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Small, Modular Nuclear Reactors — the Future of Energy?
cylonlover writes "This year is a historic one for nuclear power, with the first reactors winning U.S. government approval for construction since 1978. Some have seen the green lighting of two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors to be built in Georgia as the start of a revival of nuclear power in the West, but this may be a false dawn because of the problems besetting conventional reactors. It may be that when a new boom in nuclear power comes, it won't be led by giant gigawatt installations, but by batteries of small modular reactors (SMRs) with very different principles from those of previous generations. However, while it's a technology of great diversity and potential, many obstacles stand in its path. This article takes an in-depth look at the many forms of SMRs, their advantages, and the challenges they must overcome."
Distributed power is how our grid should be set up. Also, being self-contained, these would allow us to put them closer to the actual users and cut transmission losses and costs. Why the hell aren't we doing it yet?
-SaNo
Mr. Fusion
Still not good enough. Where's my nuclear powered car already, damnit!
There are no economically viable nuclear plants without heavy taxpayer subsidies.
The original post implies that nuclear plants have been turned down for decades and now suddenly they aren't. This is bullshit.
Corporations are lining up for the gravy train of taxpayer dollars provided by the Cheney energy policy of 2005. Per-kilowatt subsidies, construction subsidies, reauthorization and extension of the Price-Anderson Act (which makes taxpayers liable for disasters), all negotiated in secret because taxpayers don't want their money spent that way.
Nuclear power is no different than TARP. It's corrupt politicians giving away taxpayer money to their rich cronies. People don't want it, don't need it, and it's not competitive with any other source of power economically.
Out of curiosity, what would be the regulatory hurdles if someone wanted to set up a thorium reactor for power generation? Since thorium can't make bombs, I can see how it would be easier. Since it hasn't been done in the US before I can see how it would be harder. Come to think of it, has anyone actually demonstrated thorium-based electrical power generation?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The future power plant is no power plant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ghhgUmGBjX8 (TEDx Talk). This is a must see.
Give me one of these and a desert island... run a desalination plant and turn it into a little paradise.
The future of energy is using less energy :
Few or no planes, smaller cars, local food, small houses, better insulation, less AC, less imported gadgets...
Mod me down all you want, but the future of energy surely isn't "business as usual"+some nukes in the basement.
The next reactors to be built widely will probably those that burn nuclear waste. That is, "partitioning and transmutation". It seems (although it doesn't say in that article) that you can burn nuclear waste in a way that produces excess energy. Since you need an accelerator to keep the reaction going, you have automatic shutdown in case of loss of mains power.
Both large and small reactors have their uses, but AFAIK the small ones are likely to be less efficient and produce more waste* per kWh. I applaud the renaissance of 'modern' reactor construction to help wean us off the petro-teat, but am sorely disappointed that we're still burning less than 1% of the available energy in our current nuclear fuel and calling the other 99% 'waste'. Integral fast reactors should be a part of (if not the future of) the world's energy production.
*Not necessarily waste from the fuel itself, but more incidental waste like cladding storage containers, contaminated clothing, etc.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
to our energy needs
The worst possible pollutant imaginable with no way to dispose of it. *That's* very "green".
Even without a study I'd say that stuff is safe in theory but often not in practice...
From the summary: "...It may be that when a new boom in nuclear power comes..."
...that's unfortunate phrasing.
"It may be that when a new boom in nuclear power comes"
Given Joe Public's irrational fear of a nuclear explosion, "boom" may not be the best word to use...
Use less energy and use it more efficiently.
Which unluckily is not what energy producers want.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
So, the NIMBY guys get to pay exorbitant power charges by buying excess power from neighbours, or get no electricity?
Could be a good idea
Until the first hurricane blows through and puts your island paradise under 20 feet of water...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
And it was posted on here.
A company had a small nuclear reactor, self-contained, the idea was pretty damn solid. Enough to power small towns.
What happened?
NRC killed it.
Go figure.
Too many little nukes around to regulate.
One of the selling point of electric cars is that they concentrate their pollution at a few large point sources. Sure, today they belch out coal byproducts. But as technology advances, we can monitor and retrofit a few large plants more quickly than having to hunt down the owner of every old beater car. These modular nukes are the logical equivalent of a fleet of cars. Eventually, they'll descend into beaterhood.
Have gnu, will travel.
For residential I like solar produced hydrogen powered mini-turbines. Individual or neighborhood sized units.
Alas I am not a physicist or an engineer.
"Waitress I need two more boat-drinks..."
The article mentions the word 'thorium', but it doesn't specifically mention thorium or breeder reactors.
Isn't thorium reactors considered for the future? are the development issues with it so great that it has been abandoned?
There doesn't seem to be a lot of information about this design yet but this TED talk makes the design look very promising.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAFWeIp8JT0
one of the things that irks me about the nuke debate is how much it hinges on how much it costs to build a nuclear plant, while for example germany spends 8 billion euros a year in direct moneys to solar producers, and god knows how much it spent on subsidizing the panel build, added infrastructure, elastic supply to get in when solar output falls, etc.
All of this money, and I quote, "Solar energy has gone from being the great white hope, to an impediment, to a reliable energy supply. Solar farm operators and homeowners with solar panels on their roofs collected more than €8 billion ($10.2 billion) in subsidies in 2011, but the electricity they generated made up only about 3 percent of the total power supply, and that at unpredictable times." To summarize: only in transfers, NOT in total subsidy costs, Germans each years are paying themselves, meaning some taxpayers are paying other taxpayers through electricity bills, the amount of money needed to build one of finland's new reactor from scratch, after cost overruns, and a simple neat multiplication by 2. Ain't life splendid?
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
But decentralization is going to be the real game-changer. The mark of a new era. One day there will be no "grid" and no "service". All energy will be produced locally (or shipped in some form we can't even imagine today). That's a little difficult for most slashdotters to grasp, and it probably won't happen in our lifetimes, but it will happen. It has to. Centralized energy is wasteful, expensive, dangerous, and (most importantly) politically exploitable (as any instance of centralization). Decentralized energy will eliminate all of those risks and make life easier and safer in so many ways.
Independence and decentralization cannot be exploited nearly as much as dependence and centralization, and that is preciesely why government continually pushes for dependence and centralization.
Energy differential is critical for efficiency, and smaller reactors may be far less efficient than large ones. We can heat water from room temperature into steam -- a difference of 100-200 degrees F -- and it will run a heat engine. However, reduce the difference in temperature to 50 degrees -- like you see between groundwater and an hot summer day in the US, and the heat engine won't run. We don't exploit geo-thermal for electricity generation because it's so inefficient that it's a net energy loss. The same applies for SMRs versus gigawatt generators, especially if the SMRs are running significantly cooler. A few gigawatt generators will have transmission line losses. But a large number for SMRs may be dramatically less efficient. Does anyone have numbers on this?
Nope. Two mistakes!
First, no approvals have been made because no proposals have been up for approval. Nuclear power isn't viable without government subsidies and there weren't any between 1980 and 2005, because the government in that time frame actually attempted to reflect the will of the taxpayers (oh, for such innocent times to come again!).
Second, the government doesn't actually do the approvals - the NRC does. The nuclear industry is regulated by the nuclear industry, effectively. The government is a couple steps away hiding behind some smoke and mirrors.
If the federal government now considers personal sailboats parked a mile offshore an untenable threat to national security ( ...what do you think the chances are that they would permit people to have their own nuclear reactor?
e.g., http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-g8-nato-boats-harbor-20120217,0,3473423.story )
Local battery storage is cost-ineffective for most small solar producers/ homeowners. If you don't aggressively manage your batteries they don't last worth a damn, and even if you do daily hygrometer checks etc. and get every last minute of life out of them, battery banks are unfortunately quite costly. I have an antique lead-acid electric tractor so I speak from experience!
But nickel iron batteries are back on the market - and despite their poor energy density, high mass & volume, and high cost they are still a great alternative for homeowners because they are so extremely robust. Market capitalism to the rescue? It's certainly a different approach than nuclear socialism, which is the model France and Scandinavia are on (and which the USA is attempting to emulate, only with our own special sauce of corporate profiteering liberally slathered over the top).
That's wrong. French nuclear power plants have load factors of only about 75% instead of the usual 90% precisely because they do follow loads. As for renewables: Germany has not increased its share of wind power generation. Installed capacity has increased by about 30% over the last 5 years, but amount of energy generated has not grown at all. That's because the electricity grid cannot transmit wind power from where it is generated (north and east) to where it is needed (south and west).
Biogas and bioethanol production did increase and means that Germany will import grain this year, because it is burning too much of its own production. Germany has been a grain exporter for over half a century. Biofuels and biogas are the main culprits for the vanishing supply of global grain markets and the hugely increased prices. (Some 85% - only about 15% can be attributed to speculation.) 10% of the world grain harvest in currently being burned for "sustainable energy", a receipt for sustained famines.
In a way, America currently has a distributed grid. We have LOADS of small 200 MW coal systems and a number of 400-600 MW nuke system all over the USA. In fact, most cities have at least one small coal type system somewhere close to its core (originally on the edge, but then built up around it).
A number of these will closed over the next 10-20 years and larger centralized coal, natural gas, and occasionally nuke power plants will replace these. The reason is because these old powerplants are from the 40s(coal) or from the 60s (nukes). Now, note that each and every single one of these locations are IDEAL. All of them have massive connections to the LOCAL grid. Likewise, they have cooling in place. Some have decent generators (though most do not). ALL of them have a lot of land around them esp. the nukes. So, what are these ideal for?
The nukes sites have stored 'waste' fuel. Instead of shutting these down, tearing down everything and then moving the waste to WIPP, it would actually be better to build a number of GE PRISM reactors on-site while JUST the old reactors are dismantled and shipped out. GE PRISM are the IFR reactors that use 'waste fuel'. Basically, other than part of their initial load of fuel, there would be no more shipping of fuel to the site for the next 100 years. Instead, you would add to these reactors with the local 'waste' fuel. Once done, that 'waste fuel' would be a fraction of the size and it would be dangerous for less than 200 years.
As to the coal facilities, these would also be useful. Either put in a thorium reactor, similar to Ft. St. Vrain's old generator, OR, consider putting in thermal storage. Now I have seen a number of comments against thermal storage backed up by natural gas boiler. It is correctly pointed out that you lose 50% of the efficiency. HOWEVER, this is a cheap cheap way to take older equipment, keep it running for another 30 years, while using it to provide a buffer for AE AND regular power. In addition, the energy that would be stored would be from AE that would normally be discard. For wind generators, they simply feather the blades rather than run them 100%. For Solar, they lose a large part just in resistance in the lines as it takes a bit of time for electric loads to come and go. IOW, such a thermal system would allow a company to build larger base-load plants while dumping all of the on-demand systems (read expensive to run). How to do the thermal system? Simple approach is just use silos of salts and heat it up via direct heating or even microwave. There are other more efficient systems being developed, but this would be inexpensive to install. In addition, other than waste heat, most of the pollution would be gone (save when you need to run natural gas to add electricity due to high loads for say AC or other site outages). As electric cars or other energy storage systems become available, these can be phased out.
Regardless, it would be criminal to lose this cheap opportunity to re-develop our energy matrix.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It may be that when a new boom in nuclear power comes,
Hope I'm far away when that happens.
The BP oil spill and Fukashima again prove that you can't repeal Murphy's Law. Nothing about these small reactors changes this.
I think any progress in nuclear power is probably a good thing for the environment and economy.
One of the diagrams in the article at gizmag shows a 30 mVA transformer to handle the output of the module. I guess you could light a few LEDs with that one!
The link you provided says the Toshiba design has not yet been built or approved - thus there are none in commercial production, right?
I said there are no commercial nuclear reactors that are not subsidized by taxpayer dollars. In the USA, sbusidies include the Price-Anderson act (which provides subsidized insurance) and the Cheney energy policy of 2005 (which provides per-kilowatt incentives and removes requirements for set-aside of decommissioning costs). Naturally, I got modded troll for speaking independently verifiable truths about a controversial topic.
Maybe it would be great if commercial nuclear fission were economically viable in the future, as your link suggests might be the case with Toshiba's product, but I'm talking about now.
Thanks for the link, though - it was very interesting!
What will the Nokia achieve with this new technology? Also, does this mean that if I let a small child play with batteries and a screwdriver, they won't have acid burns, they'll have radioactive isotopes on them... YAY
Small reactors are currently being developed for their modular nature (you can add more reactors at a given site) and the low power density improves safety due to the passive cool down in the case of a problem. I'm currently working on the codes and standard for these new designs and a lot of the backing is coming from private industry. The biggest backers are people like Conoco/Phillips, Dow Chemical, Eastman Chemical, etc. Electrical production is really a niche market on these designs and the big draw is the thermal heat. Current targets are for 550C outlet temperature with 750C targeted in the future. The goal is 950C but we still are working on the metals side for that.
We're just waiting on the government to make some decisions. The Industry Alliance has offered ~$3billion for production of the first plant. They are asking the government to pony up ~$1billion as a good faith offering that the testing and regulations will move forward to allow licensing.
Very interesting stuff...
They hav 75% load because they're down so often.
Why?
Rivers too low and water in the river too hot to cool the reactor. Boom tomorrow.
And, please, whilst you're whining about "where's the proof!!!" where's yours?
PS Nuclear gets around 60%, the 90%+ figures are for "when running". But it's so often out for maintenance (or error, see above) that you don't get to run them more than about 2/3 the time.
Google "DAWES" report.
Distribution fee covers the infrastructure costs. Ever seen a footage after a big storm with fallen trees, broken lines? Maintaining and repairing the lines is costly. It costs much more than power losses due to transmission over large distances. You would have to pay fees to cover infrastructure costs no matter if there were one power plant per 100,000 households or one per 100.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
The effort to fight NIMBY types and tree huggers is the same if your reactor generates 100W or 100GW. Thus even if you could get a small reactor for free the cost is still extreme.
Plus the type of customer who will buy one of these are the core customers of the power company. The power company can't afford to lose these customers. Thus they will block their use through regulations where only they can pass muster.
Funny, that article didn't use the words "terrorist", "untenable", or "national security" at all. It's only "the federal government" in that it's the Secret Service.
No. When slash-headline asks a question, the answer is always no.
Nah. It'll inevitably be ultracaps. Capacity is coming up steadily, and when they pass batteries, they'll be the tech to use. Why? Extremely long lifetime; extremely high charge and discharge rates; excellent environmental operating ranges; modular nature and ease of swapping components as they improve or require maintainance; relatively low cost (partially because of life expectancy, partially because they simply aren't that hard to make, at least so far.)
Right now, UC's are below battery storage capacities and all the hype is about batteries, but that's to be expected. I guarantee you that at some point, all else - pumped storage, molten salt, batteries, flywheels... will fall by the wayside. Ultracaps are the way storage should be done, period. The only issue is capacity, and that is rising steadily. It's coming. Inevitable.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Something which doesn't often get discussed, but which I learned about a couple years ago - a number of knowledgeable people have said that what really killed nuclear power in the United States was the Shoreham Power Plant.
This was a nuclear power plant built in Long Island, New York, for about $6 Bn. The plant passed certifications and inspections and was all ready to go into commercial operation. However, because of politics, the plant was never able to get the go ahead from the State of New York to operate. The governor, Mario Kuomo, basically vetoed an *already built* power plant.
As long as the laws are such that investors can't get reasonable assurance *before* they spend all the money to build the plant, that they will be definitely allowed to operate as long as the plant meets relevant technical standards, the *politics* of the situation make the plants not viable.
Without such political uncertainty, nuclear plants are, generally, good investements, economically. A nuclear plant (depending on how much power it produces), should produce more than enough power to pay for itself in the course of 60 years, if it's allowed to operate.
I can't wait to get my Mr. Fusion
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
You're describing previous generations of reactors. The new ones are more like a giant battery. They are sealed, self contained, and walk-away safe.
Walk Away safe is a pretty big claim for something that has never actually been built yet. (And no, Navy shipboard reactors don't count. Operation of those reactors is top secret, and they are way too small.)
At some level, the concept of "walk away safe" is just another example of The Arrogance of Engineers. There are just too many things assumed.
The real problem with this design is that it might actually be built in reasonably large numbers, installed in places that are less well planned, operated by your average mid-sized power company, guarded by Mall Cops, maintained by low-bidders, and inspected by bribe takers.
In short, this type of reactor has the ability to become far too ubiquitous before any of the inevitable problems are discovered after 10 years of operation.
One could say that they may be too successful, too quickly.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
nuclear power doesn't follow load unless you make it more expensive overall and put extra stress on the nuclear reactor (reducing its economic life).
Doing load-following nuclear doesn't put "extra stress on the reactor". It has fuck-all to do with the reactor itself. The load following is accomplished via appropriate design of the steam system. You are right that it is more expensive though.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
IMC = "In My Car!!!";
How cool would it be if you replaced the power pack in your car every 10-ish years? And if you could plug your car into your house/the grid...yeah...that's what I want.
We've got a ton of it.. It creates jobs, it's cheap. It's clean. Vote for it!!!
I disagree with multiple parts of the post above. Modders, please mod parent down.
Good grief, How many ways do I need to explain this so you can understand it? The tech to do this is NOT HERE TODAY, so you CAN'T ESTIMATE THE WEIGHT using today's tech.
These questions are currently unanswered: How many farads will ultracaps be at that point? What voltage will they allow at that point? How much will they weigh at that point? What volume will they occupy at that point?
Therefore, your numbers -- in fact, any attempt you make to to specifically quantify the issue in any way -- are complete nonsense. Got that?
In closing, I made a general statement, which I will paraphrase for you: WHEN (not if) ultracaps exceed battery capacity vs cost, THEN they will be the energy storage mechanism of choice. I further assert that this is almost a certainty, based on the fact that production ultracaps are improving in both cost and capacity quite rapidly, though they are STILL behind batteries at this time, and batteries are moving targets in terms of capacity as well.
UC cost, while higher up front, is not what it seems, because in the vast majority of cases (bad units and casualties of other hardware failures excepted) you won't have to replace them until several several human lifetimes have passed -- by which time, for comparison, you would have consumed many, many batteries in the same role. Furthermore, in many storage applications, the ultracap's ability to take -- and release -- charge thousands of times faster than batteries without wear or loss completely trumps battery tech anyway. So even if known, the volume and weight and dollar issues don't adequately reflect the actual "cost of batteries" vs. "cost of UC's." But -- as I said -- we don't know those numbers anyway, because the tech to meet my general notion isn't here yet.
Now, if you want to write a VALID counter to my post, explain why it is that you think ultracaps will never, or can never, get to the point IN THE FUTURE I indicated: Where they outperform batteries in storage applications. If you have such information, I'm interested. Otherwise, I'm not.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"At some level, the concept of "walk away safe" is just another example of The Arrogance of Engineers. There are just too many things assumed."
Plenty of unobtainium and handwavium are needed.... Just like in Space Nutter threads.
Lot of discussion here of NIMBY et. al. but this all misses the point. Thermal generation (what nukes are) becomes less efficient when shrunk down and their operation and maintenance costs go up (also a major problem at wind farms, too many machines). This is why microturbines never took off, and why thermal units will never work well for distributed generation.
Economies of scale got the price down. Mini-hydro from a small trickle works but you get a far smaller percentage of losses from Niagra Falls.
Getting back to the nuclear example - the entire advantage of nuclear is a vast temperature difference that you cannot get just by burning stuff (due to flame temperature limits) and if you want to take proper advantage of that you need to use a lot of steam to spin very large turbines so you get a smaller percentage of losses than with little ones. In practical thermal power stations that means not just one set of turbine blades but also turbine blades optimised for different steam pressures (eg. on a turbine shaft there may be blades for low pressure, medium pressure and high pressure with different inlets and outlets for each portion). If you have vast amounts of steam you can loop it around a few times until you've extracted a greater percentage of energy than with an equivalent number of smaller installations. That's why any nuclear installation that even pretends to be effective is huge. Since the end point is huge amounts of steam at the turbine that doesn't necessarily mean huge reactors - with pebble bed several small reactors feed a large turbine.
Anyway, due to there being a lower percentage of losses as things get larger the thermal technologies scale up so you do want enormous installations instead of distributed ones. Things like photovoltaics don't scale up, if you double the size you don't get more than double the energy, so there's not much of a disadvantage to distributing them. Wind power is in a similar situation because the unit sizes are small and they only need to be bunched together to make them simpler to maintain or to take advantage of a location.
So to sum up little nuclear plants distributed around can be compared directly to having a coal fed steam locomotive in every town instead of a huge central power plant somewhere.
Covering peaks complicates the issue (and makes small units of a variety of types cost effective in some circumstances), but for the general case lots of little units all over the place is a very bad idea. Somewhere between the two extremes is where things start to make sense.
Also, to address people other than the poster above, anyone that advocates "one true energy", no matter what it is, is either selling something or IMHO is a deluded fanboy that had been tricked by salesfolk. To put things frankly, without a mix of energy sources circumstances will arise where you are effectively screwed and it can take years to get out of the hole. In my case it was a coal fired power station that nearly ran out out of cooling water and it took nearly five years to get a pipeline to a more reliable supply, (only to have all of that water hijacked by irrigators who wanted the water for free and eventually got it for nearly nothing). There are a lot of places that are even running old aircraft engines to produce a few megawatts to cover peaks - at that scale even wind looks very good in comparison.
You're describing previous generations of reactors. The new ones are more like a giant battery. They are sealed, self contained, and walk-away safe.
Sorry, but you are describing either a sales brochure of something that has never been build yet or an RTG which is a completely different sort of technology and only useful at very small scales.
Meanwhile back in reality we still don't have an operating AP1000 yet which I suspect is a couple of generations behind what you are dreaming about. Don't confuse hopes with reality. That's the sort of counterproductive bullshit that has resulted in old tech being considered as being as good as the wet dreams of nuclear science fiction and resulted in very little progress towards the sort of device you are talking about.
So the devices you have been led to believe are almost ready to be available at Walmart are not actually real things yet. We need some actual research and some actual development before jumping in and buying whatever some slick lobbiest has spent the money that should have gone into R&D convincing a Senator to buy TMI painted green while meanwhile even South Africa has more advanced nuclear designs (pebble bed, of which the German and now Chinese designs are better again). Give it a few years and you may even be able to get something like you are talking about from India or from a startup using Los Alamos submarine reactor technology, but it's not real now.
So sorry, you can't blame the NIMBYs on this one and you do appear that you need to be "adequately informed"
In this case it is the arrogance of PR. The people in civilian nuclear research that were not 100% committed brainwashed fanboys were sacked remember? Those guys that dared to suggest smaller units or thorium would be better for safety reasons were kicked out because they dared to imply that current operating reactors were not the pinnacle of perfection.
I still find it astonishing that this little bit of PR from the "too cheap to meter" bullshit days is still stuck in peoples heads. There's wikipedia out there. Take a look and see how the fuel is really made. There's stuff deadlier than just about anything else on earth involved. Even oil is "cleaner" and no idiots are calling that stuff "clean". "Clean" is just PR bullshit if it's applied to any industrial and mining process or pretty well anything other than washing powder.
I've talked to several real experts in the nuclear industry over the years about a lot of interesting things but none of them would consider using "clean" to describe it. It's the sign of a "mark" that has been conned by a professional liar instead of anybody that knows anything at all about the subject.
Sorry kid, please just leave this one to people that have put in at least ten minutes into understanding the subject matter, we've heard enough mindless parrots.
There's plenty of countries without the strict rules and politics you are blaming. If it's such a good idea economically then why are all plants built with some sort of government financial assistance? Once you can answer that question you'll see why comments such as yours above are treated with scorn - "number of knowledgeable people" indeed. Please take off the tinfoil hat.
Nuclear reactors become more efficient as they become larger. More power per fuel input, as the capture rate is higher with more moderator.
Expressed conversely, smaller reactors are less efficiently.
we do not mode people down because we disagree, we mod them down because the are trolls flamers or people like you who would mod people down for disagreeing instead of writing well a reply and arguing your point logically
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Conventional nuclear reactors are those cooled and moderated with water and using solid fuel. They are a crappy, dead-end technology that needs to be abandoned, in favour of just about every other way possible of harnessing nuclear energy.
Seriously, they are the "alpha" prototype technology. As the first engineered system, they have taught us enough to know that the *right* way of doing things is utterly different.
They're a "throw away design". Continuing to persist with them is utterly idiotic. These will *always* be dangerous. Only fast-breeder metal cooled reactors are worse. (even less conditional stability, needs much more fuel to start, and hence, bigger mess if control is lost).
The only reason they're still being used, is because financial managers don't understand what they're choosing to fund. They see "experimental" as a damning uncertainty risk - "rather the devil you know" they think, and pour more money and resources into this dead end.
This old design has taught us much, but we need to close the book on it. Hell, the original designer of them did his best to argue that they shouldn't be used anymore - and he did this and was ignored decades ago!
The *right* way, is a graphite moderated, liquid state fuel, thermal breeder running from Thorium.
Unconditional stability, high efficiency, extremely low fuel requirements, able to run without any water whatsoever (air cooled - can be run in a desert), generates far less waste, is cheaper to build and operate, so much so that it can be cheaper energy source than fossil fuels. Also, is sustainable: enough fuel on this planet for many thousands of years, and more available from all about our solar system.
This is known as LFTR - Liquid Fuelled Thorium Reactor.
It's roughly a hundred times better than the "conventional" design, in every way it can be looked at, bar one: It's no good for making weapons material.
Google it. Youtube it. Let your friends know.
Icebike wrote :- concept of "walk away safe" is just another example of The Arrogance of Engineers
I am a nuclear engineer and would never make such a claim about anything, let alone a nuclear power plant, nor would any of the guys I have ever worked with. If you know such an engineer then he does not deserve to be called one.
In fact it is easy to make the mistake that someone talking about a subject (energy, medicine, economics) is a practising professional in that topic when in fact they are more likely to be just a professional spokesman or joirnalist.
Anyway, why should a "small modular" unit, whatever that is, be safer or more reliable than a large one? Better to concentrate the power generation where there are experts, emergency services and facilities close to hand as part of the site, and at the same time not close to urban areas. For example the nuclear power stations I have worked with have all had a large reservoir of back-up cooling water on site - where would that fit in with a local urban generator?
And just who is going to keep an eye on these numerous "walk away" local generators? The neighbourhood street cleaner? The mayor? The local plod? Neighbourhood watch? You're kidding.
OK, I'm all for it. Really.
But I want reactors which would only leak elements with a very weak half-life should a SNAFU happen.
Because SNAFUs shall inevitably happen. And the last thing you want when something like Fukushima happens is elements decaying so slowly that they've got a half-life of 90 years or so.
So give me a reactor which provably, should the worse of the worse happen (because it shall inevitably happen), only leak elements that have an half-life of 8 days or so.
Is this possible?
That's wrong. French nuclear power plants have load factors of only about 75% instead of the usual 90% precisely because they do follow loads. As for renewables: Germany has not increased its share of wind power generation. Installed capacity has increased by about 30% over the last 5 years, but amount of energy generated has not grown at all. That's because the electricity grid cannot transmit wind power from where it is generated (north and east) to where it is needed (south and west).
Biogas and bioethanol production did increase and means that Germany will import grain this year, because it is burning too much of its own production. Germany has been a grain exporter for over half a century. Biofuels and biogas are the main culprits for the vanishing supply of global grain markets and the hugely increased prices. (Some 85% - only about 15% can be attributed to speculation.) 10% of the world grain harvest in currently being burned for "sustainable energy", a receipt for sustained famines.
B^llsh!t.
There is plenty of capacity for feeding everyone. The problem isn't grain or grain prices. It's geo political.
It's ignorance. It's this myth you are pushing here removing focus from the actual agents responsible for the problem.
Synroc Wasteform (updated web : July 2010)
SYNROC is a suite of technologies providing effective and durable means of immobilising various forms of high-level radioactive wastes for disposal.
It is basically a ceramic made from several natural minerals, incorporating all of the elements present in high level radioactive waste.
Recent developments are of specialised forms to immobilise plutonium, and of composite glass-ceramic wasteforms.
SYNROC is a particular kind of “Synthetic Rock”, invented in 1978 by the late Professor Ted RINGWOOD of the Australian National University. It has since diversified but generally speaking is an advanced ceramic comprising geochemically stable natural titanate minerals which have immobilised uranium and thorium for billions of years. These can incorporate into their crystal structures nearly all of the elements present in high-level radioactive waste (HLW) and so immobilise them. Originally some 57% of SYNROC was titanium dioxide (rutile, TiO2).
SYNROC can take various forms depending on its specific use and can be tailored to immobilise particular components in the HLW. The original form, SYNROC-C*, was intended mainly for the immobilisation of liquid HLW arising from the reprocessing of light water reactor fuel. However, by 1980 those reprocessing used fuel had chosen borosilicate glass as the medium for immobilisation because it was the most technically mature technology.
* The main minerals in SYNROC-C are hollandite (BaAl2Ti6O16), zirconolite (CaZrTi2O7) and perovskite (CaTiO3). Zirconolite and perovskite are the major hosts for long-lived actinides such as plutonium (Pu), though perovskite is principally for strontium (Sr) and barium (Ba). Hollandite principally immobilises caesium (Cs), along with potassium (K), rubidium (Rb) and barium. Synroc-C can hold up to 30% HLW by weight.
Over the past few years, different forms of SYNROC have been developed to deal with military radioactive wastes, including a substantial amount of plutonium. Other applications have been developed related to the partitioning and transmutation of wastes. This involves partitioning HLW into separate components, some of which can then be transmuted, or changed, into different forms which are less radioactive or shorter-lived (usually by neutron bombardment in a reactor or accelerator). Those which are not suitable for transmutation can then be immobilised in SYNROC, since the hot isostatic pressing (HIP) involved copes with volatile radionuclides (such as Tc & Cs) and eliminates off-gases in a one-step process.
The waste form is the key component of the immobilization process, as it determines both waste loading (concentration), which directly impacts cost (due to volume reduction), as well as the chemical durability, which determines environmental risk (especially in relation to highly mobile and long-lived I, Tc & Cs). SYNROC is also thermally robust and can incorporate high concentrations of caesium and strontium, with high radiogenic heat output. Other advantages claimed relative to vitrification are greater processing flexibility with elimination of off-gas emissions. To achieve maximum cost savings and optimum performance the SYNROC waste forms are tailored to suit the particular characteristics of nuclear waste to be immobilised rather than adopting a single one-size fits all approach.
Background
Early research and development on SYNROC and its properties was carried out at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) Research Laboratories at Lucas Heights, NSW, and at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. From the early 1980s funding was provided by the Australian Government. A pilot plant to manufacture SYNROC using only non-radioactive material was designed and constructed at Lucas Heights. SYNROC became the flagship of an ANSTO program which has now broadened into other wasteforms and ma
There are pious canons that Green Warriors take as unquestionable dogma, in regard to Nuclear Energy. Firstly, nuclear opponents state that nuclear energy is “... more expensive than conventional or alternative power sources...” Fortunately, in The Age, 28/04/2005, there appears an article by Lesley KEMENY containing favourable quantitative costings of nuclear power versus other sources – including waste disposal & decommissioning, see http://www.theage.com.au/news/Opinion/Going-nuclear-its-the-new-green/2005/04/27/1114462096097.html The companion opinion article on 28/04/05, by Peter GARRETT, was starkly revealed as only that - unjustified opinion. Secondly it is asserted that there are no adequate technologies “... in place to safely quarantine radioactive waste ...”
This is abysmal luddite ignorance, and for better information, one should now consult the ABC news article on-line at: http://www.abc.net.au/ news/newsitems/200504/sl 346616.htm
Also see: http://velocity.ansto.gov.au/velocity/ans0008/article_03.asp.
These internet articles report on 25-year old Australian SYNROC technology, invented by Ted RINGWOOD, which more than matches any safety requirement for disposing nuclear waste. This technology can store the entire world’s current annual nuclear waste in a small 20metre cube, unharvestable by terrorists, buried underneath any stable Australian geology, (a mere nothing) for eons. A portable or permanent SYNROC plant set beside every reactor can immobiise its waste into a deep rock-steady mass, avoiding the necessity to transport any unstable waste overland or water.
Thirdly, there is raised the spectre of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. These were mainly political disasters, not so much as technical ones. The Luddites of this world should remember that - “The cure for BAD technology is not NO technology, but BETTER technology”. No one is going back to living in caves as some kind of halcyon rebirth! Even greenies need electricity and computers and transport to distribute their views. Yes, recyclable energy is environmentally attractive, but it can’t be developed quickly enough to cure the crises which confront our energy hungry populations. Only nuclear technology can get there in time, and one better nuclear technology is the High Temperature Gas Reactor (HTGR), which can be explored at: http://www.iaea.org/inis/aws/htgr/topics/article 04.html This reactor is intrinsically stable, and cannot “go critical” - any loss of moderator gas just causes the nuclear fires to snuff out like a candle.
Fourthly, in terms of “the risk of terrorists attacking reactors”, such reactors can be buried deep underground, to minimise nuclear leakage from any militant attack. Though one notes that every kind of above ground power plant is equally vulnerable to attack, it is granted that radio-active isotopes need special protection against dispersal.
Fifthly, other letter writers have expressed concern about “Nuclear Mining” – a separate topic to nuclear energy to be sure – but not so distant that it can’t be solved in one further paragraph. The concern is about Australia shipping Uranium ore to countries with poor supervisory & management schemes which might allow U238 to be diverted into a weapons program.
Solution? Don’t ship the U238, refined or not, but ship the energy it represents. We know Northern Australia has abundant ore bodies of Uranium and Aluminium. So build the nuclear reactor(s) close to the Uranium ore deposits (reduced transit risks), bring the Aluminium bauxite to the reactor (which outputs abundant electricity), and smelt the bauxite into pure Alumium metal, now b
Operation of those reactors is top secret, and they are way too small.
The reactors this story are about are much smaller than the smallest Navy reactor. Think about the average shed in Home Depot, then consider it going underground 3 stories. That's it. It is passive safe, if there is a problem, it just shuts down as it is subcritical. There are no control rods, as none are needed. The only way for a leak to happen would be something puncturing 6" of steel, and with it being underground, not on the surface, that is not an issue.
Please poke holes in this all you like, I would love to see your informed opinion now that your uninformed opinion has been pointed out invalid to you.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?