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

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!

[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!

[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!

[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.

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?

[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?

[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: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: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: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:MWe

[GiveBenADollar]

MWe = Megawatt electric

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

[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.