Slashdot Mirror
US Plans "Disposable" Nuclear Batteries
holy_calamity writes "A US government program is in the works to design small nuclear reactors for use by developing countries. The work continues despite fears about security and nuclear proliferation. Plans include having reactors supplied with fuel by the US and other trusted nations, or to build reactors with their whole lifetime of fuel packaged securely inside — like a giant non-user replaceable radioactive battery.' '"
Reactor grade uranium is 3-4% Uranium-235 (the dangerous kind), and weapons grade uranium is 90% U-235. It takes an order of magnitude more equipment to reach even a crude weapon's level at 20% 235. It even says in the article that the uranium enrichment and processing won't be done on-site.
What do you think nuclear powered ships use for cooling? Seawater.
Toshiba hasn't done anything with theirs yet because it hasn't been licensed yet by the NRC. Once licensed, they're going to install it free of charge (proof of concept). That should offset a fair amount of fuel costs for Gurnee, AK.
You are just misinformed. USA foreign aid as a percentage of the GDI is the lowest of just about any developed country:
http://markc1.typepad.com/relentlesslyoptimistic/images/foreign_aid_chart1.GIF
Most of that aid goes to (semi)developed countries like Colombia, Israel and Egypt for political reasons, or to Iraq and Afganistan (which we fucked up in the first place), instead of to the poorest countries in the world:
http://static.flickr.com/51/189662626_257b15004f_o.jpg
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
like a giant non-user replaceable radioactive battery
The iPod Yotta cometh. Steve's gonna be pissed that it leaked.
(The news, I mean. If the battery leaked, you would have to evacuate the city.)
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Actually neither the silly nor the unsilly part of me is assuming that reducing consumption should be a priority over improving generation. Re-read my post. First thing I said was we should improve generation facilities. I just specified two forms of generation that aren't nuclear. Improving efficiency and reducing consumption was the second point in my previous post. I'm not making some environmentalist, or hippie anti-materialist argument. Consumption is going to increase as population increases, and because people, in the US anyway, want more stuff. But that doesn't mean you can't dump research money into improving energy generation forms like solar and wind. The improving efficiency curve for generation on either of those hasn't hit the plateau yet, and we should keep pushing it.
The problem with Chernobyl wasn't nuclear power. It was the government who built the reactor. Research some of the new technology being worked on to make nuclear clean and safe and you'll change your tune. Start by googling "pebble bed".
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Not exactly. Pebble bed reactors aren't prone to large catastrophic explosions, like Chernobyl, they still can have serious accidents and radiation leaks. Google Hamm-Uentrop West Germany THTR-300 PBMR. That 300-megawatt reactor was shut down by the German goverment, after an accident in the reactor, on May 4 1986, that damaged the fuel pebble's cladding and released radiation into the area surrounding the plant. Pebble bed reactors are not as 'safe' as people say, nor would I call the nuclear waste they leave 'clean.'
As a percentage of our GDP, the US is lowest. The US is also the highest donor of foreign aid when you look at the total money given away.
It's much like the tax argument. Many people think that the rich should pay more taxes to be fair, but the flip side of the argument is that the wealthy already pay much more in taxes than anybody else.
The only way the US gives more money away is if we increase taxes - which 90% of us think we pay too much already. I'm not going to pay yet another tax so that the people of Zimbabwe can have better toilets. If YOU want to give them money, feel free, but don't assume that the rest of us want to do the same.
Developed countries get more money because they spend more money on lobbying. Poor countries can lobby the US government just the same for less money if they organized themselves properly, but they don't. Rarely do US lawmakers pick up causes on their own and start funding them - it's more often the case that somebody is knocking on their door and providing a good argument for the fact that they deserve funding.
If you look closely at the foreign aid the US gives, I would guess that a solid 75% of it is waste. If you really want to make a difference, why not take a close look at the existing aid programs and figure out ways to better manage the money and submit your ideas to those in a position to do something about it. Yeah, it's a long arduous process and it's a lot easier to just complain that it's not done right, but if you put a little elbow grease into anything you end up with a sense of personal satisfaction that outweighs any momentary happiness that complaining gives you.
Is there any reason why people can't buy solar panels and put them on their roofs? Are they too expensive? Ugly? Do they not provide enough power for the average home?
1. Nope
2. Very much so
3. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
4. Sure, you just need a lot of them, not to mention a storage bank if you want power when the sun's not out.
Limited exceptions aside, the only thing keeping solar from being part of the standard roof installation is that even with 50-75% subsidization on the part of various government agencies the payback is over 20 years in most cases. If you assume a 5-10% cost of capitol, many systems would never break even.
Cut the cost of panels in half and double the cost of electricity and it makes sense in orders of magnitude more places, such as areas where electricity is extremely expensive, such as some European countries and California when the legislature is having a particularly large cow.
Get the cost of an install that'll cover ~50% of a home's needs down to ~$2-4/watt and I'd expect them to be building factories to build the panels left and right. I say 50% because more than that and you'll likely need battery banks($$$) to go off the grid otherwise the power companies will start doing things like charge a monthly connection fee to pay for infrastructure and maintenance, and refuse to buy power because they have no demand when you have power to sell.
A single watt of panel can be expected to produce ~2-3 kwh a year. If you're paying $.30 a kwh, you're looking at a payback period of around 4-5 years. That's reasonable. The problem: I haven't seen a new panel kit for less than $10/watt, and I only pay $.10 per kwh. So I'm not installing them anytime soon.
I don't read AC A human right
...instead of lawyers to make statement. At the very least they should have someone with a background in science to proof read statements before they're released. It'd keep incorrect statements like this: "At this point, there are no proliferation-proof reactors," Sokova says. "If a country develops a reprocessing program, they then have the ability to turn the fuel into the plutonium needed to make a nuclear bomb." from being made. There are ways to create fuel (like pyroprocessing) that cannot be easily enriched into a weapon. The impurities it leaves in the fuel are nearly impossible to remove to get the concentration necessary to actually create a weapon. What I mean by "nearly impossible" is nobody, not Russia, the US, the UK, France or China has figured out how to do it, much less a way to make it cost effective. If any nation is sophisticated enough to develop a program capable of separating out the strong alpha emitters they'd already be capable of creating a weapons program without foreign aid.
I have a small correction to make: current ethanol production does produce a net energy gain if it's extracted from sugars like corn. The kind that's still operates at a loss is ethanol produced from cellulose and that's the breakthrough that we'd be waiting on since it can be produced from food byproducts like corn husks or the grass stems from wheat. At our current energy level consumption ethanol isn't a miracle cure but it does have a place at the table along with hydroelectric, solar, wind and atomic power. Fossil fuels, whether or not you're concerned about global warming, simply cannot meet the world's growing energy demands forever and humans are going to have to diversify if we want to maintain our current standard of living.
http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html
...
He started with smoke detectors (americium), moved up to radium, the uranium.
"When David's Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors from his mom's house, he decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place" and began to disassemble the reactor. He hid some of the material in his mother's house, left some in the shed, and packed most of the rest into the trunk of his Pontiac."
"At the shed, radiological experts found an aluminum pie pan, a Pyrex cup, a milk crate and other materials strewn about, contaminated at up to 1000 times the normal levels of background radiation. Because some of this could be moved around by wind and rain, conditions at the site, according to an EPA memo, "present an imminent endangerment to public health."
After the moon-suited workers dismantled the shed, they loaded the remains into 39 sealed barrels that were trucked to the Great Salt Lake Desert. There, the remains of David's experiments were entombed with other radioactive debris."
It doesn't take a gallon of diesel to produce a gallon of ethanol, that's why I said it was a net positive energy producer. Don't take my word for it, here's a technology review article: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19924/page1/ From the text: "... 54 percent of the total energy represented by a gallon of ethanol is offset by the energy required to process the fuel; another 24 percent is offset by the energy required to grow the corn." That's less that 100% energy consumption, so it's net positive. There are lots of other issues, food supply, cost, production unable to meet our current energy demands but it is a net positive producer meaning it does make sense to use it as a fuel.
You forget that on top of of the US being the biggest donor in absolute dollars, we also have the highest per-capita charity rate, something like an order of magnitude higher than England and other European countries.
Charity is kind of like people voluntarily taxing themselves to help out people they'll never meet. Kind of shoots a hole in the ugly American myth, but there you go.
A pebble got stuck in the reactor and some idiot tried to move it with a metal pole, breaking it. The "radiation release" wasn't airborne, it was a few pieces of broken pebble. At no point was anybody in any danger.
The reason the reactor was closed down was:
a) This is Germany, the land of green
b) It happened two weeks after Three-Mile Island when the press was full of nuclear nightmare stories.
Pebble bed reactors are not as 'safe' as people say
Yes they are. Nobody's claiming 100% safety - there's always unexpected idiots with metal poles.
Besides, if "safety" is your concern: Do you have any idea how much radioactivity and other contaminants the average coal fired power station releases into the air per year? How many coal miners die every year to feed that plant...?
Pebble-bed reactors are orders of magnitude cleaner/safer than coal-fired generators, it's just that coal seems "natural", it comes out of the ground and hippies can hold it in their hands.
No sig today...