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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.'"
I'll take three.
Great for pumping stations and desalination plants... probably the cheapest way.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Nuclear energy is probably the best chance we have are breaking our addiction to oil. Nuclear energy is also relatively clean. I don't know why the government doesn't just fund the development of a bunch of nuclear power plants and put them on the coast or on the ocean somewhere. We could generate enough power to power the entire country, not to mention we could probably put hundreds of thousands of nuclear power plants in the desert.
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.'
put them all over as the power grid is not setup for having a lot of power in one place.
Brilliant. Instead of needing to get one "back yard", you now need half a dozen.
Actually, this could work out... smaller plant means smaller yard, right? We could put them in rougher terrain away from people.
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.
Isn't it un-American to have something that is the size you need when you could have something that is 100X the size you need?
The amount of objections that citizens raise doesn't appear to be related to the size of a nuclear plant. They just seem to object to its very existence. Therefore it makes sense, that once you've got through the planning process, reviews, delays, hostility and protests you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and make the plant as large as practically possible.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The Do It Yourself Heavy Water Reactor Project
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Let's call it what it is. The BP disaster.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
As much as nuclear energy would help reduce CO2 emissons, the the anti-nuclear crowd has to be seen as a "force of nature" making new power plants less likely. The idealist would fight against irrationality, but as a realist I would redirect that energy elsewhere, e.g. against the NIMBYs who think wind turbines ruin the coastlines and kill birds or bats.
Also, if oil is non-renewable because it takes millions of years to re-form, then nuclear fuels are the ultimate non-renewable with a "when is the next supernova due?" regeneration period. And the energy density and relative ease of use is just too good to waste it powering our washing machines and slashdot browsing. Maybe in a few hundred years outer solar system exploration will be in a serious crunch because the lack of a good power source after all the uranium, thorium, plutonium etc. has been used up.
Nope! Modern reactor tech takes that waste, and re-uses it. Then, THEIR waste is still processable by OTHER reactors, all down the line...and pretty soon, you wind up with stuff that's only about as dangerous as your average mining slag. (You don't want it in your groundwater, but it's not utter devestation).
Peak oil is nonsense. Why are there hydrocarbons in space?
There is no way to recycle it...
Here, let me give you a couple citations to look at.
The only thing preventing us from recycling nuclear waste is government regulations inspired by hippy FUD. If we could get past those artificial roadblocks we'd find ourselves with a much longer timeline to deal with peak uranium (it's still a finite resource, after all) and we wouldn't have to squabble over Yucca Mountain and other potential repositories.
I can't imagine investing in a national nuclear infrastructure without also overhauling the distribution grid.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Isn't there room for quite a lot more hydroelectric power in the USA?
I mean, build a diversion pond, put in a generator, hook to grid. Repeat on a small to medium scale thousands of times wherever it makes sense. Same with solar. Same with wind. Same with geothermal.
Seems that a distributed heterogeneous solution would make a lot more sense in terms of sustainability over the long run. Not to mention being much more difficult for your average (or even above-average) terrorist to exploit for nefarious purposes.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I just have one thing to say, Pebble Bed Nuclear Reactors!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
http://www.pbmr.co.za/
The reactors can reuse Uranium and Plutonium, but not the fission products and all the material that becomes radioactive after being exposed to the neutron radiation.
Word salad 'Zippy the Pinhead'-style quotes go in the 'fortune' script at the bottom of the page.
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
Hippies don't want nuclear power period ... the proliferation sensitivities of reactor designs and reprocessing plants they don't care shit about.
Pure government paranoia, nothing to do with hippies.
as a small nuclear plant still needs almost as much safety, inspection infrastructure not forgetting the larger number of armed guards
There has been talk of very small reactors for developing countries that are basically sealed concrete boxes, several feet thick.
You need no guards or monitors, because they are self-contained and self regulating.
Then when they are spent (I seem to remember 20-50 years as a figure) you take them away and put in new ones.
If you make them small and compact enough you really can do away with a ton of infrastructure (on site infrastructure anyway).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
it easyer / cheaper to start local with grid upgrades then to load it all in one area then one tree limb / train crash can wipe out most of the power system.
With every single form of energy generation in widespread use today, economies of scale heavily favors building big plants, assuming you're in a country with a well developed electric grid.
This is not only true for nuclear, but also coal, natural gas, hydro, wind turbines and even solar installations. Even combined heat and power works better when implemented as a district-heating system ( as is done many places in the world ). The effect is even more pronounced for nuclear, however, because capital costs associated with construction is such a big part of its cost. Since power output increases more rapidly than material and construction costs, this heavily favors large installations.
There is one exception I can think of, and that is if you try to build a nuclear plant to do load following, in which case you want to keep capital costs low, since you will be operating the plant at a low capacity factor. For such an installation it might make sense to make it as small as possible while still being able to deliver adequately during peak hours.
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 word-to-comma ratio is a little on the high side. (I'm not an English major)
WRONG. The technology to reprocess nuclear fuel has existed for more than half a century and is currently employed the world over. Just not in the U.S. In fact breeder reactors incorporate reprocessing into the design to use a fraction of the fuel and produce a fraction of the waste of those reactor types permitted in the U.S.
The problem with nuclear waste is one of politics, not of technology. Following on the heels of Gerald Ford's ban of commercial plutonium reprocessing, Jimmy Carter signed an order to ban the reprocessing of spent commercial nuclear fuel. Regan overturned the ban in 1981 but there was no funding provided to start up reprocessing facilities nor has the DOE provided license for anyone to do it. While they've waffled a bit during the Bush-Obama presidencies the DOE presently doesn't want domestic reprocessing. This has accordingly put a rather big crimp in the success of the GNEP which had closed loop nuclear power as a primary goal.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I can't imagine investing in a national nuclear infrastructure without also overhauling the distribution grid.
did no one RTFA?
Oh yeah this is slashdot.
The idea is as Coal Plants get decommissioned you can use most of the same equipment, Which I assume means the same generators. Which make the nuke plants cheaper then overhauling the coal plant.
Nuclear energy is probably the best chance we have are breaking our addiction to oil.
Think so? I think you are not considering a few facts.
I don't know why the government doesn't just fund the development of a bunch of nuclear power plants and put them on the coast or on the ocean somewhere.
Let's see. First, what coast did you have in mind that is unoccupied yet close to major metropolitan areas? How do you propose to convince the taxpayers that might be fearful of nuclear that it is a good idea? How do you propose to transport the electricity economically to places far from the coast?
We could generate enough power to power the entire country, not to mention we could probably put hundreds of thousands of nuclear power plants in the desert.
First the coast and now the desert. Have you really given this any thought at all? No one lives in the desert and it's expensive to get the power out of the desert. Not to mention that cooling becomes a bigger problem there. While there are nuclear plants that don't require water, most use it because it is cheap and abundant. The entire advantage of a small nuclear plant is that you can place it where it is needed but no one wants to live near a nuclear reactor if they can help it.
Seems that I have to post the same reply to everyone. Breeding reactors only takes care of the uranium and other very heavy atoms. It does not do anything about the fision products, which are lighter radioactives. And it does not do anything about the material that the reactor is made of. This also becomes radioactive because of the neutron radiation.
Dr Stupid's Laboratory - Build a (back yard) Nuclear Reactor (on page 29)
The main problem in implementing small output conventional power plants comes from the difficulty of altering power output swiftly enough to follow rapid changes in load. The traditional steam generator method, regardless of the source of heat, has a large amount of inertia which makes its response sluggish. Making them small to get a more nimble response sacrifices efficiency. The conventional method of dealing with this difficulty is to have a huge grid with a quantity of large baseline generators, supplemented with peaking generators which are started up or shut down as needed. The size of the grid smooths out the fluctuations enough so this method works, usually. As long as nineteenth century methodology, boil the water, use the steam to turn a turbine, dominates the generation of electricity, the use of small generation facilities will be confined to applications such as factories where the load is fairly constant.
I'll have one for the car, and maybe one for the boat, thank you.
Our options are very limited. We have to solve the energy crisis immediately, by any means necessary, because if we don't it will cost us more lives than if we do.
If we go nuclear the risk of a nuclear meltdown or radiation being unleashed is a lot less than the risk of another terrorist attack, another middle east war, another oil spill. I don't understand why people would fear something that hasn't happened over something that has.
We should pass an energy bill to fund nuclear energy. We should spent 100 billion on the energy bill and spend half of that on nuclear energy. We should use the other half on biofuels, on solar, on wind, but we need nuclear energy because it will solve the problem immediately in the short term while we need to fund the other 50 billion on the long term.
For 100 billion dollars we could solve the energy crisis in the USA. Of course we'd need to invest another 100 billion improving the grid and building the electronet but these investments would pay for themselves and it might be the only solution to get out of the economic crisis.
So basically we either go nuclear or we are going to die in poverty. There aren't going to be jobs for us if we don't lower the price of energy drastically, and make the energy as clean as possible.
I'm all for a stable energy source but there are several issues with nuclear facilities:
1. People tend to live on the coasts, & people tend to disapprove of any nuclear plants near their homes.(note I lived near(
2. Various security agencies see nuclear facilities as potential targets. (plane + nuclear plant = Chernobyl)
3. You need to store the spent fuel somewhere; no one wants to live near a nuclear dump. Even if it is out in the middle of nowhere you still have to transport the fuel there (through citys? on major highways?)
Put the floating power plant far enough away from the coast that people feel safe. This would cost a bit more but if people are really scared they wont mind higher taxes in exchange.
From TFA:
Maybe not precisely predictable, but certainly predictable in a broad and useful sense. The USN discovered this back in the 50's and 60's.
This is true of bloggers too... Especially bloggers seeking to work backwards towards a conclusion rather than forwards from the data.
Don't break your arm patting yourself on your back there bud - because the principle you 'pointed out' fourteen years ago is a principle well known in engineering circles at least half a century before that. (And encapsulated in the very old bromide - "no project gets completed on time or under budget".)
Welcome to the 1950's - when the US Navy first put the entire primary plant into a pressure vessels.
Think so? I think you are not considering a few facts.
But it's a good start. If we go nuclear we'd be well on our way. There is no better option to produce the same results for the price.
Oil provides about 2% of the electricity we use in the US. We get five times more electricity from hydro than from oil and coal provides about half the electricity used. Most oil is used for transportation and for various products. I like the thought of electric cars but those aren't going to do away with the need for oil anytime soon.
When electricity is cheap enough, we'll be able to plug our cars into our walls, along with our robot maid.
Building nuclear plants takes time. Lots of time. Even if we started today we couldn't bring enough nuclear plants online fast enough to service the anticipated need for electricity solely with nuclear during the next 15 years.
Thats not necessarily true. The time it takes to build is relative to the cost it takes to build it and the expertise. It could be built in 5 years if we saw it as an emergency. You see how fast all that surveillance technology got built but they can't built nuclear power plants? Please!
If these smaller plants were to work (no idea if they would) that might help but then you have a distribution, cleanup and security problem with nuclear fuels.
If you think people are opposed to a coal plant in their backyard, try putting a nuclear plant there. People are quite fearful of nuclear. Sometimes with good reason and sometimes not but they are fearful nonetheless.
Not all nuclear plants are bad designs. Some have the cleanup as part of the design. Some are designed to require mininmal cleanup. And they are all more clean than coal.
Let's see. First, what coast did you have in mind that is unoccupied yet close to major metropolitan areas? How do you propose to convince the taxpayers that might be fearful of nuclear that it is a good idea? How do you propose to transport the electricity economically to places far from the coast?
New York, Boston, California, Florida, All the coasts. Build a large floating island on the coast, put the nuclear power plant on these islands just like we put our trash on floating islands. Float the islands far enough out so people don't see it and don't think about it.
First the coast and now the desert. Have you really given this any thought at all? No one lives in the desert and it's expensive to get the power out of the desert. Not to mention that cooling becomes a bigger problem there. While there are nuclear plants that don't require water, most use it because it is cheap and abundant. The entire advantage of a small nuclear plant is that you can place it where it is needed but no one wants to live near a nuclear reactor if they can help it.
Dig holes deep underground like a sandworm into the desert. Build the nuclear power plants under the desert sand so deep that nobody even notices they are there. This makes it easier to secure from terrorists because it's in the desert and this also puts it out of sight, out of mind.
I agree with you that we should focus on decentralized power generation. But before we can make solar generators cheap, we have to build nuclear power plants. If we don't build the nuclear power plants we wont get out of the economic recession or depression with 10% unemployment, and if we stay in this state we will never be able to afford to fund anything with tax dollars because the government wont have anybody left to tax.
Generate power first, and then decentralize it.
Somehow I don't think the campaign slogan "VOTE FOR ME - And I'll stick a nuclear power plant in your area" will catch on
So it's more like, would you like to live on welfare or would you rather we build a nuclear power plant in your area? There really is no alternative to the economic / jobs problem besides building nuclear power plants.
The reactor becomes lightly radioactive. We are talking about neutron radiation, so not that more radioactive than the mine where the fuel originally came from to begin with. Even a fusion reactor using D-T fusion would irradiate the construction materials with neutrons during its life time. The lighter, non-reusable fissionables in the spent fuel, are mostly low lived radioactive products which decay quickly.
The reasons reprocessing is not more advanced are two-fold: 1) is that uranium is so plentiful and cheap, it is just more economic to dump the once through fuel by the wayside, 2) if you can separate plutonium, you can more easily make a nuclear weapon. The fact is the major powers are not interested in reprocessing, although there are many possible avenues to doing it, in addition to the currently used processes. I suspect some of the more recent nuclear powers will eventually do it. India is a good candidate since they have low uranium deposits. Japan is another good candidate since they have next to no deposits. Japan also has low coal deposits unlike India.
The US has pitifully old, not to mention inefficient, enrichment technology. This is the result of decades of non-investment. Recycling and reprocessing is just another face of the problem.
You realize that I wasn't ADVOCATING any of those barriers to nuclear power, right? I'm saying why nuclear hasn't taken off not "I think we shouldn't use nuclear power."
If we go nuclear the risk of a nuclear meltdown or radiation being unleashed is a lot less than the risk of another terrorist attack, another middle east war, another oil spill. I don't understand why people would fear something that hasn't happened over something that has.
Explain to me how nuclear power solves our oil dependence? You're saying we should build nuclear-powered cars?
As I understand it, nuclear could feasibly replace coal-fired power plants. While it's true that we could run electric cars off of nuclear power instead of oil, they could also be run off of coal power. With nuclear power, we would still presumably be using oil for our transportation energy.
Seriously, the majority of America's power does not come from large plants, but from small plants (50-200 mgwatt) that were built about 70-40 years ago. Many of the coal plants are Ancient and either need to be shut down or re-built. Interestingly, many of these are on a lot of land. Where life gets better is that the water required to run a coal plant is more than many nuke plants. Also, all the power lines have come into these areas. It is possible to put in nuke plants that are 50% or even 100% bigger in the same space, using either the same, or slightly more water, and be a plug-in.
Of course, nimby will still be an issue, but most ppl will prefer a nuke over a coal.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is correctly called nuclear waste because the potential benefit of having it is a lot less than all the work required to separating it out. Machining very strong, hard, highly radioactive materials is incredibly expensive as the French have shown despite about thirty years of trying to make their reprocessing methods viable.
You can reuse the steam turbines and electric generators with solar thermal power plants as well.
Why not call it the Deepwater Horizon blowout? That's the phrase everyone else seems to be using.
It's more specific than 'BP Blowout' (for obvious reasons)
It's also more specific than 'Macondo Blowout' (The Macondo Prospect, as wikipedia tells me, is the name of the field, which presumably might still have another blowout at some point in the future. Deepwater Horizon, having sunk to the bottom of the ocean, is unlikely to have any future blowouts.)
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
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.
It's a great idea that still needs a lot of work. If LFTR's can be designed properly the economic, safety, and security benefits of thorium can be put to good use.
Lovins isn't just against nuclear for the (IMHO rather simplistic) economic arguments he gives here.
Back in the 80s he was asked what he would think of a truly cheap, clean and plentiful source of energy. He said it would a great disaster. Why? Because he felt that given any concentrated source of energy, humans would use it to wreak havoc on nature. Thus, it would be better to only have diffuse and limited sources.
So I'm a bit skeptical of his real motives in putting this out.
I will give him this, he's at least fairly consistent. I went to see one of his talks in the 80s, and he was basicly on a similar message with respect to the economy of nuclear power.
He also said that we really didn't need any new sources of power, that conservation and limiting of our growth/what we did meant that we already had enough. At the time, I remarked that he was allowing no chance for less developed populations (India and China) to increase their standard of living, but that wasn't addressed.
He's got a fairly appealing line of talk but when you start really looking, it doesn't measure up.
With some eco-aware folks ...
As soon as someone uses the term "eco-aware" or a variant of it, that's generally a sign that the associated opinion needs to be taken with a heavy grain of salt. Right from the start, things are framed not as a disagreement between different sides analyzing the facts, but as those who are "aware" and those who are not. Would you talk about a dispute between, say, C programmers and PHP programmers, and describe the former as "compiler-aware"?
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
Proposing government action through tax breaks and using state owned energy companies as an example to follow hardly seems like a libertarian position.
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.
Public outcry didn't stop the Iraq war for example. Half the time when it looks like protest is effective the reality is "it's too bloody expensive and the investors are nervous".
People also do stupid things like blame the closure of a French nuclear plant on an RPG attack on it by idiots 13 years previously.
Except solar is more limited in where it can go. A nuclear plant can go just about anywhere.
Reprocessing is expensive. The French are only able to do it with massive government subsidies.
With respect, peak oil is about the wet stuff we can get to easily. Once there's less of it coming out of the ground things get more expensive because the alternatives are more expensive.
You've been misled by manipulative bastards pushing some agenda into misunderstanding a very simple term describing a simple problem.
It's worth mentioning the United States already peaked for domestic oil production back in the 70's as Dr. Hubbert predicted. I like the idea of decentralized generation, let's get our power onsite at our homes and destinations. Save about 20% on losses over long line distribution. But all the unreliable renewables can't compare to fossil fuels in terms of energy density. It's not even close. I happen to think our only real hope, especially in light of escalating demand in China and India, is an unprecedented moon-shot type breakthrough in physics with nuclear fusion (hot) technology, if they can get a net positive EROEI. Of course there is that stat that drives me crazy that says "the earth receives more energy in an hour than the world uses in a year", if we could only harness it. Essentially all energy comes from the sun. Sun feeds the plants, that decayed, that got compressed over eons into fossil fuels. Sun feeds the plants that feeds the animals that gives us our energy from food as humans. The sun interacts with the atmosphere to create winds. etc...
Geothermal power plants are the best substitute for nuke plants. They're highly efficient, create practically no emissions (especially once they're built), are fast to build and put online, present practically no security or pollution risks, and generate continuous baseloads. They don't depend on finite supplies of dirty fuel mostly produced in dirty ways mostly in foreign countries. All at scales only nuke plants have delivered. With a smart electric grid routing power around the country, even the few places where they can't be built at all (because of faultlines) can still get their power.
--
make install -not war
A nuclear plant can go just about anywhere.
Preferably "somewhere else" ;)
Much more true for the (especially) mining and (to the extent needed) waste storage though.
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.
First: if you're not reading The Oil Drum, you should be.
But on to my point. The controlling factor for building nuclear power plants is not money or power, but fear. Fear of contamination controls the decade-long permitting process. Fear of terrorist attack or accident controls the number of guards, monitoring personnel, and operators who work at the plant on a daily basis. The majority of the expense of actually building the plant goes into safety and security systems.
Now, some of these fears are reasonable. But that's not the point: the point is that a small power plant is just as scary as a large one.
The best power plant is not the most energy efficient one, or even the one that's strictly speaking the safest. It's the one that produces the least amount of fear per gigawatt. And that means building gigantic plants.
You mean like the liquid sodium Russian BN600 (600 MW electric fast breeder power plant) that's been running since 1980?
It's had some problems, but nothing that couldn't be repaired and put back online.
Or maybe like the Japanese Monju plant? It had a sodium fire, but that was due to a bad design on a temperature sensor rather than anything to do with sodium itself as a coolant. It's back online now. Much of the reason it took so long was due to a scandal with the management covering up and the resulting court cases. It wasn't the technical problems that stopped it for all that time but the legal/political ones.
Sodium reactors have been around since the 50s at least. Yes, there are problems with embrittlement and the reactivity of the coolant, but it's hardly a show stopper. They're known and manageable problems.
What led to the shutdown of the program was the opposition of John Kerry and others, not technical problems with the sodium coolant.
You also have to consider the amount of land the coal plat sits on and the local weather patterns.
Yes, sodium gets activated by the neutrons. Yes, it's highly radioactive then. But, it's quite short lived (15 hours for Na-24, 2.6 years for Na-22) so it's not as big a problem as you imply. Na-22 is a beta decay, so that's not problematic. Na-24 is the one that has dangerous radiation as it emits gammas. But with a 15 hour half life, it decays very quickly.
The daughter products aren't a problem either (Ne-22 and Mg-24), they're both stable.
The future of energy is in thorium. It a) cant be weaponized, b) is cleaner, c) does not need to be throttled up like uranium. They are developing these plants in other parts of the world such as india.
Yeah, those are extremely low output. It would probably be a lot more descriptive to call them "radiation batteries" instead of "nuclear" (though "nuclear" is not incorrect, it's just not fission or fusion power).
They last forever, but you'd be lucky if you could start your car with one, let alone drive it on a nuclear battery.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Doc, you are way off-line here. The reason why America is in trouble is because it became dependent on Fossil Fuel, mostly imported. Now, I am a HUGE fan of geo-thermal, BUT, the last thing that I want is to be fully dependent on it, or any singular form of energy. Instead, we need a matrix of energy. Ideally, each energy stream will provide no more than 1/3 of our total energy.
Right now, Nukes provide about 18% of our electricity. As such, it provides less than 10% of total energy. Ideally, we would bring it up to at least 20% of our total energy. At the same time, we should bring geo-thermal up to 20% as quickly as possible. Sadly, it will not happen. However, it is the smartest thing that we can do.
Finally, doc, I would also argue that we should build more energy storage as well as solar thermal addition to current fossil fuel plants. The storage would enable nighttime collection of electricity esp. from geo-thermal, wind, nukes, etc and then add to the matrix during the daytime.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You can reuse the steam turbines and electric generators with solar thermal power plants as well.
Haven't you ever played sim city? You can't replace a Coal Plant with Just one solar plant.
A solar plant with the same foot print as the coal plant might get 50 Mwatts, Where the coal plant it's replacing is usually around 500 Mwatts.
Whereas most nuke plants are like 1000-2500 Mwatts.
Two sentences in, and I'm still wondering what this has to do with nuclear power plants. Sounds like an ad for the site. You could mention these things, but later in the summary.
You should have read the main article, or have some knowledge BEFORE speaking. In the article, they will tell you about B&W. They are the ones making the reactors for our subs. Now, they are going to make them for shore. How economical are they? Well, according to the NAVY, it is many times cheaper to have the nuke than a diesel. The reason is that a diesel requires taking fuel to the sub. In addition, more space is taken up by the fuel than by the reactor. Finally, with diesel, you can not go on extend voyages, which is exactly what a boomer needs during crisis times. For example, right now, we have parked at least 1 boomer off of North Korea's coastline. ANd I am sure that we have another in the China sea. Basically, we watch NK and China constantly. But it would be difficult to do this with a diesel, since it would have to come up for air. With a nuke, it goes out and stays out, under the water.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I did read the article. B&W and Westinghouse, who also makes naval nukes, obviously aren't going to be building the same reactors, so what?
All the things you say about naval nuclear are real advantages for certain naval vessels, but that's not the same thing as it being economical. Oh sure, it's cheaper to have a nuclear plant on a sub than to run the logistical supply chain to keep it fueled up with diesel while coming up to the surface defeating the whole purpose of a nuclear missile attack sub. That's like saying the Space Shuttle is economical because it's cheaper than a staircase to the ISS especially since you still couldn't actually dock with it. What that's really saying is that the one option, regardless of cost, simply doesn't have the needed capability.
There are situations where a nuclear reactor has insurmountable advantages. Large carriers or cruisers, long-range attack or ballistic missile subs are places where that's the case. For more plentiful, cheaper vessels they don't use it. Because a Naval nuclear reactor isn't about cost, it's about the raw capabilities it provides.
Obviously the needs of such a reactor are very different than something that isn't being installed in a warship. I don't suppose that for some reason you thought I was saying small reactors couldn't be economical? That's not my point at all. My point is the Navy doesn't care about economics to a significant degree in the situations where only nukes will do, and there's nothing cheap about the ones they use and for good reason. Thus they are not an example of an economical small reactor.
The enemies of Democracy are
Deserts tend to have water. They just don't get a lot of rain. People in Arizona still get water when they turn on their tap.
There are coal plants in the desert, and nuclear plants really don't use any more water than coal plants do. The water in the reactor gets recycled back through, so unless you reactor leaks (which is a major problem which would get fixed quickly) you only really use the water in the turbine, and even that can be reclaimed if you need to. Of course, if your goal is create hydrogen, you'll need a good source of water, but there's plenty of rivers that flow in the middle of nowhere in the southwest (Colorado, Rio Grande, etc.) that could be tapped.
(You're right that there are reactor designs that don't use water, but steam turbine technology is probably the most mature and reliable way of turning the generators, so you'll still need water.)
The desert (mostly) fixes the NIMBY problem. The problem the desert doesn't fix is that the grid isn't set up for it. Obama has made noise about modernizing our electric grid, so perhaps large solar farms and nuke plants in the desert will become feasible.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
The reactor parts are "low grade waste" and is generally safe after a few decades to a 100 years (depends of course-but thats about right for 99% of low grade reactor parts). Fast neutrons do get rid of the heavy elements in modern PWR waste. Thats where the "unsafe for 10 000 years" comes from. So already you have massively reduced the lifetime of the waste (other nasties have very long life times- so don't contribute to the radioactivity that much). There are few fission products that are problematic, they too can be dealt with via fast neutrons (Cs being the hardest to deal with). Even without that we are down to centuries of "high activity time" rather than 1000s. Now we add reprocessing. This brings the volume of the waste down by about 60 fold (more or less), and gives use 60 times more plain U + some Pu. We then dilute the waste to make thermal management easier, but its already much smaller and with a shorter lifetime.
We should be doing research into this now. Sure its not a done deal, and a clear waste management plan is needed. But once though fuel cycle is completely retarded. Its that kind of wastefulness that gets us into these problems in the fist place.
People seem to think 100 years is a long time. The hotel i stayed in Italy last year was build in 720AD. The wine cellar in Czech has been producing wine since at least ~800AD.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
India mostly uses fuel bought from Russia. They're working on getting thorium based reactors working, since they won't have to import it and the proposed reactor design would use much less fuel for the same energy.
Japan imports their uranium as well. I'm not sure who they get it from, but I wouldn't be surprised if the buy it from the US.
According to Wikipedia, Japan is trying to be in position to sell the US reactors once we get over the whole nuclear paranoia and start building them again. Because of this, they collaborate with various US government agencies concerning nuclear power. I'm not sure if that would dissuade them from reprocessing or not.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
In the US in situ leaching is used.
Basicly you pump a mix of water and baking soda into the ground and the uranium disolves in it.
Then you pump it back up and extract the uranium.
Baking soda isn't high on my list of things I'm afraid of getting in my water.
Pretty clean and safe.
waste storage wouldn't be too hard if it was treated as a technical problem, unfortunatly politicians who consider the words "nuclear" and "satanic" interchangable screwed that one up.
meh, if they want they'll just say the factorys producing the solvents for making the solar pannels are being used to create chemical weapons.
If they want a pretext for war they can just claim the renewable bioreactors are being used as a cover for producing bioweapons.
nothing changes.
You need to store the spent fuel somewhere; no one wants to live near a nuclear dump. Even if it is out in the middle of nowhere you still have to transport the fuel there (through citys? on major highways?)
No-one? Let's correct that. My handle isn't Nukenerd for nothing. They can put an underground nuclear waste dump vertically under my house for all I care. What is the issue?
However, I would not want the entrance near me because it is bound to be a traffic nuisance. Not the waste delivery traffic itself (there is not in fact a lot of waste to deal with) but the cars of the zillions of office workers that seem to accompany any operation these days. But that would be the same with any project, nuclear or not. In fact nuclear waste traffic would be insignficant compared with the traffic and activity associated with some of the electricity schemes advocated by the greens.
Have more smaller plants so a) if there is an accident, the disaster is not as big...b) they cost less to make, and the more you bring on line at a time the quicker the return on your investment.....c) they would need smaller teams of people to function, and would cost less in personnel to maintain,....d) should at anytime we need such things as nuclear materials for making any sort of quick weapons
for xxx reason, a few strategically placed plants might make getting materials easier for deployment. This is of course only for national security (that last one)....you terrorists out there, don't read into this, I was not talking to you!
It's the McReactor. While I do agree we need to start heading in a direction like this, security concerns are pretty high surrounding anything involving nuclear material. While the business aspects may point to cheaper nuclear power with McReactors, the costs of securing a bunch of small nuclear reactors would be significant IMO. Maybe we could start a pilot project where the first ones are built on military bases? While each reactor would still need its own security, having it in an already secured area would help.
You couldn't have a better sig for that post!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
1) today, in the us, nukes are economically unviable without huge gov't subsidys (aka welfare or socialism in other contexts) due to the potentially catastrophic nature of accidents 2) Civilian nukes help the spread of military nukes, because the sophisticated exotic technologys are, to some extent, fungible 3) and best of all we have better options The country that has the courage and foresight to turn away from nukes, and invest hundreds of billions in solar and wind and storage and mundane things like more efficient light bulbs and motors will be the economic powerhouse of hte 21st century. Further,we know that huge decade long gov't investments in RnD pay off: its called aerospace, computers and biotech; each of these industrys, a standout in our economy, became realistic because of long term gov't investment in basic RnD I sort of view nukes as an intelligence test for big picture thinking; since there are better alternatives, onlly someone who can't graps the big picture would bother to argue the technical merits.
I completely agree with your general point. But it is nuclear fission that produces the heat that runs the battery, it's just not a chain reaction.
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.
Not true. clearly a strawman argument. I'm not going to waste my time reading an article thats based around a logical fallacy.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Uranium *dissolved* in ground water is not the same as "just baking soda".
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I just read that, and it's full of rubbish. The counter arguments are wrong. His statement about baseload in no way undercuts Brand's assertions; which are accurate. Yes baseload is about all plants, but wind a Solar can not provide baseload at this time. Wind never will. Ever.
The area between SOlar panels is not sued for anythign except travelling to the panel to do maintenance.
The area in between large wind plants is also rarely used. He also ignores noise. That did, the best wind areas are out of the way and often not usable for farming. You would need to run wires over mountain and other rough terrain, but that's an engineering challenge that is quite doable. Volume or usably wind is still an issue. And small windmills take more to make then they will produce over their lifetime.
His cost analysis is that of a simpleton. Sadly they are far to complex to take part here. Even if he was correct, he isn't, I would say so what? All it means is that either electricity cost will go up 20%, or my taxes will be subsiding it. Both is fine with me,. It is foolish to think the free market needs to have the last word.
oh wait, RMI's goal is to make it so only corporation dictate energy policy. I wonder if thats what he basis his non scientific reasoning on?
Lovins is still stuck in 1978, and ignores all nuclear advances since then.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If I lived next to a coal-burning power plant, I would jump at the chance to have it converted to nuclear.
Redundancy is good And also good.
you mean the groundwater where they'd be mining? where there's already natural deposits of uranium and as such uranium in the groundwater?
The decision wasn't made on the basis of technological deficiencies but rather on the knee jerk reaction to India becoming a nuclear power a little more than a couple years prior. Like Ford's ban on plutonium reprocessing, Carter's ban on reprocessing spent commercial fuel was based on an irrational political notion. Like Ford he believed that we could motivate the world to keep weapons grade material out of the hands of India and other places that would scare us should they attain nuclear capabilities. Ironically we are now sharing nuclear technology with India so as to counterbalance the growing weight of China.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
They are not that big a deal in terms of loss of life, but they are a very big deal in terms of economic cost and disruption. The problem is that radiation is detectable down to very low levels. And people are very afraid of radiation. Every bit will have to be cleaned up, because people won't believe your assurances that the levels are so low that they present negligible risk, even if it is true (and there is an unfortunate history of such assurances having been made when it was not true). The cost will be enormous, not to mention the cost of relocating everybody in the affected area until the cleanup is complete.
Presumably much higher uranium concentrations than what naturally occurs in the area's groundwater - since, apparently, baking soda leaches it.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I don't know what is wrong with the mods today. Troll? for a SimCity joke?
I think I must be lost, can you tell me where I might find a tech nerd forum?
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
The nuclear waste problem is overblown. Absolute safety far into the future cannot be guaranteed, but that is an unreasonable standard. The ore wasn't safe before we dug it up, so a reasonable standard would be to make the waste as safe as the ore was when it was in the ground. This is not horribly difficult.
Please tell me you're just trolling. DHS may have their problems, but believe me a dirty bomb being used in the right sort of place would be a major deal.
It may not be that effective as a weapon of mass destruction, but the response that results would make it a weapon of mass disruption.
Imagine, if you will, someone steals a medical source from a hospital on Manhattan (thus possibly avoiding radiation monitors set up after 9-11 that they'd encounter trying to move it a longer distance), and manages to reasonably finely spread it around the Wall Street financial district, or the diamond mart, or one of the tunnels to the island, or etc, whatnot before they get stopped. Regardless of the real health threat to anyone, it would shut down that area for days while it was decontaminated, and investigated.
If you think Manhattan is too well protected, then Chicago and the CBOT, etc, etc. There are large numbers of targets for it, and you can't protect them all. You don't even need to do a good job for it to be effective. Just the perception will be enough.
If you think that the radiation hazard would be a deterrent, think again. Suicide bombers seem to be rather common round the world these days.
Far easier to steal a medical source. There are more of them, they're widely distributed under varying security conditions, the containers they're in aren't as robust and the radioactive materials are more effective when dispersed.
Stealing even a small nuclear power plant doesn't strike me as particularly easy.
Its not in a soluble form without the acid or carbonates. That's why leaching works in the first place.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
The big problem with nuclear power is radioactive waste.
BZZZZT. What you call "radioactive waste" I call "nuclear fuel which needs to have the neutron poisons removed"
There is no way to recycle it
BZZZZT. 100% incorrect. You can reprocess it and use it as fuel again. An average pressurized water reactor only uses 1% of the fuel before you need to swap out the rods due to trans-uranic neutron poisons. There are processes to remove these neutron-capturing elements and load the other 99% back into the reactor.
and no matter where you put there is always the risk that it will show up in drinking water or somewhere else in the environment in the long run.
When we're discarding perfectly useable fuel? Yes. It lasts for tens of thousands of years. If we reprocess it? The stuff you have to worry about will only last a couple hundred, or will last a couple million years because it's as stable as iron. You know what ends up "in drinking water or somewhere else in the environment" all the time today? Fly ash containing uranium and thorium, and corrosive sulfur from burning coal. You want your nuclear waste in one small place, or everywhere including your lungs?
I guess that all these small reactors will produce a lot more waste.
Whereas I guess that you really have no idea what you're talking about. Let me give you some stuff to read about, so you can stop spreading completely false FUD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_cycle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_wave_reactor
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I don't know where you are getting this imaginary point of view you are pretending that I have - all I was doing is describing where the peak uranium idea came from in the first place.
Now back to reprocessing - it is very difficult to do for the old designs of reactors which is why very little of it was done. As I said above "Since then reactor designs that are less fussy about fuel have been developed".
The oil analogy is very cute but reality is metals with very high strength, very high melting points and oxides that are very difficult to reduce. It's likely that we won't see any more than proof of concept reprocessing for a very long time and then you'll see new designs of reactors that can get a bit more out of those spent fuel rods without any reprocessing at all.
actually they prefer to use acids but in most of the US sites the ground already contains too much carbonates so they have to use the less efficient carbonates on the uranium.
so it's already being dissolved due to the carbonates.
just less.
I wouldn't be too mad on drinking the groundwater where there's a natural uranium deposit with or without mining.
In addition to 'peak uranium', there is also a matter of cost shifting, either to other budgets or to future dates. There was some storage preparation made near where I lived once and storage facilities use not a small amount of energy to place, build, and operate. About fission, I have gone from cautious support for it to wanting it phased out. Not stopped suddenly or arbitrarily but phased out, keeping the cleanest, safest ones longest.
Again note that I say phased out, not cut out overnight. The newer ones are basically safe and newest ones like pebble bed are very good -- in the short term. It is dangerous and criminally irresponsible to allow the old Soviet reactors to stay in operation. And I object to the stupid practice of shutting down safe reactors in order to increase production in the unsafe reactors.
I still have hopes for fusion, but after all these decades, am no longer realistically expecting much effort to be made. What changed my mind about fission is the energy costs related to storing fission wastes. It looks like storage and waste management may use more energy than was produced by the fission that produced the waste. It's hard to tell and since the payment of that energy debt is pushed into the future, it is hard to get reliable or truthful assessments. Now if we can safely re-use fission byproducts as fuel, and clearly show a long term gain, then fine.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I don't like what you have to say so whay you have to say is FLAMEBAIT! For the Fuck-tards who modded me so, may your mother, mother's mother, daughters, grand-daughters, and all further femal progeny be gang-raped by psycho-pathic homeless people while your eyes burn in anger and rememberance of me! FUCK-TARD!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.