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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."
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
I dunno, I think their last addition to the catalog was still better.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
So from your sarcastic comment, you believe that it's a good idea for, say, the Somali warlords to have nuclear weapons? Fascinating.
If you don't have enrichment capabilities, whether you start at 3% or at 0.1% is pretty much irrelevant. And assuming you could have those enrichment capabilities, using enough 3% enriched material to reach the 70-90% you state for a usable amount of weapon-grate material will required a huge quantity of low-grade fuel. This fuel quantity, most likely way above the consumption of your power plants, will raise red flags before you can do anything with it. Also, I bet someone will notice that not spent fuel rods come out of your reactors...
The risk of someone in a 3rd world county of using this fuel in an enrichment process is ridiculously low. I would be more worried about the possibility to see this fuel disappear due to corruption or lack of proper security and see it end up in dirty bombs.
Enrichment for weapon grade fuel production is way overrated and is more a modern political lever than a real threat.
...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.
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.
Excuse me a second, just pissed myself laughing. Individuals are rational? Seriously?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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
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.
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.
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.
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