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NPR Story on the Future of Nuclear Power
deeptrace writes "The Living on Earth show on NPR recently had a segment on the future of Nuclear Energy. The nearly hour long show is available as an mp3 and in transcript form. It talks about hot fusion, cold fusion, and Pebble Bed Reactors. It provides a well balanced and informative overview of progress towards their use for future nuclear power generation. Most interestingly, they talk with Dr. Pamela Boss and Dr. Stanislaw Szpak at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego. Dr. Szpak says of their cold fusion experiments: 'We have 100 percent reproducible results'."
We have 100 percent reproducible
100% success or 100% failure?
The risks are well known. It's like putting a revolver to your head, but you know what? 5 out of 6 times, that hammer's just going to click and nothing's going to happen.
But how many times are you going to put the gun to your head and pull the trigger? It seems we've already hit that live round a couple of times. TMI and Chernobyl certianly come to mind.
...seem like an interesting concept.
I was especially interested to read the following (apart from the funny connotations of the scientists name!)
Sue Ion is the technology director for British Nuclear Fuels. She thinks nuclear energy is becoming more attractive because of the growing concern over greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. Ms. Ion also says pebble beds have an added benefit that can move them beyond the electricity business. The reactors will operate at extremely high temperatures -- not hot enough to melt the fuel, but hot enough to efficiently desalinate ocean water for drinking. And actually so hot they could crack open molecules of water. That would make it possible to manufacture hydrogen.
It would seem that this could kill several birds with one stone - "cleaner" electricity production, a source of hydrogen for motor vehicles and the possibility to make sea water domestically usable. Those seem like massive upsides, what are the downsides?
Chernobyl, definitely. TMI could more accurately be equated to a mis-fire (probably a dud round), not an actual shot.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
It will truly be an amazing day when NPR advocates nuclear energy. However, this article doesn't exactly constitute a ringing endorsement. The three articles essentially say this:
1) "Hot" fusion works, but a practical solution is always 20 years away. (However, they then go on to say that the current target date for a workable solution is 2050 -- 44 years from now.)
2) "Cold" fusion is not quite dead yet. A small group of researchers claims fusion is taking place with a mechanism requiring "new physics", but the vast majority of physicists don't take them seriously.
3) Pebble bed reactor technology is progressing in South Africa, but the economics are vastly overstated and there's no disposal solution.
NPR is still a long way from advocating nuclear power.
Fission reactors will always produce harmful waste, but we have been able to deal with that in the past quite effectively. The problem that will kill nuclear energy is people. Private citizens are freaked out about both meltdowns and terrorism, so they'll lobby to have new plants built in someone else's backyard. The other people problem is the people running the plants. If you hire an $8/hour rent-a-cop to guard your facility, you're asking for trouble. Also, both the Three Mile Island incident and Chernobyl were caused by inattention and lack of maintenance. I guarantee that turning over contol of nuclear facilities to the private sector will immediately trigger the hiring of low-wage bare minimum staffs to save money. Eventually, someone will screw up, trigger another disaster, and that'll be the end of nuclear power in the US forever once people start demanding a stop to it.
I agree that nuclear energy is probably one of the best choices for the future as coal, natural gas and oil run out, but it's got a lot of obstacles to overcome.
Chernoble was more like putting a fully automatic weapon to your head and firing a full clip. The Soviets MADE that accident happen, even though they did not intend for it to explode, they set the conditions up for it to occure on purpose by removing all fail safes. Chernoble is not a statement on the saftty and efficasy of nuclea power, it is a statement of the stupidity of people.
And what precisely did you find left-leaning about the article? You did read the article, didn't you?
As it turns out, you guessed right that the article was not very balanced, but not he way you thing. The imbalance here stemmed from the way informed criticism of the technology (not of local economic issues) were awarded about one sentence in an great big sales-brochure-like presentation of the proponents' view.
Yes, valid criticisms do exist, and from solid sources too. Google it. Not necessarlily saying they're wnough to tip the scales in the "no-go" direction, but pretending there are none, or that this article was anything close to balanced, is just ridiculous.
And what's "left" about believing in pshychic phenomena, anyway?
sudo ergo sum
NPR may not be the best source, but to compare it to Fox News is an insult and simply wrong.
I believe in conservation as a means to make our society more energy efficient. However, in a world of increasing population and bringing 3rd world economies into a one world modern economy, we cannot expect global energy consumption to decrease. This means either burning fossil fuels at a faster rate, wind and solar, or nuclear. As far as burning fossil fuels go, realize that we will run out and that burning coal releases tremendous radioactivity into the atmosphere. I love wind and solar but I think we need to hedge our bets with a major committment to developing safe nuclear power generation.
NPR is still a long way from advocating nuclear power.
Seems to me, this is NPR doing its job of presenting an issue in a balanced manner. No, they're not advocating anything here. They're just informing.
IIRC, the pebble bed designs usually use helium as primary coolant, and helium simply doesn't get "dirty". The natural isotopes (He3 an He4) are stable, and the others are both hard to create and have half-lives of under one second.
sudo ergo sum
I'm asking this next question in the utmost sincerity:
Are you saying this because of specific misinformation in the piece, or is this a knee-jerk reaction you had without even hearing it?
NPR is a media organization. Their focus is on public discussion, information dissemination, and issue analysis. As such, NPR is much more useful, and threatening to the status quo, than they would be if they were a politicized organization such as MoveOn.org or the American Heritage Foundation. (And yes, I did mean the American Heritage Foundation.)
1) "Hot" fusion works, but a practical solution is always 20 years away. (However, they then go on to say that the current target date for a workable solution is 2050 -- 44 years from now.)
Which is where it's been since we started thinking about it: 40-50 years from now. Fusion, real controlled commercially viable fusion power, as opposed to just an interesting source of neutrons, is fantasically difficult. Hell, forget the difficulty of actually sustaining the reaction; we don't even have a good idea of what materials to build the reactor out of; over the life of the reactor vessel, every single atom in it will be struck and displaced by neutrons up to 500 times, and that does very bad things to all known materials; austinitic steels start to swell and degrade after only 30 dpa, and the best candidates we know of can only handle 150 dpa. And ITER doesn't even come close to generating the number of neutrons necessary to test these things in a reasonable time frame; there's another facility due to be built to explore this single issue, but there's not even a completed design yet, let alone an ECD.
So we don't even know what to *build* a real fusion reactor, as opposed to a test vessel, out of, and we haven't even spoke of how difficult the actual fusion process is to get useful energy out of. Brehmstrallung losses mean that, really, D-T fusion is the only real candidate, so all those fancy aneutronic schemes that enable you to extract energy directly from charged particles, and all the non-equilibrium schemes, will result in a net energy loss.
Fusion isn't just hard, it's *really really really* hard. By comparison, the Manhattan Project was just a trivial engineering problem. There are aspects of fusion power, like that materials issue I mentioned, for which a solution just might not exist.
but the economics are vastly overstated and there's no disposal solution.
There are plenty of disposal solutions. The amount of nuclear waste generated per unit of electricity is absolutely piddling. You could take the stuff and dump it into a subduction zone, or even just into some random abyssal trench, and you'd end up doing far less environmental damage than we're doing right now with fossil fuels, for which the "disposal solution" is "vent the waste directly into the atmosphere." Just because a cost is widely distributed, doesn't make it any less of a cost. Just because you kill people all over the planet, instead of just around the power plants, doesn't mean they're any less dead.
Seems to me, this is NPR doing its job of presenting an issue in a balanced manner. No, they're not advocating anything here. They're just informing.
That's the trouble with balanced journalism, a great many people find listening to an opposing point of view unbearable.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Yeah, it's an insult alright - an insult that our tax dollars prop up the blatantly leftist NPR.
Well, conservatives believe that *all* media is liberal, with the possible exceptions of Fox News and certain talk radio programs. This fact adds nothing to our understanding of NPR. Note that most people who have actually listened to NPR approve of it. Hence, it is doing its job.
The notion that government should promote conservative values and stifle everything else is arrogant, ignorant, and in the end inadequate for a pluralist society.
NPR managers were deciding on who to hire based on whether or not they were Republicans. Great way to get balanced news, huh?
Well, the Republicans in charge thought that Republican views weren't getting enough airtime apparently, so they wanted to hire more Republicans to call the shots. I've listened to several talk-radio stations, both lefty (which there are very few of) and righty (which are everywhere), and NPR is nothing at all like either type. You'll not find anything like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly from the right, or Thom Hartmann or Jerry Springer from the left. Compared to the righty and lefty stations out there, NPR is the model of balance and journalistic integrity. They regularly have both democratic and republican guests on several of the shows. They have shows like Justice Talking where you actually get two sides of an argument presented in a manner that doesn't devolve into a Crossfire-esque shouting match like you find on many "news" shows these days. The host puts forth questions and the guests both get some time to answer them. Simple. Fair. Comprehensible. So go ahead and take a shot at them for their funding, but don't even try to compare the level of bias with Fox or any other news organization that hardly even tries to appear balanced.
Of all the people who bash NPR, I wonder how many have actually listened to it for any length of time. It's one of the least biased news sources out there right now. Hell, I know quite a few Republicans that support it. I'm an independent who pretty much fits the bill of the social liberal / fiscal conservative. Needless to say I'm very much frustrated with the current state of both major parties. At least I have a decent radio station to listen to on the way to and from work though. Sure beats Rush or Springer (I can't believe they gave him a political show).
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Yeah. Chernobyl.
We should consider it as a learning example, instead of just proof that nuclear energy is unsafe.
The nuclear technicians should learn that.
A) When you run procedures that states minimum of 30 rods down do not run it with only 6.
B) Do not turn off the reactors cooling system.
C) When running tests with powerplant please inform the people that are actually running it that there is a test going on.
The Nuclear Power Plant builders should learn to build the plant according to designes specifications instead of making it like it looks almost reasonably like that.
And people should learn that people at nuclear plants need training.
The finally, the reactor type should be decommissioned as soon as possible since there is inherent design flaw that made it impossible for humans to fix the problem they made during that test.
I think after Chernobyl people are atleast little more carefull here in west than the people responsible for Chernobyl.
56 people have died because of chernobyl and chernobyl related radiation diseases.
4000 people is estimated overall toll. There was over 400 000 people on the effected area.
Oh. And one thing, most people on the toll where within 20 mile radius of the reactor.
Thats from one accidents in many decades. The coal industry is more deadly but the difference is that coal industry has thousands of small incidents that kills, and those doesn't raise the headlines like a single nuclear accident does.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
There are people out there who seriously think Fox News is the epitome of journalism and that any other source (except maybe the WSJ and Wash. Times) is hopelessly biased. No, I'm not kidding.
Everytime I hear about cold fusion, my BS alarm just rings like wild. If they're getting such real results, then why not hook up an array of these to a small generator that feeds back into itself and give themselves some free energy. Any competent physicist/chemist would know how to convert heat to electricity with an acceptable loss rate - especially at the 4x output that's being claimed in some cases.
If I had a portable fusion generator, the first thing I would do is hook one up to my house and disconnect myself from the electric company so I wouldn't need to pay electric or heating bills anymore. The next thing I would so is start selling "long life" battery systems, or "super duper efficient" heating systems to fund my research. Considering that this is the last thing they are doing, even after having 8 years to study it - my BS alarm is ringing like wild. They wouldn't happen to be seeking big government funding would they? Hmmmm.
I think your numbers are off. Without using breeder reactors, at current power generation rates and known deposits of uranium recovered at economically recoverable levels (current energy prices), it's about 200 years worth. *However*, there are a couple of big glaring holes in this.
1) As energy prices rise, "economically recoverable" changes.
2) This ignores seawater uranium recovery, which contains thousands of years worth at current consumption rates.
3) Non-breeder reactors burn 0.7% of uranium down to about 0.35%, so they're using about 0.35% of the mass. A good breeder will burn 95% of the mass of the uranium.
4) There's also thorium breeders.
Realistically, we're looking at thousands of years even as energy consumption grows.
Beautiful Blueberries
Wake up and envision a sitaution where NPR was conservative and being supported by your tax dollars.
The funny thing is that there are many liberals who feel that NPR is too conservative. Or rather, too corporatist, due to the fact that they've generally given up government money and are now reliant on corporate grants (aka sponsors).
When both sides call a source biased, that's a good indication that they're about as middle-of-the-road as you can get.
When it comes to hot-button issues like nuclear power, most people equate "balanced" with "agrees with me". That's how Fox gets away with claiming that they're "fair and balanced".
A bucket left by itself for 10 days in a university laboratory will not lose any measurable level of water to evaporation. First principle experiments are not fashionable. Many scientists nowadays will not look at a simple experiment in which 36 liters of water evaporate, but high tech instruments and computers are not used. They will dismiss this as "anecdotal evidence."
.5 liter of Kool Aid evaporate off the hood of a car before it had a chance to pour onto the ground. I don't need expensive computer equipment to "prove" anything to me, just a basic calorimiter and the kind of careful measurements a C- high school chemistry student is expected to make.
Weren't Pons and Fleishman from Utah? Humidity there is typically under 4%. I once watched