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Russia's Floating Nuclear Plants Under Fire From Greens
slashdotmsiriv writes with a link to an International Business Times article about Russia's plan to build floating nuclear power plants (a subject we discussed some time ago). The project is getting a lot of flack over possible safety problems from green groups. "The first floating power plant will be named 'Academician Lomonosov.' Mikhail Lomonosov was an 18th- century Russian scientist who achieved worldwide acclaim for his work in chemistry and physics and was founder of Moscow's state university. Customers could include Russian state-controlled gas giant Gazprom, the northern region of Chukotka and countries from Namibia to Indonesia, according to industry sources."
Has ANYTHING Nuclear related not taken flak from green groups? I'm not surprised at all that they're objecting, I mean this is a perfectly clean form of electricity which wouldn't pollute anything and, in the event that it sank, would only deposit nuclear materials back where they came from, the Earth's Crust. Oh sorry, my anti-green group side is showing...
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
So, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 would be like Waterworld, with 'Academician Lomonosov' being the center of the zone?
Do you think an ecoregional wiki government would do such a thing?
Why aren't these groups up in arms about nuclear-powered subs that have navigated our oceans for quite some time? How is this really any different on a fundamental level?
"Outsourcing, take them away!"
-ZAP-
"It's a miracle! They moved our factory to a third world country!"
"Now I have more time to play the lottery, CA-CHING!"
First of all, the objections were noted last time Slashdot covered this topic. Secondly, the greens are always complaining about nuclear power plants.
.hk TLD (is that Hong Kong?)...different currency.
Also I see a some discrepancies between this article and others. Aside from the obvious claim that this is the first floating nuclear power plant in history (I guess if you don't count 11 carriers, a couple dozen cruisers, and well over 100 submarines for the USN alone, none of which have had a nuclear accident, btw), the BBC quotes it as costing $336 million, not $2.7 billion...sorry strike that, I see this news article has a
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article234753 6.ece
Do you think Putin cares about the green party.
--VladP
http://www.google.com/search?q=fuel+rods&ie=utf-8& oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&clien t=firefox-a
Fuel Rods
Whatever you're looking for
you can get it on EBay
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Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
Just how many light years away is this gas giant, Gazprom?
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
Scandals around gasprom is well known. Even martians know that russia is a state that is run by mafia. I dont think that these grunts would care for environmental concerns.
Read radical news here
If you think about it, one of the most significant difficulties with building nuclear power plants is the "not in my backyard" problem. This could move the problem onto the oceans, perhaps the safest place for it. (This doesn't address the "any nuke is a bad nuke" arguments, but those are likely to prove impractical in a power hungry world in the long run...)
Benefits:
1) No immediate population centers. This gives any fallout time to disperse in case of a major failure.
2) Portability. Aside from the commercial advantages (shift reactors to high demand areas, no building costs for new locations/shutdown and cleanup costs for areas suddenly with low demand, etc) things like this could be moved off the coasts of disaster regions to provide major power to devastated areas quickly.
3) If they build it to be submersible, they can simply ride out any storm below the wave level. This means a lot of the extreme construction required for fixed-target plant defenses (storm and hostile) becomes less critical.
Risks:
1) Reliability engineering may prove a challenge for large scale plants. This is unknown at present, and I didn't see enough information handy as to studies done on the designs. You need to simulate the heck out of these things, and design failsafe (I wonder if it could be made provably failsafe...)
2) If a large amount of radioactive material gets dumped accidentally into a major ocean current (I should think this an unlikely failure mode with correct designs, but just suppose...), I'm not sure about the effects - better or worse than venting into the atmosphere? Will it simply sink and stay in one area, eventually recoverable?
Using truly modern designs, I am willing to believe the risk of major disaster can be made very small. (It seems like the human element was the least accounted for in older designs, so including that in the designs this time around should help...) This is a very interesting idea, and I think it deserves a detailed study to ascertain its risks, benefits, and whether it is practical with current technology.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I used to be solidly anti-nuclear, but after I educated myself and weighed the pro's and con's, I realized that it's the way to go. One plant, with it's few tonnes of radioactive waste that can be reprocessed several times and then securely stored away even though it's not an immediate mortal threat, can produce as much energy as many ugly, smelly, waste-by-the-megaton, coal plants.
Really, it is the appropriate mid-range solution. Hydro plants are very good (the one in Quebec is amazingly huge), but you're limited in where you can have them. I don't agree with man-made lakes feeding Dam hydro, and tidal/wind are a ways off yet... nuclear is the way to go to get rid of gas and coal plants, that are doing more to mess up our environment than one glowing bar lost in Homers shirt ever could.
And a floating plant? It's not like it's riding on an inner tube, where one errant bb pellet is going to take the whole thing down. It doesn't exactly fill me with joy to consider it, but at the same time, it does have aspects that make sense, and if it'll get some more strip mines closed, I'm all for it.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
What do they plan to do in case a tsunami hits? By definition this would be deployed near coastal areas where the tsunami's deliver their greatest punch.
Aside from being a non-military device, how exactly is this different from hundreds of nuke power plants floating around the worlds oceans inside military vessels?
As a baby step this is a good idea to test waters. It would be most useful when it reaches the scale of 1000MWe.
I'm not surprised they can find someone to object to this idea - if you go far enough out, you can probably find people who object to the human race on the grounds the Earth would be better off (for some definition of "better" that I don't really understand) without us. There are people to whom the word "nuclear" is associated with nothing but disaster/mass destruction. This is understandable, but other objections have been raised to almost every form of power imaginable. Minimizing unnecessary damage to our environment is good, and I applaud the efforts to push for this goal, but there are limits to how far this can be done without becoming unrealistic. For example:
1) Wind farms are decried for noise, wiping out birds, and ruining the view.
2) Solar power is objected to in terms of the materials/processes needed to make the cells and the ecological effects of shadowing large portions of the landscape.
Geothermal is probably the only case where I don't know of any major objections, but geothermal cannot power everything we do. The fundamental truth is that extraction of energy from the surrounding environment (or introduction of it from storage by increased thermal/other emissions due to combustion/nuclear processes) MUST have an impact on the system. We cannot live without having an impact on the world around us - it is simply not possible. The concern is to minimize the negative effects of our activities while still doing what we need to do. Solar and wind appear to be much less intrusive compared to most current large scale power generation methods, and as such seem like logical directions to pursue. Reducing power usage is good but in the end our population is likely to expand either in activities or numbers to consume all possible economic power that we can generate.
I'm wondering if the folks objecting to this one are objecting on the grounds of practicality, or simply on the grounds that it is nuclear, period. If the latter, I think they will eventually need to face up to the fact that fossil fuels won't last forever and we are not going to abandon large scale power usage. The problem is thus defined as how do we sustain that usage without undue risk, not how do we live on power levels low enough to be generated without significant impact of any kind. The later is simply unrealistic and not a useful basis for discussion.
Because how else are these worse than nuclear submarines?
I do love how a Russian engineer used the example of the Kursk to argue that these are safe in a recent article. Yes, I know, the reactor held together. But the comparison will hardly be comforting to plant workers.
Ahh.. the good old days.. j/k
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Revelation 8:8 (King James Version).
I don't remeber how that whole thing worked out. I think I fell asleep after that part. Just my luck...
Green groups will complain no matter what. It's the same sort of people that don't want wind turbines in their beautiful fields that they don't even LIVE in, the view from the road (mmm gas guzzlers) will be ruined. Fuck the hell off. If nuclear is even 10% greener that should cover the deficit in building a new plant etc and is GOOD.
They are under fire from Greens? You think the Greens would be smarter than to fire at a nuclear facility.
Not that it is related to the article story, but public criticism of this nature is "flak." The word comes from FLugAbwerKanone, the German word for "antiaircraft gun." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flak
pebble bed reactor
no china syndrome there, there's no chance it can melt down
your attitude needs to catch up with the latest technology
i don't blame you, but a lot of people's opinion of nuclear is based on 1960s era technology
and maybe, even with modern technology, with the much smaller risk, the risk still isn't worth it
but then you weigh that against hurricane katrina-making global warming, and petrol dollars that fund wahabbi islam and therefore islamic fundamentalism and terrorism via saudi arabia, such that in today's world, nuclear doesn't look too shabby
no energy source is perfect, they all have their draw backs, the decision is complex, but weighing all the factors i can think of, nuclear looks best, with all of the negatives of nuclear considered
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Elements from Nature. Check.
Basic Nuclear Physics. Check.
Water. Check.
What's not to like? Uranium is all-natural.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Has ANYTHING Nuclear related not taken flak from green groups?
You've obviously never watched "Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster". Those Japanese hippies partying on the side of Mt. Fuji get damn near wiped out by Hedorah before Godzilla saves their grubby, unwashed, marijuana-reeking asses. By the end of the movie, they're so damn happy they've lived to smoke another joint that they'd probably OK the installation of a Chernobyl-style reactor right next to the free-love commune where they all live.
GMD
watch this
Right! And nuclear waste is NOT pollution!
I make a distinction between waste and pollution.
A barrel of waste in a containment facility isn't pollution. Mercury, in a container, is a valuable product for commercial use. Mercury that's escaped the smokestack of a coal power plant is pollution.
Basically, since we contain all the nuclear waste quite successfully(esp compared to coal power), it's not pollution.
Having seen the figures for realworld deaths caused by the pollution of coal power, combined with it's safety record and the figures screamed by the greens for worst-case nuclear disasters*, I'd rather go with the proven safety record of nuclear.
*That aren't even panned out for the worst nuclear power disaster in history, Chernobyl.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm sure geeks always enjoy a discussion of navel reactors.
After spending nine years in the US Navy, five years on a US Warship (USS Reuben James), and one year on a USNS (John Lenthall), I can say that nearly 60% of all time on ships is spent doing MAINTENANCE.
US Warships will degrade into a complete rustbucket if you stop doing maintenance for even a single week. One of the biggest expense accounts on any ship is the paint locker and it's associated gear of chipping hammers, knuckle dusters, needle guns, grinders and deck crawlers. You chip paint and then re-paint every single day, non-stop, 365 days a year. And every three years, you pull into drydock to get scoured from stem to stern in a right proper job, inside and out.
And this is just the painting maintenance.
Add in broken electronics, broken pumps, broken valves, broken flanges, bent hinges, worn gaskets and the flood of everyday things that continuously need fixing, upgrading or maintaining, and you suddenly understand why so much of our ship's budget goes towards maintenance.
The ocean is a VERY harsh environment, and it breaks things. Easily.
Our military is able to keep things running smoothly because they have the following:
1. MONEY.
2. Highly trained people. (Yes, even the deck apes.)
3. Highly trained civilian contractors on shore that can be sent to a ship in less than 48 hours.
4. Rules and regulations carved in steel that must be followed or else officers get fired or sent to Leavenworth.
5. MONEY.
This is why we can have nuclear reactors on aircraft carriers without them going *BOOM*. Also, ours are very small, meant only to supply power for the ship and it's crew.
Now then...
The Russians have:
1. No money.
2. No more highly trained people. (They all left because they weren't getting paid.)
3. No civilian contractors that aren't part of the Russian Mafia in some way.
4. No rules that can't be bent with a few rubles.
5. No money.
So please...explain to me just how having the Russians putting nuclear reactors-meant to supply power to cities on the shore-on THEIR ships would be a good idea?
[End Of Line]
- All of the current above ground fuel (spent and unspent) in america could power ALL of America's electrical need for about 100 years (I am not certain about that if we switch to electrical cars).
- All of the current above ground fuel (spent and unspent) in Europe could power ALL of Europes's electrical need for about 150 years (ditto on electrical cars).
- I am not certain about canada, but they would certainly have enough to last without digging. But then again, they want to dig. But it would be minimal
- All the waste that is left is a fraction of the current waste and will only be bad for about 100-200 years.
- Once the reactor is built and the fuel is loaded, you do not touch the fuel again(directly), until it is ALL gone.
This would allow us to move to developing AE at a good clip rather than trying to do it too fast.I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The Navy has about the only justifiable use for reactor based nuclear power. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is the stratagy whereby no party to a nuclear conflict can be denied a counter strike. We manage this by hardening silos, putting bombers in the air and hiding submarines in the ocean. The mission of keeping our subs hidden can really only be accomplished with nuclear power. But, the power requirements are miniscule compared with our total power consumption so the generated waste can be disposed of through transmutation. This is not the case for nuclear power that makes up about 20% of our electric power consumption and so there is little justification for that. What the russians are proposing sounds pretty risky and suffers from the problem of generating waste that will consume more power that was originally generated to dispose of.
... since you obviously use electricity, and plastic, and have a job that pays enough to own a computer - which implies that you commute to work be it on a train or a bus or in a car... oh forget it the list is endless.
My point, which I digressed from - is that you are as much a problem for the environment as everyone else - so just shut your trap already.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
From the fine article:
"This is the most dangerous project that has been launched by the atomic sector in the whole world over the past decade," said Ivan Blokov, campaign director of Greenpeace Russia, Thursday. "It is scary as this is basically going to be a floating atomic bomb."
I bet Mr. Blokov has no idea how brain-damaged that statement is. There are reasons to be concerned about floating nuclear power plants, but calling them "floating atomic bombs" just reveals his personal ignorance.
And labeling them as the most dangerous project in this decade, without thinking about, say, North Korea or Iran... the mind boggles.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The only real way of the post peak-oil humanity is not solar or wind power, but closed fuel cycle with 99.6% of all active ingredients used
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_cycle
...is a new twist on the idea of a floating grid!
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
http://www.westernstatescenter.org/publications/d
STFU about slashdot bias.
The folks who run the nukes are VERY highly trained. There are lots of lackeys there, but the majority are bright and hard working. And just out of curiosity, have you even worked with radiation, let alone even KNOWN anybody who works a nuke plant? Somehow I doubt it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What makes that funnier is that the answer isn't, "Green Groups".
[Spoiler]
We win
[/Spoiler]
I've never actually met a person who is concerned with trying to lead a clean and un-destructive life and who is also fundamentally closed off to logic and reason. Perhaps these 'Greens' are out there, but I don't think they are quite as prevalent as would justify the level of hostility being directed at them. It sounds like the same kind of vitriol which angry, blue-collar conservatives (who, sadly, I have met in quantity), direct at all the 'welfare moms' sponging their tax dollars.
People need to chill out a bit on this stuff and stop directing so much anger at straw-man villains.
-FL
One of the reasons for these plants was to STOP THE SPREAD OF NUCLEAR KNOW-HOW. So they sell them a floating nuke rather than teach them how to build a nuke of their own. So who runs it!? Nuclear reactors are incredibly complicated, and only "safe" at any level with a highly trained intelligent crew operating it. So does it come with a tight-lipped Russian crew to man it? or are you training locals and sharing all the information you're supposedly not sharing!? Seems poorly thought out. Or at least poorly explained in TFA.
so, why not floating on the Oceans, etc.?
(Maybe a city that's lost its power plants to terrorist bombs can Rent-a-Nuke, until they are replaced)
On the other hand, aren't Global Warming scientists predicting ever LARGER STORMS?
If they're right, who wants a floating nuke to spill radioactive bits into the sea?
This is a positively idiotic idea. While I am for nuclear power, I am dead set against this implentation. I am for tracts of breeder reactors in the deserts of nevada, not something like this.
1. As anyone who has ever been aboard a boat or a ship knows, saltwater and the pounding from the sea shifting means an IMMENSE amount of maintainence has to be done, compared to keeping the same machines somewhere in a building on land. The tight passages that a ship has, or a floating vessel containing a power station, don't make things any easier. This means the salt water will rust all sorts of things, reducing the reactors life and making accidents more likely.
2. If in the event of a meltdown, the nuclear waste melts through the metal of the ship and drops into the ocean. While the 'china syndrome' may be FUD, (a melted nuclear pile going through rock til it hits groundwater - unlikely) this is very possible. Once in the ocean, the waste will be constantly polluting the seas through diffusion, and be extremely difficult to recover - how do you grab tons of highly radioactive slag off the seafloor?
In Soviet Russia, power plant nuclear you!
Modern society dictates that we have to do environmentally destructive things in order to live. I don't see your point. Greens want to make society less destructive to the environment.
They are called aircraft carriers.
Also many (most?) submarines are nuclear powered, and they are designed to float (surface) from time to time.
Seems to me that building some sort of (as you call it) Planet of the Apes style signage over a single dump somewhere, is a hell of a lot better than dealing with thousands or millions of tons of toxic heavy metals all over the place, deposited by coal burning plants, or the destruction of inland fisheries and forests due to acid rain, or the possibility of serious longterm consequences if we really are causing global warming somehow.
I'd much rather take all the best engineers in the U.S., and throw them at one tractable problem -- "how do we keep this stuff safe for a long time?" -- then the myriad issues that we get from just dumping toxins into the atmosphere to blow away, and not be thought about until they start to cause a real problem.
If you want to live the kind of lives that we have today, and moreover, if you want to maintain the upward march of standards-of-living (and if you don't, that's fine, but realize you're in a tiny, tiny, basically insignificant minority), then there are going to have to be tradeoffs. There's no free lunch where energy and thermodynamics are concerned. You want the lights to go on, the juice has to come from somewhere. Either you burn coal and poison everyone, or you cover every flat surface with solar panels (and deal with the pollution that their production entails, not to mention the problems just associated with deploying them, if you could ever make enough), or wind generators on every hilltop and kill birds (and again, you probably couldn't build enough anyway), or you dam every lake and river for hydro power (incredibly, almost unbelievably, polluting, due to deoxygenation), or you build nuclear plants and deal with the waste. Pick your favorites, but I don't think we can do it, long-term, without nuclear plants -- a lot of them -- and we're going to have to deal with the problems eventually. Might as well start thinking about it now.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
http://www.nuclear.com/n-plants/index-Floating_N-p lants.html says
July 30, 2005
Floating plant by 2011, Russia sez
Russia's Federal Nuclear Energy Agency has said it will complete the first of several floating nuclear plants by 2011 and put it into operation at the northern port of Severodvinsk, on the White Sea. Construction will start next year. Each 70-megawatt plant is designed to last 40 years and will cost about $200 million US.
it goes on to say this is being funded by China.
Chris
the U.S. DOE and the USGS says there is only trace amounts of these elements in burnt coal, much like other rock of the same type.
And who do you think is paying them to say that, eh?
I'll give you a guess -- who's the best friend of the oil industry? (The answer isn't the nuclear industry)
You've probably seen their commercials on TV; they run these saccharine spots with too-cute, ethnically-diverse kids playing in a field, ostensibly in the shadow of their friendly local...coal-burning power plant.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I see some sort of recycling reactor coming to the fore within the next hundred years.
A breeder reactor can reuse almost all of the high-level nuclear waste. I hate to see them just bury some potentially useful fuel, especially when the future supply of fissionable material is limited.
It's limited only by the fact that we built up quite a stockpile during the cold war and that's limited continued exploration.
For that matter I've always figured that if they interred used reactor rods in Yucca Mountain or elsewhere that we'd end up digging them up again. Now wouldn't that be hilarious? 'They spent an extra billion to make sure the facility would last 20k years. We ended up pulling all the waste out for reuse in under 200.'
I don't read AC A human right
I notice that there is a lot of animosity towards the greens in Slashdot. Yes, they maybe just agitators, but I would like you to consider if the reason they are ostracized here is simply a conflict of interests.
Simply put, what do us geeks/nerds want? we want abundant, cheap energy to power the technology we "live and breathe" and in which our jobs and means of subsistence depend. We secretly fear peak-oil and rationing our energy use is almost unconceivable to us.
Could it be that we want energy so bad that we dismiss any criticism before even thinking about it?
Okay, I'm going to ask a silly question that I'm sure there is a very simple answer for, but I have been wondering about.
One statistic I have often heard from the pro-nuclear crowd is that coal releases more radioactive material that was locked inside them when burnt than is produced per megawatt by nuclear reactors. The thing is we simply don't notice because it's very dilute. If this is the case, then would not a simple solution to the waste problem be to simply grind the waste and eject it from the top of tall smokestacks very slowly?
We shouldn't be shooting the waste into the sun. We should be using it in breeder/IFR reactors for even more power. As for the low level stuff, grind it up and mix it with earth to seal old mines.
I don't read AC A human right
The green people complain about EVERYTHING. They say even windfarms are damaging because they kill birds. Then they'll drive their car, and leave the lights on at home while recycling aluminum cans. Its like they have drive and passion, but they just don't have a direction to funnel the passion, so they complain about EVERYTHING. Why not complain about just the big things like the fish population dying, or the rain forests being stripped. I'm sure if someone was smart, they could lead this desperate group of people who think civilization is out to kill the planet. For example: Nuclear power is cleaner than fossil fuels since fossil fuels emit all sorts of toxins, and nuclear waste can just be tossed away in parts of the world that aren't inhabited. I'm not sure if that statement is even true. I'm just saying that if someone was smart, they could figure out what maximally helps the environment while minimally hurting civilization. Then armed with this information, they could invoke change. If you're looking for a calling, you could be this person.
God spoke to me.
Pebbles nukes do have their problems: http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/internationa l/press/reports/nuclearreactorhazards.pdf , page 41 (see the authors references page 4)
During the soviet era, before the Chernobyl disaster, local "powers that be" claimed that "those nuke plants are so sure we may build one on the Red Square!". Do we really have total confidence in the guys who, here and now, claim the same? Where is the large group scientist declaring "we analyzed those blueprints and are absolutely sure it is not dangerous as a whole" (in any other case, after a disaster, there will be the usual bunch of "I checked my part, it was OK, I could not knew that another part was not, so let's devise a complete new architecture")
Nuclear waste doesn't need to be tossed away in parts of the world that aren't inhabited... It COULD be recycled, but that world-class assclown Jimmy Carter decided that he wanted to keep sleeping with the Greens and signed a bill that banned the construction and use of breeder reactors. Kinda ironic how the Greens DON'T want use to recycle nuclear waste back into useable reactor fuel, then complain about the Government having to bury it underground.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
...the same dumbfucks who brought us Chernobyl. Seriously, there's no evidence they learned a single thing from that incident, and in fact, the government has never admitted, acknowledged, or recompensed for any part of it. Of course they should come under the highest possible scrutiny for any new nuclear plant designs. This is not a time for political correctness -- they could seriously damage the global environment with a catastrophe at sea and they need to heavily scrutinized at this time.
True it is theoretically an energy source, but doesn't mean its viable, economical, or prudent. I can combust gold and fluorine to make energy too. Doesn't make it good idea or economical. Many things could in theory be an "energy source". Nuclear energy is a fun science project, but despite lots of economic inputs for 50 years it just fails the test on so many fronts.
Breeders = more fuel. Breeders = nuclear proliferation too.
Why do you thin the designers of light water reactors didn't choose a breeder design? Why do you think that US presidents for 20 years have shut down the reprocessing? N-U-C-L-E-A-R P-R-O-L-I-F-E-R-A-T-I-O-N.
You think that a huge complex of private industry can abate the risk of a softball sized lump of Pu going missing? You think that the US taking on nuclear is on a large scale paveing the way for more nuclear power plants everywhere is a good idea? So General electric end up selling plants to every 3rd world country breeding away there own supplies? Totally insane.
Oh, wait.... I forgot nuclear isn't economical (amongst many other faults). Oh wait renewables are already cheaper? What was the question?
Pain of Salvation's album "One Hour by the Concrete Lake" (the concrete lake being lake Karachay in Russia).
Unfortunately safety engineering isn't a requirement at university. You end up with a bunch a cocky engineers walking around thinking they can overcome the laws of physics.
Here is the fundamental problem: there is no such thing as a fail-safe system. Sure, better designs can tack on a extra '9' to the statistics before failure - but it *will* fail - and the risk is far greater than other forms of energy. (And the nuclear industry has a string of failures in its history, up to and including critical failure - in case you think nuclear is immune to statistics).
Nuclear power presents trade-offs, none of them good. There is no magic pill with nuclear power, you can shift around some of the downsides, but it still ends up with a *whole lot* of down sides. Don't get me wrong, I think it is interesting science, but a good choice of power it isn't.
Integral Fast reactors don't change that fact. They switch some failure modes for others (high pressure water for tons of liquid sodium), which sound good until a real one is actually built. They output waste that is usable in nuclear weapons (don't be misled, IRF levels of Pu 240 doesn't make the best bombs or the most predictable yields, but it can still make a reasonable bomb good enough for terrorism). IRFs can be used to breed Pu 239 to very high grade if the user or rogue state chooses to as well. And "Proliferation resistant because the waste is so hot", is like calling a bug a feature.
Given the many problems and risks, and poor economy associated with nuclear power it would only be acceptable if there were no other alternatives. The thing is... there are alternatives! Renewables already are building more capacity annually then nuclear worldwide, they have similar economics or are more economical (despite vastly lower subsidies and research funding), have better energy-returns-on-energy-investment, better security, no major safety issues, are decentralizable, etc, etc, etc. Now why would I want to build nuclear power plants?
As an environmentalist strongly in favor of nuclear power plants I have to say that this is probably the most retarded implementation ever.
a)You want the plant close to cities so you can use the spill heat for district heating.
b)You want to transport the electricity as short a distance as possible to avoid resistance losses in the wires.
c)You want the reprocessing facility to be next-doors so you can minimize the need for waste transports, thus cutting the costs associated with securing them.
d)It is far easier to build a decent containment building on land. Easier = cheaper.
The only advantage I see with this project is that you can move the thing around, but quite frankly you don't want to do that since it would require you to disconnect it from the grid. For best efficiency you want to keep the reactor online for the majority of its time. 20 year refueling intervals has been suggested for some modern designs. This is a rubbish proposal as it could displace much more CO2 emissions if built efficiently. You want to maximize the useful energy output, thus maximizing the amount of coal/gas/oil that you save.
"And who do you think is paying them to say that, eh?"
Holy tin-foil hat, Batman!
Look, I am as suspicious of government as the next geek, but to suggest that somebody is paying the DOE and USGS to "say these things" is simply absurd. And even if it were true, this is the age of the whistle-blower hero; nobody could get away with it for very long.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Here is the fundamental problem: there is no such thing as a fail-safe system. Sure, better designs can tack on a extra '9' to the statistics before failure - but it *will* fail - and the risk is far greater than other forms of energy. (And the nuclear industry has a string of failures in its history, up to and including critical failure - in case you think nuclear is immune to statistics).
Critical point: The present alternative, coal, is presently blamed for 24k deaths/year in the USA from respitory ailments alone. This is without addressing other safety aspects, failure modes, global warming, etc.
Sure, accidents happen, but the nuclear industry has a very good safety record. Nuclear power currently has the best safety record and lowest injury rate per kw/h produced.
Even solar and wind have potential fatalities, and it adds up when you're talking about millions of wind turbines.
Nuclear power presents trade-offs, none of them good. There is no magic pill with nuclear power, you can shift around some of the downsides, but it still ends up with a *whole lot* of down sides. Don't get me wrong, I think it is interesting science, but a good choice of power it isn't.
No good tradeoffs? How about being essentially carbon-neutral? Non-polluting? Able to provide rated power better than 95% of the time; whenever you want it?
Integral Fast reactors don't change that fact. They switch some failure modes for others (high pressure water for tons of liquid sodium), which sound good until a real one is actually built.
Sure, there's issues. It's a new design. That's why I'd build a test reactor first, preferably somewhere remote where even a truly stupendous failure wouldn't contaminate much affects humans/wildlife.
They output waste that is usable in nuclear weapons (don't be misled, IRF levels of Pu 240 doesn't make the best bombs or the most predictable yields, but it can still make a reasonable bomb good enough for terrorism). IRFs can be used to breed Pu 239 to very high grade if the user or rogue state chooses to as well. And "Proliferation resistant because the waste is so hot", is like calling a bug a feature.
99.5% efficiency. The Pu isn't pulled out on a regular basis, indeed most of it is also 'burned' in the reactor along with the rest of the fuel. For that matter, even light water reactors can be used for weapon production, just not as easily. At this point I feel that proliferation concerns for plants built in the USA and other first world nations to be missing the mark. Some refining and you stick the Pu and such right back into the reactor.
Given the many problems and risks, and poor economy associated with nuclear power it would only be acceptable if there were no other alternatives.
Poor economy? Nuclear power at this point is cheaper than most coal power. The reason it ended up being so expensive was that we didn't have any type certifications, so each station had to start at step 1 for getting permits for permit applications, and we let construction be haulted for practically every little concern expressed in a letter.
The thing is... there are alternatives! Renewables already are building more capacity annually then nuclear worldwide, they have similar economics or are more economical (despite vastly lower subsidies and research funding), have better energy-returns-on-energy-investment, better security, no major safety issues, are decentralizable, etc, etc, etc. Now why would I want to build nuclear power plants?
Nuclear power, properly done, is one of the cheapest per kw/h, easily beating solar. In most locations as well, you have to install at least 3-4 watts of capacity to match 1 watt of nuclear. Right now renewables have better economy because they ARE massivly more subsidized than nuclear and decentralization allows smaller installs. Still, I've read that we'll have massive problems with our infrastructure if solar/wind become more than 5% of our power
I don't read AC A human right
From a failure potential this one would probably break the previous nuclear pollution record if it goes wrong. Stuff dependencies on something as unreliable as wind, no, take good old trusty flowing water to carry pollution as far as possible. Also has the advantage that you can't hide from it because most people still have to drink, and plenty of fish will store the pollution for years to come.
Ah, what a (literally) glowing tribute to stupidity that would make: the Chernoboat..
(BTW, it's going to need one heck of an extension lead)
Insert
What about freak waves/storms/lightining,etc?
Polluting ocean with radioactive materials is not harmless:Fish& sea critters die/mutate,desalination plants process such water,evaporation circulates the water back into snow,rain.
Taharvey, meet the IFR. IFR, meet Taharvey.
There's your nuclear proliferation answer.
"Greenpeace firing salvos, aiming to sink floating nuclear plants"
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
-b.
The floating nuclear plant design is the same design as has been used on atomic icebreakers. It is a proven, reliable, and even simple design. All concerns of pebble bed nuclear reactors (which the floating plant is not one of) are based purely on speculative fiction. Reading your pdf, it is clear to me that any disaster they describe would require an unbelievable series of events, in which not only would the pebbles themselves have to fail, but the containment would have to fail and a separate oxygen explosion would have to occure. All of these events would have to occure within a period of time before any one of them are addressed by the technicians.
Skimming through a variety of other claims in this release paper makes it all the more clear what it is: pure and simple fear mongering. They use figures unecessarily formatted like 100.000 km^2 instead of 100 km^2 (no, it is not european, they use ',' everywhere it is appropriate.) Furthermore, their use of sources (not the author references of pg 4, but the sources on pg 45) is laughable; while adequate sources are provided in detailing the working of the reactors, very little if any is provided backing their claims of safety issues.
Greenpeace is a fear mongering organization. If these documents don't show it, their commercials do.
Demented But Determined.
"I mean this is a perfectly clean form of electricity which wouldn't pollute anything and, in the event that it sank, would only deposit nuclear materials back where they came from, the Earth's Crust."
1. Nuclear isn't perfectly clean, fission results in this inconvinient thingy called TOXIC WASTE MATERIAL that 1st world nations love to ship to 3rd world countries for "safe" storage...1,000 episodes of the Simpsons later & you're still F'ing clueless.
2.In the event the nuclear plant sank at some random place in the ocean, so would this toxic waste material. So now our already fish depleeted oceans can enjoy immediate eradication of whatever species live there. Oh yeah baby - *ucking brilliant plan!
Adeptus.
PS. Lesson over, please carry on with your basket weaving activities.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Nuclear is concentrated power that we need if we do not have a superconducting power grid. See transmission losses. Plus it is really concentrated. GW+ of power.
Modern recycling reactor designs do not produce nuclear fuel in a form conducive to building nuclear weapons. If a softball size lump of U238+Pu239+Pu240+Random Actinides goes missing, it's no national security problem - the people who stole it will die from radiation poisoning and it'll take building a full scale nuclear reprocessing facility to separate the bomb material.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Being ignored by anti-nuke activists who say that they must be being "paid off by industry" to come to that conclusion.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
> the same design as has been used on atomic icebreakers
:-( ) and there are no real information about their whereabouts. The plants, on the other hand, will be numerous and their hot points (or did I misunderstand?) will be on land.
> It is a proven, reliable
As far as I know 10 of them existed, a handful are presently in activity, they operate very remotely (let's bet that, one day, someone may find a huge source of radionuclides at the bottom of a cold sea
> All concerns of pebble bed nuclear reactors (which the floating plant is not one of) are based purely on speculative fiction
When a study bashes one's opinion he can name it "fiction", but a better way is to prove it wrong
> Reading your pdf, it is clear to me that any disaster they describe would require an unbelievable series of events
Chernobyl and TMI were others "unbelievable series of events". In a way the very fact that TMI did not degenerate into a major disaster (the reactor vessel did not melt) is unbelievable.
> but the containment would have to fail and a separate oxygen explosion would have to occure. All of these events would have to occure within a period of time before any one of them are addressed by the technicians.
This seems a good point to me, but we already are far of the "there is absolutely no danger" motto
> Skimming through a variety of other claims in this release paper makes it all the more clear what it is: pure and simple fear mongering. They use figures unecessarily formatted like 100.000 km^2 instead of 100 km^2
Isn't it numerically equivalent? Does it impedes their results?
> sources ((...)) backing their claims of safety issues.
Which major assertion isn't backed?
> Greenpeace is a fear mongering organization. If these documents don't show it, their commercials do.
They have to draw public attention, and no commercial can convey all proofs. Seeing "fear mongering" there is saying either "you lie!" (one, then, has to prove their studies wrong) or to say "shut up, don't reveal anything to the public" (which is be... well... let's say "inappropriate")
>> Where is the large group scientist declaring "we analyzed those blueprints and are absolutely sure it is not dangerous as a whole"
> Being ignored by anti-nuke activists who say that they must be being "paid off by industry" to come to that conclusion.
If it exists, one may find it. No-one can forbid them (or the powerful industrialists and gov agencies sustaining the nukes) to publish. Where is the academic paper, or the Web site, with all the assertions and author's names and qualifications? Or are you really thinking that anti-nuke activists can put a whole team of scientists, along with their publications, into oblivion?
It is true that a softball sized lump assumes weapons grade Pu 239 - I stated that to give perspective. Still Pu-240 is almost as fissionable, the critical mass would not be much different. The important issue is that it is on the scale of softballs, not whole truckloads of material.
The idea that high Pu-240 material can not be used for bomb making is a total myth. All Pu isotopes can be used for bomb making. Pu-240 is as fissionable as U-235. Pu-240 is less desirable, because it has the tendency to predetonate, so a large military countries try to avoid it. But a terrorist cares not if its makes the 'best' bomb. They just care it works. In fact, reactor-grade plutonium may be even more desirable than weapon-grade plutonium as a bomb material for terrorist or other sub-national groups. The increased probability of pre-detonation would eliminate the need to include a neutron initiator in the weapon, considerably simplifying the task of designing and producing such a weapon.
It's 41 days out of date, but The Yamal's last know position is here. But it would seem odd to post up-to-date information on the position of commercial ships for everyone to read on the internet.
My point in calling it 'speculative fiction' was not say it is impossible, but rather that it is not well supported. I saw nothing in that article that would convince me that the authors had any more of an idea what they were talking about than the people who claim it is safe. I did not set out to prove your document false (perhaps my pebble bed rant got away from my point, though.) My point was that the document was heavily skewed in favor of those that paid for its publication (Greenpeace.) I used the 100.000 km^2 as an example of that: it was deliberatly written in a way that is ment to imply a greater impact than it has. I called them fear mongers because they tell half truths, put forth speculation and hyperbole rather than objective scientific and engineering analysis to convince people. They simply didn't have convincing evidence; all I found was a lot of speculation and vague references to other works that (from what I could see) were mostly general conceptions of how the reactors worked. Feel free to look through the source more thoughrouly and show me otherwise.
Demented But Determined.
> The Yamal's last know position is here
By "whereabouts" I meant "did they have any breakdown and where, did they drop any radioactive stuff..."
> My point in calling it 'speculative fiction' was not say it is impossible, but rather that it is not well supported. I saw nothing in that article that would convince me that the authors had any more of an idea what they were talking about than the people who claim it is safe.
A factual and detailed answer from those last people to the document published by Greenpeace may let us progress but I could no find one.
> the document was heavily skewed in favor of those that paid for its publication (Greenpeace.)
Could be, but IMHO its value can be pretty high despite of this (dubious intentions can lead to an useful/true discovery)
Actually you identified exactly what is wrong with nuclear. It *is* a very concentrated from of power. That is NOT a good thing (for safety or for distribution).
Users are widely distributed. Having monolithic centralized power plants requires a much more expensive grid, than having lots of small distributed power plants. Over the last 30 years power plants have become exponentially smaller due to this fact. Most of our power problems are currently transmission and distribution issues, not generating capacity. In the balance transmission and distribution costs more than generation - so it is a very important criteria.
Nuclear advocates don't include the cost of grid infrastructure in the cost of nuclear power, but it is a very real cost even if it is hidden from the end users view.
Compare that to a very decentralized and distributed technology like solar - it actually reduces transmission stress, instead of increasing it since it can tap into the wired grid or the wireless grid of the sun. Kinda like wi-fi for electricity, it acts as a gateway between the two networks - only difference is there is a existing, free, world-wide, nature provided, wireless network provided by your friend the sun.