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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.
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?
Coal byproducts aren't radioactive.
That's the thing. They are radioactive
While coal burning indeed doesn't produce radiactivity like nuclear power does, there's actually so much radioactive material in it such as uranium that we'd get more power from refining it for the radioactives and sticking it in a reactor than burning it.
There's a former power plant worker out there that's DQ'd for life from working in a nuclear power plant because he absorbed too much radioactivity from his house. The bricks were made from coal ash.
Meanwhile, when you burn the coal, radioactive materials end up not only in the ash but go up the flue.
I don't read AC A human right
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!)
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.
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.
That 100 year estimate is only known reserves of U-235, which is the most basic, wasteful type of reactor. By breeding U-235 from the much more plentiful U-238, and by using Thorium, there would be enough nuclear fuel on the Earth to sustain our energy needs until around the time the sun burns out. The waste fuel from one year of a thousand megawatt reactor of this type would be about 1 cubic meter. So yes, nuclear is the answer.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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
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.
While coal burning indeed doesn't produce radiactivity like nuclear power does, there's actually so much radioactive material in it such as uranium that we'd get more power from refining it for the radioactives and sticking it in a reactor than burning it.
No we wouldn't, otherwise we'd be refining it from fly ash. As the ORNL article says, 99.5% of the fly ash produced by burning coal is retained by precipitators, not sent into the air, and thus could be processed and the radioactive material extracted after burning the coal. (Heck, it would be more concentrated that way.) Instead, Canada and Australia are the big uranium producers.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
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.
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.
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);
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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