (India is where most of the world's Thorium is so it's a natural choice for them). The reason it's not widely used is because it's slightly more expensive than using 5% uranium-235, and why use an expensive process when you can use a cheaper one.
So basically although electricity may get slightly more expensive we'll always have it available from breeder reactors. For me the real mystery is why environmentalists aren't crazy about this, taking nuclear waste and generating energy and non-radioactive waste? Sounds like an environmentalist's dream, but I guess they just can't see past the N-word.
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The nuclear industry uses too much science fiction - put a fraction of the advertising budget into that project in India and you may see more science instead.
Assuming Sci Am is right, I question your 24 tons number; I don't think we've decomissioned > 1,000 nuclear plants, and that's just counting fuel rods.
They're talking totals. They're counting the fuel rods still sitting on site in the plant's pool. Plants don't actually get decommisioned that often. They can store between 20-40 years production on site. Generally they can store 10-20 years waste in their pool alone. After that solutions vary. Some use above ground containers.
Apparently the nuke waste, since fly ash is used in concrete construction.
Concrete locks the stuff up and people aren't eating it. You could turn my sand into glass and nobody'd be able to tell a thing. Without some extreme scientific equipment.
We already get 15% of our grid power from nukes. Why do you need more plants for this comparison?
Because all our plants are of different, unique designs. This drives costs up. I'm talking about building a few dozen of the same type, so they can share those engineering expenses.
Tell you what, how about we remove Price-Anderson protection from nuke plants and require them to pay for their own waste storage (and insurance of same), and then do a comparison?
Hmm.. Price-Anderson's 'protection' is simply a government mandated insurance co-op with a cap of 10 billion. Each plant provides 300 million of individual insurance. Only if the 10bil cap is exceeded does the fed.gov step in, and they tend to do so regardless for any disaster in the billions. Enacted in 1957, the individual insurances have only had to pay out $151 million, of which $70 million was TMI. The DOE has paid out $65 million, for reasons not listed. It could have been earlier, before the act was modified to establish the collective, and when the private insurance was only $50 million or so. Personally, I'd simply keep upping the collective amount. This would be easier with even more plants to pay into it.
As for the waste storage, I'm sure the power companies would love to take care of it themselves, they're being charged $.001 per kilowatt/hour for yucca mountain.
Given that wind power is growing at 25-35% per year, however, it looks like we'll get a good impression of how practical it is in the not-too-distant future anyway.
Survival of the fittest! Great idea. Love it if it works out, but I'm not holding my breath. Wind is so small even now that 25% growth isn't difficult. Kinda like when you only have 1 tower up. When you put the second up you've just doubled capacity. Doubling it's market share would be a better accomplishment.
Perhaps one of the new cheap solar techs we hear mentioned now and again will become practical, also. Since sunshine and AC load correlate pretty highly, powering one's AC from such a system takes care of the intermittent power production issue.
If it wasn't for the fact that I live so far north that my annual AC needs are like 1 week a year, I'd consider it too.
I don't read AC A human right