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MIT Designs Tsunami Proof Floating Nuclear Reactor
First time accepted submitter Amtrak (2430376) writes "MIT has created designs for a nuclear plant that would avoid the downfall of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The new design calls for the nuclear plant to be placed on a floating platform modeled after the platforms used for offshore oil drilling. A floating platform several miles offshore, moored in about 100 meters of water, would be unaffected by the motions of a tsunami; earthquakes would have no direct effect at all. Meanwhile, the biggest issue that faces most nuclear plants under emergency conditions — overheating and potential meltdown, as happened at Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island — would be virtually impossible at sea."
Convince the career politicians.
Step 3. Convince the tax payers.
There is no step 4.
They power nuclear subs, nuclear icebreakers etc. Stick a transformer on it and connect it to the grid, Bingo, floating nuclear power plant.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
It's perfect! Unsinkable? Unthinkable!
No Homer will ever be allowed, and all the regulators will be objective and unbowed!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Now they need to worry about torpedoes
Compare the relative frequency of major hurricanes/typhoons to that of major earthquakes. Add to that the various potential problems that any floating structure has (springing a leak and sinking comes to mind here).
Then, consider that in Japan, the nuclear plant closest to the quake epicentre actually survived unscathed. Because the people designing it did not stick with the minimum legal specs for the seawall height like the geniuses at Fukushima had, but did some research on their own. And simply made the seawall much higher.
Conventional plants are not that bad, if they are designed by competent people. If you put them on barges, though, as these dudes are proposing, you are just adding to the potential failure modes, while not avoiding any that are impossible to handle. Not a good thing.
then a huge rogue wave hits it. aw shiiiiiiiiiiit
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
While it might be moored out at sea, it would have to be built in a much different way to avoid the possible dangers from a hurricane tipping it over or making it unstable.
Of course, it might save a couple hundred square miles of land from being contaminated - but contaminating thousands of square miles of ocean doesn't seem preferable to me.
Just spitballing here. Feel free to flame away and tell me all the reasons why this can't ever be made to work. IANANE.
Or, instead of spouting off in ignorance, you could read the article.
"Meanwhile, the biggest issue that faces most nuclear plants under emergency conditions â" overheating and potential meltdown, as happened at Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island â" would be virtually impossible at sea, Buongiorno says: âoeItâ(TM)s very close to the ocean, which is essentially an infinite heat sink, so itâ(TM)s possible to do cooling passively, with no intervention. The reactor containment itself is essentially underwater.â
Just take Ocean ranger and add reactor...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Not in my back ocean!
Russia is already constructing floating nuclear power stations.
You missed it. Reprocessing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We could stop wasting the fuel you call waste, and using it completely instead. What we do now is like bringing in oil, burning off the diesel and ignoring the gasoline, kerosene, and all the other fuels it contains.
http://www.nei.org/Issues-Poli...
On the other hand, thorium reactors are even more efficient, and the leftover is nearly inert.
Really, Mr Bond?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
It was said that it's impossible for land based Nuclear reactors to melt down, so "virtually impossible" can't be impossible enough.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
with modern design.
What about the issue of getting the electricity to shore.
Remember, when these reactors were design. plate tectonics was new.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When it comes to nuclear power, we can't afford to think in terms of probability. We have to think in terms of possibility. There will always be unacceptable consequences to the catastrophic failure of a nuclear power generating facility, so we're faced with a balancing act. I believe the added dangers outweigh the added benefits.
didn't we just spend half a year trying to deal with with a broken oil platform?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
DH was a failure of a blowout prevention device. This essentially BLASTED the rig off the well, which continued to spew oil.
You're not going to have that sort of problem with a reactor.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...then you face a whole new risk profile. Storms, collisions with ships, corrosion due to the salt water. Fire is a greater danger in a platform environment. Crewing the platform is a greater challenge. If the platform is a floating moored structure then yes, it's essentially earthquake-proof. If however it uses a rigid seabed platform then this is not true. And it's my understanding that most shallow water oil rigs use the rigid stand design.
Of course you can design for this and the risks made acceptable. I'm just saying that it's not as simple as "floating reactor, all the problems go away!"
Perhaps, but the design is still somewhat myopic. It solves one problem but leaves open others. The world's oceans for instance, make for the one of the best conveyors of leaked radioactive material. To my view at least they would also be far more prone to weather related disasters even if they weren't as affected by seismic events--though I'm not really sure how they're an improvement with respect to Tsunami and rogue waves.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
It's called "reprocessing".
"Spent" nuclear fuel can be reused many, many MANY times if it is reprocessed properly.
At that point, spent fuel "waste" becomes a non-issue.
Except that it's not been done. When Dixie Lee Ray was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission he proclaimed that the disposal of nuclear fuel would be “the greatest non-problem in history” and would be accomplished by 1985, yet here we are almost thirty years past that date and still there is no High level waste disposal site anywhere. The closest anyone has come is the Swiss and even there project is a multi-decade test project and extremely expensive.
As for burner reactor technology, such as IFR, there are no materials technologies to support a plutonium economy.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Simply being at sea doesn't prevent the cooling problem. Remember, Fukushima was right on the ocean. The problem is that the cooling system has to have at least two loops. An internal loop of coolant (usually water, though salt has also been used) actually travels inside the reactor. Consequently it picks up some residual radioactivity from being exposed to all those neutrons flying around. You cannot just use this single loop for cooling, or else you're releasing this radioactive coolant into the environment.
A second external loop of coolant cools the internal loop via a heat exchanger. This external loop picks up nowhere near as much radioactivity, and the coolant (water) is safe to dump back into the environment.
If it were just one loop, you could come up with a clever design using thermal expansion to make the water flow through it to provide passive cooling in the event of a pump failure. But with two loops (and the inner loop being closed), you're pretty much reliant on active pumping to remove heat from the reactor core. The problem at Fukushima was that power to these pumps failed, and backup generators designed specifically to supply power in that scenario were flooded and their fuel source contaminated.
I don't see how putting the plant on a floating platform helps in this scenario, unless you're willing to open up the primary cooling loop to the environment and just dump water straight into the reactor (with the resulting steam carrying both heat and radioactivity out). Which was pretty much what they ended up doing at Fukushima. If they'd done it before the cladding on the fuel rods melted, we'd only be dealing with a small amount of radioactive water (deuterium, tritium, etc) being released into the environment as steam, instead of fission byproducts being directly released. So I don't see how being by vs on the ocean makes any difference for this scenario.
Maybe you could design the steel containment sphere to act as a heat sink, allowing sufficient cooling when submerged? But the containment's primary job is to contain what happens inside. That's why it's a sphere - it encloses the largest volume for the least amount of material and surface area, and its mechanical behavior under stress are very easy to predict. This is precisely the opposite of what you want from a heat sink. You want the most surface area for a given enclosed volume. Which makes me suspect that the steel containment could only operate as a heat sink if you're willing to compromise its protective strength somewhat.
The other problem I see is that putting it out at sea hinders accessibility. Meaning more mundane events like a fire, which are trivial to handle on land, become much more problematic at sea.
I'm just picturing what happens when you mix the best parts of Deepwater Horizon with the best parts of Fukushima... It doesn't conjure a great image. This would definitely face an uphill PR battle, at the very least.
Everything I need to know about energy logistics I learned from Sim City 2000.
You put the plants / reactors away from the city, out in the water, so that pollution doesn't bother folks and if there's an explosion, nothing else catches on fire. The cost of maintaining the power lines is far less than additional rebuilding costs after a disaster strikes and the plant blows. I guess next they'll discover it's fucking egregiously foolish to zone schools and residential next to industrial plants. In this case, they didn't even need a sim, they could just read a history book.
In the news Somali Pirates have hijacked a nuclear reactor...
Considering how badly infested stationary ocean objects can become with various types of sea life, and how much maintenance it takes to keep a small sailboat from corroding and suffering general mechanical failures due to both of the above, I wonder at the amount of maintenance required to keep one of these in operation.
What could possibly go wrong?
http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/24/...
Rat-infested nuclear Cherynobyl.
So what about Tsunamis? What if a giant rock or snowball from outerspace hits it at upwards of 17000 miles per hour?
Better not worry too much, just chill out to some smooth, rolling basslines from the 1970s, man.
I think it's going ro be a long, long time...
Stick Men
Objects floating in the ocean are EXPOSED, they are easily damaged by weather, can be attacked easily, are hard to secure, and VERY expensive to operate.
On top of all this the article is silly. Nobody at MIT has 'designed' a reactor, they just made a proposal that is barely more than just saying "build it on an oil rig!" with a few pictures. They talk about reactors anywhere from 50MW up to 1000MW which means basically "Gosh, you could float almost any nuclear reactor!". However it is not AT ALL clear that a 1,000 MW reactor would be made safe by passive seawater cooling in the event of say the whole thing sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Consider the effects of Fukushima COMBINED with the McCondo well blow-out... Its not a pretty picture to imagine a meltdown in 100 meters of water not too far offshore. Yes, the ocean would probably make this less totally disasterous than on land, but it might also be IMPOSSIBLE to quell or clean up. Statements on the lines of "it must be safe in the ocean" are exactly what goeth before a fall in engineering.
Anyway, it will seriously have to be studied, though I suspect others have done so already. As they said, the Russians have been working on this concept for years. That's one of the interesting things about it though, working on it for years, but where's the beef? Its probably not quite so easy as it sounds.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
How do the Strontium and Cesium go away with reprocessing? Maybe processing removes some useful and some harmless stuff from your waste stash and so you're slightly better off, but I fail to see where the issue of hazardous nuclear waste is actually dealt with.
In fact it's not even clear that reprocessing spent fuel is useful. You get more energy out of fuel, but the fuel is cheap and plentiful (and you need little of it). I'm glad that France is doing it, but just because maybe having that capacity and experience may be useful some day if we can transmute harmful elements by throwing fast neutrons at them or something.
Assume a large spherical radioactive cow...
Table-ized A.I.
The bigger problem is that ALL REACTORS ARE RUN BY HUMANS and the track record for their response to major disasters is not great. Sometimes people do the right thing, in fact most of the time, but many opportunities exist for disaster, and a statistically significant amount of the time responses fail. Furthermore there will always be greedy and unmotivated operators cutting costs like TEPCO. I have no reason to believe that Entergy for instance (a major US operator of nuclear power plants) is any better than TEPCO, or regulated any better either. Is it thus not just a matter of time before we have Fukushima in the US? Probably. Its not clear that building a whole bunch of AP1000's or MSRs or whatever will materially improve that situation. It will just create greater complacency resulting in even worse preparedness. Its inherent in the system.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Like, say, placing the emergency generators on the hills right next to it, nothing bad would have happened. Of if they had spend the extra $100.000 that would have cost for hydrogen valves, the buildings would not have exploded.
The problem is not that nuclear cannot be made safe. The problem is that the people doing nuclear cannot make it safe. And as these are also the people doing waste storage, this will remain a serious issue for the next, say, 1 million years or so. The combination of greed and stupidity found in nuclear planners is absolutely staggering.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) design (state of the art 1986) shuts down safely in the event of a sudden, complete power failure. It uses nuclear waste as fuel, reprocessing until there is orders of magnitude less long life nuclear waste than with a light water reactor, the design they propose to float. IFR is an inherently safer design that largely solves our nuclear waste problem. Why are we dreaming of ways to build more light water reactors?
I actually like the concept a lot. But I agree that there is some potential for fallout here:
Having a replacement for Fukushima is one thing, but a world of these going wrong could be a real problem. A majority of the world's oxygen comes from phytoplankton in the ocean: killing them in mass via radioactive leaks might actually create a credible climate disaster.
Not likely that all of the world's reactors would start spilling simultaneously, but the only thing about this that gives me pause. Otherwise, this is a really great idea.
And it is still a non-issue. When it is 30 years later and you can still store it on-site then it is not a lot of waste. Compare that to any other energy source, the amount of toxic waste, even solar panel manufacturing and you have your answer.
Have gnu, will travel.
Reprocessing has not been done because Peanuthead declared it to be illegal. Meanwhile there is no rush to reprocess because new fuels is so cheap from bot mined supply and recycled from Cold War weapons through the Megatons to Megawatts program. While we wait for reprocessing to get cheaper and fuel to get more expensive, there's storage at Yucca Mountain, which is finished and waiting to be opened.
Reprocessing and breeding are dirty and VERY VERY EXPENSIVE technologies. They will never compete with mining natural uranium out of the ground until most of that uranium is gone, at which point only if we have a LOT of reactors will it even then be worth it. Sadly by that point we will have HAD to get rid of most of the waste we could reprocess since it will simply be insane to keep that much of it around on the off chance we decide to do it. What this means is that ironically it will never be cost-effective to reprocess fuel at any time, now or in the future. The only way would be a massive up front expenditure of money and the result would only be nuclear power that is 2x more expensive than it already is, not much of a bargain.
Thorium may well work, but the problem is we're a good long ways from building the type of reactor that we can put it in and burn all the fuel down (just using it in existing LWRs doesn't provide much benefit). Even with massive funding these reactors won't really come on line for 30 years, maybe more like 40 realistically. That puts them out to 2048-2058 time frame. Even LWRs like AP1000 won't be online for 10 years. Its not even clear they will be competitive with SOLAR by then, and they lose to wind NOW.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
"would be virtually impossible at sea."
Ah, use of those famous last words I see......
Howso?
Unlike DH, a floating reactor has no hard-line connection to the sea floor that can be snapped the way the well head was.
It's basically soft anchored and just using subsurface water as a monster heatsink.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Right, it hasn't been done because a bunch of environmentalist morons have forestalled any reasonable measures of fuel reprocessing by invoking the "proliferation" boogeyman.
Yeah. Disposal is a non-starter. And should never have been pursued the way it was. Why? Because NOBODY wants that stuff in their back yard. They don't care HOW safe it is.
But, again, the dueling environmental agendas have basically left the fuel with no place to go. So it basically sits in containment casks out in back parking lots and the like.
As for "a plutonium economy". Why would it have to be solely plutonium? IFRs will burn plutonium, Uranium, Thorium and other fuels equally well. So you're burning stuff down until it's only going to be "hot" for a couple hundred years, rather than tens of thousands. And more, fully "spent" wastes burned in earlier generations of reactor can actually be used as fuel in later generations.
So we get rid of weapons-grade materials, and burn it down into something far far safer. And we get a buttload of power out of it at the same time.
How the hell isn't that a Win-Win-Win scenario?
Oh yeah, because no matter what, some idiot bridgae is going to equate nuclear power with "it's a bomb".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
That's just it. Yucca Mountain was never finished and will never be opened.
It was a pork project and a boondoggle from the word go.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Of course it happened, which is why BP will be chosen to head up this project.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
You're assuming that no Republican will ever be elected again and that Harry Reid will live forever?
Another option to not run out of water is to just have the thing downhill from a large permanent lake.
Putting something out at sea and sacrificing containment for the sake of reliable cooling water seems to be ignoring that there is more than one possible mode of failure. It also means that the thing can never be mothballed but instead needs to be actively dismantled at the end of it's life - not a trivial task when there would be a great deal of radiation involved in many parts being demolished.
However what this thing DOES have going for it is a small reactor size which brings it in from being an utterly stupid suggestion to something that may just work if as much care is taken as is with the small military reactors - which probably removes it from commercial consideration without a few "shortcuts". IMHO the same small reactors on land with reliable cooling water are a far more sane idea.
They're leaving. And have thanked us for all the fish.
One of the biggest expenses I hear about when someone is building a new nuclear reactor is the zillion lawsuits that spring up. I imagine a fair amount of these could be avoided if the physical structure was built in a different country from the one adding the fissile material. Or, even in the same country, people would be less likely to try to stop construction because if it's a good reactor and people stopped you from using it, you could probably sell it to someone else who is willing to use it. I imagine whoever works the kinks out of the reliable floating reactor construction process could have a nice ongoing construction business.
There was enough money involved to attract management with plenty of political skill to get the good jobs but no background on what they are attempting to manage. That has led to a cycle of needing a unmistakable disaster with each generation of management or they forget their responsibilities. TMI was the perfect one since it was an obvious fuckup with little consequence, but it was too long ago for anyone other than engineers, technicians and other non-horse judges to take seriously. Chenobyl gets written off as "those crazy commies". The most recent chain of stupidity is unfortunately being written off as entirely due to the tsunami and the similarities to US reactors and US industry practices are being ignored.
As for waste storage - any mention of it was seen as being some sort of traitorous move against the nuclear industry, which is why the Synroc I saw in 1987 didn't get the funding and approval to be properly tested until a couple of years ago. Waste storage has been so badly managed that there have been incidents such as one where some idiots put enough drums of high level waste together to get something similar to the Chicago atomic pile.
Who told you that lie? Several reactors have suffered a melt down / loss of primary containment event where fuel slumped to the bottom of the pressure vessel and burned through. TMI is an example of such an event. This was always a possibility in Generation II PWR and BWR designs. It's one of the reasons we need to be building Generation III+ replacements.
Don't forget the white cat.
With 2 tails, just to mess with the environmentalists.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Subs are designed to sink.
Its part of their mission.
There was a british nuclear sub involved in the search for MH370
I don't know if its still on the case, given that no more pings have been heard, and they expect the batteries of the black boxes to have run out by now. A nuclear attack sub has good passive sonar, great for detecting other sound, but not useful at looking at the ocean bottom for wreakage.
Rouge waves, typhoons, collisions with tankers, vulnerability to warships, aircraft, submarines.
But hey. It's cool that a tsunami won't screw it up.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Chernobyl would not have been prevented by putting the reactor in water. It was the only accident which had a "nuclear power excursion" as the reason. TMI and Fukushima were a failure of the classical cooling.
In Chernobyl the operators ignored the normal precautions. They operated the fuel in a state where xenon (see http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g...) was present. Due to this the system was far away from the assumed stable oprtion point assumed in the controls.
The power which you would have needed to dissipate at the event to cool the reactor would have been ong the order of 200GW. Normal heat transfer coefficients are on the order of 10s of KW/m^2/K if i assume that you allow 200K difference on the surface, you end up at an active cooling surface of 100000m^2, which just is not there, not even if you drop the reactor into water.
So you prefer certain atmosphere and aquifer contamination to a little bit of radioactivity. I suggest you document yourself on nuclear waste storage and fly ash storage. The first is a fear-driven, over regulated and technologically advanced process (see Areva), the latter is the kind of self contamination garbage humanity has been doing for centuries.
How do the Strontium and Cesium go away with reprocessing?
10 seconds of your time would have taken you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... where you would have discovered that methods have been devised to separate them out and thus in large part detoxify the remaining waste (given that we should already be recovering the other useful elements).
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Back in the 1970s, General Electric created a company called Offshore Power Systems that was intended to build floating nuclear plants. I knew some of the people who worked there.
No such plants were ever built, though, and OPS is long gone.
Well, hindsight is 20/20. Can you can guarantee that the design of the next reactor using smart and cautious engineers won't blow up or cause damage? No! There's also the problem of dumping nuclear waste. I think the harm caused by coal is less than that caused by a nuclear reactor incident and the risk of maintaining a reactor is totally not worth it.
Really? You actually prefer this: http://www.google.com/images?q=coal+ash
Over this? http://www.google.com/images?q=dry+cask
All of the spent fuel ever generated by a nuclear plant for 30+ years, inertly stored in an area smaller than the parking lot.
Using seawater in the secondary cooling loop makes maintaining the cooling system a nightmare because seawater's rather corrosive.
And it is still a non-issue. When it is 30 years later and you can still store it on-site then it is not a lot of waste. Compare that to any other energy source, the amount of toxic waste, even solar panel manufacturing and you have your answer.
Fukushima highlights the consequences of on-site storage and the difficulty faced in securing the fuel rods when an accident has occured. It's only a non-issue if you don't understand the impact. The main issue faced is a plutonium fire starting in Unit 4 storage pool, holding 1500 fuel rods, spreading to the nearby containment facility that holds another 6000 fuel rods.
Such a fire will render the U.S "virtually" uninhabitable.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"Man marks the earth with ruin; his control Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain The wrecks are all thy deed," We are still kidding ourselves if we think we can control the sea
It's all about blimps nowadays. Both Google and SpaceX are racing to complete their prototypes
"My atomic zeppelins high above in the mesosphere, beyond the reach of storms and artillery, will beam both free energy and internet connectivity directly into the homes of a grateful populace below. And once the masses has abandoned their carbon fuels and cable service, greedily suckling at our teat for both knowledge and energy, they will be completely under our domination, and then nothing - nothing - will stand in our way!" - Sergey Brin interview, The Economist, 18 Jan 2014, p. 42
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Since you value lazyness here's what's written there :
"Nuclear reprocessing reduces the volume of high-level waste, but by itself does not reduce radioactivity or heat generation and therefore does not eliminate the need for a geological waste repository."
But indeed there's that "UNEX" processing and other stuff though they seem to be about studies and such, not a proven and high scale mature process.
It's actually because it doesn't attract investors like wind and solar do. Wall street thinks its a bad investment as nuclear power needs regulatory constructs such as the Price-Aderson act because its insurance impacts are so high.
Except that the law (IIRC the 2005 Energy Policy Act) specifically *excludes* ratepayers from having a say in where a Nuclear facility is built.
How so? What evidence do you have for such a statement? Yucca mountain is geologically unstable and fails the DOE's original specification for a spent fuel containment facility. So how are environmentalists responsible for this?
Because materials technology do not exist to produce an IFR that avoids the inevitable cost of decommisioning. Don't get me wrong IFR is a great concept, but it has a long way to go before becoming a reality.
By the way, the Thorium fuel cycle's waste product is Thallium 238 which is also a very nasty material.
That is incorrect. You don't burn it into something safe, you burn it into something far more deadly but shorter lived. So instead of 25,000 years for pu-239 it would be more like sr-90 for 600 years.
Not much difference in terms of a human lifespan.
It is, it's also SyFy.
Last time I checked Nuclear reactors wern't powered with alfalfa sprouts and hamsters, so it's only idiotic if you are attempting to delude yourself.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Is this an innovative new design or a solution to a problem that has already happened?
"Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the f-ing Peace Corps." - John 'Bluto' Blutarsky
Really? You think the public will accept the idea of putting nuclear power plants directly on/in the ocean?
Uh, no way in heck. Could be the best engineering and design in the world, not going to happen untile our collective human backs are against the wall facing a calamity that only this idea can solve.
Besides, there is no problem with well designed land-based nuclear power plants ... only with poorly designed ones. So the solution to that is obvious.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Can't put nuke plants in the ocean ... threatens to many colorful pretty things like coral, 'free willy' whales, and 'Flipper'.
No the solution is BLIMP MOUNTED NUKE PLANTS. 100% immune to the effects of earthquakes and tsunamis. And we can reclaim the land for useful things like corn fields and stuff. And the air is cold up there, so cooling is easy, right? And if there's a problem, cut the cord and they drift off safely in to space.
Remember you heard it here first, so that's like a patent or something.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I don't value lazyness, I just pointed out that you were too lazy to perform a 10 second search. Piqued by my comment you then took a few seconds to read the wiki article. Bravo! It's the first step that's the hardest. Now dig deeper!
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
> Reprocessing has not been done because Peanuthead declared it to be illegal
That's right, because we all know all politicians are idiots who make snap decisions that can't possibly be correct. In fact, Carter stopped re-processing for very good reasons, after listening to advice from some of the smartest people on the planet. You might not agree with the decision, but saying it was his, and then simply saying that was bad because it was his, is precisely the sort of BS argument that has to be expunged from these debates as rapidly and strongly as possible.
India exploded a nuclear bomb in 1974. They said they were doing it to use nuclear weapons for large construction processes, which they said was within the terms of their agreement with Canada about the peaceful use of nuclear technology. That December the specific wording of the agreement was changed so that no nuclear explosives were allowed, even "peaceful" ones. Canada then withdrew all support and flew all their engineers home.
Much of the CIRUS effort had been supported by the US, and they were very much aware that their hands were dirty in this affair. This led to an extensive series of studies on the potential fuel flows and routes to weaponized material. The US had tested a "reactor grade" weapon, which worked fine, and spent considerable time examining the reprocessing cycles. This led to the clear conclusion that reprocessing is a very real proliferation risk. And I should point out this was not under Carter, but Johnson.
So then, that left the US in the position of either deploying reprocessing and demanding no one else do it, or not doing it themselves. That one was a simple and obvious answer. The fact that it hasn't been taken up since isn't Carter's fault, it's not like that law is part of the constitution. If there was any real support for it, it would happen. But there isn't. There's even less support for reprocessing than there is for new reactors, and they aren't exactly popping up all over the place.
Fine but I'm helpless now, cannot buy linked articles at 34 euros a piece and remember the warning from Wikipedia that the article was low quality.
in an ocean, what could go wrong? Except maybe typhoons, rogue waves and terrorists....
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
And there is a good solution for storage, but the allies of the fossil fuel industry have combined with the anti nuclear folks to block Yucca mountain from opening. Bury the nuclear waste deep in the earth, because that is where it came from in the first place.
It is very sad for the thousands of people that lost their homes because of radiation around Fukushima. But compare that evacuation to the effects of the earthquake and tsunami itself, which claimed the lives of 15,885 people and injured 6,148 with 2623 people still missing, the response to the radiation leak is just one after effect of the tsunami, but it hasn't caused any deaths.
As for "Such a fire will render the U.S "virtually" uninhabitable.".... a hundred nuclear weapons were detonated on the US mainland as part of above ground nuclear weapons tests. While I think that was incredibly stupid and irresponsible and there have certainly been health effects and increased cancer deaths in the decades afterwards, the radiation leaks at nuclear power plants pale in comparison to the radiation released by those above ground tests and as far as I can tell the US is still inhabitable.
If there was any real support for it, it would happen
I disagree. Most people don't even know that nuclear "waste" isn't actually waste. People became fearful of nuclear because of the waste. And if nuclear is awful and dangerous and produces waste, why spend R&D efforts on it? US policy neutered the industry. People stopped getting degrees in it. No R&D dollars ever went into reprocessing. So now, we look back and go "oh, we should not have done that" but it is too late. There are no technicians to work on it, no R&D budget, and nobody can seriously propose it without being beaten out of office by the anti-nuclear lobby.
It is not about not having disasters. It is about having them with acceptable low probability and acceptable amortized cost. The nuclear industry has failed spectacularly at that.
The stance "nothing bad must ever happen" is only advocated by people that failed "risk management 101", i.e. people that are really clueless.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Emergency cooling was available at Fukushima. The lack of pumps early on was widely publicised but actually they had emergency vehicles with pumps on-site that were working just fine. They would have been enough to avert the meltdowns and explosions, but due to damage to the plant and a critical valve being in the wrong position most of the water the pumped in was diverted to storage tanks.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
As I suspected; you hadn't missed it, you just ignored it because it conflicts with your world view.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Have you paused to consider that this inability of yours to research useful information by yourself, other than through the kindness of strangers here on /. is part of the problem? Your google-foo is deficient & you visibly lack access and/or ambition to use the resources known as libraries. Try working on these points and knowledge & wisdom will come in time.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that the Yucca Mountain's geology is inappropriate to contain nuclear waste.
Specifically the Yucca mountain failed to meet the criteria for the DOE's original policy using the 'Defense in Depth' approach to the specification for building a spent fuel containment facility. The reason to choose that specific geology (in addition to being stable) was also to have the geologic chemistry of the rock able to mitigate the effect of ground water traveling through the facility and carrying radioactive isotopes into the water table. The half lives of the actinides would be dependent on the reactor and I've heard of figures around 600 years but it would also have to contain the daughter products before they were inert. So they would be shorter lived but also much more radioactive placing an even greater emphasis on having the geology mitigate the ground water migration to contain the isotopes.
The CSIRO found that this geology should be granite, Yucca mountian is pumice. There is also the fact that the area is geologically unstable, where the original specificaion is looking for somewhere that would be stable for 500,000 years, IIRC.
I haven't heard about any evidence about the lobby groups you are refering to, however if you can refer me to something specific I will gladly check it out.
Absolutely, specifically in a granite mountain would be good. The Swiss have a world leading project
I get it that a lot of people don't understand how bio-accumulation occurs in the environment and how long it takes for cancer to gestate. You only have to look to Chernobyl to understand that the consequences of a Nuclear accident is very long, slow and permanent.
What we have learned is that it took about 6-8 years for the consequences to begin manifesting in children as Thyroid cancer. The funding was cut on this vital research work so not data is being collected anymore to understand what the impact is.
It's more reasonable to say "there is no data being collected to establish how many deaths have been caused at Chernobyl". We can only hope that the science is being done this time around.
First of all, I'm talking about radioactive isotopes, not about the radiation that they emit.
Second, a nuclear weapon may contain 1 kilo of pu-239. I think there was about 50 tests, but lets double that and call it an even 100kilos of pu-239, which was also converted to a lot of energy all at once and spread over the country.
A single core of a GE Mk1 reactor is roughly 150 tons. 4 reactors x 50 tons every 10 years for 40 years makes about 800 tons of transuranic material, but let's be conservative and say half that, is about 40 times the amount of raw material of all all the testing over the entire country country, just not converted into energy all at once like the tests.
A micro gram of pu-239 is a fatal dose [oppenhiemer] causing leukemia and lung cancer and whilst not all of them will be ingested the sheer volume of ma
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Coal kills at least thousands, most probably hundreds of thousands, every year. If we had a Deepwater Horizon, an Exxon Valdez, a Chernobyl, and a Fukushima every year, the harm from all other types of power generation would still not be as great as the harm that coal does.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I fail to see the chain of reasoning here. So we didn't reprocess because we feared proliferation? Then how would our not reprocessing have any effect on the decision of India, et. al. to reprocess for themselves? The Cold War was still in effect at the time of Carter's decision, and since India at the time was aligned with the Soviet bloc, our huffing and puffing about a worldwide ban on reprocessing would probably have spurred any effort by India to reprocess, rather than stopping it.
In any case, proliferation is the weakest of all arguments against reprocessing. Carter could have very reasonably have used the argument that reprocessing was expensive and unnecessary at the time (as it still is) due to the low cost of fresh fuel, and that we would be better off storing the spent fuel for a generation or two until better, cheaper reprocessing tech gets here. Carter's decision to not reprocess was an obvious cave-in to the luddite lobby, which in the absence of any roadmap to reprocessing can claim that "nuclear waste is forever" if we have to store spent fuel until it decays by itself millions of years from now. Hence thosee silly schemes for inventing apocalyptic runes for marking "nuclear waste" so that our distant descendants will remember what it is. What they are not telling us, of course, is that all those years of decaying radioactivity represent the waste of innumerable gigawatts of energy that we could be using in our own century, given eventual reprocessing.
Now that the possibility of anthropogenic warming has become an issue, Carter's decision looks even worse than it did then. Even the left admits that if their worst fears about carbon are verified, humanity may prefer going nuclear to going caveman.