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France To Invest One Billion Euros In Nuclear Power
An anonymous reader writes "France will invest one billion euros in future nuclear power development while boosting research into security, President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Monday."
The Guardian has a more detailed article. It's not a huge investment, but it is nice to see continued commitment to Generation IV reactors by at least one Western country.
They will make a fortune selling power to all those countries "phasing out" nuclear power with no plan to replace it but the underpants gnomes.
...President Sarkozy kissed his pinky.
Politicians are similar, in many respects, to companies that derive their revenue from advertising.
They are, in truth, extremely focused on customers service. It's just that voters aren't the customers.
That line-up looks awfully familiar...
I mean, I love Final Fantasy comics as much as the next guy, but apparently France is batshit insane for it!
Interesting. France's going to be selling nuclear power to Germany for the rest of our lives. The French are smart people. Not only have they weighed out all the environmental concerns (don't get me started about coal), but these guys are really going to cash in on energy sales. Props to you, France!
Don't we have a crapload of unused base load power in this world which we could use for hydrogen production?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Canada is selling it's nuclear industry to private interests.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/ottawa-to-sell-aecl-to-snc-lavalin/article2078110/
At least someone isn't giving up.
Still, the lessons of Fukushima Daiichi are serious. There are a sizable number of reactors out there which will melt down if they lose cooling pump power. (The reactors and the pumps at Fukushima survived the earthquake and tsunami. Cooling continued until the battery bank ran down, then stopped. All the damage shown in photos is from later hydrogen explosions.) That's unacceptable. There has to be backup passive cooling.
All plants should have catalytic hydrogen recombiners to prevent hydrogen explosions. There's no excuse for not having those. That should have been fixed after TMI, decades ago.
Long term storage of used fuel rods on site has got to stop. After initial cooling, those need to go to dry cask storage.
The really tough issue is evacuation zones. Indian Point in New York has 19 million people within 50 miles.
I wonder if any of that money will go towards moving away from uranium 235? If anything, France would be a good candidate to show the western world that thorium 232 is a viable fuel source. All we'd lose is the plutonium and we really don't need more nuclear weapons anyways. Just about everything that sucks about using uranium nuclear fuel (scarcity, goes critical if not cooled, needs to be enriched, unusable waste) would go away.
I'll charge them 1% of whatever they're going to spend on "boosting security" to advise that they do not build reactors in flood planes or on fault lines.
If it's only chomp change, where is the 1 billion euro for solar?
At the end of the article you didn't read. 1.35 billion for renewables... Doh!
Hey it works great in SimCity! Industry and nuclear plants should always be located on the edge of the map. You halve the pollution, halve the risk.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
You can bet that France and Germany are going into the Nuclear energy business together, only the reactors will be in France. Must be that the political landscape makes this kind of shell game plausible to the German people (let's move the reactors over the border) after all French fallout wouldn't dare cross into Germany.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Keep telling yourself that.
Right does not mean small government, nor does left mean large. An anarcho-communist commume would be far left and have nearly no government.
Right and left describe beliefs not size of government. You can have right wing and large government which fascism is one example.
America has had multiple thorium reactors, the most famous and largest being Ft. St Vrain. The only real issue with is that GA took short cuts during construction (because it was 'safe'), and that lead to issues with alarms. After 15 years of that, PSC gave up on it and closed it.
Right now, if General Atomic chose to get back into the game, they could re-do this intelligently and be the big winners on this in under 5 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As such, they are built with an escape drain under the fuel supply. Near the drain is a refrigerator that cools the salt to a solid, plugging the drain.
When the power fails, the plug melts, and all the fuel flows out of the system into a large holding area. The holding area is too big to generate significant heat.
This means no meltdown is possible. Humans can literally walk (or run) away and in minutes, the reactor shuts down automatically.
The main problems are
1. An improperly managed plant creates acidic gasses in small quantities. It needs more maintenance to keep working.
2. Breeder reactors are much less prolific. That makes it difficult to create nuclear weapons and also means you have to actually dig fuel out of the ground instead of simply making your own for free.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Miami, in its test, set fire to two cars, one with hydrogen and the other gasoline. While both created fires when ignited, the gasoline fire engulfed the entire car causing total damage, whereas the hydrogen flame vented vertically and failed to spread to the rest of the vehicle....Similarly, in 1997, a vehicle safety study by the automaker Ford concluded hydrogen is potentially a better fuel source than gasoline when proper controls are built into the vehicle.