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Small Nuclear Power Plants To Dot the Arctic Circle
Vincent West writes with news of a Russian project currently underway to populate the Arctic Circle with 70-megawatt, floating nuclear power plants. Russia has been planning these nuclear plants for quite some time, with construction beginning on the prototype in 2007. It's due to be finished next year, and an agreement was reached in February to build four more. According to the Guardian:
"The 70-megawatt plants, each of which would consist of two reactors on board giant steel platforms, would provide power to Gazprom, the oil firm which is also Russia's biggest company. It would allow Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit some of the remotest oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas. The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years."
What if killer penguins decided to attack these floating nuke stations and because of that developed mutant powers? :P
lose control of one of those, and Russia owns all of the arctic. Just kidding.
That is not a bad idea. I have thought that the west should be putting up more small reactors to run things like Manufacturing as well as our electric trains. Do some 10-20 MW next to a maglev or just old fashion hi-speed train like Frances, and you have a fairly efficient none polluting train.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As much as I support the idea of expanding nuclear power something tells me that superheating the water near the ice caps is just going to cause them to melt faster (assuming they are light water reactors which would be the most economical, and that storing their own waste refers to the nuclear kind)... but what do I know I'm a /.'er not a nuclear physicist... oh wait.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
This probably sounds like a serious potential problem to some of the nuclearphobes, but the basic description sounds like they're using nuclear submarine power plants with electrical generators attached to the turbines instead of a screw.
In other words, this sort of thing has been operating safely for about 50 years now.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
To be fair the Russians do not have a spotless record in nuclear health and safety. Or for that matter health and safety in any form.
The Russians have been operating nuclear-powered icebreakers in that area for decades. This seems to be a similar design, just with a big generator attached.
Of course, TFA may have got it wrong, but "The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years" sounds quite impossible. Perhaps they mean it would need to be refueled once every 12 to 14 years.
Other than spacecraft there aren't many systems that can run 12 years unattended. To make things worse, there's the extreme climate conditions. Right, what can possibly go wrong?
What's so evil about their powering their industry with a carbon-free energy? I think this is awesome! I only wish that the electricity were going to people rather than to digging up more fossil fuels. Yuck!
Well duh... they need the oil to mine the uranium for the nuclear reactors.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
No, I don't agree that cheap gas is good. Cheap gas = larger cars = more emissions. Also, cheaper gas = lower price point green alternatives have to compete with. You say "until alternative cars become affordable", but the cheaper gas is, the longer that takes.
There's a reason the oil lobby is so against industrial hemp. It makes better plastic AND better fuel.
There was SL-1:
http://www.radiationworks.com/sl1reactor.htm
They learned the hard way that you should not build a reactor so small that it requires *manual* withdrawal of control rods. By manual I mean a guy hunkered over the core with his hands on the rod itself. End result: said man impaled by said rod - to the ceiling.
this sig was brought to you by the letter
I don't care what anyone says, this is a great idea. Hopefully, in the near future, a radioactive snowflake will come dive-bombing from the sky and bite me. I always wanted to be ICEMAN!!!
That would be cool.
Oh really?
Yes, really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Zemlya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Peninsula
HTH,
HAND
Oh really? Who told you that?
The only serious nuclear incident in USSR history, Chernobyl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_Disaster
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
The US used to have a 45MW shipboard nuclear power plant on the USS Sturgis, a converted Liberty ship. It was used to power the Panama Canal locks during a period of low water at Gatun Dam, the usual power source. The U.S. Army had a whole range of small reactors running in remote locations from 1952 to the early 1970s. The main problem was that they never built enough of them to justify the support and training infrastructure required.
1) The main reason for the Chernobyl disaster was a bad reactor plant design. A SCRAM should never ever bring the reactor to explosion. After the disaster, the control rods were heavily modified. Also, the control team never did anything against the reactor user manual.
2) This problem with the design was known a couple of years before the Chernobyl accident. Both the reactors of Leningrad nuclear power plant and of the Ignalina nuclear power plant, reactors of the same type, had serious accidents of the same type (SCRAM caused a nearly runaway reaction). At this point the problem became known, the designers were informed of it and even got some recommendations how to redesign the control rods to avoid this kind of problems in the future. The designers decided that since they were very important, well-known and highly-decorated scientists, they don't have to listen to "common people". The result is known.
3) There were some other nuclear accidents in the USSR. The most prominent is Mayak.
Nonetheless USSR was one of the nuclear reactor pioneers. The first commercial nuclear power plant was a soviet one. And there were some decent reactors like the current VVER line.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Speaking of Russian, shouldn't "vessels" in TFA be "wessels"?
Why save your soul when you can sell it for a profit?
Sounds like our ZPM is out of power
Like when they explode?
As you suggest, there are now a number meltdown-proof reactor designs. These are not merely engineered with "infallible" safety mechanisms, but are fundamentally meltdown-proof by their very design. As long as the laws of physics hold, which is a reasonably safe assumption, there is no risk of meltdown.
While the Pebble bed reactor is safe though, the nature of the pebbles make for very difficult reprocessing, and otherwise still pose a long term waste management problem.
Nuclear is the clear winner for clean, environmentally friendly energy production, but I would recommend pointing people to the Integral Fast Reactor instead. An added benefit would be that such a design could also solve our current nuclear waste problems, by recycling it for use in such reactors. The true waste after recycling is both very minimal and very short lived by comparison.
Snow, water and ice are really nasty. If you live near significant snow, you will have watched things just "move" around. Year after year, you can watch a fence move, or a big rock slowly move across a yard.
In many ways, water and ice are worse than space. As the water thaws and freezes, it picks up and moves considerable structures. In Southern Canada, you just put your footings down below the frost line. In the Canadian shield, most people don't have basements because it would mean blasting granite. By the time you hit the arctic, there is so much snow and ice, it becomes logistically difficult to put in proper footings.
The Russians are talking about building boats for the nuclear reactor. Sea can be more stable than land in some ways. But what do you do when a great big iceberg is coming your way? These reactors must be connected to something via a cable. They won't be easy to move. Essentially, if one of these reactors ever becomes ice-locked, it would be in danger of getting its hull crushed and sinking.
These reactors have to withstand ice, year after year, without fail. How is that going to work? We haven't built an ice-breaker that can survive rough service without on-going maintenance. How is a stationary boat going to do it without maintenance?
Additionally, if a space probe goes missing, it is largely without significant environmental consequences for planet earth. If one of these reactors fails, it could dump radioactive waste into the arctic ocean. Thanks to the jet stream, all the oceans are interconnected, and that radioactivity will go world wide.
With a geologically stable site and better materials technology we can think about how we can extract the energy from that plutonium and convert it to fissile ash (so the time frames are more manageable) perhaps using an extremely over-engineered version of IFR. End uranium mining and contain the enrichment facility in the same place as the containment and reactor facility, probably inside a mountain. Indeed a design worth developing but far far, far from being a commercial reality without overcoming the significant engineering and material science's issues.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.