Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear Power Could See a Revival
shmG writes "As the US moves to reduce dependence on oil, the nuclear industry is looking to expand, with new designs making their way through the regulatory process. No less than three new configurations for nuclear power are being considered for licensing by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The first of them could be generating power in Georgia by 2016."
honestly, this is 20 years overdue. Especially with the new reactor designs. Now, if we could only reprocess the damn fuel we'd have a clean method of power generation with very little overall waste for a couple hundred years at least.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
... currently most eco-friendly power source we have actually used instead of being ignored and feared.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
Do they automatically post this article every couple months? It seems like Nuclear has been on the verge of revival for a couple decades now. I doubt we will ever see it.
There problem with that design is there IS no design. It's a great idea (probably), but there's a lot of work between "good idea" and "ready to deploy"... and for some reason, people insist on a whole lot of testing and failsafes for nuclear plants. AP1000 has taken years and years to develop, and it was just a "relatively" simple upgrade of the AP600 design, compared to changing EVERYTHING for thorium.
I thought I saw this supposedly quite safe "Pebble Bed" small-scale reactor design reported on then linked to by Slashdot some time ago, but I don't see it mentioned in the article. I am not having luck finding it in the Slashdot search either. Did I dream that? One of the important features of it was that it was "walk-away safe" - as in, were the cooling system to catastrophically fail, it could not achieve "meltdown." In fact, it could be safely repaired and re-started with very little material damage whatsoever.
Now, if we could only reprocess the damn fuel we'd have a clean method of power generation with very little overall waste for a couple hundred years at least.
The beauty of some of the new reactor designs is that they use old radioactive waste as their fuel source. By some people's estimates we have about two centuries worth of fuel for the energy needs of the entire United States just in our existing stockpiles of nuclear waste. Not only would we not have to mine additional fuel, we would be significantly reducing the amount of waste that we need to store.
Here's a TED talk that covers the subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF-fq2Zn7I
By the end of life of these new reactors, solar should be cheap, efficient and plentiful.
The biggest issue I have with using nuclear energy for power in a widespread fashion is that it is the most dense source of energy known to man by far, and once used it's gone. Future space exploration and colonization will probably require nuclear fuel, especially if it's beyond the solar system.
Meanwhile we have deserts that are receiving orders of magnitude more solar energy than the world currently uses, that could be harvested using technology we have today.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Actually, thorium should not be anymore complex (probably simpler) than a uranium/plutonium based reactor. But all the years of the cold war and the lure of nuclear weapons has prompted all the engineering to be spent on uranium/plutonium reactors. It's not a physics problem. It's just that since all the current reactors are uranium/plutonium, the engineering is far more developed. From a physics standpoint, thorium is well understood. But from an engineering perspective it is mostly still experimental. If energy production is your only motive, eventually thorium has to win over current conventional reactor designs. It's just a matter of time. Heck, even with the current reactors, the main reason we have nuclear waste is because we do not reprocess fuel. You can thank Jimmy Carter for that decision too. But fast breeders that would have used the waste make it easier to get the resources to build weapons too. War sucks. We need LFTR's!!!!!!
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
Following hot on the heels of, "American manufacturing is dying because of the unions," we'll see, "America lacks nuclear reactors because of the environmentalists."
America lacks nuclear reactors because we have a strong oil lobby tied with government, and America lacks manufacturing because it's cheaper to outsource somewhere with lower CoL and a glut of desperate workers. In each case, precisely as is logical, it's the people in control who get to make the decisions and not some group convenient to demonise.
Nuclear power is the way to go, pity it wont ever get done though; soon as your Senate, Congress or whoever handles the decisions on these sorts of things decide to move forward on the issue someone is going to stand up and say "Chernobyl", "Three Mile Island" and possibly "dirty bomb" or "fallout (not the game mind you)" and the whole proposition is going to die right there.
Even if that does not happen there will be widespread protests with other people chanting the words above.
Not to forget that The West have been continually spurning other countries for wanting to build nuclear reactors for years and years, so suddenly deciding to build more reactors of their own is going to put the US in a tough spot geopolitically.
The way I see it though is that for the time being fission plants along with a gradual move towards a hydrogen economy offer the best chance for independence from oil. In the long term though we need to focus on getting a commercially viable Fusion reactor design up and running, it is basically the only fuel source that offers any chance of us not having to hollow out our planet in the long run.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
Nuclear power is one of the cleanest sources of power we have so far. Now if Obama will correct the damn stupid mistake Carter did, things will be a heck of a lot better. Yes, we have a nuclear waste problem and it's a large one. But it's not a technical problem, it's a political problem. President Carter back in 1977 issued a directive that stopped reprocessing of civilian nuclear waste. Mind, the US nuclear industry was built with the assumption that waste reprocessing would be available. So the result is that we have more waste than planned for being stored for longer periods than planned for, all because of a decision to change the way things were done. And said decision was made without putting into place an alternate method of handling the waste. Yes people, we have a nuclear waste issue, and if Obama can reverse the brain dead stupid decision made 33 years ago, that would be one of the best possible things he could do for the United States. But some people still hear the word "nuclear" and suddenly their brains and reasoning turn off and they start thinking worse case issues and problems ignoring the fact that many of the problems are political and not technical. What about cost overruns? Well, stop dragging them into court attempting to stop construction. What about the nuclear waste? See the beginning of this post people. What about Three Mile Island? Your point is? The safety measures worked and the public never was in danger. During TMI, they debating for *three days* about whether or not to evacuate the area. Next time a damn bursts, be sure to take three days to come to the decision about heading for high ground. The safety measures *worked* even though the operators practically did everything they could to screw things up.
Why does everyone think of nuclear power (or coal, or natural gas, or renewables) and oil as some sort of zero-sum game? Oil is used for three things mainly: transportation fuel, heating fuel in some parts of the country, and as a raw material for industrial processes. Nuclear power is good for one thing: generating electricity. While I will admit that there is plenty of small ways that we can trade off oil usage for nuclear-generated electricity, there aren't many wholesale ways of reducing oil consumption via nuclear. Are you going to heat your New England home with nuclear electricity? Will you create plastics feedstock from nuclear electricity? Even though in both cases one can do these things, we aren't about to because it's cheaper to do them using oil.
The big one is electricity, and I for one am pessimistic that we'll see a wholesale shift away from gasoline/diesel (i.e., more than 1/3 of all vehicles on the road propelled by electrical power)in anything less than 25 years.
And even then, it's not like we'll magically be trading nuclear electricity off for only imported oil. Oil is a global commodity. The determining factor of where the U.S. gets its oil from is where how much it costs. If it's cheaper or more profitable to bring it by tanker from the Middle East than it is to pull it from the Gulf of Mexico, you can bet that is where we'll get most of it. In truth, where does the U.S. import most of its oil from? Canada. Mexico provides us with as much oil as Saudi Arabia. We get more from non-OPEC nations than we do from OPEC [lots of stats here]. I am glad that the summary used the term "dependence on oil" rather than the more politically useful "foreign oil". I just wish that everyone else could wrap their head around it.
Except there WAS a demonstration LFTR reactor built at Los Alamos and operated for several years back in the 50s and 60s.
LFTR has several advantages over Uranium based reactors.
We don't have to change EVERYTHING for Thorium RIGHT NOW, but maybe we should be start investigating LFTR technology again so that a decade or two from now so we WILL HAVE a safer, more reliable alternative to Uranium based reactors.
Yeah, I know, LFTR reactor is redundant.