Slashdot Mirror
The Rise of Small Nuclear Plants
ColdWetDog writes "The Oil Drum (one of the best sites to discuss the technical details of the Macondo Blowout) is typically focused on ramifications of petroleum use, and in particular the Peak Oil theory. They run short guest articles from time to time on various aspects of energy use and policies. Today they have an interesting article on small nuclear reactors with a refreshing amount of technical detail concerning their construction, use, and fueling. The author's major thesis: 'Pick up almost any book about nuclear energy and you will find that the prevailing wisdom is that nuclear plants must be very large in order to be competitive. This assumption is widely accepted, but, if its roots are understood, it can be effectively challenged. Recently, however, a growing body of plant designers, utility companies, government agencies, and financial players are recognizing that smaller plants can take advantage of greater opportunities to apply lessons learned, take advantage of the engineering and tooling savings possible with higher numbers of units, and better meet customer needs in terms of capacity additions and financing. The resulting systems are a welcome addition to the nuclear power plant menu, which has previously been limited to one size — extra large.'"
as a small nuclear plant still needs almost as much safety, inspection infrastructure not forgetting the larger number of armed guards (the nuke police had guns way before they where that common in the rest of the uk) as a big one.
I would assume the nuclear plants found on submarines and large warships both provide a lot of energy and are not in the category of 'extra large.'
Nor are they in the category of "economical", which is what was meant by "the prevailing wisdom is that nuclear plants must be very large in order to be competitive." Economically competitive, you see. Something the Navy cares about far less than, well, basically every other factor that goes into the design of a naval nuclear power plant.
The enemies of Democracy are
Let's call it what it is. The BP disaster.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Peak Uranium? So then we move to thorium, or get uranium out of the sea, or burn our spent fuel. This is a solvable issue.
I can't imagine investing in a national nuclear infrastructure without also overhauling the distribution grid.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Because there is hydrogen and carbon in space.
Peak oil is not about running out of oil, it is about running out of oil that is cheap and easy to get. Those hydrocarbons in space are too expensive to bother with, especially when we have all this uranium and thorium laying around.
No one had the technology to kill everyone on earth until the mid 70s, so that was a pretty implausible claim for all but the last 40ish of those thousands of years.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
the anti-nuclear crowd should be renamed the anti-braincell crowd
I get frustrated by statements like this.
I'm pro-nuclear: I took classes to become a nuclear power plant operator, once long ago, and if someone were willing to let me put a TRIGA-sized power-producing reactor in my back yard I'd jump at the chance if I got free power out of it.
With that said: most of the people who oppose nuclear power aren't stupid. They just have a faulty set of data from which they're making judgments.
If you believe that the potential failure mode of a process is completely unacceptable, then it's perfectly logical to be dead set against that process. Think of a Hindu trying to convince an atheist to jump off a cliff, because, the Hindu says, if it doesn't work you'll just come back as something else, so what's the risk? The atheist, however, considers the failure mode completely unacceptable, and will, rightly, refuse the gamble.
Same thing with many opponents of nuclear power. They're not dumb, they just think a nuclear accident is an epic catastrophe. Under those circumstances, flat-out opposition is a reasonable position.
As we've recently read on slashdot, trying to use facts to change their minds *probably* won't work.
But calling them anti-braincell *certainly* won't.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Saying nuclear won't fulfill our needs because of "peak Uranium" is at best stupid, at worst a lie to try to stop development of nuclear power. We likely have enough fuel (Uranium, Thorium, Plutonium, etc) for _thousands of years_ at our current energy consumption. That's the electrical grid, cars, everything. If we can just make everything run on electricity and build the best reactors our scientists can design, we would be fine for hundreds of years at a _minimum_. And I think it's safe to assume we'd be switched over to fusion by then :)
The problem is not the technology, it's not the resources, it's the regulations and the industry. We aren't building new plants because power companies aren't willing to invest large sums of money. Because regulations make it hard for them to _acquire_ large amounts of money (limits on how much profit utilities can take in.) We can't build breeder reactors because, for an extremely short period of time, they produce enriched uranium. Without breeder reactors, we can't take care of the waste problem because it lasts freakin' forever (without breeder reactors) and nobody wants it stored or transported anywhere within a thousand miles of them.
If you got a bunch of engineers and said "figure out how to solve our energy problem", they could throw together a nuclear power system that could power the world into the next millennium - and it would be cheap, it would be clean, and it would be safe. It's only restrictions like "you can't create highly radioactive products, even for a few seconds, you can't build anything big, you can't build anywhere near populated areas, and you can't use the word 'radioactive' or 'nuclear'" that causes problems.
Fourth, and maybe most telling of all, is the Obama administration's recently proposal of $8 Billion in loan guarantees for the nuclear power industry. Translation -- nuclear power is such a bad investment that nobody wants to give them any money.
Of course it's 'bad investment' from the perspective of people looking to make money. Building infrastructure is always a 'bad investment.' Yet we all benefit from it. Nuclear power is still the safest and cleanest energy out there. Clean coal has been shown again and again to be a lie. Nuclear power is used in Japan and throughout Europe. Let's take the plunge!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Part of this energy problem is socieconomic. Virtually no one is discussing the obvious problem of cenralizing power.
It is not going to work.
What should be happening is every home should have its own power system, and should be self sufficient, connected to a grid which can resell excess energy per household back to the grid for use.
The idea of central authorities controlling all the power of whole regions is economically as well as politically dangerous.
For example, lets talk about Obama's terrorist boogieman. What is easier to pick off, central power plants owned by a wealthy few? Or everyone's home self sufficient which provides its own energy with no one point to attack?
Our own socieconomic models are designed for the military industrial complex to provide a reason for its existence.
Technology could be developed to provide homes that generate all the energy they require, but it is being denied due to these and other facts which would destroy the wealthy's power structure so it cannot be permitted.
Combinations of natural gas turbines, solar power, gas, oil, solar and wind and geothermal, nuclear and space could easily be distributed by regions household based on what energy sources are cheapest or practical.
Change isn't hard. It is hard though when 14 families control all of the worlds energy supplies and do not look kindly upon ideas that threaten the status quo.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I suggest watching the current Russian efforts at getting a large liquid sodium reactor going before putting all your faith in such a thing. There are major problems to solve that the French and the US were unable to sort out in the 1990s that made such a technology unworkable at a large scale, that's the real story behind the cancelled program. If the Russians can get it to work or some local R&D can solve the problems you'll have something to talk about, but for now what you are selling as a done deal is nothing but hopeful dreaming.
I thought it was interesting the reason given when the cancellation of the IFR was mentioned in Clinton's first state of the union speech. It was that we would never need it, and thus it was a waste of money.
To say the least, I disagreed.
There are a few useful sizes at which to build such things as nuclear reactors. One useful size is what can be transported on a railroad car or a heavy-equipment transporter truck. That's as big as you can get and still build the thing in a factory, which has substantial cost advantages over on-site construction. The upper limit for this seems to be around 135 MWe.
Wind turbines have a size problem, too. Somewhere around 3MW, they become too big to transport assembled by road or rail, even with the blades shipped separately. Better generator design seems to help with this. Enercon has been able to get up to 10MW or so with a no-gearbox generator design and still ship the parts by road. The very large machines require more on-site assembly.