Slashdot Mirror
IAEA Forms Nuclear Fuel Bank
Kemeno writes "The International Atomic Energy Agency voted on Friday to form a nuclear fuel bank to help developing countries acquire nuclear fuel without having to enrich uranium themselves. Warren Buffet contributed 50 million dollars to a pool of 150 million with contributions from many different countries. The goal of the program is to provide countries with a source of low-grade enriched uranium suitable for fueling reactors but not for creating nuclear weapons."
This has to be the best addition to the IKEA catalog yet! Grab my tape measure, allen key and let's go shopping!
Can you poison the fuel used in the rods so that it can't be used in weapons at all without starting the enrichment process over from the beginning? I understand that you need 70-90% U-235 for a weapon and only about 3% to run a reactor. But 3% enriched fuel is a better starting point for making a weapon than raw ore, is it not?
1. get clean energy to people in the developing world.
2. getting rid of people who oppose nuclear power in the developed world.
2. build nuclear plants.
3. synthesising gasoline and diesel fuel with nuclear power.
4. no more CO2!!! profit!
Notice: no ?????? mark step.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
So from your sarcastic comment, you believe that it's a good idea for, say, the Somali warlords to have nuclear weapons? Fascinating.
No I think he is saying "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for life."
I don't think any current nuclear powered countries would appreciate their fuel supplies controlled and rationed by a central body.
If this is the best way, lead by example and have your fuel supplies controlled by a third party.
Oh.. you don't want to do that? National security issues? I thought so.
It is pretty hard to eat your own dog food.
And how exactly would a country like Iran "kill the entire human race"? At best, they'd get one bomb on target and be pounded into dust afterwards. The real point is - one single bomb would protect them from the USA bringing them "freedom". Can't have that, can we? Thought you are about "promoting liberty", by your sig? Doesn't that extend to Iran running its own nuclear program? Ah, I get it, it is "liberty for the privileged to shit on everyone else". Nothing to see there, just another libtard. Move along.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
...and leave a legacy that will improve life in smaller countries, he should champion the development of cheap, abundant, safe nuclear power in the form of the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). Thorium is far more abundant than Uranium and the plants are potentially much smaller and cheaper.
You got a spare 200 kiloton CONTAINED reactor to rent?
What are you smoking?
Many developing countries have grids where the lights go out on a regular basis because of a the lack of baseload generation capacity. They are in desperate need of baseload (coal, nuclear, gas or hydro) to stabilize their grids and meet demand. You cannot do this with PV - period. Nuclear is the least environmentally damaging option and the lowest cost low emission technology.
Notably Vietnam and Bangladesh have recently signed agreements with Russia to build two VVER nuclear power plants in each country. Vietnam looks to be about to conclude a contract with Japan for two more reactors.
While PV won't provide baseload, solar thermal can and will - particularly in tropical/subtropical regions with highly predictable sunshine.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Nice to see the fine slashdot tradition of making bold, unsupported statements, declared as absolute truth, is still alive and well.
"to what is essentially a very expensive environment-ruining nuclear-timebomb"
Oh, really? Please, do, provide some actual *science and engineering* based source for this assertion. Before you trot out the old "Chernobyl", do note that *nobody*, except *nobody* is building any plants that are similar to the Chernobyl design, and that modern designs have multiple layers of safety in their designs that Chernobyl lacked. If Nuclear Reactors are so dangerous, so environment ruining, such ticking timebombs, how come in 60 years of nuclear plant operation, Chernobyl is the *one and only* accident which released any significant radioactive material into the environment? Modern plant designs are very safe, and even in the very unlikely event of a meltdown accident, are extremely unlikely to release any significant radioactivity into the environment.
Unlike you, I'll provide a source for my assertions: Ted Rockwell's Nuclear Facts Report. Now, that report is very long, but it's also well supported with bibliography references to many sources, including peer-reviewed studies by professional engineers and scientists.
You might bring up Three Mile Island, or Davis-Besse. Three Mile Island was unfortunate, but was only a disaster for the investors who payed for it. It got worse than it should have, but even in that situation, only a very small amount of slightly radioactive (very slightly) steam was released from the plant, but no other radioactive materials or radiation was released. TMI had an actual meltdown, and it wasn't an environmental or public safety disaster.
In the meantime, the nuclear plants being built now have been built with better safety designs than older generation II plants - a TMI type incident, although we can't call it completely impossible, is much more unlikely than it was with the TMI design. The Nuclear Industry has spent many Billions of dollars on R&D to design new, safer plants, and shepherd those new designs through strict regulatory oversight bodies like the NRC to get them approved.
I truly don't believe those new power plants are at all "environment-ruining nuclear-timebombs".
About the waste - the truth is, we should be recycling the spent fuel. The only proper, responsible final 'disposal' for spent nuclear fuel is to seperate out the short lived 'true waste' products from the rest of the fuel, and keep re-using the fuel until it's all converted to short lived waste. We *have* the technology to turn our current nuclear waste, which is radioactive for 100,000+ years into short-lived waste which essentially becomes non-radioactive after about 200 years - I think we *can* safely store the waste for 200 years, but I've never heard anyone who thought we could really store it for 100k+ years.
Sometime, try googling for "Integral Fast Reactor" - it's a fascinating read.
Finally, on your comment, "They should just give them free photovoltaics - you can just set a mini-plant in any of the villages". Really, do you really think a few PV panels in a village is going to provide enough power? For what? Each household can run one or two LED or CFL lights? What if that village needs power for running a water treatment plant, or a desalination plant? What if they want to have businesses and small industry which need enough power to run machinery, commercial refrigeration units, etc? What if the villagers want heat, hot water, and electric stoves in their homes, instead of burning wood or coal for those needs? You think a few PV panels in town and on the roof will provide enough power for all that? What about the big cities? Even the most undeveloped countries usually have at least a Capital city, if not a few others? What about future growth? That small village, as it gets access to clean water and power, might start to
For a perspective on the role of nuclear weapons in US foreign policy see here: Empire and Nuclear Weapons
In addition to using nuclear weapons, the US has also threatened to use nuclear weapons on more occasions than all other nations combined.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism_(Foundation)
The Foundation presents nuclear (atomic) power as a religion, allowing their uncivilized neighbors access to the technology without understanding how it worked. Maintenance is done through ritual and ceremonies.
The original story was published in 1942.
I truly don't believe those new power plants are at all "environment-ruining nuclear-timebombs".
I'm as big a proponent of IFR technology as anyone, but it is head-in-the-sand thinking to expect that waste from this program is going to be recycled any better than we've done for the last 30 years. Practically nobody is doing it today, ain't no way third world countries are going to be the ones that start doing it even half right.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Solar thermal may be cheaper than PV but is still a lot more expensive than nuclear. The Arithmetic adds up to Nuclear
I'm not aware that there is any solar thermal plant in existence that has anything like the 90% capacity factor of nuclear. Andasol 1 and 2 in Spain as I understand it have 7 hours of storage. The most likely scenario for solar thermal is that it is backed up by gas in the immediate future.
So long as the Chinese are now white.
And the Indians.
Of course those are just the two major non "white man" countries with nuclear weapons. Other countries have nuclear power, but not weapons. Brazil and Taiwan to name two.
The thing is it would be nice to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of crazies and unstable countries. Nuclear weapons aren't dangerous, and even can help prevent war, but only when they are in the hands of people who are loathe to use them. So long as they act as nothing but deterrents, they are fine. Not saying we might not be better off without them, but when they play only a deterrence role there's no problem.
Nuclear power, on the other hand, is something good for everyone. Modern reactors are very safe. It is a good way to cheaply supply a lot of energy, and a society needs energy to improve quality of life. Poor countries face many challenges, but energy is one of them and nuclear energy could really help out.
This creates a problem though. If they can turn the energy tools in to weapons, well then you can end up having nuclear arms in the hands of people who would use them out of spite, ignorance, etc. If you don't believe that have a look at the Vice Travel Guide to Liberia. We are talking about places where soldiers sacrificed children and ate their hearts.
Thus you can see while getting them nuclear power would be nice, countries want to make sure they don't get nuclear weapons with it.
I don't particularly mind the US or China having nuclear weapons. I really can't see either ever using them capriciously. I would mind Liberia or Congo having them because all it takes is whatever warlord gets them having an attack of the crazies and a lot of people are going to die.
Err, perhaps I wasn't clear. I agree that Fast Reactor technology is going to start in more developed places - China and India, I believe, already have plans to build some, here in the U.S. GE-Hitachi recently announced they have reached an agreement with the DoE to build a prototype PRISM plant (PRISM is the commercialized version of IFR, from what I understand).
When I made the statement, "I truly don't believe those new power plants are at all 'environment-ruining nuclear-timebombs'", I wasn't referring to IFR or other "Gen IV" reactors - I was talking about the Gen III plants being proposed for these small developing nations - things like the ABWR, EBWR, AP-1xxx, EPR, etc.
Whose more crazy?
a) a country which has never attacked any other country in recent history i.e. 200 years.
b) a country which has started/participated in almost 50 wars, has done coup in at least 10 countries and has used 2 atomic bombs?
You want to prove your point by using lies. When Iran openly said that?
The problem is used correctly nuclear power is not a cheap energy source. As nuclear power plants cut corners they find creative ways to ruin the environment
The problem is that the cost of nuclear power is inflated by the regulations that the anti-nuclear lobby imposed upon everybody as a very effective form of sabotaging the nuclear power industry.
Different from all other power systems, you cannot find examples of how the nuclear power plants have ruined the environment by "cutting corners". What they are doing is storing nuclear waste "temporarily" but in a highly secure way at the power station plants, instead of moving them to the non-existent "permanent" waste storage facilities.
The reason why permanent storage facilities do not exist is only because politicians have never agreed on where those facilities should be located and how they would be constructed. each time some proposal comes up it's immediately shot down by the anti-nuclear lobby.
The anti-nuclear lobby is financed by the taxes we, the citizens, pay. There are NGOs all over the world that get tax-exempt status because they are officially "pro-environment" organizations. Perhaps Wikileaks should tell us how much those NGO directors get in salaries (or do you remotely believe that everybody who works for those organizations is a volunteer?)
Not that old saw again. This program would allow countries to run nuclear power plants without having to develop a hugely expensive supporting industry. The same way African countries currently import cars rather than having to develop a car industry from scratch. It's just another way of bootstrapping the economy.
You are a few years too late. North Korea already has nukes for one, Iran is close, Egypt have has been working on it for years, and in Israel it's getting close to having a crazy fascist get the keys to the nuclear bombs let alone Pakistan and a few former Soviet republics.
A country even more batshit crazy than warlords in Africa already has the bomb. Just last week they shelled South Korea to extort more aid money. Cannibalism (like your anecdote above) is reported there as well.
As for the dirt cheap safe reactors - theoretically they could exist but they don't yet. I don't know why people always talk about untried technologies that only exist on paper as "modern reactors". Of course they are safe, you can't get anything safer than something that doesn't exist. I say build prototypes and test them out, but suggest laying off the bullshit about how perfect untried things are.
Breeders were an expensive and pointless dead end as shown many times in the 1970s because it is incredibly difficult to handle the highly radioactive materials with a short half-life produced. Those that wanted to pretend it was not a failure renamed such promising new and unrelated technologies as accelerated thorium reactors to "breeder" to save face.
Give up on the old shit that was shown to be shit and learn about something from the last quarter century instead. You've just been conned by Westinghouse or similar that want to fleece the taxpayer by selling some ancient failed experimental designs they still have on the books.
The problem with Pu is that only the 239 isotope is suitable for weapons, and if you have too much 240 or 241 (more than about 3%) then it isn't stable enough to fission when you want it to. Pu-240 and -241 spontaneously fission, leaving daughter products that absorb your neutrons.
Isotopic separation isn't done with Plutonium because the atomic weights of the isotopes are too similar. Cascading centrifuges won't get the job done, and chemical separation won't get the job done.
In order to create Pu-239 for weapons purposes, you have to use a ridiculously short fuel cycle in a specially configured reactor - it's quite obvious to the inspectors that will undoubtedly be required to be present should you sign contracts with the IAEA to get this fuel.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Pretending that the first world can survive without a base load power supply that is more environmentally friendly than coal is counterproductive bullshit that halts progress. I'd much rather live with the consequences of having to store used nuclear waste instead of burning off the numerous toxins in each ton of coal.
Even if my post regarding breeder reactors was incorrect, reprocessing spent fuel with $CURRENT_NUCLEAR_TECHNOLOGY is still a valid method of handling the fuel.
Continue to complain about nuclear, it'll still be used because there are so few options for base load with current technology.
Well this proves the questionable value of the "troll" marking - I'm actually a recognized expert on this subject and everything I have said here can be verified.
Check out Carson Mark's (former head of the Theoretical Division of Los Alamos) treatise on exactly this topic "Reactor-Grade Plutonium's Explosive Properties": www.nci.org/NEW/NT/rgpu-mark-90.pdf.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj