Slashdot Mirror
Centrifuge May Be Superseded by Laser Enrichment
An anonymous reader writes "Australian scientists have discovered, after a decade of tests, a new way to enrich uranium for use in power plants." From the article: "There are at present only two methods for sifting uranium atoms, or isotopes, to create the right mix. One, called diffusion, involves forcing uranium through filters. Being lighter, U-235 passes through more easily and is thus separated from its heavier counterpart. The second method, widely adopted in the 1970s, uses centrifuges to spin the heavier and lighter atoms apart. Both, said Dr Goldsworthy, are 'very crude. You have to repeat the process over and over,' consuming enormous amounts of electricity. The spinning method requires 'thousands and thousands of centrifuges'."
Objective answers - rather than pro-nukular or anti-nuclear spin - preferred (some hope!)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It's been around for over 20 years. What's new is that the Aussies appear to be commercialising it.
Iran has LAZERZ ! PEWPEWPEW !
Call in teh marinez !
Do you know where I can find detailed information about that new method?
Kisses,
Ahmadinejad
No Kidding! From TFA:
Dr Goldsworthy said that, due to regulation, "we report to the Government regularly".Dr Goldsworthy is a regular reporter of the highest degree. OTH I wonder what Iran would pay for his services right now?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Bingo. One can make a strong arguement for nuclear power. It is efficient and clean. Yet we don't seem to want to let anyone have it because it might be a cover for nuclear weapons. What to do?
I think the solution is to put butt-loads of funding into bringing fuel cell technology to the forefront.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
If this is really so novel and useful, surely an analysis of it exists that is not written by the guy trying to sell it!
The article goes on to explain that six other countries have tried laser-enrichment schemes and failed, but this effort has succeeded, and the only possible hint at why is that this new approach is that it is more "elegant and sophisticated".
Even a link to the press release would have provided a bit more information (though more legalistic than technical).
The post mentions diffusion and centripetal enrichment. There is actually a third method that has been used by several nations. The "calutron" separates isotopes using a magnetic field. It is the least efficient and most expensive method, so it is uncommon. However, it was used by the Manhattan Project and Saddam had an array running in Iraq at one time.
Making Uranium enrichment easy is not necessary a good thing. Uranium ore isn't hard to get. Enriching it is the tough part. The same processes used to make fuel lead directly to gun-type "atom" bombs. It's just a matter of degree and some machining.
Get this process down to something small enough to quietly function in a barn and you could build a weapon inside the borders of your target. A gold mine or somesuch would be all you need for cover.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Sigh.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
The whole frightens me. It seems absolutey crazy to encourage the use of nuclear fission in an atmosphere. There are to many things that can go wrong not to mention that there is no proven safe way as of yet to deal with the waste permanently. Instead of finding new ways to enrich uranium wouldn't it be better to focus on that 7 nation project to produce fusion power? Cold fusion may be a pipe dream but normal fusion isn't.
Fuel cells will do nothing about the demand for power stations. Anyways, this makes fuel for nuclear plants even cheaper, and it's already a 'negligable' cost for the operation of a plant.
;)
I say we build so many nuke plants in 'trustworthy'(IE already nuclear) countries that we're buying all the fuel just to feed all the darn things.
Realistically, it's going to be impossible to prevent any country that wants nuclear weapons from getting them. I'm kinda suprised that we've done as well as we have, as all it takes is a country going 'screw you' and building the stuff themselves. We know it can be done with cutting edge 1940's level technology, and it's been over 60 years. Even countries like Iran have reached the point where they can do it with domestic industry if they truly wanted to.
I don't read AC A human right
The first generation of nuclear reactors in the UK (Magnox) used natural (i.e. unenriched) uranium metal as fuel.
This meant that the fuel was very cheap to make but the fuel cans had to have a low neutron capture cross-section, hence the Magnox. This limited the temperatures at which the reactors could operate.
Moving to enriched uranium allowed the use of stainless steel cladding which keeps its integrity to much higher temperatures and is mechanically stronger.
There have been many developments in nuclear fuel technology since the 1950s, as one might expect. MOX was a good idea, but derailed by BNFL corporate incompetence and "environmentalist" hysteria.
The idea with MOX is that, instead of enriching uranium to increase the proportion of fissile U-235, you mix in fissile plutonium recovered from used nuclear fuel which is then "burnt up" in the new fuel to provide power. Plutonium isotopes are natural byproducts of the nuclear reactions in fission reactors.
Perhaps it would be more economical and environmentally-friendly to use more MOX than enriching fresh uranium?
Stick Men
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists should advance its Doomsday Clock toward midnight. The cheaper enrichment of nuclear bomb isotopes just advances the entropic spread of nuclear weapons and increases the likelihood of a nuclear detonation or war.
It is ironically funny that they all justify what they are doing as being for power production. Anyone out of diapers knows it is nuclear bomb technology whether it is being developed by Iran or Australia.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists site: http://www.thebulletin.org/doomsday_clock/timeline .htm
E Proelio Veritas.
- allow construction of valuable Caspian pipelines
- keep Halliburton and Bechtel's stocks higher than Timothy Leary
- threaten the security of the West
*delete as appropriateThe Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
But in a laser, the Uranians can't go "Wheeeeeeeeee!".
No, I'm just joking, I really do love the Uranian people.
We have a power station in Nebraska that operates off fuel cell technology.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It's one hell of a genie to have let out of the bottle.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
I think that if they have half decent scientists, they knew about it for many years. I wonder if they had a way to stealthily build an enrichment chain without international control, or if they are not currently building it.
...
BTW, they will manage to get the bomb. North Korea too, Afghanistan too, one day, every country will have its nuclear weapons. We can delay the Iranian bomb by 5-10 years maybe, but what then ? Isn't it time to have a political plan about the question ? Preferably before it becomes possible for a grade student to make a nuke as a school project
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I think it was about 25 years ago. I saw a tv-program about laser isotope separation. It was american, or english.
Kim0
It's "drown it in a bathtub." :)
Which is why it became a pretty good anti-Republican response, superimposed on images of Katrina-damaged areas.
According to Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear whistle blower - as quoted by the Sunday Times - Israel had laser enrichment technology, in actual production use, at the early 1980s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu
So - nothing new here, move along, move along.
However, it's a LONG way from lab benchtop enrichment experiments to a functioning enrichment plant. And once you get to that functioning enrichment plant, there's the question of whether or not it was economically justifiable to build in the first place. This is where the American effort "failed" - even on paper, it never made sense to pursue this technology because it was just too expensive. Sure, you need thousands of high-precision centrifuges to run an enrichment cascade. This was still cheaper than building a laser enrichment plant.
The designs for a uranium laser enrichment plant ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE are not for the fainthearted. YOu've got to have the uranium in a gaseous state. That means heating it so hot that not only do you have a pool of molten uranium, but it's BOILING. The laser is going through the HOT uranium "steam". The only material that can stand up to these temperatures is pure graphite. The design becomes like a series of rain gutters on a house that carries "more enriched" and "less enriched" streams of molten uranium back for reboiling. Somehow you've got to figure out a way of putting optical ports into this hellhole to fire the laser beams in. The laser beams themselves are a weird wavelength (green) and takes some really expensive gear to generate at all, much less with intense enough power to penetrate deeply into a fog of molten uranium. Doing all of this cheaply? Good luck.
And in the background overshadowing enrichment plant economics was and is the fact that nuclear power plants are still just too expensive a way to generate electricity (primarily due to regulatory costs) compared to coal and natural gas turbine plants. The expected boom in nuclear power plant construction forcast in the 1970s and early 1980s never materialized, mainly due to Thre Mile Island and Chernobyl, and so the need for new-fangled enrichment technology as a support industry never materialized with it either.
Right now the cheapest way to come up with fuel for a nuclear power plant is not laser enrichment or even centrifuge enrichment. It's diluting old Russian warheads, all 30,000 of them, down from 93% enriched uranium back to 3% uranium. This, along with all those Russian brides American men now have access to, are the REAL spoils of winning the Cold War.
All they need to watch for is large aquariums for the sharks.
There is a third method that has been used on an industrial scale, which is to essentially build a huge mass spectrometer. Mass spectrometers are usually used to separate atoms into their isotopes for analysis but Ernest O. Lawrence proposed this for the Manhattan Project and the Y-12 separator at Oak Ridge, TN, built in 1941, yielded some useful results before being superseded by gaseous diffusion at the K-25 facility and later the S-50 thermal diffusion plant. Indeed the first 200 grams of fissile material delivered to Los Alamos came from the electromagnetic separator, more than a year before the diffusion separator started operation (the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima used about 64Kg)
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Process heat comes from the Sun, still the best fusion reactor going.
Electrolytic by-products are:
Now if the reaction can be combined with some hydrogen injection to make water and ease the total (electrical) energy required you get a nice sustainable technology. Water, also.
Solar cells are made from the silicon, formed into parabolic mirrors that focus the IR band to the smelting pot. Interference coating the cells is easy with the free nothing called a vacuum
Electricity from the power cells drives the electrolysis and runs the station power.
With all that silicon, I'm betting that some composition can make silicon into something more ductile.
Cheap building material would be nice...
This is progress?
> There are at present only two methods for sifting
> uranium atoms, or isotopes, to create the right mix.
AVLIS has been around since the 1970s, and there is also the South African cyclonic process. There are also hints in the public literature that there are other methods that were examined by the Manhatten Project and not pursued for various reasons.
sPh
What kind of mad, crazy system *is* that? The usual way of getting hydrogen is to split it off water; that takes electrical power. And what's the result? You recombine the hydrogen with oxygen to get water and, er, electrical power. Naturally, you're going to get less electrical power out than you put in.
Where are you getting the fuel then?
Hydrogen doesn't occur naturally in pure form - it's always combined with something else, like a hydrocarbon chain, or water. To run a fuel cell you either have to:
1) Use hydrocarbons as your fuel source. This is environmentally little different from using a standard internal combustion engine. You're still using natural gas, or possibly some other fossil fuel.
2) Use water electrolysis to get hydrogen. This requires loads of electricity. This in turn means that your hydrogen "fuel" is actually a power storage medium like a battery. You cannot run a power plant this way.
Got a link to the nebraska plant? I'd bet good money they're using option #1, and if they are, then they haven't weaned themselves of fossil fuels.
Option #2 is the only way to use truely "green" fuel cells, but it also requires a source of clean electricity - such as fusion - or else you're just moving the source of pollution from a tailpipe to a power plant.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
MOD PARENT UP!!! Excellent links.
Quote from the first linked article: "In MLIS, an infrared laser is directed at uranium hexafluoride gas. The laser excites uranium 235 hexafluoride gas, while not disturbing the uranium 238 hexafluoride gas."
In 1972 or 1973, I built an apparatus to test whether a flowing gas carbon monoxide laser could excite uranium 235 hexafluoride. My little project was shut down without explanation.
The Silex web site gives almost no information. The "about Silex" web page misspells the word neutrons as "neutrins".
It could be that the U.S. government has been successful at laser enrichment, but has published misleading information about the project. The article linked by Slashdot says, "One US effort involving 500 scientists gave up after spending $2 billion." That doesn't make sense. You know very early, without spending a lot of money, whether you have a laser tuned to the right frequency.
--
Taxpayer Karma: If you contribute money to kill people, expect your own quality of life to diminish.
Two Words : OH SHIT.
I don't mean to be too alarmist, but this is VERY bad news. See, it's easy to get access to uranium ore. Many countries have the mineral, and buying yellowcake is not supposed to be all that hard. Heck, some of it supposedly went through Africa. If you have just a few kilograms of highly enriched uranium, again it is easy to make a bomb. Spherical explosives aren't needed, a simple crashing together of a critical mass is enough. 10-20 kilotons is still enough to cut the heart out of a major world city, and kill hundreds of thousands of people.
But getting from A->B WAS ludicriously expensive. I read that it takes a year for a sample to travel from one side of the centrifuge plant to another, and these plants have to be enormous, costing billions. The laser method as described appears to be much cheaper and generates probably close to 100% pure U-235. Yes, it is a secret technology, but the plans can be stolen or bought, and lasers and all the other stuff needed to make it work are not restricted exports.
It might still cost a billion dollars to make a nuke, but that's it - not 10 billion. Most private individuals without access to nation state resources can't do it, but even the poorest dictatorship in the world can probably scrape together or steal from the U.N. a billion.
...Methods of enrichment? Well, shit...I guess the Calutron has to go back into the closet. Since it was used long before there were any reactors, and uses low tech methods, Iraq would never use one.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
If you read up on the Gen-4 reactor designs, you'll find that greenhouse gasses, non-proliferation, safety, and more efficient designs (a LWR reactor is rather wasteful on the scale of designs) have been taken into consideration. Rest assured that the new reactors being built in Florida, and all across the USA are being built with the best, safest technologies available.
Oh, and the thousands of centrifuges? That's just bad journalism. I don't know how lasers are cheaper at all (someone needs to actually write a decent article here), but for what it is worth, Nuclear Energy in the United States is cheaper than coal, but just barely.
Check out www.nukeworker.com and ask your questions there. Those guys know their Uranium from their belly buttons!
It's not just republicans, it's all bad-government conservatives. What happened to the days when conservatives had the balls to just say "centralism sucks, so we're cancelling these programs and lowering taxs"? Nowadays, they fuck up otherwise successfull programs, DON'T lower taxes, create deficits spending money on things that don't work, and lie constantly. Modern conservatives can't even come up with good lies. At least guys like Nixon made it hard to be sure exactly what was going on. You knew he was full of shit, but what kind of shit? Bush just relies on the fact that most Americans are as almost gutless as he is, and are too cowardly to doubt anything. Or my own "leader", Stephen Harper, who tells lies that are contradicted (often within hours) by undeniable evidence. At least Paul Martin's lies left you confused and uncertain about reality... Harper's just embarass us all.
Right now, nobody needs or wants any more U235, except for North Korea, Iran, and various splinter groups.
The US Govt has PILES of the stuff, as does the USSR. Plus many tons of Plutonium. All very expensive stuff, but worth less than zero.
There's more tons of U235 and Plutonium in all the unprocessed fuel elements that have outlived their usefulness in nuclear reactors. The stuff is so worthless it's being stored or buried, not put through a relatively cheap chemical reprocessing cycle to recover the U235 and Plutonium.
If we needed more U235, there are several multi-billion dollar separation plants in mothballs that one could restart with relatively little effort.
So this laser-enrichment, IF it can ever be gotten working on a large scale, is (a) a threat if rogue states and the Mafia get into it and (b) Will produce soemthing nobody needs, and (c) probably riskier and more expensive than just starting up the old plants.
That is possibly the most hilarious irony of the entire nuclear "debate". If we simply burned the by-products of nuclear power plants, it would still dump less radioactive material into the atmosphere than if a comparable amount of power had been derived by burning coal. Coal fuel-cells might be able to do better -- at least the waste could be put into drums where people could freak out about what to do with it)... but still.
The technology to make weapons that are much more dangerous than gun-nukes are already available to pretty much anyone. Anthrax practically breeds itself. And by "practically" I mean "literally". A variety of super-lethal chemical agents can be synthesized with stuff from your local grocery store, and made into weapons using stuff from your local hardware store. A pack of matches and a forest during the summer can net you a firestorm that will destroy pretty much anything. I could go on and on. Besides, why worry about nukes when the common automobile kills more people per year than all nuclear weapons combined ever have? I'd worry more about the proliferation of the horseless carriage than about the proliferation of uranium.
The ninja effect! A source of endless Internet hilarity.
Well, the US constitution really doesn't make any exceptions about what kind of arms that citizens can own. And after all, the British -- America's traditional enemeies -- have nukes of their own. Isn't it about time that the average Joe six-pack had access to nuclear arms? Even just a little bunker-buster would be nice, in case he needs something to take with him when he travels, or goes hunting for Leviathan.
A good idea, except that building more nuclear power plants won't have a significant impact on our use of imported oil. Most of the oil the U.S. imports goes to gasoline. Power plants use coal and natural gas primarily, which are both widely available in the U.S. at low cost.
That's not to say that someday the availability of vast amounts of electric energy won't help us move away from gasoline-using transportation. The point is that most of the oil imported to the U.S. is for transportation, not electricity production, and about the only thing nuclear energy is being used for is electricity production.
That said, I am still gung-ho for nuclear power. I can't wait for the day when I have my 100% electric-drive car! And maybe someday we'll have direct nuclear to electric generators that bypass the steam turbine and are small enough to load into a vehicle...
Your spelling of the word "centrifuge" is strangely disturbing.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
And if they're second- or third-generation nuclear workers, they've got two or three belly buttons to compare to their uranium!
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Your bitterness is mighty. :)
If a photon of precisely the right frequency (and therefore energy) hits an atom, two things happen:
(1) It gets absorbed, and transfers its momentum to the atom -- i.e., gives it a little push.
(2) One electron in the atom absorbs the photon's energy, exciting it to a higher energy level.
Then, after a random time interval, two more things happen:
(3) The electron drops back down to its old energy level.
(4) The atom emits a photon, carrying the energy given up by the electron, and the photon's momentum delivers another push to the atom.
But while the first push was in the direction of the laser beam, the second one is in a random direction -- so the affected atoms, statistically speaking, wind up with a net gain of momentum in the direction of the laser beam.
So far, the laser is basically just stirring the gas. Now you tune the frequency of the laser a little bit lower. The "average" atom sees the photons at the wrong frequency, and the photons just truck on by. But atoms that happen to be moving toward the laser see the photons Doppler-shifted up to just the right frequency and they receive a push away from it -- so their average speed is reduced. Ba-bing, ba-boom, the gas is colder.
Laser cooling, along with a couple of other techniques, made it possible to get the super-low temperature needed to isolate the Bose-Einstein Condensate which got the 2001 Nobel.
rj
Uranium hexafluoride can be (and is) used in enrichment process:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_hexafluoride
This substance is gaseous at 64C, no extreme temperature is needed. Laser enrichment works with this compound.
Yeah, great....so why is every man and his dog is trying to buy Uranium from Austalia right now?
I'm wondering if this type of method could also be used to find the "good" atoms of uranium in spent fuel and to separate them out so they can become "new" fuel rods. Does anybody know?
Plus, it would be really cool if they could tune several different lasers in such a way as to create a laser refinery which can separate different heavy elements beyond just uranium. This technology sounds great if it can be used to recycle nuclear waste too. Then the question becomes, will they use it to recycle?
[Sig goes here]
Use of UF6 is the MLIS process, championed by Los Alamos. Use of atomic vapor is the AVLIS process, championed by Livermore. You would not believe the endless arguments that ensued during the 1980s over which was better. AVLIS won.
You're in good company. It really pisses me off that we Americans invented so much stuff that was just sold off for a quick buck to some foreign company, or just blatantly ripped off and sold back to us for a song just to destroy what competitive capability we had left (i.e., "dumping.) There really isn't much point in making a significant investment in R&D if you're not going to use it to benefit your domestic industries. There's even less point in making such an investment just to benefit someone else's domestic industries, since that becomes little more than expensive foreign aid that comes back to bite your own citizens in their collective asses. International trade is just a highly-stylized form of warfare anyway, and the one thing you don't do in war is give the enemy anything for free. Make him pay for whatever he takes. Otherwise you have a "foot in self shoot" situation, which is where we are right now.
P.S. Our government and our corporate leaders also have much they need to answer for. Some atonement is in order, I think.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Let's not forget his little campaign to deny national journalists access to him, in favour of speaking directly to regional reporters, whose views he feels are "more in line with his own."
Harper has taken some bizarre, anti-informative, anti-democratic stands in his last.... what, has it only been a hundred or so days? in power. He seems to resent that there is no puppet media outlet a` la FoxNews who will spin his denying cheap access to daycare to working mothers as a "great move to strengthen FamilyValues," or the war in Afghanistan as a "heroic mission aiding to spread democracy across the middle east."
And yet, it seems he's more popular than ever. Go figure.
TFA states "..[p]ower stations are fuelled by a specific blend of two types of uranium. About 5 per cent must be uranium 235...".
This is of course untrue, for example the CANDU reactor uses heavy water and natural uranium. Not processing uranium is cheaper than processing, laser or not.
Anybody want a peanut?
You still need u238 to dilute the u235.
What the grandparent is saying is there's no need to enrich given the surplus u235 that's lying around.
Yuck, don't remind me. The journalist thing is an unusually lame move... I'm not found of modern conservatives, and I thought I expected the worst from them. And yet Harper has still managed to underwhelm. Maybe he and Bush can get together and have a little "I'm the Decider" party, while they ceremonially burn copies of their respective constitutions and swoon over pictures of Franco and Mussolini.
Never said that we'd use it to replace oil. As for building lots of plants, I'd shut down the natural gas plants first(it's one of the more expensive ways, and NG is valuable for many things), then the coal plants. Now, yes, with that much cheap electricity available, electric cars would make much more sense, even if it does just take the form of a bigger motor replacing the starter motor and a battery with a 30 mile range.
;)
As for putting a nuclear generator in your car - well, that's pretty far off.
I don't read AC A human right
I caught the original article, but missed the retraction. Let it never be said that I'm afraid to admit that I'm wrong.
Sorry about that.
I don't read AC A human right
Use hydrocarbons as your fuel source. This is environmentally little different from using a standard internal combustion engine.
I disagree. When the fossil fuels are being used at a centralized location it can be economical to use huge scrubbers on the stacks and reduce emissions far below what is possible on each and every car.
Not sure I agree in this context. We're talking about using fuel cells in a power plant remember - the person I was responding to was reffering to using fuel cells to generate commercial power, which almost certainly means a plant running on natural gas.
Lets say your power plant uses propane gas. It can either burn the gas to run an electric turbine, or it can run the gas through fuel cells to produce electricity. Any scrubber system you can use with the first option will also work with the second, so unless you get signifigantly more effeciency with fuel cells, there is no difference in emmissions.
Now, with regard to using power plants to make hydrogen for use in cars, I agree, it's better than using straight hydrocarbon fuel. However, the amount of power required for electrolysis is very very high, so your best options are things like nuclear power, which means you have to convince people that nuclear power is better than the alternatives.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Thermal diffusion, calutrons, gaseous diffusion,and centrifuges - sounds like 4 methods to me. Two big problems with thermal diffusion, one is it is a huge energy hog and two it takes a couple of years before you get significant HEU output.
You're a bit off in the order - the first batch of uranium was first slightly enriched with the S-50, the further enriched with the Y-12, then finally with the A and B racetracks.
The Little Boy bomb was spectacularly inefficient, the 12.5 kT yield was 1% of the theoretical 1.3 MT yield if all of the uranium was fissioned.
I gotta say, the best part of that site is this map. If there was ever proof that many Americans know little to nothing about Canada, it's the diagram of the province of Saskatchewan labeled "Saskatchewan, Ontario". LOL
Of course, the actual labelling of the map was done by the Canadian Website http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/uranium_map.htmnuclearfaq .ca. So unless Americans are running nuclearfaq.ca, I suspect your 'best part' doesn't quite hold up :).
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
It's not helping that you guys are way down there at the "bottom" of the world, either. I think you should give some serious consideration to relocating a little closer to the population centers of the world; the shipping costs alone have to be just about killing you (besides, why would someone buy stale nucular fuel shipped from almost the South Pole when they can make their own fresh fuel right here at home?!)
In short, until you can overcome the transportation issues inherent in being about a zillion miles away from your customer base your best bet is to just export your ideas and let someone else implement them.
(in all seriousness: the "because they're very far away" answer is so far the ONLY way the wife and I have been able to convince our two three-year-olds we can't just pick up and go visit The Wiggles some weekend...though one of them actually just wants to go because on our globe Australia is pink.)
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You state that there is an excess of uranium. Is that why uranium prices have increased over 500% in the last six years? Commodity prices in general have been soaring, and many other countries use uranium. Electrification of India (nuclea power) and China (also nuclear power) is creating a surge in power consumption.
The Soviet materials have been mostly reprocessed. Consumption has reached 80 thousand tonnes per year, and production is still less than 50 thousand tonnes. Additionally, GE has already signed to build a facility in the US. Obviously someone thinks it's worth the investment.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Yeah, perhaps the mountains on some other planet.
Sucks to this.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Hopefully this doesn't get bitch-slapped as "off-topic"...
Maybe only NOW it's just become commercially viable to use lasers instead for data acquisition from subjects?
I suppose centrifuges leave the subjects somewhat flattened, deflated. After spin cycle You can't wring out much more information.
But, with the new and improved laser light show, it can be quite a fright, and as enlightening as a lightning show. Or, is that "laser light show"?
Order yours from dwon udner, at +61 2332......
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
There would be no reason whatsoever to enrich uranium (Other than to make bombs to kill people) if we were to use the CANDU and IFR technology.
Fuel reprocessing however is necessary.
There is just no way we can supply our energy needs in the long haul other than with nuclear... that is unless we accept a massive change in our life styles!
Oil is peaking now. The actual month may well be in 2007 or even beyond that - but we are effectively already at peak because we cannot signficantly grow our supplies. We can increase our coal consumption and we can liquify it as well. We can also make bio-fuels. But they will not fill the gap created as conventional oil depleats. The short of biomass->ethanol for instance is that a tonne of any biomass (not the refined cooking oils!) is equivalent to about 2 barrels of oil. This is easy to illustrate by looking at the chemisty (CH2O)n -> C(n)H(2n+2).
We are starting to face a major energy crisis and this is only the beginning - barely the tip of the iceberg.
The issue is the current generation of reactors generate a pile of plutonium. While it isn't weapons grade Pu (too much Pu240 relative to the Pu239) it is still dangerous. The best course of action is to burn it up for power.
The CANDU is a near breader design and is quite efficient in its use of neutrons. It is a decent reactor to use until IFR can be put into production. Note that a CANDU can easily burn the spent uranium fuel which is incorrectly called "waste". An IFR can even burn depleated uranium.
Of course we need to allow fuel reprocessing for this to happen. The only reason we don't do it now is political. (for the short term... IFR combines the reprocessing on site and hense is far more secure).
As for the cost of nuclear energy?
The short answer is that enough governmental beauracracy can make _ANY_ industry unprofitable.
The Original method for enriching Uranium, and the easiest to build for a nation who wants to do so was the Calutron.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Brazil just opened a commercial uranium enrichment plant. They can become a weapons state any time they feel like it.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
that can run on un-enriched uranium anyway?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
This might well be vapourware (if you'll pardon the pun), but isn't it also possible that Silex has figured out things that the project you worked on missed back in the 1980s?
Mind you, USEC was an early investor in Silex, but has decided to instead go with centrifuges for their new enrichment plant, so clearly they came to a different conclusion.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If you think I'm making it up, do the research. The amount of Hollywood misinformation that the average person has is obscene. Here's one: you can't blow up a nuclear power plant and get an atomic explosion. What? Yeah, it's basically just glowing green rocks, water, pipes, dynamos, and a lot of concrete. You can blow up a natural gas or oil power plant, however.
has anyone told you that Australia dosent use LWR reactors because we dont actually have any nuclear reactors? Although our pollies are talking about it now so that may change. Apparently we were gonna have on but it was during the cold war and apparently the "Good Ol US of them" decided we were a security risk and didnt give us the tech to make one. And of course, we're all too stupid to come up with one ourselves so we just shrugged our shoulders and went on burning coal. We like coal, its nice and simple, gerhoick!
I'm sure that's true in most cases. I know Canada's nuclear industry is very well-regulated and safe. But I was in Japan in 1999, when the Ibaraki nuclear 'incident' happened. The nuclear industry, like any other, can be dangerous if safety procedures are not followed. And instead of something obvious like a big piece of machinery crashing down on you, a nuclear accident kills you without you ever realizing what hit you.
Despite the fact that the nuclear industry is one of the safest, it is psychologically more intimidating to know that you could be killed by invisible rays instead of a big chunk of steel.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Incidentally, there are more than two methods for enriching uranium--the author of the article should have read Chapter 14 of Benedict, Pigford, & Levi.
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
Fuck off slashbot piece of shit. All I had to say fucking fit in the subject.
Current installed plants do not live up to any of the propaganda - but there's a few promising things in development which may make the "cheap atomic power is just around the corner" claims of the past fifty years actually be true this time.
http://www.ansto.gov.au/natfac/hifar.html
"Get off the cross - we need the wood" - Tori Amos
correct, i confused myself and was thinking about nuclear power stations. whoops!
Sounds like the laser fusion project. Aren't we the only ones (USA) doing that? hmmm....
E Proelio Veritas.
I was just reading Tony Benn's diaries from when he was the UK Minister for Technology. Interesting discussion of the security worries when the UK AEA got a Centrifuge method working.
Most people had given up on the centrifuge method, as it was mechanically very difficult to engnieer such a big fast centrifuge, and indeed the UK was about to start work on an expensive huge new diffusion plant for making fuel.
Now they had the centrifuge, which, once you could actually make it work, was cheaper and smaller and easier. So they didn't need the diffudion plant, but it occured to the Govt. that if they didn't build it, then other countries would work out that they had the centrifuge, so they would restart their centrifuge development program.
Since a centrifuge is easier to build and hide, the worry was that e.g. South Africa would start manufacturing bomb fuel in an undetectable way.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
I'm curious to see these results, because I believe it's cooked numbers.. Here's why:
Energy = Power * time
If you define efficiency as a greater transfer of energy, then you COULD define this through the use of extremely LOW power levels (e.g. extraction over a very long time).
Hell, by that standard, weak nuclear decay has higher efficiency energy emmission efficiency than gas.
Power = Work / time
Work = Force * distance
Force = mass * acceleration
Big trucks have heavy mass, so they need (indirectly) lots of power to do the same work. A hypothetical low powered fuel cell therefore would not be sufficient to manage a big truck.
On the other hand, a US citizen is spoiled and requires lots of acceleration - just look at the cars we purchase compared to the rest of the world.. The little honda motor-scooter with like 15HP is the worlds most popular vehicle, while the US needs 135 HP to get out of the parking lot. The whole US hybrid car thing pisses me off.. All it is is a way to gain Horse Power (and thereby the acceleration). They put a little 60HP motor in, and use battery assist to enhance horsepower during periods in which the driver slams his foot on the gas (which should NEVER happen with an environmentally respectiable driver). You wait for a merge gap before you merge, you wean the throttle from a red light, you maintain a constant speed with a LARGE 2 to 3 second gap between you and the car in front of you to avoid fuel-consuming speed fluxuations, etc.
But US citizens do not do this. (I say this as an OCD American)
So, as fuel cells hyopthetically achieve low acceleration levels, they would not suffice replacing the battery as the acceleration module. What they COULD do is replace the engine as a true low-horse-power machine.. A diesel-electric train uses high horse-power electric motors and a diesel generator to recharge the electric batteries (or provide direct current - I don't know which). Theoretically the same could apply here... A large electric battery would power the electric motor wheels and a fuel-cell could recharge the batteries. To compensate for the hypothetical low power levels (the long energy emmission times), you could add more fuel cells in parallel.. A train has enough fixed weight that the incremental weight of the fuel cell theoretically isn't a problem - thereby avoiding the energy-to-weight v.s. gas issue which exists smaller cars.
-Michael
The expected boom in nuclear power plant construction forcast in the 1970s and early 1980s never materialized, mainly due to Thre Mile Island and Chernobyl.
The boom in nuclear plant construction in the 70s and early 80s didn't occur because of an incident that didn't occur until 1986? Is there some kind of prescience going on here?
Power plant construction in the US was already at a very low ebb by the time Chernobyl happened. TMI plus a bunch of poorly informed "greens" jumping to the wrong conclusions had already put the hurt on the US nuclear industry. That plus horrible mismanagement of the regulations that made it impossible to build a plant without truly astounding cost overruns.
I can't speak to what happened outside the US, but at least France went right ahead and did a great job utilizing nuclear power safely and effectively.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I don't know about the Nebraska fuel cell, but you can read about the Portland, Oregon feul cell here:
http://www.oregon.gov/ENERGY/RENEW/Biomass/FuelCe
or here:
http://www.green-rated.org/resctr_tech.asp?id=5
In short, it uses option 1 but its fuel, while natural "gas", isn't a fossil fuel.
-- Steve
Thanks for the link :-)
/. doesn't let me edit...
Though I would say that the important distinction with the Oregon plant you linked is that they use biofuel, rather than the fact they also use fuel cells. You mention that in your post, but keep in mind that it makes all the difference. Since their fuel source is carbon neutral, it doesn't matter what means they use to convert it to electricity.
The difference between fuel cells and turbines, as other posters have informed me, is effeciency. The difference between biofuel and fossil fuels is their impact on the carbon cycle (plus the problems associated with dwindling fuel supplies). It's the fuel, not the power plant, that determines whether the plant contributes to the greenhouse effect.
However I should have mentioned that in my list of hydrogen sources - that was a serious oversight on my part. Pity
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
What happened to the days when conservatives had the balls to just say "centralism sucks, so we're cancelling these programs and lowering taxs"?
They were largely replaced by RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) - liberals and middle-of-the-roaders claiming to be conservatives. Actual conservatives are only a fraction of the so-called "conservative" office holders.
Prime example: The current immigration "reform" legislation. An actual conservative would get the borders under control FIRST. "Guest worker" programs and modifications to the naturalization process and quotas would wait until it had been PROVED that the executive branch was willing and able to enforce the immigration law. Look at the voting records of the Republican senators (excluding those who are up for election THIS year and might face a voter backlash while the issue is fresh) to see the proportion of conservatives to RINOs.
(This deal was made once before for (supposedly) a bit over a million illegals (turned out to be far more) - and the "no more" part was replaced by "ten times as many". Why should real conservatives, or anyone else, believe the second half would happen this time? Actual conservatives aren't going for it until the previous deal is enforced - which would take the pressure off if it actually happened.)
Of course the legacy news media is so far off in left field that office holders only slightly to the right of Joe Stalin are portrayed as being slightly to the left of Attila the Hun.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There is just no way we can supply our energy needs in the long haul other than with nuclear... that is unless we accept a massive change in our life styles!
Sure there is: Space-based solar.
We're less than 100 million miles from a STAR. It's trivial to collect so much solar power, convert it to milimeter waves and beam it to ground (at >90% efficiency, with most of the losses NOT showing up at the in-atmosphere end) that the waste heat from USING the energy would be enough boil the oceans. (And once waste heat becomes a problem, to put up enough sunshades to reduce the solar input to compensate.)
The limit becomes how dark things can get before you can't grow food.
With 1970s technology it would actually have been cheaper than building new fossil fuel or nuclear plants on the ground - and with 2000s tech it would be easier yet.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> Knowing what we now know about how Eason Jordan's CNN played patty-cake w/ Saddam
> in the run-up to the war, you have the gonads to cite them about that issue???
> Why don't you just cite a random Democratic Underground moonbat, they have
> the same amount of credibility.
Fox News says the same thing as CNN, so you might want to take a look at the evidence instead of wrapping yourself in a coccoon of self-delusion.
That's a fair statement, however I am certain those "film strips" they make you wear for exposure-checking become an eagerly-watched fashion accessory in the plant. One of the nuclear workers in America told me that he said some folks cannot return to work after certain medical procedures, because the radiation levels in their body would set off the sensors. I don't know if we're talking Barium enemas or what here, but I'd say those sensors would mean a lot to me if I had a job like that. Not everyone is cut out for every job. I'm sure most people don't want to grow up to be in the US Marine Corps, but the ones that do, heck, they love the idea of being the front line. I'd take Nuke Worker over combat infantry any day.
So why are Australians so interested in an enrichment process if they have no large needs to do so? Do they have nuclear-powered warships, perchance? The Australians were also responsible for a ceramic-based vitrification remainder technology. I just don't get this.
Does any one know how much nuclear waste is needed to make it weapons grade? All the news reports never mention it and don't go beyond the basic head line "IRAN determine to go Nuclear".