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Next-Gen Nuclear Power Plant Breaks Ground In China
An anonymous reader writes "The construction of first next-generation Westinghouse nuclear power reactor breaks ground in Sanmen, China. The reactor, expected to generate 12.7 Megawatts by 2013, costs 40 billion Yuan (~US$6 billion; that's a lot of iPods.) According to Westinghouse, 'The AP1000 is the safest and most economical nuclear power plant available in the worldwide commercial marketplace, and is the only Generation III+ reactor to receive Design Certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.' However, Chinese netizens suspect China is being used as a white rat to test unproven nuclear technologies (comments in Chinese)." Update: 04/20 07:28 GMT by T : As several readers have pointed out, this plant will generate much more than 12.7 Megawatts -- more like 1100 MWe.
In all seriousness, 12.7 MW seems rather small for a $6 billion price tag.
Either way, people may want to consider getting on the nexr plane out of China...
Hope they've got all their paperwork in order; from what I understand, simply leaving can prove problematic for those folks.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
12.7 MW sounds a bit low. Even a DeLorean could generate 1.21 GW.
But seriously, my home entertainment center uses more than that. Well, OK, not so seriously. But still, I'm just sayin.
Please name all historical liabilities incurred in the entire history of nuclear power generation, with specific dates, and provide a comparison to the net power generated and cost savings over time. Thanks.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Fool, they're not running Vista on the control system. They're running a pirated copy of the Windows 7 beta. Get it straight.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
(~US$6 billion; that's a lot of iPods.)
That iPods have become an international currency? Maybe I should cash out my collection of iPods...
Next-Gen Nuclear Power Plant Breaks Ground In China
So... it was a surface detonation instead of a standard air detonation?
Please do your own damn history homework.
... suspect China is being used as a white rat ...
By now everyone should know it's the rats that are using us (or the Chinese in this case).
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
12 MW, 1200 MW, big deal.
Either way, people may want to consider getting on the nexr plane out of China...
In all seriousness, 12.7 MW seems rather small for a $6 billion price tag.
The AP1000 produces 1150 MWe (megawatts electric). The 12.7 MW figure is either wrong or has to do with the start-up phase.
The AP-1000 isn't a new technology reactor. That's the whole point. It's a conventional pressurized-water reactor. It's built mostly from existing Westinghouse components which Westinghouse had type-approved by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, so that multiple identical units could be built without going through a full design review for each one. So far, nobody has ordered one. Until now.
Most US reactors are unique designs, which is a headache. France has 34 reactors of the same design, which has cost and maintenance advantages, although there's been at least one common design flaw found.
Westinghouse is no longer a US company. It's owned by Toshiba.
The brochure web page for the AP1000 also says much the same thing, 1154MWe.
It also states that this is a Pressurized Water Reactor, so it's probably more about generating by-products (esp. tritium) than it is about generating energy.
Since when did iPods become a unit of measurement?
"That kid was hit by a 2-ton truck. That's a lot of iPods!"
Don't worry, given the usual quality of slashdot summaries, cutting them in half is probably an improvement.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I'm guessing it's about 12 GW rather than MW. Nuclear plants' power is usually in the order of (a few) gigawatts.
If this is, indeed, a 12 GW power plant, it's one of the largest I've heard of.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It's a 1.2GW plant. The current order is for four reactors, for 8 billion dollars. The price is expected to fall to about 1 billion per reactor. China has a goal of building 100 reactors by 2020. IF the USA built that many, it would cut power plant greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, or the equivalent of nearly a million windmills.
This is my sig.
Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. That's the only one you have to know, because it's the name that's been repeating in the minds of potential private investors in US nuclear power for over 30 years. Investors don't give a crap about cost savings or net power generation - at least directly, what they want to know first and foremost is what their chances are of making guaranteed bank over the life of the plant are. Investing in coal and oil is a sure-fire 100% money maker. Nuclear might be an even bigger money maker, 99% of the time, but... Three Mile Island, Three Mile Island, Three Mile Island...
What, money is measured in iPods now? Maybe its output should also be measured in iPods it can power instead of megawatts?
Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. That's the only one you have to know
TMI's operator's insurance company payed out US$40M in lawsuits. Not much, even in 1980 dollars.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I just gave a briefing to one of the engineers at this power plant a few weeks ago. Interesting place! It's sort of out in the middle of nowhere, at least as a far as coastal China goes. It's about an hour and a half from here, and the place would never have been built anywhere in the West. There is a Western psuedo-religion that automatically opposes anything with the word "atoms" in the name...it really retards progress. It's the sort of thing that really stands out in relief after you've been out of America for a while and gotten used to the sanity of daily Chinese life. It's really cool when you have a relationship with the guy who grows your vegetables, AND he's just a regular guy, not some psuedo-religious neogardener.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Surely you realize the difference between a civilian nuclear power program and a crash nuclear weapons development project? IIRC, every nation which has developed nukes has similar stories of abuse and malfeasance by top officials.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Nah, the typo is later. The full title should be "Nexr-Gen Nucrear Power Prant".
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
> Western nuclear technology is safe, for if it were not safe, then anyone harmed by it can sue the manufacturer for restitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act (the page name says it all really (but IANAL...)
crash nuclear weapons development project? IIRC, every nation which has developed nukes has similar stories of abuse and malfeasance by top officials.
Except the irresponsible waste handling at Cold War manufacturing plants Hanford, Oak Ridge, etc weren't part a crash project. They were just criminally cheap bastards who couldn't see 5cm beyond their noses.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I doubt investors viewed a nuclear plant that's completely shut down for the better part of 6 years for cleanup as a sound investment.
You're correct. Nuke plants must be designed like modern chemical plants, which are more complex than nuke plants, handle boatloads of hazardous chemicals and have high availability.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Yeah. At the end of the day, they're both guitar amps that'll blow you across the workshop.
Hence my many comments in this forum about Westinghouse stuff just being the old stuff painted green.
The important thing before building a lot of a new design is to get something that works well for the purpose. With France they needed something that could give them military material with civilian power generation as a side benefit so they were not in competition with other forms of energy. Purely civilian nuclear power has a lot of competition and for one thing needs to be economicly self supporting without government handouts - thus it needs a lot more development before it is viable.
Unfortunately the fantasy mindset of nuclear PR has taken over, as seen by those people above saying stupid things like "it's not really just 12.7MW - it's all because steam lets nuclear down". If it's considered in the realm of reality and not nuclear fantasy perhaps it's a small pilot plant and a step forward and catch up with nuclear technology elsewhere. Personally, since it's Westinghouse, I think it's just a demonstration plant to get the US taxpayer to shell out for a whole pile of this 1970s technology and be a burden on the taxpayer for decades. IMHO we should forget about them until they show some progress - they are about twenty years behind South Africa!
It also states that this is a Pressurized Water Reactor, so it's probably more about generating by-products (esp. tritium) than it is about generating energy.
What are you talking about? If the control rods are Li then you get T. But if you want more interesting byproducts you leave the water out and go for a fast neutron spectrum *and* you get more tritium.
Its pretty clear that this is about generating electricity.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
$2.35 per watt.
The problem with Nuclear plants is they tend to build them in the middle of nowhere, usually on the coast so they can pump the "waste" heat into the ocean. This means they can never really be much more than about 40% efficient. Really you should implement a District Heating and District Cooling systems as well if you're spending billions on new nuclear power plants.
The other thing is the current generation of plants (and AP1000 is such) are basically once through designs. The fuel is enriched, left in the reactor till the poisons build up, then removed and ... well, left lying around for 10,000 years till they figure out what to do with it. They're really pretty inefficient with the fuel as well as being inefficient with the heat produced.
The most efficient Nuclear plant would be.
1: In the middle of a city.
2: Attached to District Heating and District Cooling networks as well as the electrical grid.
3: Of a design which breeds it's own fuel and burns the radioactive waste within the reactor. (Thorium cycle, molten salt reactor or integral fast reactor).
So they're basically 3 times more expensive and much dirtier than they should be.
Deleted
China is building up powerful clean power-stations, while the US is wasting billions on bullshit projects intended to keep people working, rather than doing something useful.
Why aren't we building these stations so as to be able to stop polluting the atmosphere with coal and whatever else gets burned to produce electricity here? The Chinese bloggers suspect, we aren't sure of the technology and want to test it in China first, but the truth is much less sinister — and much more worrying...
We have simply lost the drive and our ability to take bold steps and initiatives. Would I like a nuclear plant in my backyard? Yes, as a matter of fact, I would certainly prefer it to a coal-burning one (with its radioactive smoke) or to a wind-turbine, which would take up the entire plot to produce enough electricity for a single light-bulb.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
At a cost of $5.85 billion, and assuming a lifetime of 40 years, an interest rate of 6%, this nuclear plant will have an annual mortgage of $389 million. With a nameplate rating of 1100 MW, if it runs 92% of the time, it will produce 8.9 billion kWh per year, so the capital repayments will amount to $0.044/kWh, assuming it doesn't go over budget. Assuming an optimistic cost for fuel around $0.005/kwh, this gives a total cost of $0.049/kWh, neglecting the cost of maintenance, waste disposal, and any risk of contamination or weapons proliferation.
Now let's look at a new wind farm. A 50 MW wind farm would cost around $96 million (at $1923/kW), which yields an annual capital repayment of $7.5 million (assuming a lifetime of 25 years). If the plant runs at a 35% capacity factor, it will produce 153 million kWh per year. So the total cost will be $0.049/kWh.
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant that might go over budget, might leak radiation at some point during its life, whose waste will need to be carefully controlled and permanently stored somewhere that hasn't yet been identified; or a wind farm whose costs are much more certain and which comes without all those ancillary risks?
Yes, any individual wind farm will not provide a firm supply of power. But if a lot of wind farms are used, and they are combined with solar, geothermal and other renewable resources, they will provide a fairly stable power supply. There is also a lot of potential for reshaping electricity loads to match the supply of power (e.g., recharge electric vehicles when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining). And finally, if you must have a firm supply of power, you can convert a wind farm into a completely firm supply (at 35% of its nameplate rating) by spending about 10% extra and building rarely-used natural gas peaker plants ($634/kW * 35% = $222kW).
Who cares about Chernobyl? No one is building new RBMK-1000/1500 reactors these days. Since the USSR is no more, no one is stupid enough to perform a breathtakingly stupid experiment on a hot reactor that wasn't particularly stable by design in the first place.
Anyone who invokes Chernobyl as an argument against modern nuclear power had better have a good grasp of what actually happened at Chernobyl and why it isn't applicable outside of Chernobyl.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant ... [blather] ...; or [exactly the same figure on] a wind farm ... [blather]?
Well, I'll go for the nuke, thank you, but then I'm not a luddite. I prefer my power not to fail every time we have a calm day, and not to have ridiculous amounts of land used per unit of power generated. Your own optimistic figures show no advantage to wind power, and do not take into account that the cost for nuclear power plants would drop precipitously if they were mass produced.
How much land does that 50 MW wind farm take up?
More important how much land will those 58 (8.9 billion / 153 million) 50 MW wind farms take up? Not to mention what is the cost of building conventional power plants to supply the power on days when it is not windy. Did you factor that in to your price =)
I'd also venture a guess that maintenance costs on 58 wind farms (+ supplemental power)would actually be more than the one nuclear plant just due to the quantity of them.
I'm all for alternative energy as supplements and for using it where it's practical, but at our current state of technology we can't depend on it yet.
The only one that I can give any level of dependability to is geothermal and obviously you can't build those just anywhere.
The U.S. needs Nuclear power plants, but I fear it's not going to happen until it's too late.
Moderation is not supposed to be used as an indicator of agreement.
Let's look at two numbers here:
8.9 billion kWh per year
and
153 million kWh per year.
And - oh wait, there's just the trivial need to have them...
combined with solar, geothermal and other renewable resources, they will provide a fairly stable power supply
A nuclear power plant needs none of this to provide a *very* stable power supply, and is neatly placed in one spot, with a much smaller overall infrastructure build than a miscellaneous hodge-podge of various power sources scattered wherever the environment is suitable for them. It's also proven to work very well at base load generation.
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant that might go over budget, might leak radiation at some point during its life, whose waste will need to be carefully controlled and permanently stored somewhere that hasn't yet been identified; or a wind farm whose costs are much more certain and which comes without all those ancillary risks?
I would prefer to spend my 4.9cents per kWh on something that will reliably produce base load power 24/7 thanks. Come back in 20 years when some other sucker^W fearless forward-thinker has lost a pile of cash getting the tech tamed and into the markeplace.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
The technology may have been different, Chernobyls technology may have been inferior to modern nuclear power, but considering both the Chernobyl accident and three mile island were caused by human error, it doesn't bode well for any kind.
In the case of Three Mile Island, "The mechanical failures were compounded by the initial failure of plant operators to recognize the situation as a loss of coolant accident due to inadequate training and ambiguous control room indicators." (here ) and in the case of Chernobyl, they set up a reactor test which ran overdue and it was left to the undertrained and underskilled night-shift to handle the plant at the time (here)
In both cases, better training and adhering to safety protocols would have saved lives and possibly the reactor. So don't go dismissing Chernobyl as an argument against Nuclear power. It's an argument against cutting corners and the lowest-bidder mentality that still exists today in the building of new nuclear plants.
"How cheap is safe enough?" is something few people want to ask, and even fewer people want to answer.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
I work at a pressurized water reactor so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies....
No, seriously, I'm not an expert on the radionuclide table, but that's hardly why one would choose a pressurized water reactor over a boiling water reactor. (Those are the two big established types. The United States has dozens of both varieties in commercial operation.)
One big reason to pick a pressurized water reactor is that you limit your contamination to the primary reactor coolant loop and it's support systems. The steam plant- the electricity generating side- stays completely radiation free.
This makes servicing the steam-electricity side of the plant much cheaper and simpler.
Most electricity generating power plants in the US operate on steam power.
In a pressurized water reactor, there's a separate reactor coolant loop that passes heat through metal tubes, boiling 'feed water' in the steam generator, and the steam spins the turbine that makes electricity. The primary coolant and the feed water/ steam do not come in contact.
In a boiling water reactor, the reactor directly boils the water that spins the turbine. One big advantage of this is cheaper construction.
Both types 'burn' Uranium to generate the heat that boils the water. Pressurized Water Reactors simply have an additional segregated loop of water.
There are probably a number of advantages to either type that other folks could fill you in on. I assure you though, as an operator of an American Westinghouse Pressurized Water Reactor, tritium is nothing more than an occasional annoyance.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
If you don't get rid of the heat then you don't have such a big temperature difference so you can get a lot of energy in the first place. While you can get a bit from power plants as industrial heat you really need a really reliable heat sink such as evaporative cooling (those big towers) or sea/lake water.
The second point has been shown in practice by the French - reprocessing of highly radioactive material is very difficult and very expensive since for one thing everything has to be done remotely. Lead lined gloves aren't enough - the stuff might as well be on Mars because it has to be handled so it doesn't get near anybody. That was really the thing that killed Superphoenix (where the waste was far more radioactive again and even more difficult to handle) and the idea of a commercially viable fast breeder reactor. What that has meant is that even though it takes a lot to make the fuel in the first place it is far easier to do that than reprocess. Accelerated Thorium is a different story since it appears that far less handling of fuel materials is required and it can apparently use up discarded weapons materials and uranium fuel rods.
IMHO the answer is less money on PR and more on R&D. Having nuclear power pushed by brainwashed zombies into conspiracy theories that think it was all perfect in 1970 is counterproductive.
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant that might go over budget, might leak radiation at some point during its life, whose waste will need to be carefully controlled and permanently stored somewhere that hasn't yet been identified; or a wind farm whose costs are much more certain and which comes without all those ancillary risks?
Remember China doesn't have the NIMBYism that the US and Europe has. The waste will be recycled when possible and put in the ground when not possible.
First of all, Chernobyl was largely not caused by human error. It was due to pure bloody mindedness inherent in the USSR and a dangerous reactor design that made even more dangerous by disabling critical safety systems.
Everyone likes to paint TMI as a huge disaster that should be ranked with Chernobyl, yet TMI was no more serious than a small, controlled release of radioactive gas which quickly dispersed into the atmosphere. Which funnily enough is the exact sort of thing that coal plants do all the time yet nobody appears to live in mortal terror of them. TMI is only considered major because the danger was inflated and the government instilled panic by evacuating large numbers of people. Combine that with a little lobbying from coal and oil companies and you get the current disaster that is US policy on nuclear energy.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
You've started with wrong numbers. The 40 billion Yuan cost is not for one reactor; it is for two of the same kind.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-04/19/content_11217433.htm
So in fact, under your assumptions, the levelized cost of these reactors is 1/2 the cost of wind.
The Price-Anderson Act was re-authorised to underwrite the Nuclear industry with $600 Billion of Taxpayer money (closer to a trillion if you factor the huge amount of land you are going to lose in the event of an actual accident). However this is for government loss only, insurance companies won't insure private property holders against Nuclear accidents.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You still exhibit one of the most annoying features of Slashdot. That is, requesting exhaustive proof or documentation from someone whenever you want to make a point or disagree.
It's a fucking discussion board on the internet.
In this case, why don't you do you own damned homework and then post an assertive statement regarding nuclear power's overwhelmingly positive track record on safety when viewed over the long term.
Why do I get the feeling that many of your co-workers think you are an annoying ass?
And I'm for nuclear plants BTW.
Wrongo Bub.
TMI was a huge disaster for the nuclear industry, as it revealed that the status quo was totally inadequate.
So many aspects of the design, thought to be first rate, turned out to be totally foobar. The stuck valve, a critical item, turned out to be prone to sticking, as it was based on a valve designed to handle high-fat raw milk, an excellent lubricant.
The control room design was worse than useless, with critical water-level guages hidden off in a corner. A computer system that ran 20 minutes behind real-time. Dozens of blinking and hypnotizing alarms, with no hierarchy of priority.
Total unmitigated disaster.
Investors rightly saw that what had been touted as the best of all possible worlds was actually quite awful.
And it was not a "small controlled release". The original overflows into the auxiliary buildings was uncontrolled and could be measured at 15 times above background level many miles away.
Yet despite all of this, it didn't go "bang" and it hasn't happened before or after. I'm not arguing that accidents can't happen, or that reactor design is perfect and can never go wrong, but what TMI shows is that even when things do go wrong, they can be managed.
On a scale of 1-10 there is still a huge, huge gap between TMI and Chernobyl. The two can't be compared at all.
When the prevailing opinion on a subject matter is contrary to your own, the onus is on you to demonstrate the facts and "win hearts and minds."
Getting e-angry and insulting your detractors isn't going to help change popular perception of nuclear safety in the slightest.
TIn both cases, better training and adhering to safety protocols would have saved lives
Saved lives at Three Miles Island? Who died?
The entire industrial nuclear cycle has to be taken into account when making that assertion. If you take the view of the last twenty years of reactor operation, you can say that that because you are examining the most trouble free portion of a reactors lifespan for the vast majority of reactors around the world. Basis design issues are mostly identified, Accident sequence precursors are known. However all that changes as the reactor enters the last ten years of it's operation.
So when you include Uranium mining, Fuel enrichment and long term containment of radioactive isotopes, the long term safety record for the nuclear industry looks increasingly pessimistic. I'm not saying they can't be fixed (given funding and political will) but along with ageing reactor design and operational issues aside, every aspect of the industrial nuclear cycle has very sobering issues attached to it when looked at pragmatically.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
New pebble bed designs using Silicon Carbide "Pebbles" and helium heat transfer offer incredibly more safety than previous designs. These plants are designed to be literally "Run Away" proof, in fact, left fully engaged they will automatically reach top operating temperature then ramp down, never reaching supercritical temperatures or levels on nuclear reaction.
As well, because of the functional design, these reactors can be used as safe breeder reactors, meaning the there will be little nuclear waste to deal with.
I think this is absolutely one of the better energy alternatives we currently have before us.
Apparently, cold fusion seems to be making a solid comeback (in case you didn't see 60 minutes this last Sunday, A number of companies are producing very real products using cold fusion technology, and DARPA has verified the cold fusion technology, and plans on using it for a number of portable high energy power cells.
Seems we are at a very interesting place in our history.
"Free" energy has been suppressed for decades because it would not be centralized and under the control of the government/corporations. see: interview of George Green, and interview with Brian O'Leary. This needs to stop.
~ awaiting spiritual enlightenment ~
What? Radiation isn't magical. Even though the biological implications of radiation exposure are not fully understood, radiation is easily measured and tracked.
Anyone working with or near radiation sources wears dosimetry, and has their lifetime exposure tracked. Currently a worker at a nuclear plant receives a dose that is lower than the level at which there is a statistically-significant difference. Interestingly, airline crews get more radiation exposure (higher altitude -> less atmosphere absorbing cosmic rays), typically around 500 mrem/year, that a typical nuclear worker (~170 mrem/year).
And all that is for the WORKERS. Radiation intensity falls off with the square of the distance. So for average people living within a mile of a reactor, the radiation from the plant is totally overwhelmed by the natural background signal.
In other words, we have a good handle on the correlation between nuclear plants and health effects in the population: there is absolutely no detectable correlation.
I did some reading on wikipedia about the various nuclear reactors recently. So being a lay-person, there's some existing common wisdom.
The placement of the nuclear reactor to the sea is a safety issue. You NEED guaranteed large cool water in the condenser stage or reactor goes boom. Wiki says thermal heat is regularly used as hot-water heaters - similar to geothermal heating in iceland. Whether anybody actually uses this is anybody's guess.. Obviously you'd need to pipe the hot water to end locations, so existing suburbia obviously isn't anywhere near able to handle this.
As for breeder reactors:
A) All fission reaction is of a breeding nature. The ratio of bred material is what the different processes produce. The bred ratio varies from 0.5 to 1.2. Where 1.01 is the accepted min ratio to be called a breeder reactor (producing more fissile fuel than originally introduced).
B) Any of the high breeder reactors utilize some aspect of fast-fission. Canada, India and Russia (and France?). Fast fission requires the ABSENCE of water, as water (either light or heavy(deutreonic)) captures energetic neutrons. Instead reaction-neutral coolants are used such as sodium, molten lead, etc. The problem here is related to safety. It is harder to produce intrinsic stability into non-water-based fission. Namely, in boiler-based reactors, when a greater ratio of steam is produced, the reaction naturally slows down, thus naturally regulating the system if electronic control mechanisms don't catch and compensate the control rods in time. With non steam based systems, you use complex chemical fission-poisons (in high-pressure based reactors as found in subs) or are fully reliant on control-rod actuators. (possible single point of failure). (note: I could be wrong about liquid metal based systems not having alternate backup mechanisms such as fission-poisons)
C) Chernobyl was a fast-fission reactor. And it's melt-down was related to the inability to shutdown quickly enough.. (specifically pressure-valve failures and insufficient monitoring which would have initiated the shutdown sooner) The environmental DAMAGE, however was due exclusively to the fact that it was a warhead manufacturing site, and the construction apparatus is too large to enclose with a hardened concrete barrier.
D) 70% of Thorium is in India. Thus, even though Thorium is (likely) a less efficient starting process for a breeder reactor, it's a better long-term strategy for India so as to provide energy independence. This isn't true of most countries.
E) Breeder reactors are the basis of nuclear warheads, thus it's an extremely hot-button issue. The US and Russia specifically discontinue their breeder reactors to comply with arms control. Russia now strip-mines their old warhead supply to fuel existing reactors both domestically and abroad. I suspect that China is not indifferent to this topic as well. The french reprocessing plant is actively/heavily monitored by the UN (IAEA).
F) The French rebreeding process is apparently NOT cost effective by any measure. The reason they do it is similar to the Indian Thorium objective - international energy independence.. China is not likely to be short-supplied of uranium mineral deposits - but I'm not aware of their status. I know Canda has massive Uranium supplies.
Currently boiler and pressure based reactors are 'cheap' to build and are cheap to operate (so long as raw Uranium ore is cheap). They both require 'pre-processing' of the ore to increase the concentration of U-235 to a sufficient level. So it's slightly more expensive in the long run as both ore prices will increase over time, and the added cost of pre-processing.
heavy-water and liquid-metal and inert-gas based reactors facilitate 'raw' Uranium, (e.g. U-238 and possibly thorium), and thus make the operating costs MUCH cheaper, but they don't have the longevity of trivial passive boiler-based plants, and thus the high capital costs are for shorter terms - and thus the average cost is higher.
-Michael
Not true. India has constructed thermal breeder reactors that use thorium-uranium fuel and heavy water moderator / coolant.
Nope. You just need to ensure you don't moderate the neutron spectrum. Supercritical water coolant has a high enough heat capacity and low enough neutron absorption cross section to make this feasible. Google for the Fast SCWR if you doubt me.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Chernobyl was a thermal spectrum reactor that was heavily moderated with graphite and cooled by water. Wikipedia has a good article about the causes of the chernobyl disaster. In summary it was caused by a heavily over moderated design ( the opposite of a fast reactor ) in combination with flawed control rod design and the lack of a containment building.
U-233 in thorium fuel has a much better capture to fission ratio than U-235 and Pu-239 which means you don't need a fast reactor to set up a breeding cycle. The waste products are also less long lived since the thorium cycle only produces trace actinides.
Every single plutonium based nuclear weapons program in existence has used low-burnup thermal reactors and not fast reactors. Furthermore most designs of fast reactors are not practical to be run on a frequent refueling cycle, making them substantially less suitable to produce weapons grade plutonium than more traditional methods. The reprocessing methods needed to recover the minor actinides are also unsuitable for separating pure plutonium, making the entire fuel cycle significantly less prone to proliferation than the thermal + PUREX cycle.
Russia has commercial breeder reactors in operation and actively develops fast breeder technology, including their BREST project based on lead coolant and dry reprocessing.
Only if you compare it to coal or traditional nuclear. Compared to wind and other low-co2 energy sources it works out cheaper. In addition the French programs currently aim for research. Commercial reactors would likely use different designs to optimize economics rather than flexibility of the experiments that can be run. In addition they use the PUREX process for recycling the waste as opposed to newer dry-reprocessing methods. Because dry reprocessing uses salt rather than water ( a moderator ) criticality problems are heavily reduced allowing the plant to be smaller and cheaper. Furthermore while liquid sodium reactors are indeed more expensive than pressurized water reactors, it is fully possible to use other coolants such as Lead or Supercritical water. These would with high probability lead to a much cheaper plant ( by 30% or so ) since the lack of a phase change in the coolant allows the plant to be simpler and smaller. In addition the higher temperature increases the efficiency to about 45% as opposed to 33% for more traditional designs.
And killed the total of, what, 60 people? The worst accident in the history of nuclear power was about equivalent to a bad truck accident. That is the bogeyman we're all supposed to be terrified of?
And that exclusion zone is busily turning into a forest with flourishing widllife.
And it caused about as much death and destruction. On the other hand, mining coal kills more people every year.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"And that exclusion zone is busily turning into a forest with flourishing widllife"
Happy, healthy, multi-headed wildlife.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
It's a quote from Lethal Weapon 4, spoken by a Chinese no less. Damn mod needs a frontal labotomy ... or perhaps he's already had one !
What happened at Chernobyl was human error. Yes, the reactor design is bad and unstable, but it can work safely as long as you don't make any silly mistakes (like reduce the power too fast). The same as a car - it can work safely, as long as you do not make silly mistakes (like falling asleep while driving or driving drunk).
But its much less likely to blow up if the design makes it impossible to do so in the first place. Your car analogy would be better served comparing a traffic safety officer driving a volvo to a drunken redneck handed the keys to an F1 race car with no safety equipment. Modern designs are fail-safe, almost anything can go wrong and the worst that will happen is the reactor shuts down, you have to constantly try to balance the unstable point that keeps the reaction going.
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In the short term, pebble beds sound good. The problem, if I understand correctly, is that those pebbles are next to impossible to recycle later in things like Fast Reactors. I'm not sure how many decades it will take to convince people, but the future of nuclear fission has to be technologies which reuse/breed the 'spent' Uranium. The joke about calling Uranium 'spent' or 'waste' is that we currently get like 1 percent or less of the potential energy out of Uranium. In this PBS Frontline interview, the former director of the IFR project explains some of the concepts of the now-cancelled Integral Fast Reactor project.
According to Dr. Till, the possibility exists to get approximately 100 times more energy out of Uranium, by recycling it, than any 'conventional' reactor technology (including pebble beds) currently extracts. I'm no engineer, but I believe that it is very hard, once you've put the Uranium into those graphite balls, then run them through a pebble bed reactor, to get the uranium back out of the pebbles for recycling.
Any reactor design which inherently makes it *more difficult* to recycle the 'waste' Uranium is, in my book, a dead-end technology and we should run far and fast away from it.
That's a bit of a misleading statistic. Although 59 people died directly from overexposure to radiation and thyroid cancer, many more, infact an estimated 4000 more will or have died as a result of the accident.
Source: http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Focus/Chernobyl/pdfs/pr.pdf
I remember a talk given by a Shuttle engineer at MIT (I wasn't a student there, unfortunately) where he stated essentially that "All disasters are fundamentally caused by human errors, nature doesn't make mistakes." Even so called "acts-of-god" can be considered human errors: if a plane crashes in bad weather, it was perhaps a bad decision to try to fly in that area, or if people are killed by an earthquake it's because of humans who built buildings not designed to withstand the earthquake, not the earthquake itself.