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A $200-Million Floating Nuclear Plant?
Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'A Floating Chernobyl?,' Popular Science reports that two Russian companies plan to build the world's first floating nuclear power plant to deliver cheap electricity to northern territories. The construction should start next year for a deployment in 2010. The huge barge will be home for two 60-megawatt nuclear reactors which will work until 2050... if everything works fine. It looks like a frightening idea, don't you think? But read more for additional details and pictures of this floating nuclear power plant."
Will it ever be possible to have a rational discussion about energy production?
These are not even that big. According to wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propu lsion) the military has "Reactor sizes rang[ing] up to 190 MWt in the larger submarines and surface ships." The article is not clear weather the power rating is MWt (thermal) or MWe (electric) but even if it is electric the military reactors mentioned at wiki would still likely have equivalent electric output since the conversion from thermal to electric runs about 25%. Just for comparison the AP1000 is supposed to have 1000MW electric output.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I don't know why the author of the article suggests that floating nuclear power plants are a novel idea. Of course the U.S. Navy has had them for decades, and there are Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers that take civilian passengers. If you have US$18,000 to spend, you can travel to the freakin' North Pole on the Yamal
Why is it scary?
.. not worry about whether the kids are going to burn themselves (or throw a baseball through) the solar array..
.. lets build some nuclear power plants. Use the efficient safe designs (pebble bed) and .. OHMYGOSH .. recycle the fuel. Heck, even on Slashdot they posted a story about a new tech that might make the waste that much LESS radioactive..
With all the liberal imperialist environmental communists out there screaming because
1. Coal is a non-renewable energy source.
2. Oil is a non-renewable energy source.
3. Natural gas is a non-renewable energy souce.
4. Wave power is too ugly to be built (too lazy to Google for it but Kennedy / Kerry vetoed the idea because it was too close to THEIR vacataion home).
5. Water flow (river) is too unpredictable (and causes environmental damage when you flood blah blah blah).
6. Wind power is too noisy and it kills birdies.
What the hell else do we have?
Solar? Right. Who wants a backyard full of panels? Some people like to BAR-B-QUE in their back yards
I say
= Grow a brain...
"don't produce waste product like other types of reactor."
yes. they produce different sorts of waste products.
Nuclear power doesn't produce much waste, for the amount of energy you get out of it. But the little bit of waste it does produce is really really nasty. The waste is about 90% recyclable into more fissile material, but you need some sophisticated processing plants to do this. And transporting radioactive waste to an from a processing facility is extremely risky, which is why it is preferable to have an expensive power plant with all the processing facilities on site.
I prefer nuclear power over coal and oil. And the environmental impact of nuclear energy is smaller than that of a hydroelectric dam, discounting nuclear accidents, which you should never have. Hydrodams displace many animals and dramatically change the ecosystem for thousands of acres. Old nuclear reactors had pretty significant impact on the local environment too, such as warming of the river/lake/coast they sit on. this is bad, it can have all sorts of impacts on the reproductive cycles of many animals, as well as result in poisonous algae blooms. It is indeed possible to build reactors that are safe and have low environmental impact, they actually do exist.
There is no power source that you will make everyone happy. Crazy environmentalists don't like wind power (kills birds and rare bats), hydroelectric (disrupts the local ecology), coal and oil (nobody likes these), or nuclear (every power plant is a potential Chernobyl)
If oh-so-wonderful France can run 70% of its energy off nuclear power, then why can't the US? In the US we have a lot of lunatics who would rather have coal plants than nuclear plants. I'm assuming Russia, which has always been much more creative in nuclear technology than the US, that the only obstacle to nuclear power is coming up with the money to fund it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Hell, if this goes pear shaped, you could drop the core miles beneath the sea never to be seen again.
Well, never to be seen again except for the massive Radioactive Steam explosion.
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OK, I am actually a Naval Officer who designs the reactors (what NUPOC was to demanding). Those are not considered Reactor Accidents. A reactor accident is defined by a failure of the fuel system that releases significant amount of radioactivity into the environment. None of the accidents that you listed are due to a failure of the core and are therfore not REACTOR ACCIDENTS!!! Get your facts straight before you post!
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Plus, you would imagine that a few things have been learned in the 60 years since Hanford was built.
Yeah, like it is better to have a government agency supervising private industry and keeping them in line than it is to have a government operation under 300 layers of secrecy that nobody is allowed to even look at.
The Hanford mess is a result of nobody bothering to care for decades about management of waste on the site. I heard a talk by somebody who had some involvement with the cleanup efforts. Apparently over the many years of operation all kinds of stuff was pumped into tanks, and records of what that stuff was were not kept accurately. When sludge from the tanks was sent out for analysis it was done in a careless manner - without even rudimentary precautions like sending the same samples to independant labs for duplicate testing.
Basically it was run like a government operation where nobody could get in trouble for making a mess, and unsurprisingly a huge mess resulted. Additionally during the cold war there was the genuine concern that if we had fewer bombs than the Russians it might result in an enemy first strike - so in some sense they might have been right to make safety priority #2 (but there is no excuse for not doing a lot better than they did). After all, an actual nuclear war would have made the leaking tanks at Hanford look like a VERY minor problem.
Bottom line - large-scale nuclear power generation facilities require heavy oversight - by folks who are more interested in exposing problems than covering them up. There is no reason to ban them entirely - any industry has the potential to create disaster (just look at Bhopal) - like anything you just need to make sure that it is cheaper to be safe than to be unsafe.
Interesting viewpoint. What do you have other than national pride to make you think that an inactive US nuclear industry that spends more money on advertising than R&D is less worrying? Recent work from South Africa, India and China is most likely better than both.
However it is not "clean" - it is an industrial process involving mining, extremely toxic chemicals in processing and the end product produces waste that is both toxic and radioactive so cannot just be ignored. Also it takes years to build any sort of thermal plant, paticularly a brand new design, so it is not available now. Using an old design is pointless since capital costs are going to be very high and you want to be able to get the best results you can - plus things like accelerated thorium reactors could solve the fuel shortage problem (and be cheaper to build and run as a consequece) and produce a lot less waste. Pebble beds don't scale up so are expensive but solve a lot of safety issues - perhaps they can have longer lives so may end up cheap enough to use in the long run. Someone will bring up fast breeders so I'll point them to look at the Superphoenix project first - reprocessing sounds like a good idea but was very difficult to implement with highly radioactive material so even photovoltaics (which do not scale up - twice the scale and you get no more than twice the output) ended up cheaper per MW no matter how big you build your Superphoenix style fast breeder. In the end you need a new design instead of hoping for corporate welfare - President Carter (who has a masters degree in nuclear engineering) effectively killed the US nuclear industry by making it clear there wouldn't be more corporate welfare for new plants - the focus has been on trying to get the welfare back for more dinosaur plants instead of building things that can stand on their own merits (and blaming hippies, coal ash as radioactive waste too, everything but their own inaction).
No. As you can see in these crash test videos, the containers used to transport nuclear waste can be broadsided by a 120-ton locomotive traveling at 80 miles per hour and come out of it with only cosmetic damage. Unfortumately, all the fud about accidents & terrorism on trucks or trains carrying nuclear waste tends to appeal more to peoples fearful hearts than the facts do to peoples rational minds. That makes me a sad pro-nuclear panda.