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Distributed "Nuclear Batteries" the New Infrastructure Answer?
thepacketmaster writes "The Star reports about a new power generation model using smaller distributed power generators located closer to the consumer. This saves money on power generation lines and creates an infrastructure that can be more easily expanded with smaller incremental steps, compared to bigger centralized power generation projects. The generators in line for this are green sources, but Hyperion Power Generation, NuScale, Adams Atomic Engines (and some other companies) are offering small nuclear reactors to plug into this type of infrastructure. The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical. They envision burying reactors near the consumers for 5-10 years, digging them back up and recycling them. Since they are so low maintenance and self-contained, they are calling them nuclear batteries."
Well, it has to go critical (k=1) if there is a constant power output...
Three-headed fish coming to a pond near you!
why bring back the risk of meltdown/contamination. This can be achieved using solar and wind. same distributed concept. Just instead of a power cell you have a house covered with solar panels or a wind generator.
Yes this wont' work everywhere but it is viable in many high demand locations ergo Southern California.
Remember, there are still people out there that think powerlines cause cancer, and that vaccinations cause autism, despite scientific evidence.
Nuclear uis a huge red button. I don't think this option is politically viable except in rare circumstances.
I can see it working for small islands and other population centers that are far away/cut off from other population centers. If you are talking about a largish island that has no power supply on it, then it might work. Or an Alaskan town far from everywhere else.
But I can't see someone putting one of these things say in the middle of NYC, Los Angelos, or even on Long Island
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The liquid metal reactor takes advantage of the physical properties of a fissile metal hydride, such as uranium hydride, which serves as a combination fuel and moderator. The invention is self-stabilizing and requires no moving mechanical components to control nuclear criticality. In contrast with customary designs, the control of the nuclear activity is achieved through the temperature driven mobility of the hydrogen isotope contained in the hydride. If the core temperature increases above a set point, the hydrogen isotope dissociates from the hydride and escapes out of the core, the moderation drops and the power production decreases. If the temperature drops, the hydrogen isotope is again associated by the fissile metal hydride and the process is reversed. The chemical isotope splits chemically when it gets too hot. Just like water boils and turns into steam, you can design the water system to not exceed the boiling point of water. You would have to keep the water under pressure to force higher temperatures.
The safety systems will be similar but the reactor cores are different between the Triga (fuel rods in a pool type reactor) and the Hyperion Power Generation Uranium Hydride (liquid metal) reactor.
If you were going to blow it up, it would take a lot of explosives -like blowing up a 15-20 ton buried bank vault. A lot of explosives to penetrate the concrete cask and then more to blow through however many feet of dirt it is buried under.
It would not add much to the cost to have sensors and digital video camera security to these things. So extreme tunneling, attempts to move it or blow it up should be easily detectable and action taken.
For the amount of effort and explosives it would take then just take those explosives and add radioactive material (available in mines and in less secure facilities and sources) and then put your dirty bomb anywhere. Thus there is no incremental risk.
The nuclear material is tougher to turn into nuclear bombs than using raw uranium, which a terrorist could get from natural sources (mines etc...). Again no incremental risk (we are adding no new risk as there is an easier existing path).
For getting oil from oil shale this system can supply heat instead of natural gas. Hyperion also offers a 70% reduction in operating costs (based on costs for field-generation of steam in oil-shale recovery operations), from $11 per million BTU for natural gas to $3 per million BTU for Hyperion. Over five years, a single Hyperion reactor can save $2 billion in operating costs in a heavy oil field. A lot of the initial one hundred orders are from oil and gas companies.
A single truck can deliver the HPM heat source to a site. The device is supposed to be able to produce 70 MW of thermal energy for 5 years. That means that the truck will be delivering about 10.5 trillion BTU's to the site. Natural gas costs about $7 per million BTU which would would cost $73 million.
It would be better to compare the HPM to diesel fuel, which currently costs about 2 times as much per unit of useful heat as natural gas and still requires some form of delivery for remote locations. In some places, fuel transportation costs are two or three times as much as the cost of the fuel from the central supply points.
In certain very difficult terrains, or in places where there are people who like to shoot at tankers, delivery costs can be 100 times as much as the basic cost of the fuel.
Initially these units will be in remote areas near oil sand projects and they will not be directly under people's houses. Do people live directly over power transformers or oil refineries ? The first few thousand can be placed on the site of existing nuclear and coal plants which have a few square miles of space. Even if there eventually there was one for every twenty thousand or ten thousand homes, they would be situated in some industrial zoned area. For eastern europe and island developments, the units will be sited several hundred meters from where people
No matter how safe it is, I'm betting this will be the largest "Not In My Back Yard" example ever put forth in American History.
"Hyperion Power Generation Inc. has developed a garden shed-sized nuclear reactor that can produce enough heat to generate 25 megawatts of electricity for up to 10 years.
That's enough energy to power 20,000 homes, but still tiny by current nuclear standards."
These are not going to be burried in peoples back years.
A small town might have one city may have a few scattered around. A factory may have one or a data center.
As too what could go wrong? Well maybe they are as safe as they say. I would be willing to bet that they are pretty dang safe. If so then they could be great. Think of all the small villages in Northern Canada or Alaska that depend on diesel fuel truck or flown in. Or think of small nations like the Bahamas.
Yea this sounds great if it is safe.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I did on-site service work recently for a 'union man' who did some work at a nearby nuclear power plant. He told me that after they were suited up they walked in and decided they were bill gates, mr burns, and homer simpson. They were told to move a radioactive part and 'burns' asked 'gates' if he was going to go get that. He said, "Hell no, I'm not moving that fucking thing. I'm Bill Gates, I'll buy homer a six-pack and that dumb bastard'll do it". Apparently the staff at the plant didn't find it as funny as they did.
He also had screen by screen pictures of the computer-based nuclear safety exams they all used to cheat their way in and could have walked right off the set of the sopranos but that is another story.
The only way to solve that problem is to offer something signficant in return, such as free electricity for homes within a certain distance of the "battery". Getting everyone within that radius to agree might be something else entirely.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/images/w87-design.jpg
Ian Ameline
These have been working of submarines and aircraft carriers for decades.
It is high time some of that military tech comes to civilian use.
If you are afraid of nuclear power, you are on the wrong website.
This is supposed to be for technologically informed people.
Yes, start in remote areas. Islands etc where running power lines is a major expensse would be the best places to start. NY and LA prefer to export the pollution to the suburbs.
I RTFA and did not find how the battery actually produces power - is it with a typical steam turbine, or some novel new system? The compact size of the battery also raises some interesting engineering problems. The one I am most interested is shielding - if there is not enough shielding between the reactor and the cooling parts, the radiation will corrode the parts to the point of failure, which is bad especially underground. It does make a lot of sense to use this for remote outposts like mining though.
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
Most reactors are built in such a way that automatically prevents them from going over critical (critical is where you want to be, as someone already pointed out). The very nature of their design, assuming something doesn't mess up, keeps them safe.
The thing is, even though reactors are built with countless safety features, something could still go wrong. That's why you have professionals constantly (or at least daily) monitoring everything. Now, if you go and produce millions of mini-reactors, put them in the backyards of regular citizens, give them nothing but automated monitoring, and leave them going for awhile, something is eventually going to go wrong. It still might work on a one-community-at-a-time basis, though. As long as appropriate precautions are taken, nuclear power is extremely effective and clean (compared to coal).
My preferred name is frazz, but someone keeps taking it. If you see him, tell him I said hi.
I think that you'd have to be realy drunk to drive 75mph UNDERGROUND.
-- Sig under construction...
Nuclear power companies in the West have safety records and standards that would put any other power company and for that matter almost any other organization to shame (One significant incident at the outset in Britain, one minor incident in the US in '79, and a few messes of note in Japan) but any statements to the effect that it's safe, even if it's clearly impossible for a meltdown to occur, are prefixed with a clear suggestion of "But you should still be terrified of the Nuclear Bomb In Waiting."
But America gets half its power from coal, which dumps literally tons of thorium and uranium and mercury into the air due to fly ash every year.
"Supposedly" is editorial flair for "I don't understand the science or the hardware, but dammit if I'm not afraid of it, so I'm going to throw doubt on everything".
In reality, they're actually quite safe. In fact, they're probably even safer than coal, especially as of the recent coal slurry disaster in Tennessee and the Mercury in coal smoke.
Attach the word "nuclear" to something and watch the fear level rise.
They are more flexible and more reliable.
1. You can site them anywhere. Solar and wind have to be sited where there is solar and wind.
2. They are available 24/7. Solar and wind are up to mother nature.
3. They have a higher power density. You need less area to power a bunch of homes. This translates into more safety, and ultimately a lower land use footprint, leaving more room for, well, things that live in the environment.
4. Lower environmental risk. We have barely studied the long term effects caused by draining energy out of the wind, or, of robbing the ground from solar energy to convert to electricity. The aggregate effects of billions of windmills and solar panels upon the earth are not understood. With nukes, we know the risks. We might have a meltdown, some radiation, and a leak, but that's about it.
This is my sig.
Summary is incorrect. The "nuclear battery" (incorrect name) would have a 99.5% chance of "going critical". After all, that's what nuclear power plants do. What they mean is that the plant would have an infinitesimally small chance of achieving super-criticality. Super-criticality would be a very bad thing, but even that can be mitigated with enough cement. End result? The reactor will be as safe or safer than installing a Diesel Generator in the same location. But it will be more powerful, economical, and environmentally friendly.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
TFA says they will be using TRIGA reactors, which are open pool reactors. From WikiP
"Pool reactors are used as a source of neutrons and for training, and in rare instances for process heat but not for electrical generation."
So how exactly are these "nuclear battery" TRIGA supposed to actually create useful power? The flow of hydrogen atoms to the "hydrogen trays?" It doesn't say protons.
Of course, I am treating wikipedia as infallible here. Maybe that is the flaw.
More music, fewer hits
Probably RTGs, which the USSR put in a lot of lighthouses and other remote places that needed power (with poor documentation, so nobody knows where all these things are anymore). They take a radioactive source (preferably a pure-alpha emitter, since they're easy to sheild, but theoretically any radiation will work) then use the Seeback effect to generate electricity.
What it sounds like they're doing in this article is having an actual nuclear reactor with fissionable material, rather than just generating power off of radiation. They seal it up, bury it, and don't expect to have to do any maintenance for 10 years or so. The fuel source is unsuitable for weapons (it could, of course, make a dirty bomb, but those are more about fear mongering than an actual threat), and has the same self-regulating properties as a pebble bed, where fission simply stops if it gets too hot. At $30 million each, I could easily see these getting bought by medium-sized municipalities to cover their energy needs, though it's a bit much for the totally decentralized grid that the article talks about.
Not a typewriter
So these reactors power about 20,000 homes. That means that to power LA and the greater NYC area you'd need about 1000 of them. Good luck with that. People get annoyed enough if you want to put cellphone towers in their back yards.
And think of what NYC looks like during a garbage strike, and imagine what it'd be like if the garbage is now radioactive waste :-)
And yeah, sure, putting one in Alberta tar-sands country is fine, because the only people living up there are the oil workers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Digging with a backhoe for three meters, then through the seal the company is putting on the reactor? Plus they aren't going to be in backyards anyway. RTFA
There are two kinds of nuclear bomb-- Uranium and Plutonium. In order to get a Uranium bomb, you have to have highly enriched Uranium (a high U-235 to U-238 ratio). These reactors don't have anywhere near the U-235 ratio for that. The second option is Plutonium which is not a naturally-occurring substance. It is the by-product of some kinds of fission, and can be made in a specially designed nuclear reactor. These aren't those kinds of reactors, so you're not going to get enough Plutonium to be useful in weapons development.
Thus, one of these things wouldn't be much of a head-start over just mining some Uranium ore.
E pluribus unum
Waste heat from one of these things is going to be comparable to the electrical output, and will require dissipating the waste heat. Either they'll need a cooling tower (the BIG part of any nuclear site!), or be placed next to a large river or lake. Folks sort of get upset putting nukes right next to their water supply and ecosystem, so both those alternatives suck.
> the travellers slept by them for the tens of thousands of watts of heat they throw off
When I travel in cold climates I often like to sleep next to tens of thousands of watts of heat. Really takes the edge of a frosty night. Of course I'll sleep by megawatts of heat if I can find it, for a real warm night.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
The irony is that a Coal Plant is actually MORE radioactive than a Nuclear Plant!!
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Hint: It in the ashes and it affect 1 mile around it. Don't eat stuff from your garden!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
"The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical."
This statement is incorrect, a reactor has to be critical to produce power.
Criticality refers to the rate at which the chain reaction of fission is occurring. If the reactor is sub-critical, then more neutrons are absorbed then causing new fissions. In this state, the reactor power exponentially decreases to zero. When the reactor is critical, exactly 1 fission is caused on average for each neutron released, which means the reactor is at a constant power. Super-critical means the reactor is increasing in power. A special case of criticality related to nuclear bombs is called prompt-super-critical. For more info, see the wiki article.
I am not sure of the details of these designs, but I bet they use a fuel type similar to university research reactors. This fuel is a uranium-hydride mixture. The moderation for the neutrons is built into the fuel itself, but it has an extremely strong negative temperature coefficient. This means that any increase in power, and thus temperature, reduces the reactivity, which lowers the power back to the equilibrium level. It is physically impossible for the reactor to overpower.
For a neat demonstration of this effect, see this youtube video. It is the research reactor at Penn State performing a pulse. Basically, a control rod is hydraulically ejected from the core, causing the power to spike to thousands of times the rated power, but only for a microsecond. The power just as quickly goes back down to normal by itself, because of the intrinsic safety of the fuel design.
Put on a Hank Paulson mask!
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week before I head out to Vegas for a show at MGM..
The concept of "local power" was first advocated by... Thomas Edison. He was advocating small power stations all around a municipality for local distribution via his DC-based systems.
Westinghouse's AC system, however, allowed for transmission of power great distances. Despite using his name, and some patents, most of what we use today owes more to Westinghouse than Edison.
Just for clarity (and to shake my fist at Schoolhouse Rock), if you're going to refer to Edison's DC, then you should refer to Tesla's AC (not Westinghouse's). And the only reason Edison "advocated small power stations all around a municipality" was because that's the only way his baby, DC, would work. DC just doesn't travel well.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
The main problem I have with nuclear power is the enormous investment required to make it working, and the minimum scale that it can be done on.
While any reasonably competent hobbyist can cobble together a wind generator and battery array on his or her own quite cheaply and easily, the same cannot be said for nuclear power.
Personally, I think the answer does lie in local micro-generation, and the role adjustment of the grid to become solely a transfer medium rather than distribution channel. Large scale power generation could play a part in such a system, but, in my conceptualization of it, it would be a small part with the majority of power being generated by people from solar and wind sources and then sharing their generated power on the grid. People who generate would also have battery banks, distributing even the storage facilities among the community.
Such an arrangement, were it guided by appropriate legislation and regulations, would place the responsibility for power generation into the hands of the same people who consume, allowing people to choose whether they want to earn money from or spend money on their power needs. It would be power by the people, to the people, if you'll excuse the pun.
The problem with this is that no big business would be able to dominate such an arrangement, thus there will never be a political will behind it.
I hate printers.
Summary is incorrect. The "nuclear battery" (incorrect name) would have a 99.5% chance of "going critical". After all, that's what nuclear power plants do. What they mean is that the plant would have an infinitesimally small chance of achieving super-criticality. Super-criticality would be a very bad thing, but even that can be mitigated with enough cement.
Even plain-ol criticality (or sub- for that matter) can be bad if it's producing too much heat for the system to take out. Say for example because whatever fluid is being used to extract said heat for power generation purposes stops flowing. Then you have a meltdown, i.e. the nuclear core melting. TFA says it's meltdown, not criticality, that is virtually impossible, so score another one for bad /. summaries.
The modern way to prevent this is with naturally self-regulating reactors (as opposed to say relying on control rods to cool the reactor down). Pebble bed reactors do it by having the uranium in the center of the pebbles so that at the right temperatures they are at the right density for a critical reaction. When they get hotter, they expand, and the reaction slows down. Natural, physical self-regulation. No machine to fail, no control logic to have a bug, it's the laws of physics saving your ass. I like that.
Here's the paragraph on how this one works: "When uranium hydride gets too hot, above 550 degrees Celsius, it will shed hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen flows out of the core and is stored in special storage trays within the reactor. As the fuel loses hydrogen atoms it begins to naturally cool. As it cools, it will retrieve the hydrogen atoms from the trays."
So again, self-regulating based on temperature, sounds pretty cool. The only thing I don't like is that it still relies on a fluid flow, so if somehow the storage trays were collapsed in a way that didn't let the hydrogen to escape, I would think that the increased pressure would mean the uranium hydride would hold onto its hydrogen at higher temperatures. But I'm anything but a chemist or nuclear physicist.
The enemies of Democracy are
But right now nobody can build a wind farm that will run a city 24/7/365.
Large reactors don't bother me any more than large dams, or networks.
If you want carbon limted power today you have three choices.
1. Hydro if it available.
2. Geo thermal if you have it available.
3. Nuclear.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
give them nothing but automated monitoring, and leave them going for awhile, something is eventually going to go wrong
Read up on pebble-bed reactors. They cannot, under any circumstances, run away.
My friend, even if you spread generation out among everyone, how are you going to deal with people charging their vehicles using electricity? Large megawatt datacenters? Steel plants? While I agree wind and solar have a place, there are always going to be large scale electric consumers in the industrial sector that need a reliable base load. Nuclear fills this gap. It's safe (only one incident on US soil, Three Mile Island), it's almost zero-carbon, and the fuel can be recycled/reprocessed if not for idiotic laws put in place by ex-Presidents (Jimmy Carter, I'm looking squarely at you).
My backyard is already full of dead bodies. If I bury a nuke back there, the radiation will turn them all into zombies.
And I bet they would be *real* hungry after they clawed their way above ground.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I think in general the idea of full reactors spread out over many sites is a bad idea for terrestrial(ie not orbiting or beyond) based operations.
Large scale nuke reactors can be more easily guarded and monitored over a longer term than small-scale battery reactors.
Nuke can be safe but it has to be well monitored and maintained to be so. In other words it involves a long-term commitment, not an unbearable one, but a commitment none-the-less.
Just for clarity (and to shake my fist at Schoolhouse Rock), if you're going to refer to Edison's DC, then you should refer to Tesla's AC (not Westinghouse's). And the only reason Edison "advocated small power stations all around a municipality" was because that's the only way his baby, DC, would work. DC just doesn't travel well.
To be more precise - it's the low voltage does not travel well (both AC or DC), and in that moment no-one knew how to change DC voltage.
Once they've figured out how to make AC electric motor, Edison's DC system was doomed.
Nowadays, somewhat paradoxically, high voltage DC is even preferred for long distance transmission.
No sig today.
Suicide with a gun is extremely effective and clean (compared to with a knife).
I'm not convinced. Why don't you demonstrate it for us?
So you know the full environmental impact of covering deserts with solar collectors, do you? You wouldn't half look stupid if your desert became a wetland in a short space of time because you cooled the region too much.
Removing significant amounts of energy from waves and tides could also have interesting environmental side effects.
Basically you're going to get some form of side effect whenever you convert large amounts of energy from one form to another. The questions are: what are the effects, and are we willing to accept them?
Not saying nuclear is better. just pointing out the downside (never mentioned, possibly unknown) of the so-called "renewable" energy sources.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
Ironically President Carter, as a Navy nuclear submarine officer, was probably more knowledgeable about nuclear engineering than anyone in the White House not specifically hired to be an expert on that field.
Yea...and small amounts of caffeine, if made airborne, can quite quickly and easily kill people. Yet when I was in high school I bought an ounce (enough to kill several people - more if airborne) with no questions asked. Just because something can kill someone doesn't mean it's unsafe. And hell, caffeine doesn't have near the benefit of nuclear power generation. Why aren't people complaining about that?
Hell, think about how many thousands of people are killed in a year in auto accidents. More people die _every month_ on our highways than were killed in, for example, the September 11th terrorist attacks. And yet we're petrified of someone _maybe_ _possibly_ _theoretically_ being able to get their hands on material that might make an act of terrorism a tiny bit more possible - yet nobody gives a damn about making our highways safer. Yea. Let's stop hundreds of potential theoretical deaths rather than worrying about hundreds of thousands of real ones. Great choice.
Yes, radiation could maybe kill people. But guess what? So do coal mines. So does pollution. So do natural gas explosions. So do high-tension power lines. No matter how we get our electricity, there are risks involved. That's life. Get used to it. Just because it's different doesn't mean it's more dangerous. And just because it's been implemented poorly in other areas of the world doesn't mean nobody should ever try to use it again. By your logic, we shouldn't use coal either - after all, in early coal mines, hundreds of thousands of people died from dangerous gasses, fires, mines collapsing, etc. More died from chemicals leeching into their water. More died from mines collapsing under them years later. Coal is extremely unsafe. Nobody should ever, _ever_ use it for power generation.
Control rods do not "cool the reactor down". The control the nuclear chain reaction.
For instance in the standard pressurized water reactor commonly used the reaction is completely "self-regulating". If temperature gets too high then power goes down, if temperature drops too low then power goes up to compensate. What control rods do in this type of reactor is to control the temperature that is maintained by the reactor.
Thanks to the magic of decay heat it is possible for a pressurized water reactor to meltdown due to loss of cooling even if the nuclear reactor were to be terminated immediately (by scramming control rods) once flow was lost. I'm not familar with the reactor type they're proposing but there are nuclear reactor designs which cannot meltdown so I don't doubt that it could be done.
The problem was a flood overflowed the mine tailings dam into the town water supply. Several people were reported ill before the problem was identified. Due to the high rainfall and topography of the area the tailings dam has overflowed on several occasions but this was the first time it was reported to have contaminated drinking water.
I brought this example up since so many nuclear advocates think the stuff runs off magic beans and not a mining and industrial process. The "zero emissions" idiots are the worst at pretending this - we should be happy with very low emissions instead of pretending the fuel arrives by magic.
"So many more sane options than nuclear."
Umm not at all. Western Nuclear power stations have a great safety record. The soviet reactor that people like to throw out would never be built in the west.
Also tides and waves are to different things and tidal power only works in certain locations and could have a large impact on the environment.
We don't have ample power from dams and geothermal. They are limited as well.
Calling nuclear power insane is just mindless FUD.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The "backgrounder" turns out to be a 4-page brochure with explanatory text.
What is immediately apparent is the following:
- the Nuscale reactor is an ordinary boiling-water reactor with one cooling circuit: the heat exchanger is inside the reactor vessel itself, and steam from the secondary circuit is lead out of the reactor vessel to the generators
- it uses control rods like any other BWR, but which does not contain coolant pumps. Convection takes care of coolant circulation.
- it uses standard low-enriched reactor fuel which needs to be replaced every 2 years
From the brochure:
Thermal capacity: 150 Mwt
Electrical capacit: 45 Mwe
Capacity factor: > 90 percent
Dimensions: 60 feet x 14 feet cylindrical containment vessel module containing reactor and steam generator
Weight: ~ 300 tons as shipped from fabrication for shipping
Transportation: Barge, truck or train Manufacturing: Forge and fabricate at any mid-size facility
Cost: Numerous advantages due to simplicity, modular design, volume manufacturing and shorter construction times
Fuel: Standard LWR fuel in 17 x 17 configuration, each 6 feet in length. 24 month refueling cycle with fuel enriched at 4.95 percent.
In summary: this is a conventional Light Water Reactor which has been simplified and scaled down. I personally wouldn't want to see anything like that near where I live, or even in the same rainwater basin. I can just about live with large nuclear reactors which are situated in large concrete structures on carefully selected sites and monitored ever minute of their life-cycle by people who know something about them, but this little boondoggle is something else.
I don't care if it has a low operational risk. If you install thousands of the things (as you must because of their limited capacity) throughout the country (and close to population centers remember; that's the whole idea) and then run them for 50 years (carting spent fuel and fresh fuel to and from all those sites every 2 years), there is bound to be a catastrophic mishap *somewhere*. A meltdown, bent control rods, an earthquake that tears the reactor vessel open, and aircraft that crashes on top, a terrorist attack, fuel transport trucks that are ruptured in a traffic accident, or even good old criminal blackmail.
I'm not against nuclear energy per se, but this sort of nuclear micro-reactors makes me nervous. Very nervous. If we are going to have micro reactors, then conventional ones are fine. If we are going to have nuclear reactors, big is beautiful.
Windfarms are only profitable with government subsidy; wind mills cost more energy than they make in there serviceable lifetime (Hence the need for subsidy). Bad for bat populations, which are already in decline. Wow. just wow. .1/kw. Right now, Wind is viable without subsidy in a number of locations (with more coming due to increasing coal and gas costs). If we assigned a real costs to the pollution from the others, then it would be less.
/., not the 5th grade. Many other also have a clue.
The subsidies are far far far less than what is plowed into Coal, oil, OR NUKES. In addition, with our the subsidies, wind produces less than
As to the bats, well, how much life do you think is dying from Mercury, lead, etc. emission in the air by coal and oil. How many died from that recent ash release?
Solar panels are fantastically bad environmentally. They require the production of green house gasses far worse than CO2, lifetimes are limited and exponentially decay. They require toxic batteries to work, and are unreliable due to weather. 14% efficiency. Also, bad for ground-level wildlife.
You are kidding, right? Green House gases far worse than CO2. Like water? Limited Lifetime? You mean 30-50 years? They require energy storage to work 24x7 (i.e. base power), not necessarily toxic batteries. 14% efficieny? The systems vary any where from 7% (thin film) to 35% on newer products (using mags). Bad for ground-level wildlife? You mean something on the roof is bad for the ground? Hmmmm.
Of course, the worse part about your statement is that it assumes SOlar PV. Solar Thermal is actually at the same cost as coal.
The only real alternatives are:
Solar algae (2-4% efficient)
Geo-thermal (limited places)
Wave/tidal (possible local environmental impacts, high maintenance costs)
Nuclear (low risk, high output, radioactive half-lives are down to 200 years)
Again wow. Just wow.
Solar Thermal was missed in all your stuff.
Algae 2-4% efficient?????
Geo-thermal. Have you even read the current study by MIT? Google for it. If you consider only shallow geo-thermal, then USA will only produce about 10GW of power via it. BUT deep geo-thermal can produce more than 1/2 of America's total power need (that assumes everything on electrical) before 2050.
Nukes half-lives down to 200 years? ONLY if you run it through IFR. Of course, that was killed and the program needs to be re-started (if nothing else, just to use our nuclear waste up).
Look, I am a big fan of nukes (more of the IFR), BUT, spreading garbage about AE does not help the cause. This is
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
PV on rooftops is a fine source of supplemental power and I'm all for it, but it will not be enough to shut the base load plants off. You're forgetting all that electricity used for factories and other industrial operations. There's simply not enough room on their roof for enough PV panels to run the plant. Especially considering the ones that run 24/7.
Part of why residential PV costs are coming down is that they typically use the grid for 'storage' and backup. If your objective is to be off the grid, it'll either cost more or require lifestyle changes. I have nothing against that either but it's not likely for everyone.
Of the various 'green' power sources, only hydro is useful as a base load plant.
As for TMI, the reason there's a crew there is that unit 1 was brought back online in 1985 and is operating at full power. TMI-1 is licensed through 2014 and likely to be granted an extension to operate until 2034.
As for TMI-2, the only crew is a security guard because people are too depressingly stupid to stay out of a building covered in radiation hazard signs and regular inspections to make sure the roof isn't leaking. The fuel and coolant is long gone.