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India To Build A Thorium Reactor
In their first story, slowLearner writes "India will build a working Thorium reactor. [Quoting the Guardian] 'Officials are currently selecting a site for the reactor, which would be the first of its kind, using thorium for the bulk of its fuel instead of uranium – the fuel for conventional reactors. They plan to have the plant up and running by the end of the decade.'"
Before anyone gets too excited, this is only a modified Heavy Water Reactor and not one of those fancy Molten Salt Reactors folks like Kirk Sorenson have been evangelizing for a while now.
"India will build a working Thorium reactor."
Building a non-working Thorium reactor would be an absurd plan.
It reembles it in two points; it generates electricity and it uses thorium as fuel source.
But that's already about it. Canada's CANDU reactor design is also capable of using theorium for fuel source and is really close to India's design; so not very 'new'.
LFTR have 2 distinct advantages over this (more or less) proven design; they do NOT have a solid fuel source and thus can be designed to be passive-shutdown,
and they require nearly no chemical pre- nor post-processing of the fuel source. Additionally, they are supposed to have a higher energy gain.
Spain built a non-working nuclear reactor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemoniz_Nuclear_Power_Plant
I wonder why they went for solid fuel rather an a liquid fluoride thorium reactor setup. There are many advantages to the liquid setup plus it is a technology which has been done and proven. Also, the by-products are valuable, so offer additional revenue streams and there is vastly reduced risk in terms or proliferation and melt down capability. As a system, its about as safe as you can get.
The nuke waste problem still hasn't gone away. Building new plants is insane.
Pouring it into the gutter outside the plant would be safer than the way waste is handled in a coal plant, i.e., thrown into the atmosphere. Yes, nuclear waste is very dangerous, but the fact that the danger is so concentrated is a good thing. It means we can feasibly contain it all.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
And I suppose coal is clean and safe and happy? No one dies in coal mining accidents? No one dies from coal pollution? No one dies from coal plant fires? No land is rendered unusable by strip mining?
Half the reactors aren't in compliance with NRC regulations, because people like you stop us from replacing older, outdated reactors with newer more safe reactors. You can't on one hand decry the old reactors as being unsafe but then demand no new reactor be built to replace it. So is the old one more unsafe than the new one or not? If you don't like the old one let's build a new one that is safe.
And Chernobyl and Fukushima were both decades old designs, I believe, late 70s. Unless you think reactor design hasn't changed since, then India's reactor will be more safe by default especially considering how they have to "activate" Thorium to even make it fissile. Hint, it's not by itself.
I understand: The only types of power plants in the world are coal and nuclear.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Exactly. As a Belgian I can tell you, it's panic and green-huggers. Irrational conclussions, soap-like science.
I think there's also a political aspect: We get newscasts telling us we'll fall without electricity this winter bceause there isn't enough energy. The only way is to import energy at higher prices; which means we'll be importing nuclear energy.
Added to that, we have one of the highest prices for energy: so the government has social plans and budget to "help familie who cannot afford enough energy".
And, the big electricy companies are actually boycotting the government and threaten with price wars if they get additional taxes.
Net result; Belgians will get more expensive energy. But feel warm by the idea they don't have a nuclear plant. (which would bring down their price of energy, wouldn't require ugly and expensive windgenerators everywhere, increase knowhow and independence and a economic boost.)
Belgians are stupid.
A Belgian
Why do I keep having to say this? If you think that there are no problems with nuclear power, move to Chernobyl or Fukushima.
I will, but this double dare will include you moving right underneath a wind turbine, or moving into a houseboat in a large dam used for hydro-electric power. Why not move next to a coal mine / coal plant and tell me if you like that? Did you drive to work today? Try living next to a refinery, because 40tonnes of hydrofluoric acid, massive clouds of H2S, or the nightly sootblows are enough to ruin anyone's day. Maybe you prefer to simply not have power at night when you want it because no base-load energy source is pleasant and has zero environmental impact.
The problem here isn't that Fukushima and Chernobyl are irradiated, the problem here is that people were living within 20km of it to begin with. Pretty much every generating technology consumes large amounts of land / is not at all nice to live next to. But given the choice at least nuclear uses little land and doesn't put massive amounts of particulates into the air.
By the way I spent 5 years living in a house from which I could see the cooling towers of a nuclear reactor. I wasn't worried then, and I wouldn't be worried now. I work in a plant that would level a city block if so much as a spark ignited our products. Yet statistically I'm more likely to die in a car accident on the way home than due to a chemical release / explosion at work.
Statistically nuclear power is also the safest technology we have in deaths per GWh of generation, more so when you take into account mining of resources needed for the fuel. Please send your fearmongering back to the US government where it belongs.
I'm already living near a nuclear reactor, you probably are as well. That reactor is not endangering my health in the least. The hundreds of coal fired plants surrounding it however are shortening both mine and your lifespans by several years.
You are being too generic. Thorium doesn't have many of the disadvantages that Uranium has:
As a result, a lot of the safety disadvantages that one associates with Uranium based reactors are not applicable here. Thorium also cannot be weaponized, so it's unlikely that Iran, for instance, will be interested in this.
For India, it's a fantastic deal, since that country has 25% of the world's Thorium resources (thank god, one doesn't have to depend on the Middle East for this). Also, the Thorium Energy Alliance (TEA), an educational advocacy organization, emphasizes that "there is enough thorium in the United States alone to power the country at its current energy level for over 1,000 years." Build a few plants in CA, NY, the Mid West and so on, and much of the commercial energy problems will disappear. In fact, if enough countries adapt this, the cash flow to OPEC will dry up, or at least considerably slow down.
If we start reprocessing our fuel using techniques that the French have been using since the 70's then the majority of our waste will be recycled. If we further start using modern reprocessing systems (like breeder reactors), then the majority of the waste that is left will also be recycled.
Then for what is left, the Yucca Mountain storage plan is capable of safely storing nuclear waste for hundreds (if not thousands) of years with no maintenance. You add in a little bit of maintenance and we can safely store the waste indefinitely.
Compare that to coal where we have no practical means for collecting let alone storing all the pollution which they create. And whose pollution is causing much more immediate problems. And whose normal operation causes far more more deaths per MWh than nuclear. Building more coal plants is what is insane.
Err, no. The old reactors are not unsafe because they're old, they're unsafe because the *designs* are old and are inherently unsafe. The newest designs cannot go into meltdown no matter how much you try.
Start making movies about coal dust mutating lizards (Godzilla) and researchers (The Incredible Hulk), maybe a few spiders, etc. Oh and and come up with a coal bomb and use it in a world war.
Face it. Coal just isn't as photogenic as nuclear technologies.
I want this account deleted.
I started out moaning reading your post as yet another defeatist anti-nuke greenie, but eventually came to essentially agree. However, it's not the regulatory lapses, I think. Instead, it's 21st Century stupidity and management ineptitude we need to fear. People today, in general, can't do what's necessary to make things like nuclear safe. We're slip-sliding back into the Dark Ages. We shouldn't be fiddling with stuff like ubiquitous nuclear power when all we have to work with is the iPod generation.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I wouldn't mind living under a roof with solar panels on it though. Solar is still quite a bit more expensive than coal, but is now cheaper than nuclear, according to some.
So we need to stop burning coal ASAP, because with nuke plants we can contain the waste, with coal burning we just spread it nice and even across the planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Coal
According to U.S. NCRP reports, population exposure from 1000-MWe power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal power plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants during normal operation, the latter being 136 person-rem/year for the complete nuclear fuel cycle.
Belgians are stupid.
It's not just Belgians. I'm pro-nuke too, but looking at the people out there who'd run this stuff today, I'd say they're not up to it.
Nuclear power should morph in the direction of "The Cloud." Amazon and Google focus on getting their stuff right and finding the right people to make that happen, and selling the result to those who need it. Not everyone can do that with the labour and management that's out there these days. Maybe it'd make sense to leave it to France to run the reactors with the best people they can find, selling the result to all comers.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Geeks interested in safe practical thorium power really need to read the history of molten salt reactors here. I hope India and China have the sense to invest in this path. The LFTR is the long term theoretical evolution of the molten salt reactor path. My only problem with the whole LFTR hype is it's pushing for massive research instead of building reactors we know how to build now. We should get back in the game now, first building a new MSR taking into account what we learned in the 60's and new advances since then, and then build a few commercial plants.
To be specific about some of the hype I don't like, check out the claimed advantages of LFTRs. Some of the advantages that LFTR theoretically inherit from MSR I wont dispute, including inherent safety, small size, and low operational cost, as MSR research proved that already in the 60's. However, I take issue with "load following" which means ramping the reactor up and down to follow the load. That's what all our other generators are good for, but to get your investment out of a nuclear reactor, you want to take advantage of it's low fuel cost and run it at 100% capacity almost all the time. This also greatly simplifies the engineering involved, and given the economics, there's simply no way our early LFTRs will be designed for load following. Then they claim minimal end-of-life expense. Cleaning up the MSR plant turned out to be massively more expensive than anyone would have guessed, though with knowledge gained from that experience, we should be able to do a better job next time. Then, they assume that the first LFTRs will use a new turbine design, rather than standard steam turbines. That might be where we eventually get, but build the first plants using cheaply available and well understood technology! This sort of hype looks more like fishing for DARPA grants than solving the energy crisis.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
I worked on the control system for a nuclear plant maintenance robotic system back in 1990 (actually the controller was based on my design :) ). I learned something interesting about the nuclear power industry. The short version is - in France, nuclear power plants were considered machines, like airplanes. They were constructed and maintained like machines - they were all basically alike (in a given generation), and the differences were only in details of siting, etc. So each new one was just like the previous one, so everyone concerned knew pretty much how to avoid common problems like piping layout. And when a problem showed up in one, it would be fixed in all of them, much like FAA requires a problem in one 747 to be dealt with in every similar plane. (The paperwork for each 747, back when it was actual paper, weighed a significant fraction of the actual plane.)
In the US, these plants were considered buildings, and were designed (mostly in the 1960s and early 1970s) by architects (using components, but put together in different ways). So every facility is different. The architects generally weren't familiar in advance so had to learn while designing. As a result, many plants have things like pipes that go through a walkway at waist high, so the workers have to climb over or under it, and pipes that had to be re-routed on-site (often halting construction for a period of time) because they collided with another one in the design. (These were all designed before modern CAD systems had the capability to catch that.) And, because they are all different, a problem in one may or may not be found in any other, so there's no easy way to pro-actively fix problems that are found in one plant, because the design may not match in the correct way.
In an earlier job we were reviewing nuclear plant construction drawings with regard to the possibility of scanning them and generating CAD models. We found that the drawings in question were the worst engineering drawings we'd ever seen. They were essentially done without design rules, with multiple system layers all on one drawing - everything from concrete footers to electrical to plumbing all on one drawing, with pieces actually cut out and replaced by a redrawn section! I can't say that all plants were like this, but certainly this one was. It was unreadable by humans, much less computer scanners.
The plants we were working with also had radically different cleanliness standards - they are all run by independent companies, with different rules and traditions. One plant was so clean that the whole radon-in-houses problem was identified when a worker set off the radiation detectors going IN to the plant. The interior radiation level was maintained substantially lower than the ambient in the area - the place made 'hospital clean' look like a swamp. Others, based on what we heard, were more like that guy down the street with the cars in his yard.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
People have largely forgotten the 'killer fog' of London, 1952. The combination of an inversion, humidity and coal-fired home heaters made for a 'fog' (we now call smog) that killed IIRC 1200 people.
And coal dust explosions are infamous - they are a type of fuel-air explosion. I suppose that coal dust could be used anywhere that the combination diesel-ammonium nitrate explosives could be used. See also Minor Scale.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Photovoltaic can't produce base load, but solar thermal can. Several tons of liquid salt at 800 degrees can run a steam turbine all night long. It just doesn't scale down below the industrial scale, and solar power is currently used for smaller scale production almost exclusively.
Yes, I am very much pro nuclear. And that includes taking advantage of that giant thermonuclear furnace in the sky.
The article that you link to has quite a few shortcomings. Some of them are outlined here
The end-game of a majority of people putting solar on their homes is higher utility rates for everyone. Utilities buy back the electricity that the solar panels overproduce at a high price. The production from the solar panels is intermittent and so the utilities cannot rely on them. This creates even greater swing in the demand that utilities see, yet they still have to to be able to produce enough to cover everyone if the sun isn't shining.
Although the installed cost of solar may be less than the cost of nuclear, if we tried relying on solar we would find the the low capacity factor of solar, combined with the cost of grid storage would quickly move the price well beyond affordable.
That is already being done but it seems to be happening at such a slow pace. There have been plenty of coal plants put online at the same time. OK what should Hudson Bay do or New Jersey? I'm not saying you should build wind solar, etc. but it isn't enough and if global warming has to be dealt with swiftly I think a Nuclear power plant would be safer to more people than a coal fired one.
And another one comes online.
http://www.dom.com/about/stations/fossil/virginia-city-hybrid-energy-center.jsp
Well, as a steam turbine engineer, their plan for the turbine is borderline ridiculous.
The turbine system believed best suited for its operation is a triple-reheat closed-cycle helium turbine system, which should convert 50% of the reactor heat into electricity compared to today's steam cycle (~25% to 33%).
Firstly, triple reheat turbines are more efficient from a thermodynamic point of view. But nobody builds them because the increased complexity and cost just aren't worth it. Double-reheat steam turbines were relatively rare for coal turbines- only a handful were built and the design concept was abandoned, but they may be common on the nuclear side.
The next problem is using helium for the working fluid. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but the turbine would have to be enormous in order to work with helium. I'm talking so big that you need to install the blades on site because you can't move it by road or rail. This adds a huge amount of extra cost also- assuming you can find a material to make blades that long with. Currently the longest blades for steam turbines available are Titanium 52" or maybe 60" (for 50hz systems). A longer blade would probably require an even stronger material with the desired properties, which does not currently exist at anything approaching a reasonable price.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Most of these were originally designed under the AEC, before it was split into two groups, one of which was NRC. Prior to that promotion of nuclear power, bomb making and regulation were all under one umbrella. The conflict of interest - promoting vs. regulating - was the reason to split them up.
The machine vs. building issue was a world view thing. The French did it right, we did it wrong.
Also, when most of these reactors were designed, the AEC assumption was that a nuke plant would last 20-30 years, then we'd fill it with concrete and leave it for 10,000 years. Not very forward-thinking, but that was the plan. Then in the 1970s the utilities realized that since they couldn't keep building them, they'd actually have to maintain them. So for about 15 years they used a method based on day labor - bring in guys to work for two days and pay them a lot, they'd have a lifetime dose, and they could never work on a nuke again. By 1990 or thereabouts, that was no longer going to work - hence the need for a robotic system, for which my controller design was going to be used. I left the company toward the end of the fab process, but I believe that the system was in use for a number of years after that, and maybe still.
The interesting bit is that the water used in the steam generator cycle is so pure that it eats stainless steel. So the inches-thick SS tubes gradually get eaten away and have to be cut out and replaced, about every 20 years.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/