Underwater Nuclear Power Plant Proposed In France

nicomede writes "The French state-owned DCNS (French military shipyard) announced today a concept study for an underwater nuclear reactor dedicated to power coastal communities in remote places. It is derived from nuclear submarine power plants, and its generator would be able to produce between 50 MWe and 250MWe. Such a plant would be fabricated and maintained in France, and dispatched for the different customers, thus reducing the risk for proliferation."

Comments

heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[jsepeta]

i'm not sure that this is the best location for a nuclear plant, but it may lead to a cool james bond flick.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[Anonymous Coward]

france has a long history of nuclear underwater. Look at all the south pacific atolls that theyve nuked as testing nuclear weapons wasnt considered safe to do in france.... warning warning....

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[Relic of the Future]

And? The heat for every nuclear plant dissipates into a nearby body of water, and they all flow into the sea. There's no other way to efficiently move that much waste heat.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[toastar]

And? The heat for every nuclear plant dissipates into a nearby body of water, and they all flow into the sea. There's no other way to efficiently move that much waste heat.

Then why do they have cooling towers?

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[Anonymous Coward]

The cooling towers just make the whole thing cooler. Like the way Saruman's tower made him cooler.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[GiveBenADollar]

Not every location that needs power has a body of water that can be used as a heat sink. Some power plants have cooling lakes built just for them. Some have cooling towers for the same reason. The most efficient is to be able to use the water of a running river or ocean, but they aren't always availible. Note that this is not just nuclear power plants but fossil fuel as well.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[olsmeister]

And here I thought it was just for the manatees....

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[pnewhook]

And? The heat for every nuclear plant dissipates into a nearby body of water, and they all flow into the sea.

Not quite true. The Candu reactors use heavy water that does not dump into the sea, but do use a body of water for heat transfer. No water is cycled through those reactors and back out - they are self contained.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[wesleyjconnor]

comedy gold :)

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[__aatirs3925]

People like you are the reason why I read /. comments.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[Firethorn]

No water is cycled through those reactors and back out - they are self contained.

Uh, that's true for every halfway sane nuclear reactor out there.

Most nuclear plants actually consist of two to three separate water loops - reactor core, which would be the heavy water that CANDU reactors(as well as others) use. The heat from this is transferred to the second which is used for the steam cycle that actually turns the turbines - this is generally treated distilled water. The last would be the water that's generally taken from a lake or river, and used to cool the steam water, then returned.

Some plants combine the first two, directly using the water from the reactor to power the turbines.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[magarity]

Then why do they have cooling towers?

If the water were not cooled prior to putting it back in the local river or lake, the heat would kill all the fish and the algae would flourish like mad. The lake or river would be a nasty mess in short order.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[Lord Kano]

The Earth is a closed system you know. Into the ocean, into the air, it's all into the same Earth.

LK

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[Neil Boekend]

Why not? They did it that way for a short period of time in Chernobyl....

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[RsG]

Uh, no.

Thermodynamically the Earth is anything but a closed system. We lose heat into space. We gain heat from the sun, from atomic decay, from tidal forces, etc (the sun is the most significant of the lot, obviously). The planet is not a closed system, and it's a damn good thing for us that this is the case.

I think what you meant to say was that it doesn't matter where exactly the waste heat from a power plant goes, as heat tends to equalize over time. But "closed system" is right out.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[arivanov]

This solves the biggest problem with floating reactors. Most "coastal communities" which have no major grid national connection and will be interested in a nuclear plant will get hit by something up to Hurricane class 5 once in a while. Having the reactor on the sea bed away from harm solves the problem of "what do we do with our nuclear plant in a hurricane".

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[M8e]

Note that this is not just nuclear power plants but fossil fuel as well.

Not only nuclear and fossil, biofuel and some types of solar need cooling too.

Cogeneration is another alternative when it comes to cooling. I.E you use a city's demand for hotwater/heating as the cold sink.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[AmiMoJo]

It's just a shame no-one wants to live near a power station or all that heat could be put to good use in the winter.

I'm not an engineer but it seems like even if it had to be piped a few kilometres the heated water could be used in central heating, heated pavements or industrially.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[Eunuchswear]

It's just a shame no-one wants to live near a power station or all that heat could be put to good use in the winter.

I'm not an engineer but it seems like even if it had to be piped a few kilometres the heated water could be used in central heating, heated pavements or industrially.

Huh? Never heard of CHP plants? Didn't know that many buildings in Paris are heated by steam pipes coming from nearby power plants? (Some burning domestic rubbish).

(or did you mean to say "It's just a shame no-one wants to live near a nuclear power station"?)

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[phoenix321]

Using the city as a heatsink has been tried in many European countries, especially the Eastern parts.

Benefits are clear, but you have to have a rather large network of rather large pipes around the city, transporting hot water or in some places steam.

For examples, see
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:District_heating_pipelines_in_Wuppertal

Lovely, eh?

Disadvantages are
- maintenance costs for an additional network of public utilities. High maintenance if steam is distributed instead of water
- waste heat and water often leaking somewhere, if cities save on the above maintenance. Worse with steam pipes.
- cannot be transported far, so it's impossible to built into a somewhat redundant grid (unlike electricity or gas) - if the power plant feeding the local hot water distribution fails, all homes are cold.
- cannot be transported far, reaching outlying suburbs is impossible, homes need to be quite close to the power plant, rendering this option very undesirable for nuclear power plants. (Pipes transporting a physical medium from the nuclear reactor to the living room? Of course they have several levels of "impenetrable" heat exchangers as barriers between different circuits, but do you trust anyone else's Geiger counter?)

and the main reason:

The entire thing works only in winter. Waste heat must be dissipated through other means in summer, adding another set of equipment - cooling towers - that require capital expenditure and constant maintenance. Above a certain increased standard of living, electricity usage always has its absolute peak in summer, not coincidentally at the same time when demand for central heating is at its lowest.

So it's a fine technology that works best in scenarios that have a) long, cold, dark winters, b) a low to medium standard of living, c) a high population density and d) low labor costs. For maximum efficiency, add e), the political power to centralize people around power plants or other large industrial heat source (forges, smelters etc.).

In other words, perfect for the past Soviet Union, probably OK for dense northern cities in current Russia or China, less suitable for less-dens, less northern cities. Roughly half of Russia's land mass lies north of Canada's northern border, so it clearly can make more sense for them.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[phoenix321]

In theory, they all have isolated circuits/loops with heat exchangers.

In practice, heat exchangers do corrode, need inspection and maintenance and sometimes leak without prior warning. Technically, this can be prevented easily, detected and repaired quickly enough. Question is, can the political and economical forces driving this process be trusted or not?

Even the worst oil spills are tiny little specks of chickenshit compared to a nuclear power plant crew that absolutely, positively needs to get a certain experiment completed before the 1st of May annual Workers Party celebration.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[danbert8]

So harvest the algae and convert it into biodiesel... It's a win-win!

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[jgtg32a]

1st of May annual Workers Party celebration.

Is that what they are calling it now, Riot is such a nasty term

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[AmiMoJo]

Actually I had not heard about that. We don't have anything like it in the UK which is a shame.

As it happens I do live near a rubbish burner. It's horrible, ever since it was built the amount of dust in the area has gone up fivefold. If I wash my car and they run the burner that evening in the morning it is covered in dust.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[Anonymous Coward]

What you are describing is an isolated system, a system that neither exchanges matter nor energy with the surroundings. A closed system would be one that does not exchange matter with the surroundings. The earth is nearly a closed system, but definitely not an isolated system.

  However, as we are talking about energy, it doesn't really matter if the earth is a closed system, so assuming that the GPP meant isolated system is not a bad assumption.

I don't know where you got your definitions, but if you're talking thermodynamics, a closed system is a system that doesn't exchange heat with its surroundings.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[DarthVain]

I was just thinking that if you put it underwater you effectively shield it to pretty much any terrorist attack. Just finding the thing would be a lot harder. Maintenance might be a bitch though.

I did have a vision of that bond flick with the deep sea diving suits with the claws...

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[Eunuchswear]

Actually I had not heard about that. We don't have anything like it in the UK which is a shame.

Uh, oh yes you do. Check out http://www.chpa.co.uk/case-studies_19.html for some examples.

As it happens I do live near a rubbish burner. It's horrible, ever since it was built the amount of dust in the area has gone up fivefold. If I wash my car and they run the burner that evening in the morning it is covered in dust.

Must be broken. You're probably going to die of dioxin provoked cancer.

(Seriously, a badly run incinerator can be deadly ).

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[Firethorn]

We start with 'heat exchangers need maintenance' and end with chernobyl?

The Chernobyl disaster didn't have anything to do with the heat exchangers, and core water leaking where it isn't supposed to is too big of a headache to take much risk with. For one thing, leaking exchangers(or pipes) is going to be taking water from where it's supposed to be and put it somewhere it isn't; unbalancing the system.

Question is, can the political and economical forces driving this process be trusted or not?

Going by world history outside of the USSR? Yes, it can.

Even the worst oil spills are tiny little specks of chickenshit compared to a nuclear power plant crew that absolutely, positively needs to get a certain experiment completed before the 1st of May annual Workers Party celebration.

What about chemical disasters?

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[r_batty_00]

What you are describing is an isolated system, a system that neither exchanges matter nor energy with the surroundings. A closed system would be one that does not exchange matter with the surroundings. The earth is nearly a closed system, but definitely not an isolated system.

Closed system has been defined to be both an energy and a matter boundary for years.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/closed+system

Wikipedia does have a differentiation for isolated and closed systems. This could be new, or a common editor could be editing his non-standard preferences.

- Yes, I am an engineer.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[Celestialwolf]

This is true. Here in Utah Valley, there used to be a company called Geneva Steel. The steel mill was built on the shores of Utah Lake, which they'd pump into the plant to cool the machinery. Thing is, they never allowed the water to cool back down first before pumping it back into the lake. The company isn't here anymore, but the damage has been done. The whole lake is just full of algea. It's pretty gross, really.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[phoenix321]

The Chernobyl disaster had nothing to do with leaky pipes but everything with braindead engineering and even worse management of dangerous technology. Contributing was an intense fear of authority, a rather large dose of personal ignorance and a complete disregard for safety protocols or safety in general. In other words, the pinnacle of the Soviet Union.

These are exactly the general conditions and engineer's mindset under which they should not attempt to connect nuclear reactors with people's homes by any physical medium. And I doubt this general mindset in engineering in this region has turned 180 degrees since then, and yes, they still run these braindead RBMK-type reactors in many plants.

As underscored in another post, conditions for successful use of waste heat in people's home are population density, (rather low) demand for electricity in summer and concentration of people around heavy industry in climates with long and cold winters. These are pretty typical for Russia and rather rare in Poland, Germany and some areas of Japan and China. Maybe also in Canada. Everywhere else the conditions are much less ideal.

And I don't completely trust political, economical and technical processes in Russia and China when it comes to safety in engineering.

Chemical disasters are surely disastrous as seen in Bhopal, but nuclear meltdowns are worse on several orders of magnitude.

Chemical spills wash out, dilute, decompose, break down - but nuclear waste, radioactive dust and irradiated matter just keeps on giving, year after year, for what is probably the rest of human existence.

India could have ten chemical spills the size and effect of Bhopal per year, but we could still go on with our normal lives. But if we had just another 5 Chernobyls anywhere, we would have roughly doubled the natural background radiation of the entire Earth for several millenia.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[Lord Kano]

You are correct. I used the wrong term.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[stonewallred]

Yeah. Wish we got as much of our domestic power in the USA from nukes as the frogs did. Oh, that's right, carbon emissions are bad, wind power is bad, water power is bad. Geothermo power is bad. Fossil fuels are bad. nuclear waste is bad. Fucktard envirotards. Won't be appy until the human race is dead, because then Mother Earth can live free and unsullied. Cocksucking POSes, hope they all get raped by niggers.And their moms too.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[sFurbo]

I can't find my textbook in physical chemistry (Atkins) right now, but I'm pretty sure they were defined as I did above. Of course, the need for what I called a closed system is greater in physical chemistry than it is in engineering, so perhaps there are just different definitions in different fields. That would be really annoying, though.

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[RockDoctor]

Your analysis of the economics of district heating isn't utterly wrong, but it is deeply flawed. You neglect that most of the towns in question have been built solely to provide accommodation for the workers at the respective mines, oil fields, etc. Secondary occupation (teachers, shop keepers, etc) is a relatively minor and recent thing. And no-one but no-one goes there for any reason other than being paid (seriously, no-one. When I got permission to visit my Fiancée in one such town, a condition was registering with the police within one day of getting there, surrendering passport, Izveschenyie, visa etc ; when we got to the police station to hand over the documents, after an hour of hunting around the police told us to go away and stop confusing them, because no-one in the county knew what paperwork was necessary or what to do. "So just go away!" That was 14 years after glasnost.)

So, the entire population already live clustered around the railway station, power station, and already live in pre-fabricated blocks. There is literally nothing else. (OK, this is slowly changing. Very slowly. There were several privately-owned buildings built in the Fiancée's town by the time she left ; maybe a half-dozen in a city of around 100,000 people. And most of them were shops, not dwellings.)

As for summer heat load : don't forget that you're not only providing heating water, you're also providing hot water and cold water (at -50degC, clod water is hot) to all the town. That's a more-or-less constant load for the heating system. In summer, such as it is, the maintenance on the redundant life-support systems for the various accommodation blocks is carried out, while it's possible to turn off the heating (or water) to blocks without causing hundreds of deaths.

CHP (Combined Heat and Power) schemes are a lot more broadly-applicable a solution than you choose to make out. I'll agree that it's less useful in low-latitude and low-altitude areas but even there low-grade heat is useful. It is, after all, energy.

Roughly half of Russia's land mass lies north of Canada's northern border,

Is that claim as well researched as the rest of your post? Nice foot-shot! Do you want a wheelchair, or is depending on someone to push you perhaps a little too mutualist for your liking?

Re:heat generated would dissipate into the ocean

[Firethorn]

The Chernobyl disaster had nothing to do with leaky pipes but everything with braindead engineering and even worse management of dangerous technology. Contributing was an intense fear of authority, a rather large dose of personal ignorance and a complete disregard for safety protocols or safety in general. In other words, the pinnacle of the Soviet Union.

Anything in particular give you the impression that I didn't already know this, and just didn't want to make a post the size of a small novel?

and yes, they still run these braindead RBMK-type reactors in many plants.

To be fair, they have tightened up the rules and made adjustments to improve safety, both procedural and physical.

As underscored in another post, conditions for successful use of waste heat in people's home are population density, (rather low) demand for electricity in summer and concentration of people around heavy industry in climates with long and cold winters.

Where'd the useage of waste heat come from? I was talking about the heat exchangers that transfer energy from the core water to the steam water that powers turbines to produce electricity. Then the steam water is cooled by lake/river/ocean water for the return cycle.

Sure, I like the idea of cogeneration or even trigeneration plants, but yeah, you have to find an economic justification.

In areas that don't need lots of heat for homes or businesses, ideally you'd use it for industry. Ethanol production, providing steam for oil sand/shale extraction, etc...

Chemical disasters are surely disastrous as seen in Bhopal, but nuclear meltdowns are worse on several orders of magnitude.

Uh... I think you need to work on your numbers.

Bhopal: Killed 2,259 immediately, 3,787 related to the release. Other estimates vary between 8k-15k. 500k injured, 3k permanently.

TMI: No Deaths attributed to TMI by any reputable source

Chernobyl: 31 dead within 3 months due to radiation. 237 suffered 'acute radiation sickness'. 216 total 'non-cancer' deaths from emergency workers. UNSCEAR predicted 4k additional cancer cases due to the accident, but has since said those estimates were high. - ' In addition, the IAEA states that there has been no increase in the rate of birth defects or abnormalities, or solid cancers (such as lung cancer) corroborating UNSCEAR's assessments.[92]'

So, you're saying that an accident that KILLED 4k people is orders of magnitude lass than one that killed less than a thousand directly, and might of caused less than 4k additional cases of cancer(many of which were relatively easy to treat)?

I'd call them in the same OOM, personally. Heck, there's even complaints that the Bhopal accident is still making people sick today due to environmental contamination.

Chemical spills wash out, dilute, decompose, break down - but nuclear waste, radioactive dust and irradiated matter just keeps on giving, year after year, for what is probably the rest of human existence.

*SNORT* - You fail at understanding radioactive decay then. Lead, arsenic, mercury, etc... They're forever. A stable chemical won't break down without some outside force. Radioactive materials actually decay into lesser or non-radioactive forms all on their own. And radioactive materials can be dispursed the exact same way chemicals can.

India could have ten chemical spills the size and effect of Bhopal per year, but we could still go on with our normal lives. But if we had just another 5 Chernobyls anywhere, we would have roughly doubled the natural background radiation of the entire Earth for several millenia.

And would that doubling actually do anything, especially compared to the human toll additional Bhopals would impose? Background radiation on earth varies by more than an OOM anyways, and people in Colorado don't have a higher cancer rate than those in, say, Mississippi.

Indeed, disasters like Chernobyl are very much unlikely in the rest of the world because we use saner reactors and actually pre-entomb them.

Underwater nuclear power plant

[caston81]

What could possibly go wrong? Just watch out for those sharks with frickin lazer beams!

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[dsmithhfx]

You need to be more afraid of Goldfinger's bimbos with radioactive warhead spear guns!

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[Delarth799]

Just sharks with lazer beams is out of touch with the times and very misleading. See this is nuclear power plants as as the mass public known that means deformed animals, toxic waste, and death clouds of such massive proportions they could cover half of Russia. There won't be any sharks with lazer beams if this reactor gets launched, no instead it will be two, three, and four headed mutant sharks with lazer beams that shoot mutant miniature sharks with lazer beams and sludge balls of toxic waste.

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[h4rr4r]

1. A star is a fusion reactor. These reactors are fission powered.
2. If you are willing to play this name changing game you can find these sorts of things in damn near everything.
3. Fictional tales no matter how long ago they were written are not good predictors of future occurrences.

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[Anonymous Coward]

everytime I hear about nuclear and water I recall the wormwood=chernobyl reference

This reference is spurious at best.

In the Bible (that is, in Revelation) the Greek word is apsinthos, referring to the common wormwood plant (artemisia absinthium). Ukrainian chornobyl, on the other hand, does not mean "wormwood", but "mugwort" (artemisia vulgaris), which is a related, but different plant. The Ukrainian for "wormwood" is polyn hirky, the Russian is polyn' gor'kaya. No resemblance to Chernobyl there.

This is exactly the kind of reference constructed by people insistent on reading references to the present into fictional texts of the past. As soon as you look at things in detail, these references tend to break down.

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[c6gunner]

After reviewing your post, we felt it necessary to point out that being a snide bastard looks really stupid when people don't understand WTF you're going on about.

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[sortius_nod]

Damn those details, I was about to put my tin foil hat on!

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[mjwx]

Ah, I screwed that up. I should have read the GP's post, then I would have understood h4rr4r's comment better. He posts so much, I should have given him the benefit of the doubt.

I now require you to turn in your snark badge.

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[Neil Boekend]

Most predictions are like a machine gun. If you try 10M times you may have a few hits. If you focus just on those hits it will seem like you predicted correctly.
The people who believe in the Bible tend to focus on the hits. The book of Revelation is 22 chapters thick, with, according to some, multiple predictions per chapter. Most are vague enough to count as buckshot themselves. No wonder some of them seem like true.

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[Ragzouken]

Didn't anyone tell you that the Devil was in the details, you sinner!

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[Redlazer]

No, they're pretty easy to explain: They're coincidences.

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[jo_ham]

You realise that all current commercial and military nuclear reactors use fission to generate heat, right?

What exactly are you arguing against here?

Nuclear fusion is what occurs in the sun (which is a star), and in the big doughnut shaped reactor in Oxfordshire called JET among others, and is not commercially viable as an energy source for us yet; we simply cannot sustain a fusion reaction for long enough without net energy loss (at the moment). The sun is a tricky beast to mimic effectively.

So, the GP was correct in stating that nuclear reactors (in common parlance, including this proposed underwater one) are fission powered, and that the sun (and all other stars) are fusion powered.

I think you need to give him his physics badge back and go back to school.

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[marcello_dl]

I agree but I also think we are advanced enough to statistically ponder if a succession of event and a succession of prediction match by mere chance. There is also the problem of multiple interpretations for each passage.
All of this, my original post included, is just speculation until things start happening, it's trivial to speculate we are not even done with the third seal, right?

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[marcello_dl]

This is a valid point.

Some people (Look up Torrey in the book of revelations wikipedia article) analyzed the book which is indeed Greek and think it could be a translation from Aramaic, so it would be nice to see if the distinction you make is valid there too.

> ...insistent of reading references to the present...

You mean the future: there should be a catastrophe involving a reactor (not a bomb, unless a nuclear explosion resemble a star at some point) causing massive nuclear poisoning of water. Presently the passage does not describe anything I am aware of.

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[ultranova]

Just watch out for those sharks with frickin lazer beams!

Lasers don't work well underwater. Water both absorbs energy from the beam and cools the target. Sharks with diamond drills, on the other hand, might be a problem.

Re:Underwater nuclear power plant

[c6gunner]

It happens. I'd just like to say I think it's embarrassing that your comments were rated "troll" and "offtopic". Everyone makes mistakes - you at least had the decency to admit to yours. I respect that, even if a bunch of idiots with mod points apparently don't.

Man up!

[gtirloni]

I wonder when will people stop wasting time with wind/solar and man up to nuclear energy.

Re:Man up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because those are mutually exclusive, huh?

Re:Man up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wind power is still cheaper, still requires a lot less technology and if it can be used, why not?

Re:Man up!

[MrEricSir]

Wind and solar are renewable and don't generate toxic waste, so there's that.

Re:Man up!

[RsG]

Yeah, that always struck me as the fallacy of the nukes vs. passive power collection debate. Pursuing both options and using them in different applications and climates, as their strengths and weaknesses dictate, seems to be the most logical approach by far.

My take would be to build wind turbines, geothermal plants, hydroelectric dams and solar collectors (especially solar heat engines as opposed to photoelectric cells) in locations where the respective climate and geography dictates, and supplement those with rooftop photoelectric solar and other distributed systems wherever local homeowners want to use them.

This will leave a power deficit, as those means of power generation don't provide enough energy to meet our needs, so you solve that deficit with nuclear power for the time being, and fusion power when it becomes available, which realistically might not be for many decades. Add in non fossil fuel options for vehicles (biofuel, battery or hydrogen) and we might actually break our dependency on coal and oil entirely.

Re:Man up!

[dgatwood]

Until you dispose of the panels after they fail.

Re:Man up!

[iroll]

Really? You must not have gotten the memo about all of the semiconductor fabs that are Superfund sites. They don't generate toxic waste when they're being operated, but they generate a boat load when they're being manufactured. And they don't last forever, so you're going to keep on generating that waste.

All sources of power have waste associated with them, and some of that waste is toxic. Nuclear power generates *very* toxic waste, but that waste can also be condensed into a tinier volume (per joule of energy produced) than any other source of power. So, you can--realistically, through reprocessing--have all of the waste for an entire generation from an entire country fit into a very dangerous house, or you can have stadiums and stadiums of 'less' toxic (but still deadly) waste. That's what we deal with every day.

It's all about optimizing. I'm a huge fan of mixed power generation. Solar and wind should be in the mix, but we shouldn't kid ourselves and pretend they're a panacea.

Re:Man up!

[jack2000]

That would be the logical thing to do, but noooooh the world is full of simpletons who can't FATHOM several things working at the same time.

Re:Man up!

[h4rr4r]

You recycle those. Sure they make a little bit a waste, but no where near what a coal plant dumps into the air constantly.

Re:Man up!

[jack2000]

Have you read on the work some people are doing into reducing radioactive elements to less dangerous ones with high strength lasers? It's great stuff. If we expand on that technology we could further minimize the toxic footprint of the nuclear power plants.

Re:Man up!

[Namarrgon]

To be fair, if you're looking at the setup cost of a solar farm, you'd also have to consider the considerable energy & waste required to build the nuclear power plant too. Then there's operation, maintenance costs and lifespan of each to consider as well. Total cost of any system can difficult to measure accurately, especially when considering indirect effects, and can often iceberg unexpectedly.

I tend to feel that renewable (as much as possible) is the best long-term solution, but there are many short-term practical reasons to consider nuclear power as a viable option too. I wonder if there are any really comprehensive cost studies that compare solar, wind, geothermal, coal, nuclear, gas, wave, biomass etc, and that go into significant depth about indirect costs.

Re:Man up!

[GiveBenADollar]

The biggest thing that can be done to reduce the bad nuclear waste is fuel reprocessing. Take spent fuel refine it and remove the poisons then re-burn it. We'd be doing it today but Carter was afraid of terrorist attacks on recycling plants, so we still recycle fuel domestically just not fuel from the US.

Re:Man up!

[marcello_dl]

I wonder why I must be searched at the airport for some explosive in shoes while somebody else plans to produce radioactive waste that will still be dangerous when the grand-grandson of osama bin laden will need to check his prostate.

If anybody has some unbiased cost projection for atomic energy that comprises the cost of storing and keeping an eye on waste till it's not dangerous anymore with the same attention that we have in the increasing surveillance towards average citizens, I'll be willing to reconsider my opinion.

And if you're Italian recall that here the mafia is already trafficking with radioactive stuff, that Caorso nuclear reactor closed in the 80s has finished disposing of the waste only a year ago and that the reactor itself isn't decommissioned yet. Not that your opinion or mine will matter, since our Great Leader is pushing for nuclear without popular vote (after a popular vote had banned nuclear in the late 80s) so He won't listen anyway.

Re:Man up!

[obarthelemy]

there's a toxicity threshold though. A glass of water in every room in your city is OK, your room filled with all that water is not.

Re:Man up!

[morari]

Maybe when we can properly dispose of nuclear waste?

I'm not satisfied with just burying the shit and hoping that nothing goes wrong within the next 10,000 years.

Re:Man up!

[Intrepid imaginaut]

My concern about nuclear is that its pretty expensive. Projects done in the US can come to $9000 per kW, while wind at the outside, after factoring in efficiencies, lands around the $3000 per kW mark. China is building plants equivalent to wind in cost, but they don't bother with all that annoying health and safety, insurance, or capital cost business.

As well as that, in my opinion, if you had to start from scratch with a choice between wind/power cables and say prospecting for, exploring for, drilling for, extracting and refining oil, before shipping it across thousands of miles in huge freighters and/or in sealed pipes, losing more energy when you push it into land based trucks, and then pumping it into fairly inefficient internal combustion engines which create external costs in the form of widespread public pollution, it would be a no-brainer.

Petrofuels have inertia and little else going for them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants

Re:Man up!

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Solar and wind should be in the mix, but we shouldn't kid ourselves and pretend they're a panacea.

If you covered around two percent of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara with currently available photovoltaic cells, you could supply 100% of the world's energy needs. They could very well be a panacea.

Re:Man up!

[mug funky]

something to do with one superpower currently controlling almost the entire supply of the metals needed to make the special magnets that allow efficient wind turbines?

Re:Man up!

[bmo]

We *can* bury waste like this for 10,000 years. It's called dumping in an abyssal plain (by sinking it into the mud kinetically the same way sediment cores are done) or into an oceanic trench to be recycled sooner by MomNature as it's subducted.

The reasons why we don't already do this is 1, treaties, and 2, the "waste" is actually pretty valuable since it can be reprocessed and reused.

Go ahead, what terrorist has the balls or the friggin' *finances* to go after something under a couple of miles of sea water *and* literally stuck under 60 feet of mud?

The Thresher's nuclear fuel is at the bottom of the ocean. Nobody's gone after it after 50 years even though the resting place is easily found by anyone caring to look in a library and it's pretty unlikely anyone ever will.

--
BMO

Re:Man up!

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I'm not recommending that we actually do it, although with HVDC you could make a respectable effort at it, its an example that underlines the point - we are swimming in renewable energy, there are plenty of localised sites that can provide similar benefits.

Re:Man up!

[hairyfish]

Because the wind doesn't blow all the time.

Re:Man up!

[doublebackslash]

Actually there have been some studies on the feasibility of solar and wind to not only power the world as is, but to keep up with demand and the need to bring the entirety of the world to at LEAST the level of western europe in terms of energy per capita (a critical metric in the evaluation of quality of life).

I don't have the study handy, but this video quotes it a href=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760#>http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760#

for those of you without the time to watch it the short of it is that we would have to increase the production amount of things like steel, glass and aluminum to levels never before seen (low integer multiples of current levels). It would have to be a concerted worldwide effort just to keep up with the growing demand, let alone get to a stable state where we can use those raw materials for other things, like building houses or cars.

Nuclear is, for now, the only option. Fusion after that I hope.

Re:Man up!

[Cwix]

So?

Doesn't mean its not useful.

Re:Man up!

[Cwix]

You bet that it requires more electricity then it ever produced to recycle it?

I bet your full of shit.

Neither of our bets are based on any sort of facts.

Re:Man up!

[lennier]

I wonder when will people stop wasting time with wind/solar and man up to nuclear energy.

When we learn to stop worrying and love catastrophic radiation leaks.

Re:Man up!

[Cwix]

Ecologically it makes more sense to just recycle the damn stuff, so it doesn't turn the world into Fallout 3.

Re:Man up!

[GiveBenADollar]

Actually when you factor the cost of both the new uranium and the old fuel disposal, reprocessing comes out way ahead.

Re:Man up!

[Intrepid imaginaut]

This will leave a power deficit

As I've already posted in this discussion, no it won't. 2% of the uninhabited Sahara covered in photovoltaic cells = the entirety of the world's energy requirements.

Re:Man up!

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no such "superpower". Rare earth elements are everywhere and the tech for extraction is available to all, it is just China allowing them to be produced without environmental controls that made them cheaper there.

And my guess is their drive to limit exports may have more to do with their own environment than evil scarlet capitalism biting at the international economy.

Re:Man up!

[catmistake]

Riiight... because putting a nuclear reactor at the bottom of the ocean couldn't be any more difficult or dangerous than, you know, drilling into underwater oil fields. What could possibly go wrong?

Re:Man up!

[pnewhook]

Of course you still have to get that power to somewhere useful, unless you expect us to all move to the Sahara. Besides that calculation in Wikipedia is demonstrably wrong.

Re:Man up!

[catmistake]

So, you can--realistically, through reprocessing--have all of the waste for an entire generation from an entire country fit into a very dangerous house,

Realistically? Not really... it's too dangerous to transport it to... what was your address again? Seriously, we can't move the stuff. If we start to move it, realistically, from, say, merely 110 different temporary storage locations that are already over-capacity, there will be accidents. Expand that number, then you expand the number of accidents.

Re:Man up!

[KeensMustard]

A few reasons:

1. Nuclear power is complex and has enormous startup costs if you intend to build the reactor yourself. This means that you need a lot of startup capital. The startup cost contributes to several other disadvantages.

2. The management of Nuclear power is really confined to nation states. Individuals cannot build and maintain reactors. The centralised nature of Nuclear power rules it out for many communities, e.g. ethnic groups who are quasi ruled by a semi hostile government can then be at a disadvantage if that government controls their power supply.

3. The technology is complex and IP bound. This is a complex minefield to navigate if you choose to build your own reactor. If you buy one off a provider, you will be effectively dependent on that provider for upkeep of the reactor, not an attractive option for many people.

4. Nuclear reactors require fuel - if your country doesn't have the fuel, this means negotiating for fuel off another country - again, leading to potential dependence on other countries.

5. Nuclear power doesn't offer any financial advantages over other options, such as wind or geotherm, once the full cost of ownership is taken into account.

6. Building nuclear reactors seems to make certain paranoid blocs nervous. They then develop a tendency to meddle in your affairs. Why buy into that sort of trouble?

Re:Man up!

[iroll]

OK, most of what we've been saying is speculative, but what you just said is dead wrong. Hot nuclear material is moved all the time--by truck, in the US, on public freeways--and has been for 60 years.

Re:Man up!

[hitmark]

Well unless you have some way to get around the laws of thermodynamics, there will always be a net loss. The question is, how much of one...

Re:Man up!

[iroll]

Read.

http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-transp.html

Re:Man up!

[catmistake]

oh. I didn't realize it was by truck. I was thinking train (2009? 7000 train accidents in the US alone). But if it's by truck, then there's no cause for alarm, because those guys never have accidents.

Re:Man up!

[CyprusBlue113]

Yeah, but that's only if nasty job killing regulation forces you to consider that costly job killing externality in your cost estimates.

Re:Man up!

[wesleyjconnor]

same with ANY new technology, but if the whole world was using it?

I bet more efficient ways would magically appear

Re:Man up!

[TheLink]

2% of the uninhabited Sahara is still a lot of land area to build on. The Sahara is about 9.4 million square kilometers in area. 94000 square km of panels is a 300 km x 300 km area. Yes it's doable but getting the power from that area to where it's used is also going to be hard.

In contrast the amount of area needed for nuclear powerplants and to store nuclear waste is much smaller. As long as you build modern design powerplants that don't blow up catastrophically when stuff happens, they'll do much less damage to the environment and you can put them closer to the places which need power.

That said, mining for uranium/thorium does damage the environment. Not sure how much.

Re:Man up!

[catmistake]

scary. I mean, I know they're being careful. But what I said holds true. We have 110 or so reactors in the US now, and every single temp storage facility was at or over capacity last I checked. But let's double or triple the number of facilities, and increase the transportation rate too... there's a cloverleaf somewhere that will wreck your life (and the lives of your great great great grandchildren, assuming you've already procreated).

Re:Man up!

[iroll]

I'm sorry to offend your preconceived notions, but:

1) Nuclear material is transported in very durable casks
2) They've never broken in an accident
3) Even if one broke, the contents don't explode, leak into the ground, or evaporate
4) The volume of nuclear material is miniscule compared to the huge volumes of explosive, leaking, or poison gassing materials that are moved in containers that are easily broken in accidents.

You're right, the danger is not "zero." But the the precautions taken to move huge, HUGE, HUUGE, volumes of instant death chemicals on the SAME FREEWAYS are not even close to those taken for nuclear material. Believe it or not, you're chancing it every day with things that could take out a whole city block (e.g. liquid chlorine) while you're worrying about something that would be ugly but that they'd just direct traffic around.

If a tanker full of dry cleaning solvent (PCE) spilled, it would shoot straight down to the water table and spread for miles--and is pretty much impossible to clean up with current technology. If a cask of spent nuclear material broke open, it could be scraped up into another one (along with a couple truckloads of topsoil, worst case), and there would be NOTHING left.

If a train carrying nuclear material derailed in your city, odds are they'd just pick up the pieces of the train and put them on another train. If a train carrying ammonium nitrate derailed, you could sieve a few blocks through a fine screen. And that HAS happened.

So you're right, accidents happen. An accident with nuclear material would suck. But you live with much, much more dangerous things happening all around you all the time, and somehow you've made it this far.

Re:Man up!

[Skidborg]

Besides the fact that that bit of desert would suddenly become the most fought over bit of land anywhere.

Re:Man up!

[plague911]

You need to re-read the "laws of thermodynamics" to get a better understanding of their implications unless that is of course you like being an un-informed idiot who pretends that they have an idea whats going on.

Re:Man up!

[plague911]

per ton its i think always going to be cheaper to just launch the stuff into outer space. Sometimes its the simple solution that works out best.

Re:Man up!

[iroll]

It would wreck my life if it squashed me. How would it affect future generations?

It wouldn't evaporate. It wouldn't spontaneously combust. It wouldn't get into the air and spread. It wouldn't leach into the ground. It could be removed completely. The same cannot be said for many other chemicals carried in much larger volumes. How much time have you spent fearing them?

Do you think it would be a mini Chernobyl? That the land would be poisoned? It wouldn't. Chernobyl was a fire of monstrous intensity caused by conditions that cannot be replicated by the truck accident. Chernobyl put the fuel into the air, where it could blanket a large area and be impossible to remove. That's not just unlikely for a truck wreck--it's physically and chemically impossible.

Not 'unlikely.' IMPOSSIBLE. As in 'roughly as possible as the wreck causing a black hole that consumes the earth.' Not able to happen.

Re:Man up!

[RsG]

Someone else already posted the fact that 2% of the Sahara works out to tens of thousands of square kilometres, which pretty much destroys that argument. That doesn't even get into overnight power storage, or the hazards and challenges of centralizing the entire global power grid.

But lets say you're being glib, and what you actually meant was that a solar power grid distributed across the entire planet, or maybe just distributed across the equatorial regions that get the most sun, could provide all our energy needs. I'll argue that point as it's much less stupid than paving over a square region of the Sahara 300 km across and covering it in panels.

First up, you need to look at the total cost of building an entire global solar grid. Solar panels aren't cheap, and while they're getting cheaper, there's also the cost measured in energy and resources, i.e. how much power does it take for a factory to make a single panel, and what resources are needed in quantity. These are non-trivial problems.

But okay, let's take it for granted that it's possible. Hell, one thing that would make it much easier is ditching solar panels entirely and using solar heat engines, which give a more even output and scale up better. On a large enough scale, they might even be cheaper.

Let's even go so far as to ditch the "solar only" approach and instead go for "passive power only", i.e. expand our approach to include hydro, geo and wind. Gee, you know what... That actually is what I argued for in my initial post. I didn't use some flippant pipe dream about paving over ninety thousand square klicks of dessert and plunking down solar panels, I actually looked at a more realistic and nuanced approach.

But, there's still a problem, one I didn't cover in my post directly. Global power demands aren't static. They're increasing. And the rate of increase is only going to get worse as there are two to three billion people living in nations that are now starting to demand first world living standards. We're not going to be able to do this with just solar, or even just solar/wind/hydro/geo. We'll need something that can be built on demand to make up the deficit. Hence, nuclear. And eventually fusion.

Re:Man up!

[ShakaUVM]

>>Yeah, that always struck me as the fallacy of the nukes vs. passive power collection debate. Pursuing both options and using them in different applications and climates, as their strengths and weaknesses dictate, seems to be the most logical approach by far.

The most logical approach is to simply use the most cost-efficient approach for each region. If that's solar or tidal, then use it. But nuclear is the clear winner - the only major source of power that doesn't generate CO2 with its production aside from Hydro.

NIMBYism is the only real downside to nuclear (and hydro) - waste isn't an issue, and if we finally start building burner reactors, then all our waste becomes free fuel. Well, NIMBYism takes place at the state level, too. California has banned all nuclear power plants, so the Fresno Nuclear Company is trying to do an end run around the law by setting it up as a desalination plant that just happens to sell power. We'll see how that plan works out for them. PG&E (the local power company) is also a company that has a track record of breaking promises (and the law) and refusing to interoperate with indy power generation companies. So there's that obstacle, too.

In the meantime, PG&E is charging up to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour. Coincidence?

I've actually become quite pessimistic about the situation being fixable here in California. The PUC isn't doing its job, PG&E is full of criminals and hooligans, and environmentalists have been filing lawsuits against all the green power efforts in the state. I'm starting to think the only solution that will work is small-scale solar. In other words, people putting solar on the tops of their houses. It's actually more cost efficient than large-scale solar.

Re:Man up!

[Jeremi]

Cute species of whatever are nice things...

Re:Man up!

[Jeremi]

Not really. It's not like Jerusalem, where there can be only one. If someone doesn't like getting power from Big Sahara Solar Array, it's perfectly straightforward for them to set up their own solar array and use that instead. Even North Korea and Iran can use solar, without getting on the US shit list for doing so.

And in real life it's unlikely that anyone would build a single array that large anyway. Instead you'd end up with many smaller arrays in various locations, with their combined output (eventually) adding up to however much power humanity feels it needs to produce.

Re:Man up!

[tobych]

This paper, amongst others produced by SPRU, might interest you: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/documents/sewp176. I helped with the software.

Re:Man up!

[dragonhunter21]

...mining for uranium/thorium does damage the environment. Not sure how much.

So does coal mining, and we're doing way more of that than we are uranium/thorium mining. Quite possibly (assuming breeder reactor technology matures a bit more) we won't need to mine much at all, and even without breeders, the resources spent mining uranium/thorium would still likely be less than the resources spent mining coal.

Re:Man up!

[Cwix]

Man, I sure hope one of those rockets doesn't go boom in our atmosphere.

Re:Man up!

[dragonhunter21]

Giant rockets launching radioactive waste into space is the simplest solution?

Even barring the possibility of a rocket failure and crash, where are we going to put it? It's got to go somewhere, and we're not quite sure what chucking radioactive elements into the sun will do. Launching this stuff into space is like tossing your trash out of your yard and into your neighbor's- it's a stopgap at best.

Re:Man up!

[nedlohs]

Maybe you should try looking at those laws again. Or think about what "produced" means in that context.

Re:Man up!

[catmistake]

What concerns me is the half-life. I realize a tanker of gasoline exploding could instantly vaporize a small town, but at least once the fire is extinguished, the danger is pretty much passed. Even with toxic chemicals, the site may be uninhabitable for a decade or two... but with nuclear waste, and even more so with the recycled nuclear waste, we're talking, extremely conservatively, a thousand years of toxicity.

I have faith that the complexity of a reactor could be mitigated with future innovations, that danger of meltdowns, China Syndrome, could become so improbable that it could never happen. And I would marry nuclear power if we would stop white washing the waste problem. Don't play it down... it is a problem and it is not solved yet. And I'm not comfortable with pushing the waste solution to the future. Before we go balls to the wall nuclear, we really need that to be solved —definatively and unquestionably solved.. And neither Yucca Mountain nor breeder reactors are a true solution to the waste from fission.

As a footnote, what really really disturbs me about nuclear power is why we know so much about it, what it was that had driven it forward, was weoponization. Had our government put a tenth of the resources they spent on figuring out the best way to make fuel for bombs into cleaner energies, we would not have the energy crisis we have today. We won a phantom war against The USSR... but they fooled us into our arsenal. They had a hollow pagent, a show, but we really blew all those massive resources, man-centuries of work, because of fear... irrational fear of something that couldn't have happened, and our safety umbrella was, absurdly enough, assured mutual destruction. They fooled us good.

Re:Man up!

[catmistake]

I believe you exaggerate. Not logically impossible, perhaps very improbable (hopefully), but still possible. The containers are good, I assume, but no way to know, exactly, 200 years from now what the state of that container will be, nor where or what, exactly, the water table is doing in a specific area... just really good speculation.

Just noticed your nick. Dig it. I've had a DL, a DL wagon, and I'm currently storing my low milage 242 factory intercooled turbo until I can afford, well... a new turbo clutch (long story, not my fault), a decent replacement water-cooled dual stage ceramic turbo, an entirely new suspension, and their version of the LSD from the last years the 240 was made... and a few other things... it's been a crappy couple of years, what can I say... but I am looking forward to that day I can zoom around in my (wow, now 'classic') '84 242ti... perhaps we can meet and drag Mad Max-style after the obviously rapidly approaching nuclear apocalypse. ;)

Re:Man up!

[NeMon'ess]

Knowledgeable people don't blindly assume modern jets will have safety records as poor as older models. The same can be applied here.

Re:Man up!

[SuricouRaven]

But they have no problems with exports of finished products using rare earth elements. They just want to make sure that the manufacturing stays in China, paying Chinese taxes and creating Chinese jobs.

Re:Man up!

[Neil Boekend]

I can see 2 solutions:

1. Mexico could be used for the same purpose. It would even create a better balance. The US can use cheap Mexican electricity during the day and expensive African electricity during the night (expensive due to long submarinal cables).
2. You could use (part of) the solar energy to create fuels, which you can burn during the night

Re:Man up!

[AlienIntelligence]

I would NOT want to be in charge of dusting those...

-AI

Re:Man up!

[iroll]

What site? The site of a repository or the site of a wrecked truck?

Nuclear waste is not the only toxic waste that must be held in repositories forever. Your children's children have a lot of places to avoid, and nuclear material inhabits the least of those areas.

The site of the wrecked truck would NOT be uninhabitable for decades; in fact, it would be inhabitable in a matter of days to weeks, because it could be completely cleaned up. Completely. Cleaned. Up. In ways that other chemical spills could never be cleaned up, with the dangerous material gathered up and removed to its some holding place in a way that many other chemical contaminants never can be.

And there are holding places, probably closer to you than you think, probably holding more mobile and more immediately threatening things than nuclear waste, that will be around until geology itself takes care of them.

What does half-life have to do with it?

There is no half-life for arsenic-laced mine tailings that cover miles and miles of land. There is no half-life for mercury.

There is no half-life for coal ash.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill

There is no half-life for alumina sludge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajka_alumina_plant_accident

There is no half-life for heavy metals pollution and the half-life of many chlorinated compounds, like dioxins (e.g. agent orange), reaches well beyond a human lifetime. You claim that nuclear waste pushes the problem to the future. This is in no way unique. Not in terms of half-life. Certainly not in terms of volume.

Like I said, nuclear power produces toxic waste. That waste is *very* toxic. But you have a fundamental misconception of how much very toxic waste we deal with routinely. Nuclear waste is different, but not in many of the ways that you think it is.

Nuclear waste is among the most acutely dangerous wastes, but it comes in a much smaller volume than many other *very* toxic wastes that we produce, store, and avoid. It also comes in a package that, chemically and physically, is harder to 'lose' in the environment.

I'm not downplaying nuclear waste. I don't deny that it's a problem. I'm trying to express to you the gravity of the other wastes we deal with, and help you put them in perspective. The problem is that you never heard people talking in hushed tones about 'alumina bombs,' or that you never saw pictures of chromium VI leveling a city. The problem is that we do a good enough job of dealing with all of the other toxic substances out there that you have no appreciation for how much--and how dangerous--the other stuff is. When put in perspective, nuclear waste is a bad actor among bad actors, but not in all cases the worst. The problem is that without an appreciation for how truly bad the 'normal' toxic waste is, you think comparisons must necessarily be white-washing nuclear waste. The problem is that you will not understand the gravity of these substances, because you don't have to.

There is no arguing facts about nuclear waste when your first association is bombs, or when you think that 'thousands of years of toxicity' is something unique to radioactive waste, and not the norm, or when you think there are 'true' solutions for any of these things. You don't have to like, accept, or advocate for nuclear energy, but you can't make appeals to reason when you don't even know the real reasons why you should be concerned.

Re:Man up!

[iroll]

I am not exaggerating the truck wreck. If the truck wrecks, the odds are the case doesn't break. If the case breaks, the contents can be completely contained and removed, and there is no residue. No fumes. No liquid. No generations of despair.

The repository is another story. There, bad things may happen over thousands of years. But the fact is that bad things may happen over thousands of years for many other toxic substances that we sequester in even larger volumes with much less regard for stability.

Re:Man up!

[LBU.Zorro]

I think the biggest stupidity with this (aside from the awful transmission losses - you'd need *many* times the usage value to transmit it) is the fact that 50% of the time your solar panels aren't producing energy.

You honestly think it's a good plan to have to store about 6.5 x10^17 Joules of energy? (World consumption in 2008 - 474*10^18Joules)
There's about 11000J in a Lithium Ion AA battery, which means you need 5.9 x 10^13 AA batteries to store this - or about 59trillion AA batteries just to try and store the energy needed for the night-time - assuming 100% charge discharge and transmission efficiency, you'd actually need many times that in reality - and that assumes of course that there's no annual solar variation, clouds or other bad weather to do it.

Capacitors are better for this but they store even less - about 277J for a 2.5volt 350 farad capacitor.. so about 2300trillion of those capacitors. (multiplied by about 10 for transmission losses)

It's great to say, yeah enough energy falls on the Sahara to power the world, but it's completely idiotic to contemplate actually doing it. The scale of the problem is so much more than you've even bothered to look at.

In the real world, then yes, obviously relying on terrestrial passive collection energy gathering will leave you with a deficit (no matter what you do - wind stops blowing, the day turns to night etc) the only thing you can do is have many many times what you need and try and store the rest or use active generation mechanisms.

Also btw, did you know that solar panels efficiency drops the hotter they are? Last I checked the Sahara was a little toasty - especially when the sun is shining. Also, materials don't tend to like massive repeated thermal shifts like say about 50C summer days to -5 winter nights, best case is still something like a 20C shift at least twice a day. There are sand-storms, continuous abrasion and about a billion other problems.

Of course if you had solar satellites that always had the sun shining on them, well that's a different matter, but the sahara? Gah - I hate it when people bring up that armchair numbers exercise without actually thinking about it.

Z.

Re:Man up!

[imakemusic]

So, you can--realistically, through reprocessing--have all of the waste for an entire generation from an entire country fit into a very dangerous house

What kind of country are we talking about here? One the size of China? One the size of the UK?

Re:Man up!

[c6gunner]

1. Mexico could be used for the same purpose. It would even create a better balance. The US can use cheap Mexican electricity during the day and expensive African electricity during the night (expensive due to long submarinal cables).

Yep, I'm sure the US will be more than happy to depend on Mexico and Africa for 100% of their electricity.

2. You could use (part of) the solar energy to create fuels [sciencecodex.com], which you can burn during the night

Given the efficiency of the conversion process, you'd need .... what ... 4 times the number of panels that was originally quoted? Actually, factor in transportation costs and we're probably talking more like 6 times. So now we're covering 12% of the sahara, and hiring tens of millions of Africans to walk around wiping sand off of them.

Re:Man up!

[Intrepid imaginaut]

and our approach to include hydro, geo and wind. Gee, you know what... That actually is what I argued for in my initial post. I didn't use some flippant pipe dream about paving over ninety thousand square klicks of dessert and plunking down solar panels, I actually looked at a more realistic and nuanced approach.

The specific part I quoted was saying that these were not a panacea. They are, in fact, a panacea. Lets triple the world's population, and triple their per capita energy demands, look, you only need to cover less than a fifth of the uninhabited Sahara. No, I don't think we should actually do that, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, its an example to underline the point. There is no renewable energy shortage.

Re:Man up!

[mangu]

So, you can--realistically, through reprocessing--have all of the waste for an entire generation from an entire country fit into a very dangerous house

What kind of country are we talking about here? One the size of China? One the size of the UK?

One that's proportional to the size of the house. There's more difference in house sizes than the difference between China and the UK.

Re:Man up!

[QuantumRiff]

And how do you propose to get that to South America and the US?

Re:Man up!

[Muad'Dave]

Believe it or not, you're chancing it every day with things that could take out a whole city block (e.g. liquid chlorine) while you're worrying about something that would be ugly but that they'd just direct traffic around.

Funny you should mention that. I make a point to note all of the placards I see on the highway and look them up in the Emergency Response Guidebook. Just this morning I passed a tanker of isopropyl acetate (placard 1220) - fairly nasty stuff according to the guide.

The worst thing I've seen on the road were reinforced small tanks of the CX blister agent (a chemical weapon, placard 2811) and a rail car of chlorine (placard 1017). What the CX was doing on the highway I have no idea.

I've also seen casks of reactor fuel heading from the Areva plant in Lynchburg, Va presumably to one of the reactors in Surry or North Anna. I was a lot less concerned over the nuclear fuel that I was the CX.

Some of the more dangerous entries in the guidebook (check out Oxygen Difluoride, placard 2190) have initial isolation distances for large spills of 1000m - that's 3280 ft or .62 MILES in all directions. Draw a circle of radius 1000m centered on your downtown and see how many people that is. You must also protect people downwind at night for 11 km (7+ miles) for large or small spills and 11km during the day for large spills.

Re:Man up!

[crashumbc]

Except there no way to actually GET that power anywhere.... You know what kind of loses are involved in transmission?

Re:Man up!

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Firstly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current if you actualy wanted to try it, see also http://www.desertec.org/ and secondly I said "No, I don't think we should actually do that, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, its an example to underline the point."

Re:Man up!

[careysub]

per ton its i think always going to be cheaper to just launch the stuff into outer space. Sometimes its the simple solution that works out best.

The cheapest, easiest solution is what we are doing right now - putting the spent fuel in massive (~10 ton) concrete casks that are stored on the plant site. There is no technical reason why they can't be left there forever, or be moved later to some central storage facility where they sit in long rows on an empty, fenced-in plain.

The notion that we need to "do something else" is driven by politics not by any identifiable technical deficiency with the current default solution.

Believe it or not, there is no reason to suppose civilization if going to collapse be unable to provide the modest security these things require. I drink beer from a German brewery that is 700 years old (and there others that are nearly a thousand years old). Keeping an enterprise operating for millenia is already a solved problem.

Re:Man up!

[danbert8]

And people always seem to forget that solar panels don't grow in the desert. There is also mining associated with the metals necessary for solar panels, and in many cases those are much more rare metals that are mined in china with much more loose regulations regarding the environment (as well as safety).

Re:Man up!

[danbert8]

You forget that there IS a shortage of the raw materials needed to make solar panels. Solar panels do not grow out of the desert. They need to be manufactured with a lot of the same materials that go into modern electronics. There is only a limited supply of the semiconductors and rare metals needed to make current panels. There might not even be enough easily accessible materials on the planet to cover a fifth of the Sahara.

Re:Man up!

[danbert8]

Not only is that an amazingly awesome point (it would be like being worried about putting a drop of food coloring in an ocean and expecting a color change). But we don't have to launch it at our sun. We can launch it at Alpha Centauri, or any other star for that matter, or heck a black hole (the garbage disposals of the universe). Even better, the material probably won't even be radioactive anymore by the time it gets there in a few millions years.

Re:Man up!

[jgtg32a]

A lot of reactors can eat most of their own waste

Re:Man up!

[TheLink]

IMO the way to go for large scale solar energy would be with mirrors and solar thermal electric generation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Conversion_rates_from_solar_energy_to_electrical_energy

Using tons of PV panels is a waste.

Nuclear will still be better in density terms, but in places where sunlight is plentiful and land is cheap, solar is a good idea.

Re:Man up!

[rubycodez]

that's a load, you have no idea how metals are mined and made, do you?

Re:Man up!

[jgtg32a]

I remember reading about a woman who will killed by a train a little while ago. She was hit by one as she was walking on the tracks listening to her PMP. I believe she counts as one.

Re:Man up!

[res1216]

I drink beer from a German brewery that is 700 years old (and there others that are nearly a thousand years old). Keeping an enterprise operating for millenia is already a solved problem.

To be fair, this is a much easier proposition when the enterprise in question is brewing tasty, tasty beer.

Re:Man up!

[delvsional]

If the fuel was leaving from Areva then you were completely justified in not worrying about it. you could sleep next to it for 10 years and it would have no effect on you. It's not hot until it has been in a reactor. Blue containers, maybe 15 feet long, 3 or 4 feet in diameter right? Those are not waste.

They do have containers for transporting waste fuel, but it isn't that hot (still high level) as it's been sitting in a spent fuel pit for 30+ years. The waste is usually not moved all that far either. maybe a mile or two. It's going into something called dry cask storage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage

The containers for moving waste around are robust. We're talking about not cracking if two trains collide or it get's dropped out of a plane.

Re:Man up!

[AGMW]

I think the biggest stupidity with this ... is the fact that 50% of the time your solar panels aren't producing energy.

Hmmmm. How about some mirrors in orbit that redirect the sunlight to the (ma-HOOO-sive) solar array in the desert. Sure, the resulting sunlight is likely to be less effective, but it would presumably be considerably more effective than none even if it does just extend the 'light' period to perhaps 3/4 of a day. Also, given we've just paved over a shed-load of desert, the reflectors don't need to be quite so accurate and as it's mostly 'uninhabited' it shouldn't annoy the locals too much. Perhaps light up a quarter or eight of the array each night rather than all of it to keep the day/night cycle for whatever wildlife is around.

Better yet, given there's likely to be a number of such arrays in similar latitudes around the glob, these mirrors could work for all such establishments.

Re:Man up!

[AGMW]

If the truck wrecks, the odds are the case doesn't break. ...

OK, not a truck wreck, but it is from 1984, and it is a train wreck ... 100mph Nuclear Flask Train Crash Test.

Note also that this is the version that mentions the Greenpeace folks all claiming it was a put-up job and it was a 'fix' (hotly denied by the fixers obviously). Even so, it WAS a train and it did hit one of the 1984 style transport containers at 100MPH. Fix or no, that's pretty impressive!

My guess is that containment technology has improved since 1984.

Re:Man up!

[AGMW]

... when the grand-grandson of osama bin laden will need to check his prostate.

Hopefully by then he'll be able to find someone (preferably a doctor) to check it for him.

Re:Man up!

[Nadaka]

Hydroelectric power is an environmental disaster that is currently causing the extinction of many river fish in North America.

Wind power is unreliable, producing power spikes in some weather or no power in some weather. It can not be relied upon as a principal source of power.

Other than that, I agree with you.

Re:Man up!

[Nadaka]

PV for mass power generation IS a retarded idea. But solar thermal power is not. Solar heat engines can use a heat reservoir to run 24/7 and with a sufficient reservoir can have a reserve for a few days of bad weather. That right there eliminates your straw man global power grid. You would only continent spanning power grids. Every continent except Europe has vast uninhabited desert regions that can support large solar arrays, And Europe is a relatively short distance from Saharan Africa. Solar thermal can use the same steam cycle, turbines and generators that nuclear, coal and other traditional power plants do. We already have the mass produced components and expertise for the vast majority of a global deployment of solar thermal. The only remotely exotic aspect is thermal storage.

We can provide the same power as US consumption to every person on earth with solar thermal if we had to. We can also supplement the solar grid with modern clean safe efficient feeder nuclear reactors in the hostile frigid areas. There really isn't any reason we can not have global clean energy abundance in a few decades.

Re:Man up!

[Nadaka]

Solar thermal solves that problem. It requires the "exotic" material known as steel with a little bit of glass and aluminum.

Re:Man up!

[Nadaka]

Those continents have there own sunny deserts. Just like every continent except Europe.

Re:Man up!

[crunchygranola]

I drink beer from a German brewery that is 700 years old (and there others that are nearly a thousand years old). Keeping an enterprise operating for millenia is already a solved problem.

To be fair, this is a much easier proposition when the enterprise in question is brewing tasty, tasty beer.

True, but the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena in (redundantly) Siena, Italy is an operating bank that was established in 1472. Keeping an interest paying account in a bank will provide funds for operating the facility as long as the bank doesn't fail (and with no government to bail them out).

Of course perhaps a hybrid business model might work - a combined brewery and nuclear waste storage site. There might be problems with this proposal that I haven't noticed yet... (dang this Spaten Optimator is good!)

Re:Man up!

[damien_kane]

What concerns me is the half-life. I realize a tanker of gasoline exploding could instantly vaporize a small town, but at least once the fire is extinguished, the danger is pretty much passed. Even with toxic chemicals, the site may be uninhabitable for a decade or two... but with nuclear waste, and even more so with the recycled nuclear waste, we're talking, extremely conservatively, a thousand years of toxicity.

The difference between cleaning up a chemical spill and cleaning up the site of a radioactive incident, is that the radioactive agent is very easy to detect.
It can be very quickly found and made sure that none remains

Re:Man up!

[cdrguru]

There might be a problem with transmission lines.

Certainly in the US, nobody is going to allow them to go anywhere near their home. Everyone knows that electricity causes cancer, autism and impotence. Power lines are just an excuse to build another hospital nearby. At least a lot of people have read that on the Internet.

But transmission lines aren't being built.

Re:Man up!

[Muad'Dave]

Yeah I agree about not being worried. They were in long, black (IIRC) containers on the back of a semi trailer. I was more worried about being crushed if they rolled off the truck than anything else. I know that new fuel rods are essentially inert - uranium is an alpha emitter.

I was on I-64 eastbound, east of Charlottesville when I passed them.

Re:Man up!

[Celestialwolf]

+1

Re:Man up!

[Coren22]

As far as transporting the energy, why don't we use some process to produce fuel for cars using that energy, then we are producing an energy dense product that we already have the infrastructure (in the area!) to move around.

Re:Man up!

[Coren22]

Hydro only doesn't produce CO2 if you completely discount the amount of concrete used in the construction. Though if you used carbon negative concrete that absorbs the carbon from the air, it might work out. I don't know if this stuff would work for a dam though.

Re:Man up!

[Shark]

I don't know how experienced you are with the recycling industry but even with very easy to recycle material (we processed paper), recycling is pretty energy intensive.

Sure you get economy of scales going if you can find a way to run a continuous process (as opposed to an interrupted, batch process) but how much of that is applicable to solar pannels?

You can't just toss them into a vat, grind them, melt them and mould new ones out of what comes out. But even if you could, the separation processes would pretty much kill any net energy 'gain' they put into the grid in the first place.

They work well, we use them in several of our locations. They're quite practical in many other applications. But until I see them power the sort of industrial processes required to make them, I'll stick to my side of that 'bet'.

Now if you OP had suggested a solar thermal plant, I wouldn't have risked angering the mighty priests of our new eco-religion with my opinion.

They might not be all that cost-effective but they do have potential to draw out more energy our of the sun than was drawn out of non-renewable sources to manufacture them.

Do not kid yourself as to how much energy goes into making a steel pipe, block of concrete or pane of glass. That's a lot of kilowatts to live up to.

Re:Man up!

[RespekMyAthorati]

What I don't understand is why spent fuel is stored in its original, concentrated form. Why not try this:
1. grind up the stuff into fine powder, and mix 1000:1 with sand.
2. melt the result into a glass block
3. check the radioactivity.If low enough, bury the block somewhere. Otherwise, grind the result up as the new "stuff" and goto 1.

I call this the "Homepathic Dilution Method"©, patent pending.

Re:Man up!

[drinkypoo]

We should be disposing of all major toxics this way. And glass, too. Recycling glass is stupid.

In fact recycling paper is stupid, too. We should just burn it for heat energy. Then we can make more out of renewables like hemp.

Re:Man up!

[jwhitener]

I like all your ideas except hydro damns. Having lived in the Northwest US all my life, I can tell you that they are very destructive to river life. I'd much rather have a nuke plant along the banks of our rivers, or more wind turbines, like they are doing along our Columbia Gorge now, pic of the gorge

Re:Man up!

[LBU.Zorro]

That.... is a really interesting idea!

It's certainly cheaper than building a fully fledged power station in orbit and gets rid of any complaints about microwave beaming of power.

There's a minor issue of increasing global warming by throwing extra energy down onto the planet but if you can offset most of the rest of the generation of electricity it'll probably balance out.

It certainly bears thinking on and would help with the overnight storage issue.

As you say, you could have the same mirrors just on the night terminator (I'm not sure that the orbits supports it - but possibly you could balance on the sunlight you're beaming) so that for that latitude the night is shortened.

Thanks!

Z.

Well, I can see the tradeoffs.

[RsG]

On the one hand, you're introducing corrosive seawater to the mix. And you're putting it in a cramped, high pressure environment, though if it's heavily automated that won't cause as many problems as if it had a large full time crew aboard.

On the positive side, you've now got a handy, high heat capacity, thermally conductive environment to work with, which nuke plants benefit from. And you're making it such that any contamination from a disaster will be limited to irradiated seawater instead of airborne fallout, which is a good trade off as far as limiting both human and environmental damage goes. Not that contaminating the water is a good thing, but airborne fallout is much, much worse.

Plus, when you want to decommission one of these things, you can tow it to wherever it's going, instead of dismantling it on-site and taking it away in pieces.

Re:Well, I can see the tradeoffs.

[Relic of the Future]

So, the first use of nuclear power plants was in submarines. Which is to say, these engineering concerns have been being addressed for as long as we've been using nuclear power.

Re:Well, I can see the tradeoffs.

[toastar]

So, the first use of nuclear power plants was in submarines.

The Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant came on-line about 6 months before the nautilus was launched.

Re:Well, I can see the tradeoffs.

[Seraphim1982]

Other way around. Nautilus was launched in January 21st 1954. Obninsk came on-line in June 26, 1954.

Also, Nautilus was powered by a 2nd generation submarine reactor, the 1st generation prototype was a land-based but built inside a submarine hill and was first used for power operations in May of 1953.

Re:Well, I can see the tradeoffs.

[thatskinnyguy]

Desalination. That's the first step to nuclear coolant.

Re:Well, I can see the tradeoffs.

[plague911]

Realistic question/statement (I do not know the answer). Could contaminating the ocean bed cause spread the toxic chemical to all the worlds oceans? Things tend to precipitate out of the air quicker than they do water, thus im envisioning the ocean spreading the contamination further?

Re:Well, I can see the tradeoffs.

[NeMon'ess]

The oceans are radioactive. So is the air and ground. In most places the radiation is so diluted that it isn't an issue.

Re:Well, I can see the tradeoffs.

[jolyonr]

Seawater contains 3.3 parts per billion of uranium, which according to wikipedia means there are about 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium in the world's oceans.

One leaky reactor isn't going to make a spot of difference.

Re:Well, I can see the tradeoffs.

[noidentity]

And you're making it such that any contamination from a disaster will be limited to irradiated seawater instead of airborne fallout, which is a good trade off as far as limiting both human and environmental damage goes. Not that contaminating the water is a good thing, but airborne fallout is much, much worse.

Given the same volume of release. You think they'll be just as careful about releasing stuff with it underwater and out of sight?

Re:Well, I can see the tradeoffs.

[toastar]

From wikipedia Following her commissioning, Nautilus remained dockside for further construction and testing. At 11 a.m. on 17 January 1955 she put to sea for the first time and signaled her historic message: "Underway on nuclear power."

I wonder why underwater?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

My impression(not speaking as an expert shipwright or anything) is that if you want to take a land-based system and get it going for reliable marine use, you'll be lucky if the cost doubles(Boat. Noun. A hole in the water into which one pours money). That, though, I I can see the benefits of. The art and science of building large floating objects is pretty well established, and then you pretty much plunk the reactor on top of that. Nice and portable, coolant all around, and sure beats trying to make your nuclear reactor a helicopter or something. Float it where you need it, run a glorified extension cable to shore, and away you go.

Underwater, though, just seems like a recipe for making the whole thing even more expensive than on the water, along with harder to monitor and maintain, and likely to be much more exciting if there is a steam leak or something. Is there some advantage that I am not seeing, or is this a case of "when you are a post-cold-war-nuclear-submarine-designer everything looks like it needs an underwater nuclear reactor"?

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[duranaki]

I'm with you. Now if they were say converting old nuclear submarines into power plants, at least they'd be re-using something people had already thrown money through. Plus they'd be able to return to France to refuel. :)

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[RsG]

The biggest advantage I can see, which I posted just before you did, is containment. A surface nuclear power plant gets the same benefit as a submerged one in terms of cooling and remoteness, but in the event of a catastrophic failure, the underwater one will not send tons of fallout into the stratosphere. You'd still get some contamination making it into the air via the hydrological cycle (think Tritium contaminated rainfall), but not on the same order of magnitude as if the same disaster had occurred on the surface.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[hairyfish]

There are huge cost savings with not having to buy real estate, deal with local govt, residents, hippies etc. All the uncontrollable costs which add the most to power plant costs. A fully portable unit would have fixed costs every time, and can be built in volume. I wouldn't be surprised if it actually works out cheaper overall once all social/political costs that are normally associated with a regular power plant are factored in

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[GodWasAnAlien]

>I wonder why underwater?

Because it reduces the NIMBY factor.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[Dog's_Breakfast]

Putting the powerplant underwater (as opposed to on a floating platform) would have a big advantage in protecting it from storms. Once you submerge about 60 meters, you are pretty much immune to the effects of even the biggest hurricanes or tsunamis.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[BUL2294]

Umm, you still have the issue with the residents, hippies, etc. As a beachfront resident, would you feel safe knowing that 5 miles outside your big windows you have a nuclear reactor--as opposed to a wind farm? To add, hippies do like "the sea", fish, and underwater nature, so that doesn't really change. The only thing that would change is that the local government's objections end at the city limits, which may be at the shore...

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[AchilleTalon]

Security is probably another advantage to add to those already mentioned. At a depth of 100 meters, it is not easily accessible and it is then probably easier to secure from any unauthorized access.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, well. I take the most comfort from the fact that we've been building and maintaining underwater nuclear power plants for many more man-years than land based, with the number of nuclear subs we have. (At least, I think - I don't have the numbers to run, but that's my impression...)

Putting a nuclear reactor underwater is not anything like a new thing - the new thing is doing so for commercial use, and perhaps doing so unmanned.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[GiveBenADollar]

Well there are some benefits. It's inherently secure against nuclear proliferation or terrorist attack. It is likely to be much safer in an nuclear accident because it is surrounded by a almost limitless heatsink, also because it's surrounded by water it doesn't need anywhere near as much shielding. That's where the benefits end though. It will be completely automated which has been a disaster before in the nuclear industry, it will need to be removed for any maintenance, and it will be transmitting power underwater for extended distances which leads to high losses. Might be cost effective, but it's doubtful. The navy doesn't use nuclear reactors on aircraft carriers and subs because it's cheaper they do it because those ships don't have to refuel or use air for the engines. This looks like a similar pipe dream to the buried reactor design that's supposed to supply neighborhoods with electricity.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[compro01]

Submarine reactors are measured in tens of kilowatts, much too small to be of practical use for power generation.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[duranaki]

That's why they'd convert them. Duh. (But thanks for the info, I really had no idea.)

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[treeves]

More reactor-years in the Nuclear Navy than commercial reactors for sure.
Interesting to me is that it won't be a bigger plant. Little old S3G plants are right in that 50-200 MW range. Why not take advantage of whatever it is they're taking advantage of by putting it underwater and make it bigger?

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[GiveBenADollar]

Ahem. You are looking at the electrical production of submarines, not the thermal output of the reactor. Electrical production is around 10% and the main engine takes the other 90%, if you remove the main engine and substitute a huge generator set a couple hundred megawatts should be easy.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[obarthelemy]

as opposed to having it on land ?

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[Sulphur]

Submarine reactors are measured in tens of kilowatts, much too small to be of practical use for power generation.

Akula class sub: 100,000 hp, or 74.6 Mw at the shaft.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[confused one]

150-165 MW thermal. I'll let you do the conversion...

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[GiveBenADollar]

Depending on depth it would be incredibly secure. Who is going to dive to 500ft to somehow hurt a big metal tube? How would you hurt it anyway, explosives? So we need an EOD diver/Navy seal who has extreme deepwater training, proper equipment and can find the damn thing. Yup, still secure. Also, what do you think nuclear proliferation means?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation

Nice troll though.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[MoonBuggy]

With the realistic risk of catastrophic failure in a modern reactor (i.e. negligible) I'd be doubtful of whether the extra 'safety feature' of immersion is worth the associated difficulties.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[AchilleTalon]

It's not about the fact there was or not, it is about how easier it is to secure it at a lower cost underwater at 100 meters depth. It doesn't matter if there was or not any land-based nuclear plant that have been the aim of any terrorist group successfully or not.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[Cwix]

How do you propose getting the electricity onto land to power the city?

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[QuantumRiff]

You are right on the boat analogy, but this will be sealed, which means every X years, your going to have to go drop a new one in place, take the old one back, open it up, re-fuel, refurbish, and then put back out. So really, it would be like rebuilding the boat every 10 years or so, including a new hull (since in this case, the hull and keel are dirt cheap)..

Come to think of it, thats about the same as some of my friends boats...

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Not that I consider attack scenarios all that likely(getting a commercial reactor to do anything terribly dramatic is actually pretty hard, if you just want a dirty bomb there are plenty of industrial and medical sources that are less carefully watched, etc.); but there is one point of vulnerability worth noting...

If this widget is to be useful, it will need a power/control conduit connecting it to land somewhere nearby. To carry the amounts of power we are talking about, that is going to be a big, obvious cable, with beefy conductors, probably an armored shell, and a nice fat magnetic signature.

Deep diving and underseas demolition work is a fairly rare and specialized skill. Building a drone with, say, magnetic wheels allowing it to clip onto the conduit on the beach or in shallow water and just keep rolling until it finds the sub would be a college level engineering project. It is also quite likely that somebody with knowledge of the local marine biology could detect the huge thermal plume just by observing the response of local sea life. Within a year or two of installation, you would probably see a pretty marked sorting of warmer water and colder water species by preference...

As I said, a nuclear reactor, land, floating, or undersea, is a target with a lousy difficulty/value ratio, so hitting one wouldn't make too much sense; but cabling something into the electrical grid and hiding it effectively are not complementary goals. Not impossible; but sufficiently tricky and expensive that you would probably be better off just making it more durable with the money you save by not bothering.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[ShakaUVM]

>>Security is probably another advantage to add to those already mentioned. At a depth of 100 meters, it is not easily accessible and it is then probably easier to secure from any unauthorized access.

Efficiency is also a nice plus. As we all know from physics, the efficiency of an engine depends on the size of the difference in temperature between the hot and cold reservoirs. The colder the water you pump in, the more work you can extract from a cycle.

On a related note, France has had to shut down some of its reactors during the heat waves they've been getting in recent years, due to the plants' water supply becoming too warm. For a country that relies on nukes for its power, I can see why they'd find marine plants to be attractive.

It all comes down to cost, though. TFA had no information on pricing.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Do you think that those submarine systems designs that they are dusting off escaped marine cost expansion when they were written up, back when marine reactors were being designed and refined based on the initial terrestrial hardware?

Obviously, using a variant of systems you have already designed is cheaper than grabbing the plans for a terrestrial reactor and cutting it down until it fits; but those submarine systems presumably include all the costs of hardening the reactor against salt, pressure, and other aquatic nastiness. By using the same design, you skip the design costs; but you still incur those construction costs each time you kick out another one.

That was the core of my question: pretty much every part of nuclear submarine design comes down to military necessity and doesn't come cheap. What advantages are compelling enough to do that for a civilian reactor, rather than just grabbing an off-the-shelf big boat and/or drilling platform design and just dropping a reactor on top of it? Still more expensive than land; but cheaper than a nuclear submarine derivative.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[Jeremi]

1) buy remote controlled submarine from marijuana cartel (or Discovery channel)
2) fill it with explosives
3) have it follow the electric cables from shore to the underwater nuclear plant
4) press the big red button on your remote control
5) (obligatory) ???
7) terror! (or at least, rolling blackouts)

Or if the above is too complicated, you can use a rowboat, gps, and a depth charge.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[GrumblyStuff]

Isn't it obvious? It's a cover! Seaquest, man! SEAQUEST! IT HAS BEGUN!

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[Rogerborg]

Out of sight, out of mind. Really, after a week of not waking up dead, you'll forget all about it.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[hairyfish]

We got these things called cables. They are pretty good at getting electricity where ever you need it.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[hairyfish]

Just because it's underwater doesn't mean it'll have zero security. Using your logic, there's nothing stopping you from doing the same to any land based power station of any type. Have your remote controlled truck full of explosives follow the power lines to the nearest power station and blow it up.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[AGMW]

Underwater, though, just seems like a recipe for making the whole thing even more expensive than on the water, along with harder to monitor and maintain, and likely to be much more exciting if there is a steam leak or something. Is there some advantage that I am not seeing, or is this a case of "when you are a post-cold-war-nuclear-submarine-designer everything looks like it needs an underwater nuclear reactor"?

If you make it a boat and expect it to float, what's the worst thing that could happen? Yep. The sucker sinks! If there's rough seas, etc being on a boat is gonna suck, whereas being safely on the seabed is gonna be a cake-walk. Plus we're pretty good at making submarines ...

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[obarthelemy]

do you really think one MUST dive to damage something underwater ? (hint: bombs, hacking, supply feeds...)

from your link: "Nuclear proliferation is a term now used to describe the spread of nuclear weapons, fissile material, and weapons-applicable nuclear technology and information, to nations which are not recognized as "Nuclear Weapon States" by the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons"... which has exactly what to do with France's nuclear power plants being on the ground, in the sea ... ?

this said, I think my point is amply made and won't try and enlighten you any more.

Re:I wonder why underwater?

[Jeremi]

On land, fences and walls guard the nuclear power plant, so a truck can't (easily) get to it. A plane can, of course, and that is a security concern.

In water, OTOH, you don't need a plane, because you can float over any fence. Still, I take your point that there will be security; the question is will it be effective?

NIMBY

[benjamindees]

Putting it out of sight removes one more thing for the luddites to complain about. Putting it in the ocean is an obvious choice for cooling and for proximity to most of the world's population centers. And the steel used is probably cheaper than the concrete required on land; you can't crash a plane into a reactor under the ocean.

Re:NIMBY

[sakdoctor]

you can't crash a plane into a reactor under the ocean.

Did you ever see that footage of a test jet crashing into a containment building?
There wasn't a scratch on the concrete, but the plane was pulverised into fine dust.

Re:NIMBY

[BUL2294]

No, but some terrorists with scuba training could cause a little bit of a problem... Hell, unless you tell the populace where their underwater nuclear reactor is (you know, to look out for possible trouble), a bunch of divers in the water "over there" wouldn't raise any suspicions...

Re:NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm fascinated by your post and would like to subscribe to your newsletter about the truth behind 9/11.

Re:NIMBY

[turbidostato]

"No, but some terrorists with scuba training could cause a little bit of a problem..."

Ha! You forgot about the mutant bicephalus laser head-mounted sharks awaiting for such a diver!

Re:NIMBY

[Cowmonaut]

Nice troll attempt AC. For those like yourself who haven't seen it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEv8TRzxbNs

What could possibly go wrong?

[guspasho]

Did these people not see Godzilla?

I wonder what would happen...

[Haedrian]

If they ever got a leak.

It'll be like Deepwater Horizon all over again. But with radioactive stuff. This sounds like disaster-film material!

Re:I wonder what would happen...

[RsG]

Don't be absurd.

If the reactor were to suffer a total catastrophic failure, it would be moderately bad. Not Chernobyl bad, and not Windscale bad either - it's smaller for one thing, and less likely to endanger human lives. The human cost would be low, the environmental cost would be non-trivial and difficult to estimate, and the economic cost would be high. I'd put the scale of a worst case disaster on par with Deepwater Horizon, albeit different enough that it's apples to oranges.

But the key phrase there is "catastrophic failure". Not "leak". The difference between a leak and a catastrophe is like the difference between a house fire and the Chicago fire. There have been nuclear leaks at sea before, given the number of nuclear vessels in service, and particularly given the former Soviet Union's track record. They weren't even close to the disaster you're imagining.

Re:I wonder what would happen...

[GiveBenADollar]

Great plot for a Michael Bay film, but pretty boring reality. In the unlikely (very unlikely considering the whole thing is a pressure vessel and heat sink) event of a leak to the environment the actual fallout would be minimal. Nuclear submarines have been lost before under bad circumstances and you don't see huge amounts of wildlife killed or huge amounts of contamination. Some contamination would settle out within a couple hundred feet of the leak and the rest would be diluted so quickly it would be undetectable a quarter mile away. But hey, truth never stopped a good movie plot.

Re:I wonder what would happen...

[sockonafish]

Water is a fantastic shield. The halving thickness of water is 18cm. At 1.8 meters away, you'd only have .5 ^ 10 of the radiation being emitted at the source, or 0.098%. Increase it to 3.6 meters and you're at .5 ^ 20, or .0000954%.

Not to mention, the material that's emitting radiation, if it were to get loose, would quickly settle on to the seabed. These are the heaviest of metals.

Movie plot or reality?

[Nkwe]

From the TFA:

It is transported to sea on a heavy lift ship which lowers itself to allow Flexblue to maneuvre under its own power.

So if someone hacks the control systems can they pilot it away?

Re:Movie plot or reality?

[Nemyst]

At a whopping 15 knots or so (don't expect the plant to outpace a heavy lift ship by any stretch of the imagination), it probably wouldn't make for a very exciting Michael Bay film.

The Young and the Innocent

[westlake]

There are huge cost savings with not having to buy real estate, deal with local govt, residents, hippies etc.

There is nothing in the world more likely to stir up a fuss than water.

Recreational and commercial fisheries. Drilling platforms. Boating and shipping. Beaches and harbors.

You will be hearing from the locals.

I liked this movie the first time I saw it ...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

When it was called "Godzilla".

MWe

[Doug Neal]

MWe, is that a French megawatt? Une megawatte?

Re:MWe

[Brannoncyll]

I was trying to figure that one out myself. I settled on 1MW * 2.718281....

Re:MWe

[jeffrey.endres]

Megawatt Electrical to distinguish from the thermal output.

Re:MWe

[GiveBenADollar]

MWe = Megawatt electric

Re:MWe

[Penguinshit]

Since it's underwater, MWe must be "Megawet".

spooky prophecy

[Anonymous Coward]

My pet starfish is called Wormwood. He is reddish orange, like the fire from a lamp. I'm not sure if he fell from heaven or not, I didn't witness that one.

Re:spooky prophecy

[marcello_dl]

Remember to often change the water in the bowl, just in case.

Considering land-based reactors are 1 gigawatts..

[kriston]

Considering land-based reactors can be >1 gigawatts per unit.. I guess it's a good start.

New, strange take on an old idea

[Luckyo]

This is VERY old idea, directly stolen from Russians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station

The idea there was essentially the same - you mount reactor derived from other naval reactors and mount it on a large, specialized barge. Part about it being submarine rather then marine is most likely a gimmick designed to attract attention to the project, seeing how unfeasible such a construction actually seems - the maintenance alone becomes far more difficult. In a nutshell, it's a simple submarine reactor, just without the submarine. Doesn't make much sense financially, seeing how expensive such a unit would be in comparison to a surface unit, and how much easier it would be to maintain a manned, surface unit.

Unless, of course, that's the whole point, because the company producing the plants plans to charge a massive premium on maintenance. Russian design is far more usable, as it has most of advantages of a normal nuclear power plant, as well as mobility granted by the barge.

Re:New, strange take on an old idea

[benjamindees]

Somehow I don't think the idea of offshore nuclear reactors is all that unique, and certainly not "stolen from the Russians", seeing as how I have drawings of them here in a book from the 70s.

Re:New, strange take on an old idea

[badbadger]

The big PWR civil power plant designs in the US evolved from the early designs for sub reactors in the 50s, so it could be said this isn't stealing anyone's idea, but just getting back to where we started from.

What semiconductors?

[MrEricSir]

You can do solar with a steam-driven turbine. I'm not sure what the efficiency is compared to a semiconductor approach though.

Wind power doesn't require any semiconductors.

Re:What semiconductors?

[iroll]

Maintaining a wind farm generates used gear oils and solvents/degreasers in volume; these are not trivial to dispose of. Turbines have finite lifespans and it takes a huge mass of them to generate any significant power. Compare the power generated, per kilogram of mass as constructed, between a nuclear power plant and a wind farm, and then consider the useful lifespan of that mass.

Nothing is free.

Re:What semiconductors?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Compare the power generated, per kilogram of mass as constructed, between a nuclear power plant and a wind farm, and then consider the useful lifespan of that mass.

Sure, nuclear comes in at three times the cost of wind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants

Re:What semiconductors?

[MrEricSir]

Nobody's talking about "free," but renewable energy is the closest we're likely to ever get.

Solvents and oils can be derived from natural plant sources, and often are.

Re:What semiconductors?

[AlienIntelligence]

Wind power doesn't require any semiconductors.

Really?

Citation please.

-AI

Wow, lots of questions.

[olsmeister]

I wonder if it could be modified to desalinate seawater and/or produce H2 in off peak hours? I wonder how much security would be needed to protect it from terrorists with depth charges? I wonder what angle the tree-huggers (coral-huggers?) would use to argue against it?

This is gonna be great!

[Jeremi]

It'll combine the nail-biting drama of Chernobyl with the easy accessibility of the Deepwater Horizon! ;)

Re:ZOMG BBW SAUCE

[Cwix]

I for one do NOT want any BBW sauce.

Brilliant move for France

[hessian]

There's no one to surrender to under water.

Why is this not flagged as Funny?

[moxsam]

Insightful? Really? ...no.

Re:Ingenious design to prevent proliferation

[SpecBear]

So, instead of giving them fissile material that they could potentially build into a bomb, you cut out all of the middlemen and just give them a fully functioning bomb?

The only problem....

[vikisonline]

On interesting problem is transferring all that energy. I don't think you could just run the power lines through the water. That could be a lot of dead fish :P They will probably have to place them all under ground. Separating them can be trouble some too. How are you going to separate the lines? Depending on the place minerals in soil could cause shorts, or water (being under a body of water doesnt help here) Or if they build a concrete tunnel, it would have to be huge, and steel reinforcement could be an issue, unless its a really huge tunnel. Electricity at those voltages like to jump fairly spectacular distances. I wouldn't want to be one maintaining such tunnels either.

Re:The only problem....

[olliM]

You absolutely can run power lines under water. See Estlink, the 350MW cable between Finland and Estonia.

Re:NIMBY != Ludite

[epyT-R]

Power plants reduce property values.

property values drop BECAUSE of nimby luddites who think fission reactor = chernobyl.

Russia has an idea like this...

[asm2750]

...except the reactor is on a floating platform unlike being underwater.

Finally, i cracked step 3!!

[Vectormatic]

1) sell underwater reactor to japan
2) GOJIRAAAA!!!!!!
3) make reality TV show called "I am Gojira, you are japan"
4) profit!!!!

This is not meant for civilian use.

[danhaas]

They are adapting mature nuclear submarine technology to power coastal lines temporarily, with a fast deployment and reliable operation, though likely at a price much higher than building it onshore.

Cost is everything for power generation for civilian use, so this will be used only by the military or for catastrophe assesment (hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, etc, impact coastal areas more heavily).

Security

[perlith]

What about guards at the plant? Will we finally see sharks with laser beams?

It happened before

[mangu]

In 1963 a nuclear submarine was lost and another in 1968.

In both cases it took a long search and rescue operation to find the remains. By your "radioactive stuff" theory it should have been trivial, just look where the sea shines from beneath.

Mandatory

[lolococo]

Can we fit a shark with one of those?

problematic...

[hesaigo999ca]

CONS
1) no one can easily verify security protocals being taken (not like the UN can just walk in to see whats going on)
2) if something goes wrong another aquatic ecosystem is gone, and this one much worse then the BP oil spill...with effects felt for generations afterwards
3) makes it more prone to accidents as containers being used are now prone to water corrosion at a much quicker rate then just regular atmosphere.

PROS
1) cooling is actually going to cost less, to keep the generator at a cooler temperature...
2)fish with 3 eyes from simpsons start showing up
3)...sorry cant think of any.

External pressure = good

[Muad'Dave]

Placing the reactor deep underwater could boost efficiency in a couple of ways. The much lower inlet temperature would allow for higher Carnot efficiency, and placing the reactor and primary/secondary loops in a high ambient pressure environment would allow higher absolute pressure (and therefore higher non-boiling working temperature) inside the loops. That's a good thing in a PWR.

Nuke Sub with Jumpers

[DarthVain]

Rather than make underwater reactors for remote places, why not make mobile underwater nuke reactors? Basically a Nuke Sub with Jumper Cables minus all the fiddly war stuff. I mean you're going to have to have access to the thing from time to time for maintenance, and the mobility would add flexibility to your reactor "fleet", allowing you to move power to where it is most needed.

Anyway just a thought.

Re:already forgotten BP disaster?

[Nadaka]

The surface of the sea can be treacherous and rough. The bottom of the sea remains calm even in the worst storms and tidal waves.

Areva

[andersh]

The French know how to build reactors and they do so all over the world. They have a long history of working with nuclear technology. From Curie to the next generation EPR.

The world's leading company in nuclear energy is the French Areva, and the German government owns 34% of it through Siemens.

Not only do they power their own country using a large number of nuclear power stations, 90% of EDF's power is nuclear, but they also export this power to several other European countries. Without proper engineering and security it would not be possible. As if that wasn't enough they build power plants around the world from the US to India!

There have been no serious accidents that have caused anything like Chernobyl in France. So where's your evidence of a lack of security? Their present production supports my claim that they know what they're doing.