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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."
Sub reactors are tiny. And they ARE up in arms against them.
Wide spread contamination at Three Mile Island? You must be joking. The only thing deemed no longer fit for human habitation was TMI station 2. The location was secured, no contamination outside the station; hell, they still use TMI-1! Chernobyl was a disaster, no doubt about it. But you would be out of your mind to compare that generation of Russian garbage against the up and coming Gen IV. The Gen. IV series will be designed for more than just maximum reprocessing: they will be the safer than any before and will even produce hydrogen onsite from the output steam (solving one of the big problems that prevents hydrogen from being a clean fuel.) Now, if you want to talk contamination consider this: the average 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant dumps about 5.2 tons of uranium and 12.8 tons of thorium, trapped in the coal it burns, per year! Nuclear power is a high risk, but low probability venture; your alternatives (outside hydro, solar, and geo) are going to be near polar opposites: high continual yield, low risk (of a major, concentrated incident.) I'll choose nuclear over coal, oil, or natural gas anyday (I live down wind and in "range" of one, no less.) Hydro, geo, and solar are all nice, but when you need unmatched yield; it's nuclear all the way. 80% of France's energy comes from nuclear power. Have you ever heard of the French Chernobyl? Of course not, that's because there neve has been one. Nuclear power is safe, effective, and will be the power of the future.
Demented But Determined.
Or, regardless of what you may think of the source, the data is accurate. The last quote is the most OT here.
A few examples:
My sig is also an environmentalist quote!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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
TMI was not our "wakeup call", nor Chernobyl theirs. TMI and Chernobyl were our respective PR disasters. Before TMI, the Us had nuclear accident after nuclear accident. The USSR had dozens of nuclear accidents after dozens of nuclear accidents (their nuclear industry really devastated a number of regions; they really seemed to have no concept of how much they were destroying their own country). It wasn't only confined to us two nations -- the Windscale disaster being a good example.
We still continue to have nuclear accidents fairly regularly, even in the most top-of-the-line reactors (like CANDUs, which have had corrosion issues). Most accidents aren't widely reported. Most don't provide immediate public threats (although they do give lie to the "amount of radiation the public receives from the nuclear industry" numbers, which are calculated based on assumed perfect operation, and often omit production releases as well). However, thanks to containment structures, the worst you usually ever get is some discharged contaminated water or venting.
Containment structures are why I am much more in favor of lead/bismuth and molten salt designs than your typical modular reactors like the PBMR, which just use confinement structures. Containment structures are what make the nuclear industry release only a "proportionally acceptable" level of pollution. Claims that PBMRs are essentially immune to accidents, so they don't need containment structures is simply ignoring history (even the very history of PBMRs themselves) in order to save enough money on construction that such a small reactor can be economically viable. I'd never go NIMBY on a lead/bismuth or molten salt reactor in my backyard, but if someone told me there were going to put up a no-containment-structure reactor whose fuel elements used graphite as a moderator (with the lame excuse that nuclear grade graphite doesn't burn**), you better believe I'd protest.
** - Yeah, tell that to the workers at Chernobyl. Even flawless graphite will erode at high temperatures, but after being exposed to your typical reactor neutron flux and corrosive daughter products for long periods, it's no longer that flawless graphite that you started out with. Burning "nuclear grade" graphite was what aerosolized most of Chernobyl's waste. Yet, PBMRs plan to have backup cooling be "air cooling". Spring a leak in the primary coolant circuit, and you've got air in your lines. Even worse, many PBMR designs have either a secondary cooling system involving water that goes near or even through the core, or uses the primary helium coolant to drive hydrogen production (with steam). Hot graphite plus steam produces hot hydrogen. I.e., explosions.
Present day. Present time.