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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."
Err...if you're patient.
Here's a fun fact - who knew that coal produces more nuclear waste than a nuclear power plant? By a lot. Not to mention the mecury and other heavy metals and by-products of coal. Go NUKES! And I would like to be Mr. Burns if I may... excellent...
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.
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"
This doens't have to end badly for the planet.
Pebble Bed reactors are the future: they are supposed to be safe, cheap and modular. They'll be mass-produced, and allow cities or factories to power themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
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 rather old. While I'm not yet a centenarian, let me tell you, 100 years isn't a very long time. Depending on medical advances, my grandchildren may be alive in 100 years. My great-grandchildren likely will be alive then, as well. I wouldn't want to leave them with the same problems we're dealing with today. That is why we need to think further than we currently are thinking.
We know there are renewable resources out there, and in many places they are abundant. Talk about mining material from extraterrestrial sources all you want. There's no need to do that when all we need is already available to us. All we need to do is put slightly more resources towards learning how to efficiently tap those resources, and we won't have to worry about mining for coal, or drilling for oil, or disposing of nuclear waste.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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!)
Before we build one more plant, we need to do what other countries who use a lot of nuclear power - design every plant the same so the entire nuclear work force can easily move between plants and to new plants. The current American way - redesign the plant every single time - it not smart or efficient. Didn't we learn this during the colonial times with making muskettes? Hello?
That being said, we need a lot of nuclear power. We have the technology to control it, we have the smart people to maintain it. All we need now are death sentances for contractors who attempt shoddy work, supervisors who place safety after work shifts, and CEOs who place profits ahead of all else.
Oh, and we need to make sure these plants are built in weather neutral states. No tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc etc etc.
Coal is not the answer. Look at all those dead lakes in Canada. Anyone taken a look at the acidity levels of rain in the New England states? It measures up there with tomato sauce.
Wind and hydro - not enough to meet our insatiable demands. They can contribute to it, but they can't pull all the weight. Oil - forget it - it's going to run out or become more expensive that other means of producing power sooner rather than later. While I'm sure there will be future technologies we will be able to utilize, we need nuclear power now to fill in the gap.
For anyone concerned about radiation, check some numbers over at DOE. Plant workers can receive no more that 300 milirads of exposure before the red flags go up. A single flight from Tokyo to New York takes you high enough up in the atmosphere to expose to you 900 milirads.
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.
Actually, Nuclear power neither consumes great deals of fuel, nor produces large amounts of pollution. Certainly not as much as the techniques they are supposed to replace. In fact, most nuclear waste in the U.S. (the hard stuff, like spent fuel) is recyclable (although the process is pretty nasty). I think you'll find that we won't hit those limitations that coal suffers from all that quickly.
Also, the other power sources you mention have a long way to go before they have a chance of being a viable replacement. Wind and solar power especially are extremely expensive and inefficient. In fact I seem to recall that solar power actually costs more to produce than the electricity is worth. Hydro power is an established enough technology, of course, but you kinda need a giant dam and a big river for it to work.
The article was very disappointing because I didn't see any mention of the pyrometalurgical reprocessing and fast reactor design that would allow much more efficient use of the nuclear fuel. Current reactor designs and pebble bed only use about 3-5% of the Uranium (the U235 in the enriched Uranium), whereas the reprocessing method I mentioned above uses nearly all the heavy metals (actinydes) from Americium to Plutonium, including the Uranium 235 and U238.
There's a really good article (only a preview available) at Scientific American which explains the pyrometalurgical process and the fast reactors that allow this.
On the other hand, the reactors mentioned in the article won't hurt anything if the reactors I'm talking about get built later. They can supposedly burn up the nuclear waste from existing reactors.
I'm not saying that decentralized power won't be present at all in The Future. But discarding centralized power generation entirely would be foolish. Use all the tools you have at your disposal as appropriate. The Future will involve both.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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
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.
> It is likely that we will see nations like Denmark and Canada,
> which have put significant resources towards wind, hydro,
> solar, tidal, and other renewable energy sources
Hmm, I'm Canadian and I can't think of any large-scale wind or tidal energy projects here. The idea of large-scale solar power at this latitude is pretty funny, though.
There's a lot of hydro energy here, only because we've got lots of trackless wilderness to flood.
Then go with breeder reactors. 99% of your problem solved. The real reason for keeping the 'waste' around is that there's still alot of usable fuel in there. By some figures, conventional reactors only burn about 3% of the fuel.
When you get all the energy you can out of the fuel, the remainder doesn't stay radioactive for that long. Most of them are short to mid half-life isotopes, so they decay quickly.
I don't read AC A human right
woohoo!
Homer: Hey, you guys aren't from around here, are you?
Man 1: Ach, nein. We are from Chermany. He is from ze East. I am from ze Vest.
Man 2: I hat a big company, and he hat a big company, and now we have a very big company.
Man 1: We are interested in buying the power plant. Do you think the owner will ever sell it?
Homer: Well, I happen to know that he won't sell it for less than $100 million!
Man 2: 100 million?
Man 1: [opens a briefcase of cash, counts] Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fuenf...
Oh, don't vorry, we still enough left to buy the Cleveland Browns.
Well...
How about we just radiate large areas of unpopulated land, plant some seeds, and see what radioactive grapes look(and/or taste) like...
Or...maybe not...
"Crime fighters fight crime. Fire fighters fight fire. What do freedom fighters fight?" -George Carlin
Problem of H2 generation: solved.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
"Where would we put it?"
As compared to where we are putting the waste from burning fossil fuels -- which is straight into the air?
First of all, a nuclear plant, as made in Western Europe, the US, Japan and most of them everywhere else have someting called a Containment Dome.
n t_or_attack
While the Chernobyl accident caused great negative health, economic, environmental and psychological effects in a widespread area, the accident at Chernobyl was caused by a combination of the faulty RBMK reactor design, the lack of a containment building, poorly trained operators, and a non-existent safety culture. The RBMK design, unlike nearly all designs used in the Western world, featured a positive void coefficient, meaning that a malfunction could result in ever-increasing generation of heat and radiation until the reactor was breached.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Accide
RBMK is an acronym for the Russian reaktor bolshoy moshchnosti kanalniy which means "reactor (of) large power (of the) channel (type)", and describes a now-obsolete class of nuclear power reactor which was built only in the Soviet Union.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
"In September 2005, a report by the Chernobyl Forum, comprising a number of agencies including the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organization, UN bodies and the Governments of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, put the total predicted number of deaths due to the accident at 4,000. This predicted death toll includes the fifty workers who died of acute radiation syndrome as a direct result of radiation from the disaster, nine children who died from thyroid cancer and an estimated 3,940 people who could die from cancer as a result of exposure to radiation."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_accident
Not that much of Asia or Europe were "fucked" by Chernobyl.
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.
"I mean, sure, we'll probably never see nuclear aircraft or trains."
In france, 80% of electricity come from nuclear power, they also have one of the most extensive and electisied railway (railroads if your American) networks in the world. Therefor most of their many trains are effectivly nuclear trains. Sure, the reactor isn't actually onboard the train but what difference has it made? A bit more infastructure maybe, still far less overall cost per passanger mile than a modern highway.
More to the point, how well technology has progressed compared to predictions, depends entirely on what predictions you use. There have been countless predictions made in teh past, its incorrect to lump them together as societies 'prediction of the time'. Taking your example of computers, some people may have said they would do more by now, but a lot of people said they would be able to do far less.
I mean the end of Moore's law has been forcast by many since the early 80s, even now the field is well and truly split as to whether Moore's law will still apply in 10 years time. It would therefor be incorrect in 10 or 20 years to look back with hindsight and say "everyone thought Moores law would hold" or "everyone thought Moores law would fail", which is what is being said about predictions made in the 50s.
Insightful? More like bigoted and stupid. Do you really want to be dismissing entire regions based solely on summary statistics? You realize that from a foreign perspective, you and the rural south are part of the same aggregate?
1) First off, Chernobyl exploded because of idiocy in the Ukraine. You do not conduct an experiment on a nuclear power plant and turn all the safeties off. That is asking for trouble. However, NO FALLOUT WAS EVER RELEASED FROM THE FACILITY. The facility was 100% lost, but everyone was safe that was not inside the plant.
Um... NO . Not only no, but hell fucking no, you're wrong. You're probably thinking about Three Mile Island. How this shit got modded up, I'll never know. That half-assed link of yours also glossed over Chernobyl, which was actually a quite major event. I'm not saying nuke plants aren't much, much better than Chernobyl was, but we need to be continually cognizant of the dangers inherent in things like nuclear power. That being said, the greater the risk, often the greater the reward. We just need to make sure the risk is managed.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
What is we're supposed to have learned exactly?
To my knowlege (and I am an electrical engineer), a very miniscule portion of our power is being generated by so called distributed generation. Why? Because in most cases it doesn't work financially. As un-sexy as they are, large power plants are much more efficient and cost effective than most small DG installations (including solar).
At present, nuclear power is our ONLY feasable solution to the looming environmental crisis. We have the technology now. We've proven it can be cost-effective. The fuel supply is nearly limitless with reprocessing and new reactor technologies. We can build electric cars now, and eliminate our dependence on foreign oil now.
What are we waiting for???? The time to act is NOW.
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.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
According to this page, by Prof. Bernard Cohen, burning coal (the primary source of electrical power) is responsible for around 10,000 deaths per year. You would need to have an average of 25 meltdowns a year for nuclear power to kill as many people.
Energy is the key to the world, since the cost of anything eventually boils down to energy. Want to fly from America to Europe? Gotta pay for the fuel. Want to buy a computer? Gotta pay to transport that computer, have to pay for the energy to mine the raw materials and run the factories.
Energy ultimately determines how much things cost and how easy it is to make things, so the cheaper it is the better.
Unfortunately resources like wind power and solar power are what you call PEAK LOADING, whereas coal and nuclear fuels are BASE LOADING. Base loading power sources can provide a solid steady reliable source of power, which is what we need to run a civilisation. Peak loading power sources can only supplement the base load, but can never replace it because of their very unreliable nature. Only hydro comes close to being base loading, but still depends on the weather. An extended drought (like we see in Australia sometimes) will see dam levels drop and the power source disappear.
Either you're a troll or you are ignorant of a great human suffering. Why did thyroid cancers increased dramatically if there was no fallout? http://www.belarusembassy.org/humanitarian/rtc.htm
http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Features/Chernobyl- 15/cherno-faq.shtml
No, no, no. Hydro kills all the rare fishes, and destroys sacred indian burial grounds. Wind power exterminates rare endangered migrating species by chopping them up in the windmill blades. Neither hydro nor wind power is an ecologically/culturally acceptable way to generate electricity.
The world supply of recoverable uranium is enough to last for around a thousand years, and that's with the current crop of horribly inefficient fission plants we're running now. If we reprocess the fuel using breeder reactors, multiply that by about a hundred-- and the waste storage problem is essentially eliminated as an added bonus.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
One of the biggest FUDs of the XX-iest century -- "nuclear reactors are inherently dirty".
The truth is that the coal power plant throws more radioactive material into the environment per unit of produced power, then you'll find contained in the solid concentrated nuclear waste from the properly operated nuclear power plant. When I said "properly operated" I meant reactors operated by sane and rule-oriented people who do not switch off safety dead-switches in order to experiment with a with the exiting "toy" they control (yes, I do refer to power plant operators).
When I was working in 3D animation, one of my clients was Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago electric company. ComEd's plants were mostly nukes. I loved working for them, because most of the work I did was to explain concepts. Anyway...
They have a project called "Northwind". It consists of two 5 story tall buildings in downtown Chicago (eventually four) that, during the summer months, make ice all night long. During the day, the ice melts and the 33 degree water travels through pipes to subscribers to air-condition buildings. This allows client buildings to avoid wasting floors on their own chillers and avoid using electricity during the day for air-conditioning. ComEd can even out the demand for power and avoid building additional plants for a while.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Nuclear is risky science ...
I'll dispute that.
Nuclear Power Safer Than Peanut Butter
Even including chernobyl, nuclear power is safer per kilowatt/hour than any other source(except maybe hydro).
I mean, you have to be a total idiot in not following procedures to get yourself killed even in reprocessing operations.
I don't read AC A human right
In all fairness, the stupidity of the general public has been the number one deterrent to atomic power.
Was they guy who mass produced the infamous 'i survived three mile island' t-shirts an operative for the 'fossil fuel' industry? nope! just a capitialist looking to cash in on a fad!
and you know what, the fact that not a single person was injured in three mile island mattered to anyone. just the fact that a nuclear core could overheat and potentially go critical, that part of the early warning system failed, but that the fail safes managed to create a dicey, but controlled situation, where they were left no choice but to vent radioactive gasses into the atmosphhere after an ordered evacuation. well, the whole situtaion was controleld and handled remarkablly well, nothing like the slipshod handling of chernoble that the russians had to deal with.
That was all it took to 'doom' atomic energy in the united states. everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and not a single person died.
So because we had an awesome system that could prevent an atomic catastrophy like chernoble from occuring, even when the equipment failed, it was deemed unsafe by the public because we 'evacuated' people just 'to be on the safe side.' hey, atomic energy proved that if you put in the right people to do the job it Is safe. and Even with the right people, it's cheap! even if you consider the cost of building a 'long term' storage site the cost per killowatt hour is still far below 6 cents per killowatt hour.
and then there is the fact that apparently spent fuel rods can be 'recycled' into new fuel rods, and take up signifigantly less 'storage' space thanks to advances in robotics, etc. fission power is also the only source of energy that the longer we wait to tap it, the 'less' there is to tap (due to atomic decay) if recycling programs retrieved even 50% of spent fuel rods that would double the world supply of uranium (and there is PLENTY of uranium to be mined and refined yet)
I love eco friendly power, and frankly I can't imagine anything More ecologically friendly than atomic power. sure it takes some care and some precuation, but the science is good, it's proven, the technology is mature, we know how to build reactors and how to certify them. we know what level of staffing efforts it takes to train people to keep atomic energy facilities safe. Many many sites are projected to reach end of life, if we don't rebuild our atomic infrastructure and expand it, we're in serious trouble.
and we can even locate the plants many many miles away from 'major population centers' just to keep the 'scared public' from worrying. in smaller less populated areas the safety and benefits of atomic power can be more easily 'sold' to the residents... even if the 'power' is being sold to 'large communities' hundreds of miles away through high efficiency transmission lines. if the state of 'texas' can supply electricity to california, then it should be no problem to find plenty of suitable locations to place as many reactors as we need to provide lots and lots of cheap, atomic energy. and if we're looking for a 'cheap' fix for the 'oil and coal' addiction, well, converting more of the grid to atomic power would be the 'easy' answer.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Coal has enough problems without making things up. Paticularly in the USA sulphur oxides are a problem, and NOx are a problem everywhere (which is why we have pollution controls to stop acid rain and lesser problems) - and even after the pollution controls coal has the CO2 problem.
It's time for nuclear to talk about how good it is instead of bashing the opposition or comparing to purely portable or remote area solutions like solar cells that don't scale up. Push the new technology instead of regurgitating propaganda that doesn't stand up to minor scrutiny.
"Of course, a meltdown near a big city can be devastating."
You mean an uncontrolled release of nuclear materials from a plant can be devistating.
In a meltdown everything stays inside the containment buildling. The core *melts down* and sits in a pool of slag at the bottom of the containment building inside a big pit constructed soley in case the reactor ever melted down. This is exactaly what happened at Three Mile Island. No release of anything nasty (tritium is rather benighn).
The RBMK type reactor in Chernobyl that exploded was built by the Soviets for the sole purpose of making plutonium. The probems that reactor design had with stability were ignored because it could be refuled without shutting down. What happened at Chernobyl was not a melt down but a steam explosion caused by running the reactor at too low power *AND* not having a containment building.
The steam explosion hazard present with the RBMK type reactor is not present in any commerical reactor in the United States.
It would take several simultanious acts of God to make most Western reactors release any really dangerous materials.
Here in the states, to push nukes, we recently released the plant operators of nearly all liability. Basically, if they have a radiation release, they will not be held responsible. Likewise, the gov. is going to take on the task and costs of storage. That is subsidized production.
Now, as to all the wind cancellation in Australia, you may wish to google. It appears that projects are moving forward just fine. As to those that were killed, give it time. Most, if not all, of the projects will be back. As more plants get built in the states (and in other places), the costs go down. Right now, wind is one of the lower cost power generation options here in the states.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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
The biggest problem I see are those that cook the books to make things look cheap and those who pretend that something inherently dangerous (like lots of things we use with proper precautions) is not. Everyone that has handled radioactive materials that are active enough to be immediately dangerous knows to treat them with respect instead of pretending there is no problem. The advertising agencies and thinktanks full of horse judges are doing the talking instead of physicists and engineers.
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.
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.
because by then, our technology will be so advanced that we will just dig all the crap up with robots and put it in our new 100,000 year containers. Of course, those will be unnecessary, as after another thouseand years, we will dig it up again and use our mass transporters to teleport it all to the center of Alpha Heptarion 7.
Mining uranium releases heavy/highly soluble radon gas http://www.epa.gov/radon/pubs/citguide.html which is highly radioactive and pollutes any nearby water table. Currently it kills more people than drunk driving per annum.
As for breeder reactors, put in 5 kg of plutonium waste to use as fuel and get 15kg of highly nuclear waste from the other 10kg of elements (pollonium and paladium i think). In other words - the tonnage of waste created by these reactors increases exponentially, why do you think they were banned?
The reason is deliberate, CURRENT GENERATION NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS ARE ENGINEERED TO PRODUCE PLUTONIUM FOR WEAPONS AS THIER MAIN PRODUCT and electricity as a by-product. Consequently they are heavily subsidised to make them appear economically viable.
The only realistic future for nuclear is the INTEGRAL FAST REACTOR, liquid metal cooled, uses 99% of the radioactive elements U238/U239 (vs less than 3% for cold war reactors)and current nuclear waste becomes a useable fuel. No need to mine uranium any more as there is enough spent fuel to use for many thousands of years, and no need to worry about those pesky terrorist spoiling your day because of the pyro-process closed loop feul re-processing. These are the types of reactors that we need to invest in around the world because they virtually eliminate waste transuranics, the volume of waste decreases and the remaining fissile radioactive material (the plutonium ash) is reduce to a half life of a mere 500 years.
Cold War reactors, should all be left to run out thier remaining lifespan and decommisioned in favour of these new generation reactors, in every way Integral Fast Reactors are safer and are engineered to produce electricity as a main product.
Sure it's easy to accept the rhetoric about Cold-War nuclear power but it's all been said before (power to cheap to meter etc), however SAFER NUCLEAR ALTERNATIVES EXIST. This is a no-brainer and I'm suprised how many people get duped into thinking that we stopped being able to come up with any new methods for generating energy since the 1950's. You think patents are only used to stop software being developed? What do you think these industry's lobby groups are doing, influencing politicians to make introducing alternative enery sources easier? Do you think these industries care that they pollute the air, make greenhouse gasses or kill generations that aren't even here yet? Public opinion must FORCE goverments and corporations to invest in better technology or we face a bleak future.
The reality is our economies are heavily dependant on oil and coal and we have reached a point where it is obvious that this economic model is not sustainable. Cold War Nuclear (including pebble bed) power is no better than these because it to produces deadly wastes from the raw material stage to the spent feul stage, and lets not forget the millions of litres of radioactive water that is also produced.
There is no future in somthing that kills our kid's kids kids kids kids.... It's time for you 'Cold War'-nuke jocks AND anti-nuke types to take a pragmatic approach, look at the facts and evolve your thinking. A sustainable nuclear alternative exists and now is the time for people to get thier heads out of the sand and relegate coal, oil and cold-war-nuclear to where they belong - history.
IFR information is available here http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/designs/ifr/ifr1.html
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Always has been, always will be ;)
Physics is good
More of this "coal make nuclear waste" FUD.
Coal on average contains 3ppm (parts per million) of uranium.
By comparision, ordinary soil contains between 1.8 and 5ppm of uranium.
So let's all try and not smear the boards with nuclear industry marketing material shall we?
May the Maths Be with you!
It depends on the design. The classic designs that have been used in the U.S. have a serious problem. If coolent flow fails, the reactor can melt down.
Pebble bed reactors are designed to fail safely. If the flow of coolent stops, so does the reaction. The fuel is safely encased in tennis ball-sized graphite "pebbles" which are dropped in the top of the reactor and retrieved at the bottom. For there to be a release of the radioactive material, the pebble has to be broken open. Even if that happens, the amount that's released is very tiny.
There is a problem with fire, since the pebbles are graphite, but fire is a lot easier to deal with than a melt-down.
The point is that we need nuclear power in order to ween ourselves off of oil, but we also need to demand that safe reactor designs are used.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
Last I checked, I didn't breath in ordinary soil, and I had to have the decay products of that uranium in the soil (radon and radioactive lead) pumped out of the air in my house in order not to get lung cancer.
Not only that, but all the carbon that makes up the majority of the coal gets burnt off in the power plant, so the concentration of uranium is *much* higher in the soot.
Let's not all try and smear the boards with the anti-nuke lobby's propaganda, shall we?
Best you stay away from quarries then; and fields, and roads, and construction sites, and the seaside.. and deserts. Then you should be OK.
.5% of it in the air? Wonderful. Go read the air quality reports from the day of the east coast blackout a few years back. It could be like that *every day* if we used nukes instead.
...but I think you're underplaying this. The effects of trace radioactive particulate in the air are well understood, and it's quite likely that the recent increase of lung cancer in non-smokers is due in part to coal. It doesn't take much airborne material to put the incidence at around 2% over 70 years. Admittedly, the uranium will settle out of the air much sooner than the rest of the particulate will, and only those within a few miles of a plant are probably affected, but *nobody* would be breathing in uranium if we weren't burning so much coal.
There's lots of reasons to stay away from quarries... As for the rest of that stuff, the type of dust that usually gets stirred up isn't usually from the types of soil that contain uranium. The uranium is usually contained in pebbles broken off of granite ledges.
It's been pointed out in these comments already, but 99.5% of the radioactive material burned from coal is caught by modern, manadtory, filters.
Leaving
The argument that burning coal produces more radioactivity than nuclear plants is pure FUD.
Good thing nobody makes that argument then. The argument is that it releases more radioactivity into the air, and it's pure fact.
Coal pollutes because its kinematic and chemical properties, which are very significant, far more so than any trace amounts of naturally occuring radioactivity.
I completely agree with that statement.
It's radioative properties are absolutely minimal, a mere punctuation mark on the long, long list of its other ill effects.
Everyone posting (at level 5 moderation) is making good points about how nuclear waste is minimal, that there are solutions and that burning coal releases radioactive materials too. What are these 'solutions' to nuclear waste? Is anyone aware that right now, and for the past decade, every single nuclear power plant in the US has their spent rod containment facilities to maximum? We've run out of temporary storage! So where is all the waste going?
The Admin and the Engineer
The problem is not with nuclear power but with mans inability to manage it. The safety record at plants like Indian Point just north of NYC are pathetic. There is really no oversite since the NRC seems to be in the back pocket of the industry particularly with this administration.
What concerns me even more is security. One of the planes for 9/11 flew right over Indian Point which was a target if they could not make it to WTC. Yet little has been done to secure Indian Point or the spent fuel pools should any form of attack from land or air occur.
This is one area I agree with the French who are smart enough to put the military and anti-aircraft batteries at the nuclear plants due to threats of terrorism. Despite the public outcry the administration is unwillingly to do what is necessary to secure our nuclear power plants and our borders.
The climate changes from global warming, and associated change in habitat ranges for other species (eg: malaria) is the best chance for the carbon mongers to wipe out the human race. Nuclear power has a better potential -- if people are stupid enough with it -- to wipe out our species outright.
It just struck me--we're contrasting the potential worst case of nuclear with the expected outcome if everything works as it should with fossil fuels. And, if we do that, it's pretty much a toss up.
--MarkusQ