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UK Sticks With Nuclear Power
Coisiche writes "Despite recent events in Japan and the certain public outcry that it will generate, the UK government proposes to build new nuclear power stations. Well, earthquakes and tsunamis are very rare here."
Good!
The UK, like many countries, has committed to a substantial drop in CO2 emissions. Nuclear is obviously going to have to be a major component in that.
With the recent shit storm of FUD out there concerning nuclear power, I am shocked that there isn't a more vocal promotion of building/funding/using thorium salt reactors by the "scientific community". Although no technology is 100% safe, this seems to be the best middle ground when it comes to generating energy while not completely ruining the environment.
...that someone's not being completely reactionary about this. Maybe it's Torchwood?
Well, earthquakes and tsunamis are very rare here
A serious understatement. While the UK does have the very occasional tremor, they're so minor that nothing more than a single roof tile has ever moved*. There are no active volcanoes. And hurricanes/tornadoes/etc are extremely rare.
The UK must be one of the best places to build nuclear reactors.
* I'm just assuming this. The point is that they are incredibly minor compared to earthquakes experienced by most other countries.
So my thorium reactor is on the way?
to Mt. Yellowstone
What is the UK planning to do about nuclear waste? It cannot be kept in cooling ponds forever. I just watched the intriguing documentary Into Eternity the other day (99p rental on iTunes) about Onkalo, the massive network of tunnels the Finnish are digging in solid bedrock in which will become a giant subterranean depository for the country's nuclear waste. The documentary reminds us that nuclear waste remains harmful for something like 100,000 years, and shockingly they reveal that although Onkalo will be used only for Finnish nuclear waste, the country will need to dig many more Onkalos to handle all of it! What hope is there for countries that are not on a shield of bedrock? Why isn't Canada doing something similar? (Think Canadian Shield.) I recall the US was going to proceed with Yucca Mountain, but Obama slashed the budget that would have funded the work...
Good. Next story please...
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
Gimme safe and reliable cold fusion any day.
Now they just need to make them Thorium reactors. Safety issues: solved.
The question isn't, "Should we have nuclear power?"
The question should be, "Are we willing to tax people and ask them to make sacrifices to make sure that their energy is safe and efficient?"
Given that the Tories are in power, the answer to the second question is, "no, and it doesn't matter where it comes from."
If David Cameron's head didn't explode from the sheer impact of cognitive dissonance if he ever had to raise taxes to cover infrastructure in a huge way, his party would be after his head for betraying their core principles and values.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
What if a Tsunami or an Earthquake hit the UK? What's gonna be your excuse?
We all know that whatever methods being used to generate power there are risks. I would like to see some stats on the number of direct and estimated indirect deaths involved per kwh hour produced for each techs. Along with the number of life serious injuries. eg where the recovery time is greater than a year. Or permanent. After all no matter which tech we use. People will always die from it. eg wind turbines with ice flying off blades and hitting people ....
This is the same party that vetoed an £80 million loan to Forgemasters, the Sheffield steel company, that would have allowed them to make pieces for nuclear reactors. The loan was cut as a cost saving measure. I guess that saving will be wiped out when we have to buy from overseas. Good thinking!
The Scottish Government doesn't agree.
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2011/05/31082406
Westminster aims to recover the power to build nuclear stations in Scotland with the passing of the Scotland bill/Calman commission. We export electricity to England as it is so perhaps the next generation of nuclear stations will be so safe they can be built in Battersea where it's needed.
The IAEA really dropped the ball after the Fukushimi event allowing the tree huggers and fear mongers to take control of the FUD and spin popular opinion against nuclear energy when the overwhelming evidence that continues to indicate the overall safety of these facilities are very high. The lack of damage control by the IAEA , et al is deafeningly silent and I am glad that finally some government agency is has got the balls to stand up and say "sorry pal, nuke plants are safe and are part of the deal"
Are you sure about this? Canterbury Cathedral was damaged by an earthquake 600-odd years ago. It has never been "demolished" by an earthquake.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
So where can I buy my nuclear powered UK stick?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The UK has no uranium mining or reserves and thus is completely dependent on imports for its nuclear energy. Though less is known about thorium, it is not listed as having any reserves here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium Particularly given the many many unaddressed problems with making a liquid salt reactor work (the last one never really did) and the huge clean up cost for using that kind of fuel, there does not seem to be any advantage for the UK to adopt thorium.
Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown. The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster. Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US? Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
IF subsequent governments don't screw it up.
The UK is an island with little in the way of seismic activity or tsunami like events.
The UK already falls short in power generation, requiring imports at peak times through lengthy vulnerable and costly to lay and maintain under sea cables and pipes.
By 2015 it is estimated that the UK will no longer produce sufficient energy for off peak, requiring imports 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
We can ill afford the risks these vulnerabilities pose let alone the 10+ years of money flooding out of our economy for what should be a matter of national security.
Any delays will be costly in so many ways.
Interesting that Dungeness did not make the cut. That is one of four sites that Greenpeace studied and found problems. http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/nuclear/british-energy-reckons-nuclear-power-stations-are-safe-from-flooding-20071128 The UK does expect to have to use setbacks and dikes elsewhere.
If there is a time to use it, this is it.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Nuclear power is unavoidable if we want to free ourselves from the oil&gas economy (because it makes us dependent on the Arabs, Iran, and Russia, and that is not a good thing). The windmills and solar panels are not an option. The controlled nuclear synthesis is far far away in time. For the near and not so near future, the nuclear fission is the way.
And in an effort to show 'playing with Atoms' was safe in the UK - they had a policy of removing organs and go so far as replacing the bones of the dead with broomsticks.
So don't worry - your leaders won't ever let you down in the UK and fail when it comes to Fission power.
Link to the article
Accelerated Thorium reactors look like they could run on SOME high grade waste such as spent fuel rods from other plants and expired weapon materials - but there hasn't been one designed or built anywhere yet. Nothing else comes close to your dream.
No such thing unless you redefine "little" to mean whatever you want it to be.
That sort of very active material is very bad news and the real reason why the fast breeder Superphoenix was so difficult to run. Rapid decay means very intense radiation which means everything has to be done remotely without any of the sort of electronics we take for granted - it's hard to do stuff by robot when the robot gets fried. It's also stupidly counterproductive if you are suggesting it to reduce waste and shows a severe lack of understanding - more radioactive material is generated because intense neutron sources make the surrounding material radioactive. All that French reprocessing equipment is now also radioactive waste and people need to keep away from it.
There are ways to deal with waste. Pretending some magic fairy will make all disadvantages vanish is not one of them.
Japan and The Netherlands also stick to building new reactors. They at least learned the right lesson, we need to build reactors that are more inherently safe. Only Germany doesn't stay the course. That is primarily the result of cultural fights in the eighties in Germany that defined some generations. When Three Miles Island went down, there was no significant release of radiation, but the public reaction was based on it's fears, rather than on the reports. That is a natural thing happening in other areas as well. When Chernobyl happened, that was much worse than a reactor melt down, the reactor was designed as an enormous dirty bomb. Fukushima is the first real nuclear full scale disaster. And look, hardly any casualties, just an enormous financial burden. Even if a Fukushima incident happens every year it would be roughly on par with coal burning power plants running steady.
We don't have as many earthquakes or tsunamis here as they have in Japan. But we do have exactly the same industry that's immune to public reaction or the liabilities of risk. The US reaction to Fukushima is to make laws to cap nuke plants liability in the event of catastrophe. Which means yet again the power corps (monopolies and cartels) have capitalism for profits, but socialism for losses. This is already true, because nuke plants are uninsurable in the market so the public covers their insurance. But now it's even more starkly true. And what's even more starkly true is that the US nuke government/industry complex is interested in only that "innovation", not in any other changes even when events confront us with the actual risks and damages from these expensive, hazardous boondoggles our Cold War legacy has forced on us.
The technical problems can be patched. The business problems, especially the corruption of a government captured by the industry it regulates, show no sign of any of hope for patch. And that means not even the necessary technical solutions will be applied, when they cost a little profit.
--
make install -not war
Sorry, but the cargo cult only gets you so far before real physics comes in and burns your foot. There is, very obviously, such a thing as nuclear waste and if you had spent your time learning about nuclear power instead of swallowing the crap from clueless PR fools you would know that your suggestion only covers a fraction of the waste.
It's this counterproductive and idiotic bullshit that resulted in research on how to deal with nuclear waste getting held up for nearly forty years. Look up synrock and what it's designed to deal with - that should give you an idea of what nuclear waste actually is.
In particular, we need the thorium reactors similar to what Ft. St. Vrain had.
In addition, we really should be working towards SMALL-MEDIUM MANUFACTURED reactors ideally, doing IFR. With that approach, we can burn up what we have, rather than pay the high costs of storage.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Several of my friends in the Pacific Northwest USA operate (privately!) scientific instruments to detect radiation levels. They were all watching radiation levels carefully after Fukishima. None of them detected statistically significant changes in background radiation levels at their Oregon or Washington sites. While their instrumentation is not super-sensitive, they detected little or no change.
I am not a doctor, but I know a bit about the effects of radiation. Most of the harmful effects of low level radiation come in the form of increased rate of mutation of offsprings and increased cancer rate. Small increases in background radiation don't kill anyone outright, they increase the probability of early death and mutant/dead offspring. It seems implausible that a small increase (note that none was detected!) in background radiation would directly increase infant mortality in the short term: radiation effects on animals don't work like that. Instead, one would expect slightly increased background radiation to slightly increase infant mortality over a period of decades, starting 3-6 months after the increase.
Science has clearly demonstrated that radiation is harmful to health. No question about it. However, when it comes to pegging specific deaths to specific radiation releases ... well, that's much harder. After the US Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (where most of the medical studies of high radiation exposure comes form) there was a dramatic increase in mutation, cancer, and infant mortality. In fact, most of the death caused by the atomic bombs actually occurred long after the actual bomb mess was cleaned up. Small increases (barely detectable or not detectable with decent instrumentation) in background radiation are much harder to evaluate. The data is noisy (as this data must be noisy), and it is hard to draw accurate conclusions.
There's no need for them to be common. One is enough.
That is rather disingenuous, and I think you know it.
'Tornadoes', here in the US, are graded on a 5 level scale, from EF0 through EF5.
An EF-0 tornado has winds between 65-85mph(105-135km/h). The strongest tornado to hit the UK in the past 200 years was the equivalent to an EF-2(93 and 130mph). A basic, run of the mill winter storm, has stronger gusts in the UK on a yearly basis. Here in the US, there are residential stick houses that could functionally survive the worst tornado the UK has seen in modern times.
To not design a nuclear reactor to even minimally survive winds that houses in the US could survive, is not a realistic problem. It would never happen. I would go so far as to say it is almost impossible, unless you plan to build your reactors out of 1x2 stick wood-frame buildings. A metal shed with aluminum supports would be enough in 99% of the cases. Moving to concrete, even non-reenforced, would bring that to 100%. To avoid any possible problems, add in some re-bar, and I would feel perfectly safe living right next door to a nuclear plant that would take a direct hit, when it comes to the strength of the tornadoes in the UK.
Being afraid of the word 'tornado' makes no more sense than being afraid of the word 'nuclear'. It arouses fear in people who do not understand it, but the mechanics and consequences can be easily comprehended and dealt with by those who do.
*I've been directly under an EF-5 tornado in my past, that obliterated everything above ground level, as well as watching a EF-0 roll right through my front yard from my living room window. It would be foolish to fear them both in the same way, just as it is foolish to fear anything with the word nuclear in it.
"Why nuclear power will never supply the world's needs.
World req. 15 TW =15,000 reactors. Each lasts 50yrs. 6-12yrs to build. 10-20yrs decomission.
11 nuclear accidents at the level of a full or partial core-melt. 14,000 reactor-years of nuclear operations.
15,000 reactors would mean we would have a major accident somewhere in the world every month."
Proliferation and Tactical targets in war.
Thank You - Lisa Zyga
In fact there is a news blackout and no fly zone above ft. calhoun. nebraska.
James Woolsey on energy security and national security.
Generation sources, The grid, "Ostrich design" Very vulnerable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF8mwFxAy4g
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
None of you is getting the idea that the problem is that "none can predict where or when the next tsunami/earthquake will hit any area"
That's all I have to say and that's what I'm trying to tell you, ladies and gentlemen. You may have the controlling capabilities over your nuclear reactors, but you can't deal with their powerful effects of the natural disasters. The greatest example of all is that Japan has a lot of advanced technologies but they got hit unexpectedly.
Fuck You. I've had enough of suffering because of your shit. Now troll me, you know it's true.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
Excellent information, this is exactly what I needed. Thanks. Keep up the good work!
windows
The devil is in the detail.
What constitutes as contributing to the statistics?
Deleted
Wow, a government that doesn't listen to the mooing cows!!!!! You should think when planning ANYTHING, including Dams for hydro power. It's nice to see someone is thinking instead of just reacting.
Well "Well, earthquakes and tsunamis are very rare here." but what about reducing power consumption ?
Reducing our energy voracity is about as important for saving the planet as finding sources of fuel...
Don't forget that in case of a nuclear catastrophe like in Chernobyl or Fukushima it never really ends. In Japan they recently started to give 280.000 dosimeters to school children, what a happy perspective every evening, for parents back to check the life expectancy of your children according to the amount of radioactivity he or she has got in a day at school... :-(
I am pleased to hear that our government has got something right.
Sadly, this is probably more because of big companies lobbying for contracts than looking after my future power needs.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I am shocked that there isn't a more vocal promotion of building/funding/using thorium salt reactors by the "scientific community"
1. U fuel cycle is KNOWN
2. U is actively mined worldwide
3. India is the only nation that is attempting to put in money to research thorium because they have massive reserves of thorium and no uranium - it's only about the $$$
4. Did I say already that U fuel cycle is known?
5. Active research is going on to close the U fuel cycle via fast neutron reactors (4th and 5th generation reactors)
6. Uranium has an active market
Thorium is not any "safer" than Uranium. I have to say that proliferation risk is not a risk anymore - it's a political word. Any nation that can build a nuclear weapon can do so anyway via thorium. It is not that much more difficult to build a Pu-239 bomb than to build a U-233 bomb (from thorium). Also, a thorium reactor needs U-235 to prime it, so that point about proliferation is moot.
It is also more expensive to use thorium. For now, thorium is not an economical option unless a nation has massive resources of thorium, no uranium resources and has resources to invest in development of the thorium cycle. India may develop thorium as a power source, maybe. UK, not so much.
Now, if you want a holy grail of power, look towards ITER and fusion. Uranium/Thorium are messy in comparison. Fusion is the beautiful solution to concentrated power source. Fusion reactors can have much higher power density than fission reactors (fission reactors have limits due to thermal conductivity of fuel - you do not want to melt the fuel while producing power :). It is just not easy to get fusion working economically!
We all know there are no black swans in Britain.
The UK will become an Islamic theocracy. Might be best to start shutting down and dismantling nuclear facilities there.
just change the name and the problem will be solved. Windscale became Sellafield and eveyone was happy. Right?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
I can assure you, we are quite capable of having nuclear disasters without the aid of natural disasters. In 1957 we had a major fire at Windscale which melted the nuclear fuel and released iodine 131 through the cooling chimneys. In 2005, over 80,000 litres of radioactive waste leaked inside the Thorp reprocessing plant. Sellafield limited were fined £500,000 for breaching health and safety rules.
Also, on the international level, neither Chernobyl or 3 Mile Island were due to natural disasters, so lets not get into the mindset that tsunamis or earthquakes are required. Nuclear disasters are usually down to bad reactor design (i.e. everyone agrees the design was bad once the accident has happened, and then go on to insist that the newest reactors really are safe, honestly) and human error.
you don't need to make the tech safer. What IS needed is to make abuse-for-profit hideously dangerous. There will be no nuclear accidents when the law provides for death for the nuclear power plant CEOs and other responsibles.
Those things were not the answer and are really military solutions that the military doesn't need any more and probably never did. These days we have so much plutonium stockpiled that those two fast breeders you describe are really ways to effectively make nuclear waste because we just cannot use all the plutonium they produce. The debacle of superpheonix showed that it doesn't scale up and is not suitable for electricity production.
They don't do what you pretend they do anyway and you can't just feed any high grade waste into them. I suggest you spend a few minutes learning about how they work before dragging up the 1970s propaganda again - the world moved on from Plutonium fast breeders decades ago. They were built on the idea that Uranium was going to be difficult to obtain and that a rapidly expanding nuclear weapons program would need a lot of plutonium more quickly than could be supplied otherwise - both ideas were shown to be wrong in the early 1980s.
I suggest you actually read about plutonium fast breeders, it's interesting stuff but a pointless dead end. Pebble bed and accelerated thorium show a lot more potential, and the latter comes close to doing what you appear to think plutonium fast breeders can do.
In practice, economics always tend to become more important than safety. US reactors are rotting, and when something falls under the safety limits, the limits are adjusted, problem solved. Even the Japanese took better care of their facilities it seems.
"""
Time after time, officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril, according to records and interviews.
"""
From this AP article : http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110620/ap_on_re_us/us_aging_nukes_part1
We need better alternatives.
The Lithium Fluoride Thorium Reactor aka LFTR is what the UK and Germany need:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk
We as a nation need to divest ourselves of the nuclear reactors whose main design goal is for nuclear weapons material primarily and electrical generation secondarily. We need to move to Alvin Weinburg's *other* reactor design and his favored for when power generation is the primary goal and nuclear weapons material production is not wanted or needed. The Lithium Fluoride Thorium Reactor is the way forward. China has already started their program based on the unit built at Oak Ridge some 40 years ago. Interested in learning more?:
http://www.facebook.com/EnergyFromThorium
http://energyfromthorium.com/
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-06/next-gen-nuke-designs-promise-safe-efficient-emissions-free-energy?page=1
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/25/244122/three-mile-island-accident-nuclear-power/
Rare is enough for the safety of the Nuclear power? In proportion to the time of pollution, it is not to say: an oil spill pollutes for 10 years, we can thus have a major oil spill every day in the world?
http://www.burnham-on-sea.com/1607-flood.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunamis_in_the_United_Kingdom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake