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US Nuclear Power Industry Poised For a Comeback
ThousandStars sends us to The Wall Street Journal for a report that momentum for nuclear energy is waxing in the US. "For the first time in decades, popular opinion is on the industry's side. A majority of Americans thinks nuclear power, which emits virtually no carbon dioxide, is a safe and effective way to battle climate change, according to recent polls. At the same time, legislators are showing renewed interest in nuclear as they hunt for ways to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. The industry is seizing this chance to move out of the shadow of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and show that it has solved the three big problems that have long dogged it: cost, safety and waste."
Yes, I agree: the fear surrounding Three Mile Island is based more on Hollywood than physics. The article makes at least one other mistake:
Many environmentalists do oppose nuclear power, but they're also knocking over AM radio towers because of the scary radiation. But it's not true that many scientists oppose nuclear power. From a recent survey:
So it isn't true that many scientists oppose nuclear power. A minority of scientists oppose nuclear power, just like a minority thinks abrupt climate change isn't happening. Also, strangely enough, the scientists most likely to understand nuclear power are the ones most in favor of it.
absolutely correct.
The facts are still on the side of the pro nuclear camp.
"Dangerous Nuclear Waste" of the old plants remains active for thousands of years, we can't really be sure to contain it for that long.
Once fully processed through feeder-breeder plants, the waste will be of two types.
1: almost non reactive with a half life of hundreds of thousands of years. Its about as dangerous as normal granite.
2: highly radioactive stuff with half lives of decades, the stuff will be decomposed and safe after about 2 centuries. We can build safe containment sure to last that long.
I've asked that question myself, for many years. For the most part, people would just say, "No, they don't do that," and ignore my response of, "Why not?"
Finally, I got an answer: those pools get near the boiling point of water, but no further, and you're not going to get enough energy for the generators to pay for themselves unless they're running on super heated steam. Yes, there's a fair amount of energy there, but it's not concentrated enough to use. Sigh!
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I'll expand your idea to my local utility, Progress Energy in Florida. Progress Energy estimates that a two reactor plant is going to cost $17 billion (http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/993686.html)
At an 8% cost of capital, that is 1.36 billion a year. With a 35 useful lifetime of the plant, there is an additional .5 billion a year to repay the capital. Throw in some of the other costs you mention (fuel, labor, property taxes, etc) and let's say the plant needs to earn 2 billion a year with no profit for the owners.
The reactors are two Westinghouse AP1000 which produce 1154Megawatts each (http://www.ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/). If I recall correctly, nuclear plants are running about 90% of the time these days. That means the plants will produce in the ballpark of 2 reactors * 1154 MW * 1000Kw/Mw * 365 Days / Year * 24 hours /Day * .90 (availability derating) or 18.1 billion kilowatt hours per year. Given our cost estimate of $2 billion dollars per year, that works out to 11.04 cents per kilowatt hour.
Your 10 cent per kilowatt cost estimate is very close!
The scary thing is that I'm old enough to have lived through the last wave of nuclear plants being built. They almost all came in at two to four times the original cost estimates. If that happened again, we are talking wholesale electric rates of 22 to 44 cents per kilowatt. Solar PV (being stored in banks of lead acid batteries for night use) is already cheaper than 44 cents per kilowatt.
And a 4th-Gen (IFR-style) nuclear reactor would, I think, be like going for a ride in an armored troop transport. IFR-style (Integral Fast Reactor) was designed around a slightly different principle of nuclear physics, such that you aren't even trying to prevent a meltdown, because the very physics of the reaction is such that if it starts getting 'too hot', the nuclear reaction itself starts to shutdown - the temperature increase, if I understand correctlyl, prevents further fission, at which point the temperature stabilizes at a 'safe maximum', until proper cooling is restored). There's no 'active' safety systems that could theoretically fail - no control rods that might get stuck and fail to drop, or other systems that might fail.
I don't think anyone is currently planning on using that design in the near-term, but I hear that GE and Hitachi are in some sort of partnership to try to get approval for, and commercialize, small-scale reactors based on the IFR designs.
Ask the Chinese if it costs more to keep someone in a cage or execute them behind the courthouse.
Given that the Chinese are turning around and selling the organs of the executed, I'd say that helps the balance sheet a little.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
If we build a modern generation of feeder-breeder reactors that are something close the 97-99 times more efficient than the old breed and can consume previously generated nuclear waste as fuel.
Unfortunately, it seems that we are not, and will not, be building any breeder reactors because people in the government are still freaked out about the fact that they temporarily produce weapons-grade waste. So, while everything you said is true and how I wish the fuck heads in the DoD would stop screwing us over, it doesn't look like that solution is going to happen any time soon, making the anti-nuke position a lot more reasonable.
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Well, since you asked...
Assuming one heavy waste atom per neutron converted to energy, and for the sake of argument let's say these atoms have an atomic weight of about 300:
1 neutron x c^2 = 1.67e-27 kg x 9e16 = 1.5 e-10 J/atom =
1.5 e-10 / (300*1.67e-27 kg) = 3e14 J / kg pure waste
Now, granted the efficiency with which we can extract pure waste from the rest of the spent fuel rod knocks down by a few orders of magnitude that figure. I don't know that number, but let's call it a thousand. So we have 3e14 J / metric ton waste. That's 3e5 GJ/metric ton.
For reference, total electricity produced per year in the US (source: DOE, http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html) is about 1.5e19 J / year = 1.5e10 GJ / year. If we're going to use all nukes, that would amount to 50,000 metric tons per year of the contaminated stuff, assuming 1 kg pure waste pollutes 1 metric ton of spent fuel.
Now, for coal:
1/2 of our electric output is coal right now. That's 0.75e19 J/year of coal. Coal uses a chemical reaction, not a nuclear reaction, so the mass of hydrocarbons is far greater than the number quoted above. For simplicity (and since I never took organic chem in college), let's approximate it by saying it's all clean-burning methane gas. ie CH4 + 2O2 = CO2 + 2H2O. The internets tell me (at http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/energy/Companion/E06.1.pdf.xpdf) that this reaction yields 55 GJ/ metric ton methane.
Dividing through,
7.5e18J/year / 5.5e10 J/ton = 1.4e8 ton methane burned per year. Coal has higher energy content, but I'm going to make the unfounded guess that the inefficiency of the generator will balance out my assumption of using methane.(Corrections from chemists are welcomed.)
To review, we can spew out 1.4e8 ton of carbon (roughly), or 5e4 ton of dilute (factor of 1000) radioactive waste. So now the question is, how much radiation in that 1.4e8 tons of carbon. (http://www.docstoc.com/docs/4991532/radioactive-elements) tells me this is on the order of 10 ppm for thorium. So that's about 1.4e3 tons/year of pure thorium vs 5e1 tons/year of pure radioactive waste.
Again, corrections to false assumptions and math mistakes are most welcome from people who actually know what they're talking about more than I do (I'm an EE/software guy from 9-5).
I partially agree with you. Though Obama hasn't really shown his colors either way in regards to nuclear power (unless I missed that, been to busy to do much news recently), I expect him to do exactly what every president since carter has (including Reagan and both Bush's) and utterly ignore it as an option.
Photovoltaic solar is currently and will likely remain a niche market due to cost to manufacture and rareness of materials (rare earth metals, etc) for the higher performing panels.
Solar thermal is generally much better than PV for large scale energy production, as it uses proven technology, and does not require batteries to produce power at night or for a few days of reduced light (the thermal mass of molten salts can keep the boilers going for some time, depending on the design and insulation of course).
Nuclear plants have an advantage over solar thermal in that they are largely impervious to hazardous weather and use much less space for a given amount of power, particularly in more northern or overcast areas.
Let's take a look at ANWR...
Oil reserves are estimated at 5 to 10 billion barrels of oil, with the number of those barrels that are economically feasible to extract rising and falling in line with the price of a barrel.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-0028-01/fs-0028-01.htm
Now let's take a look at our oil consumption...
We are the leading consumer of oil in the world, with a consumption rate of around 20 million barrels a day.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html
Hypothetically speaking, if all 10 billion barrels are extracted in ANWR, this gives us 500 days worth of oil. This is not something that will make a bit of difference to our reliance on foreign oil reserves, especially when you consider that it wouldn't be possible to add this oil to the market all at once.
"If I may be allowed to pursue the idea of 'addiction to oil,' I think the nation just reached the point where we sold our wedding ring for one night's fix."
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Actually the half-life of Pu-239, the primary waste from once-through cycle reactors, is 25000 years. It is a potent alpha emitter and a dose of roughly a microgram (inhaled) is enough to give you lung cancer. Ingested via other means and it is an iron analogue to the body so is a potent cause of Leukemia. Much more dangerous than granite.
From reading about the waste products of breeder/burner reactors the first daughter product was after 600 years, still within the range of human engineering but it's important to be realistic about the time frames and the actual potential for harm (which is still a very potent risk). But your right, a shorter half life means it is more radioactive, and a lot of people here are getting that wrong because the article gets it wrong.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Though Obama hasn't really shown his colors either way in regards to nuclear power (unless I missed that, been to busy to do much news recently)
Actually, he put the final nail in the coffin for Yucca Mountain.
Then he denied the feasibility of nuclear energy because there was no storage facility.
Kind of circular logic.
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Except for the last week or so, when a pebble got stuck in the recycling system and the operators had to unclog the system manually, causing primary-circuit helium to be released in the atmosphere. One accident every 21 years does not cut it.
Also, there are significant issues with using helium as a primary circuit fluid. When water was used, you were pumping a liquid; for helium, you need a gas compressor, which is a significantly less efficient unit. Also, efficiency considerations practically dictate to use an axial compressor, which is the kind most sensitive to compressor surge. A surge in a large compressor can melt its casing in seconds. And guess what, the conditions in which surge occurs in compressors are those closest to high efficiency, where the compressor is supposed to operate.
In addition, when water from the secondary circuit leaks into the primary circuit's helium, there are risks of reaction between water and graphite pebbles if the temperature is too high (I suppose you can figure out what happens). In Germany, they were lucky they were running at about 500 degrees when that happened in 1978, but it took a year to dry the core.
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Close but no cigar. While you describe the technical reasons, you ignore the human reasons and just assume that the manager and his crew were suicidal. They weren't.
The manager used to work at VVER type reactors before he started at the Chernobyl powerplant. He studied the manual of RBMK and according to manual the reactor was similar to operate. There was nothing about positive void coefficient or xenon poisoning in the manual. Minimal safe thermal power also wasn't specified. And of course there was nothing about SCRAM possibly could cause a runaway reaction - such a condition may not exist in any reactor built according to some safety standards.
So while the manager chose to run the experiment on a different thermal power rating, he did it in the knowledge that the procedure was still safe according to the reactor manual.
But let's go a couple of years back before the accident.
Anatoliy Aleksandrov - three times Hero of Socialist Labour (a degree of distinction similar to Hero of the Soviet Union), 9 times awardee of the Lenin Order, director of the Kurchatov Institute, was the project manager on the RBMK project. Nikolay Dollezhal - two times Hero of Socialist Labour, 6 times awardee of the Lenin Orden, director of the Research and Design Institute for Power Engineering was the chief engineer of the project. Both of them were among the highest decorated soviet scientists, both of them designed pretty much every soviet nuclear reactor and a good part of soviet nuclear armament. Both of them were getting older and set in their ways.
They were warned that their RBMK design was faulty in many ways. They ignored the warnings. The near-accidents at the Leningrad and Ignalina power plant were classified and the proposed solutions of making the RBMK design safer so the accidents wouldn't happen were also classified.
Then came the Chernobyl disaster. Both scientists blamed the reactor crew and the political bureau sided with them - they couldn't blame such high decorated scientists and had to find a scapegoat. But silently the reactor user manual was updated and so were the reactor control rods. Also, Dollezhal was forced to retire (Aleksandrov was over 80 in 1986 so he was retired already).
Shortly before his death Aleksandrov more or less admitted his guilt, Dollezhal though insisted that the RBMK design was inherently safe until he died.
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