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Robert X Cringely Predicts More Mininuke Plants
LandGator writes "PC pundit Robert X Cringely had a life before writing 'Triumph of the Nerds' for PBS: He covered the atomics industry and reported on Three Mile Island. In this blog post, he analyzes the Fukushima reactor failures, and suggests the end result will be a rapid growth in small, sealed 'package' nuclear reactors such as the Toshiba 4S generator considered for Galena, Alaska. He thinks Japan may have little choice, and with rolling blackouts scheduled, he may be right."
I'd be fine with it. I think it's a way to go.
But nuclear power still has the stigma of Chernobyl. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is going to scream NO at the top of their lungs and most will probably point at Japan's current situation and say "You see why it's a bad idea".
Again, I'm all for more nuke plants. It's cleaner than coal, and going heavily into solar + wind is a pipe dream. Instead of pumping tons of crud into the air I'm fine with some barrels of toxic waste so long as they don't cut costs on the storage.
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
the toshiba 4S is a sodium metal reactor. take that and shove it 30m underground to produce 10MW of power. awesome.
until you factor in the earthquake and tsunami.
water + sodium = BIG BOOM.
and the fact that regulatory approvals take a shitload of time for EACH reactor.
and you need 1200 of them to even come close to meeting demand.
and 1200 x 100s of days of regulatory paperwork is much more than 2-4 conventional plants with 100s of days of paperwork each.
not to mention environmental impact assessments at EACH SITE for EACH of those 1200 reactors.
the toshiba design needs to use lead and be rebuilt. the legal process needs to change which will take longer than it takes to build conventional plants. in short... NO.
Thousands died from the quake, and all they are writing about is what's happening in those reactors.
Every summer more people die of heat stroke than have died from ALL NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS COMBINED since the nuclear industry began.
With all this melodrama, priorities will be shifted in the public's minds. They will believe that reducing the, so far inexistent, deaths from the Fukushima reactors is more important than reducing the emission of greenhouse effect gases.
There are some indications of radioactive cesium and iodine.
Yeah, great. "Some indications" is evidence enough to make them want to shutdown nuclear power entirely, while overwhelming evidence for catastrophic global warming is disputed as "unconfirmed" or something like that.
If the same criteria were used for CO2 generation as is used for nuclear power, burning fossil fuels would have been outlawed long ago.
Wow, you have a direct feed from the Crack News Network or something?
Puzzle me this, if only radioactive noble gasses were emitted, why did the Ronald Reagan have to move even though it is miles off shore? Why was there a spike of radioactivity in Tokyo, a couple hundred miles away -- are the winds really traveling 240km per couple minutes? What about the breach in in the containment of reactor two?
More interestingly, what about the torus half full of water under the reactor -- will the building withstand a steam explosion when the core at some thousands of degrees hits that level, breaches the container, and releases the water? That's a big question that the US Atomic Energy Commission first asked in 1972. Cited from: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16contain.html
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
My reading: older, better known reactor designs are safer.
My reading: reactors built by capitalist corporations who face massive financial loss when something goes wrong are safer than reactors built by communist dictatorships to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
A nuclear dump? Well I wouldn't want piles of crap sitting around in a vacant lot, but if it was miles below ground I wouldn't have a problem with it. And if I was next to a nuke plant instead of a coal plant, I'd get less radiation...
So yeah I'd be happy to live near one. But I'm also reasonably intelligent, and understand pretty well what sort of dangers there are and how they're addressed by safety features and the design of the facility.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
The only loss experienced by corporations will be lost opportunities. If you actually bother to look at how the nuclear industry is subsidised, you'll see that in every country the risk is underwritten by the state. In the event of a massive catastrophe, all the company loses is the capital invested in the plant, the state is left cleaning up for potentially hundreds of years.
There's no way you could make nuclear power companies liable for the cost of cleanup in the event of catastrophic meltdown. That would require them to put extraordinary amounts of capital into escrow - hundreds if not thousands of times the cost of the plant - and would mean nuclear power would become economically unviable. Even if you mandated insurance, who would underwrite it? The payout in the event of a serious meltdown would cause a meltdown in the insurance sector and.
Financial service companies were dumb enough to play hot potato with sub-prime mortgages, but even they're not dumb enough to underwrite the risk of nuclear power.
Nick
I'm pro-nuclear but i'm sick of this downplaying bullshit. Reactors that require actively powered safety systems ARE flawed.
This entire crises we have had absolute dickheads claiming that the radiation levels are safe at a time when people in the immediate vicinity are being encouraged to evacuate by the authorities. There is a radiation leak. This is a fact. Up to 400mSv/h near the reactor has been confirmed (noticable radiation sickness will happen at 800 and above, but 400 is still very, very dangerous). People need to be acknowledging that fact. Much smaller than Chernobyl but there's no reason to downplay it. There are some heroes right now working in the irradiated zone trying to keep things under control. There are people in the immediate area who should leave for the next few days.
Assholes like the guy who wrote the following "even if you were standing at the top of the cooling tower you would be fine" and "fukushima is currently safe and will stay safe" should be sent to help maintain the reactors without any protective suit. Link: http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/
Enough with the downplaying. The design WAS flawed. People ARE risking their lives to contain it. We should learn from this.
I know. How stupid that "Joe Sixpack" would not want what's happening at the Japanese reactors to happen here.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the primary...wait for it...containment chambers! in the No 2 Fukushima reactor has been breached. Not because of the earthquake (if I'm reading this correctly) but because of the tsunami which overwhelmed the cooling systems causing the fuel to be exposed to air, causing a hydrogen explosion. That's what caused the mini-mushroom cloud that the Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier. But that couldn't happen here because the corporations that build our nuclear plants would never cut any corners on safety because the "free market" insures that every possible safety measure has been taken.
Personally, I'm going to wait a few months and then eat a bunch of imported Japanese pickles. Maybe I'll get superpowers.
Seriously, I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other about nuclear power. But it bothers me when I hear proponents ridiculing "Joe Sixpack" for being a little alarmed about fuel rods exposed to the atmosphere and breaches in...wait for it...containment chambers!
You are welcome on my lawn.
You've vastly oversimplified what's going on. First of all, it's pretty clear that the first level of containment (the zirco-alloy cladding on the fuel) has failed. There's been radioactive iodine and cesium detected outside the plant, indicating the fuel rods have at least partially melted.
Those two can get outside the primary containment vessel because their primary cooling system is broken. Normally there are two water loops to keep the core cool. The inner water loop is a closed system which carries heat from the core to a heat exchanger. There the heat gets transferred to an outer water loop (ocean water in this case), which does the actual cooling. The inner loop water never leaves the plant, and thus not even the radioactive tritium which gets formed leaves the plant.
When the electrical systems and backups failed, that cooling system ceased to function. The only way they have to cool the core right now is to directly vent the water surrounding the core. Vent the steam, lower the pressure, cool the core. Best case you're releasing radioactive tritium. But since the rods have melted, the water is now in direct contact with the uranium fuel and fission products. That's where the radioactive iodine and cesium come from. Iodine is gaseous (so escapes along with the venting), and cesium is water soluble.
That's where we were at yesterday. It rated a 5 on the INES nuclear safety scale, which was the same as Three Mile Island. Unfortunately, today has had two very, very bad developments.
First, there's reports that the containment vessel for reactor #2 is damaged. No confirmation and no details. For whatever reason TEPCO and the Japanese government are being tight-lipped about it. Second, apparently some of the debris broke through the wall of building 4 and exposed a huge, huge flaw in the system. They have spent fuel rods and unused fuel rods sitting in storage pools outside of containment. The only thing protecting them is the water in the pool, and the building walls surrounding them. Walls which have blown apart in buildings #1 and #3, and have holes in #2 and #4.
Supposedly some of these spent fuel rods in building #4 caught fire (they're still experiencing nuclear decay, so still generating heat; just at a much, much slower rate than in reactors #1-#3 which were shut down recently). The water in the pool is supposed to keep them cool, but with the electricity gone, they suffered the same cooling failure as in reactors #1-#3. It just took a lot longer for the problem to exhibit itself since the amount of heat they were generating was much lower. Anyway, supposedly some of these rods caught fire, which corresponds to the sharp spike in radiation release yesterday. Those radiation readings dropped back down to "normal" again after the fire was put out.
But if those spent fuel rods have boiled off enough water to expose them to the air, then there is nothing stopping them from heating up. They will melt, possibly catch fire, and worst case they will start fissioning again after melting into a slag at the bottom of the pool. And all of this will happen outside of containment. Basically, the situation right now is only slightly better than what we had in Chernobyl - a hot core exposed to the atmosphere with a fire. That's why the situation was upgraded to a 6 on the INES scale today.
If the rods catch fire, it'll basically be the same as Chernobyl again. Maybe a bit smaller since the fuel isn't as hot as in
The Toshiba 4S is a reactor with a 10 MW capacity. The peak summer load in New England is 28,130 MW (see link below). So you would need 2,813 of these reactors. Get 50% of New England's power from nukes and thats still 1406.5. Whats the cost to protect them by the way?
Sure, its the next best thing for Galena Alaska. For national energy policy, this is completely irrelevant.
http://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight/mkt-electric/new-england.asp#gen
Your sarcasm is well placed. The BWR design with a pressure-supression pool was designed so that a weaker containment system could be built as a, you guessed it, cost cutting measure. This design was been questioned in 1972 by S.H. Hanauer. Of course, because of the weaker design and the requirement for many valves and backup valves (which are notoriously unreliable), Hanauer concluded that costs are probably about the same as the safer dry containment system.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The nuclear reactors in Fukushima are boiling water reactors. It uses water for coolant, which boils as it flows through the reactor chamber, goes through a heat exchanger, and is recirculated. Since the coolant systems are not functioning properly, they are dumping saltwater into the coolant lines, letting it boil off, and vent out into the atmosphere through pressure release valves. This is releasing radiation, however it is a small amount, and containing elements with short half-lives that will decay rapidly and cease to be a danger. This has been happening for several days
This steam release is very energetic. It is so energetic that the water is spontaneously disassociating to hydrogen and oxygen. When you get large volumes of hydrogen and oxygen, along with a high temperature source, you're going to have an explosion. There is no way around that, but it is not an indicator that the containment vessel has breached and the core is exposed.
The reports of a breach in reactor #2 appear to be part of the coolant system. The suppression chamber has developed a crack, which lead to an uncontrolled release of coolant, as the system depressurized to atmospheric. This resulted in a large venting of radiation as it depressurized, but now, the situation is no different than at the controlled steam releases at the other reactors. The containment vessel is still intact. Corium is not flowing out of the containment vessel. There is not currently any risk of it being released and contaminating the ground water.
nat geo: small town nukes
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/big-idea/08/mini-nukes
i have the magazine somewhere, but cant seem to find the article at a glance and dont remember if the print article was any longer.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
ask any Victorian about their willingness to live near Hazelwood (note: Moe is near there...)
That's Victoria, Australia folks. Home of the meanest belching brown-coal moonscape and Pink-Floyd nightmare of a 1950's power station. And Moe (pronounced "mowie") is a Township, not a Stooge. Or was, anyhow. Just in case you needed more detail. Bad idea to leave your clothes out on the line for any length of time.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
First off, the fuel pellets in these boiling water reactors are made of uranium dioxide -- a ceramic which has a melting point of 2,865 degrees Celsius and the zircaloy cladding melts somewhere in the range of 1,850 to 1,975 degrees Celsius (depends on which alloy they are using). I could not even find a combustion temperature for either material. That doesn't matter, though, because the temperature of the spent fuel in the pool would be somewhere around 200 degrees Celsius, depending on how long it had been taken out of the reactor.
So it is unreasonable to speculate that the fuel rods have `caught fire`.
Secondly, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said that an oil leak in a cooling water pump at Unit 4 was the cause of the fire the media keeps talking about.
I would strongly suggest anybody interested in following this event watch that web page and/or this one for accurate, knowledgeable, non-scaremongering reporting. I've heard too many news reports totally screw the facts up. (Like when they reported there was a 3rd explosion when really it was the 2nd explosion that happened in the #3 reactor building.)
There are competitive reasons to avoid a core meltdown, namely that the reactor would need to be replaced at incredible cost.
And how is that a problem for the senior executives and the shareholders who built and profited from a reactor 5, 10 or 40 years ago and have since cashed out?
Geeks seem to have the quaint notion that corporations will somehow protect themselves from exposure to massive liabilities in order to preserve themselves. But - in spite of the recent United States Supreme Court ruling to the contrary - corporations are not people. Corporations - especially the really big ones - are a vehicle which really rich and powerful people use to accumulate more wealth and power for themselves. Think of them as big Saturn V rockets - they burn up all of their fuel and discard most of their structure and mass in the process of delivering their real payload into financial orbit; the rich goons and wealthy investors running the operation.
There are plenty of billionaire psychopaths who are more than willing and able to destroy their "own" corporation if it can make them an extra few million dollars, provided they can skip away without being held responsible for any of the mess they leave behind. It's perfectly rational behavior, if you're a psychopath.
Mozillo over at Countrywide made $500 million dollars in a single year while shoveling fraudulent mortgages out the door like they were McDonalds hamburgers. He still has the billion plus dollars he made during his tenure running Countrywide, and he's protected by an army of lawyers and bought-and-paid-for representatives in government. He doesn't care that Countrywide was destroyed, as it served his purpose - it made him rich. The taxpayers and the customers of and investors in Countrywide have been left on the hook to clean up the mess.
You wanna trust these guys with nuclear power plants and - worse - tons of nuclear waste? Good luck with that!
The ash from coal plants is radioactive. Coal has low concentrations of radioactive elements in it. When you burn the coal the radioactive elements are among the ash and are at a higher concentration of the ash than they are of the source coal.
http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/tenorm/coalandcoalash.html
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
A lot of the commentary about radioactivity and coal plants come from this Scientific American article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Many people read the headline of that article and didn't really bother to read the article. The argument that Scientific American makes is that a coal plant puts more radiation into the surrounding environment than a nuclear plant. The nuclear waste is still obviously more radioactive than the ash. However, the nuclear plant carefully controls their waste and materials.
In both cases the radiation released is low and not a health risk.
1) this was a *SPIKE* of 400 mSv, not a continuous 400 mSv/h. case in point soon afterward it descended to 12 mSv/h and now is at 0.6 mSv/h. This is what happens when you get your news from CNN. Citate : "Japanese authorities told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that radiation levels at the plant site between units 3 and 4 reached a peak of some 400 millisieverts per hour. "This is a high dose-level value," said the body, "but it is a local value at a single location and at a certain point in time." Later readings were 11.9 millisieverts per hour, followed six hours later by 0.6 millisieverts, which the IAEA said "indicate the level of radioactivity has been decreasing." "
2) Japan *automatically* evacuate people as a precaution, not as a need ! Just like tsunami drill this is something Japan implemented to be on the SAFE side.
3) radioactivity , a doubling of the normal background rate of Tokyo was measured. Big Fucking Deal. if an inhabitant from tokyo was moving to my region it would take *FIVE* time the background radioactivity they get now per year : about 10 millisievert. And if they were moving to those naturally radioactive hot spring in iran they would get about 80 times the dose.
While i agree that downplaying the problem is not so good, UPPLAYING it as you made is adding to the fucking media circus fear mongering.
It is a bad situation at the moment, but not a catastrophal one. The likely scenario at the moment, is that the fuel goes into containment, a bit of radioactivity might escape, but basically the plant will have to be written off, and the REAKL environmental catastrophe will be all the chemical from chem plants washed inshore over crop field by the tsunami, the destroyed towns, and the dead people. The reactor at the moment isn't even a BLIP compared to that.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Water has a specific heat of 4.187 kJ/kgK and a heat of vaporization of 2,270 kJ/kg.
Liquid nitrogen has a specific heat of 2.042 kJ/kgK and a heat of vaporization of 199.1 kJ/kgK, and a specific heat of 1.04 kJ/kgK when gas.
So putting in 1 kg of water at 20 C and extracting it as steam at 100 C removes (4.187)*80 + 2270 = 2605 kJ of heat energy from the reactor.
Putting in 1 kg of liquid nitrogen at -200 C and extracting it at 100 C removes (2.042)*4 + 199.1 + (1.04)*296 = 515 kJ of heat energy from the reactor.
Per kg, water removes over 5x more heat energy than liquid nitrogen. The only reason to use liquid nitrogen is if you wanted to drop the temperature below the boiling point of water. AFAIK radioactive decay is not influenced by temperature, so there would be no benefit to doing that here.
If I had to guess, the Soviets had to encase an active pile in-situ with concrete. Concrete tends to be very temperature-sensitive when curing - too hot and it'll crack. So they probably used liquid nitrogen to drop the temperature to where the concrete which initially contacted the pile could cure without cracking.
Seriously, stop comparing the number of deaths caused. Every single death is one too many. You sound like the tobacco industry claiming there is no link between smoking and cancer. Stop ignoring the dangers in case large amounts of radioactive particles leak and spread. One time is too many.
Every single death is one too many? Whilst that's a nice ideal, it's entirely impractical because life is inherently risky. You also make it sound like contamination is solely a nuclear issue. Couple of events for you to ponder:
By your logic we should also ban coal mining and oil drilling, a hell of a lot people die from accidents whilst extracting these and they contaminate the landscape with carcinogens galore. Frankly we have to manage the risk, because nobody wants to give up their car or central heating quite yet.