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Waste Management: The Critical Element For Nuclear Energy Expansion
Lasrick (2629253) writes "As part of a roundtable on the risks of developing nuclear power in developing countries, Harvard's Yun Zhou explores the reprocessing of spent fuel. Zhou points out that no country in the world has come up with a permanent solution to nuclear waste in either of its two forms: the spent fuel that emerges directly from reactor cores and the high-level radioactive waste that results when spent fuel is reprocessed. Zhou points out that China and France have just announced a joint effort to establish a reprocessing plant, but that option isn't really practical for the developing world."
Nuclear plants might be safer/cleaner than coal and all, but when they fail (and they always seem to, due to people attempting to cut costs and corners) it leaves areas of land unusable to us humans. Not just a little unusable either. It does it for such a long time that it might as well be considered permanent. Solar, Water, Wind are all completely renewable sources of energy that upon failure...don't destroy the ecosystem around it.
About a decade or so ago I recall reading an article that suggested cutting a hole into the earths surface where it's thinnest and dropping the stuff directly into the magma. At that point it would just be a matter of building a good air seal to keep any remaining toxic or radioactive gasses from escaping.
Throw it into the Sun, maybe? - Zoidberg
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"no country in the world has come up with a political solution to nuclear waste" FTFY
The technology is relatively simple. But then so are the opponents.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
We spent billions on that facility and it can store most waste (including spent fuel) for 1000's of years. Use it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_Oxide_Reprocessing_Plant
It's not nuclear waste, it's unprocessed spent nuclear fuel.
The plants had some place to ship it once in casks. The prospect of the local NPP becoming a waste storage site would of course cause screaming and yelling, even though that is exactly what they already are, but less safe. West Texas seems gung ho about it, now accepting "temporarily" the Los Alamos stuff that was headed to WIPP for now.
There's really no comparison. Hydroelectric killed 280,000 people at Banquai. (Or was it 180,000?). Nuclear power has killed dozens of people in 50 years. Coal? Ever heard of Black Lung? Nuclear has proven to be orders of magnitude safer than any other option for bulk power.
Solar can provide about 5% of our energy needs, but for the vast majority of our power, we can choose between oil, coal, natural gas, or nuclear. Of the options that can provide significant power, nuclear is by far the safest option, by a very large margin.
I've already posted this below but just to repeat it so this 5% nonsense doesn't gain any more traction...
I'm afraid you underestimate the staggering power of the grand daddy of all nuclear power plants, the one that rises and sets each day. Covering some tiny percentage of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara for example, approximately the size of Wales, would supply Europe's baseload, and that's with relatively inefficient PV cells.
http://www.dailytech.com/EU+Of...
A huge first step, which some world-famous environmentalists are now taking, is to clear up the political problem by cutting out the BS, deliberately misleading people. For decades, Greenpeace went around telling people how dangerous some nuclear waste is, as and how some of it lasts for thousands of years. Now the fouunder of Greenpeace explaining that the claim was a bunch of BS. More people need to follow his lead and start telling the truth.
For anyone unfamiliar with the Big Lie, radioactive materials radiate energy at different rates. Just like combustible materials, some go fast and some release energy very slowly. The lie about long-term waste is effectively the same as saying:
Some conmbustible materials shoot out large amounts of heat and burning pieces, so they are dangerous (see gunpowder). Some combustible materials burn for a long time (see candles).
The key fact they tried to oobscure is that the really dangerous stuff is dangerous BECAUSE it releases its energy quickly, just like burning gunpowder. Give it a few years to "burn up" (decay) and it becomes perfectly safe.
The stuff that lasts a long time, that releases energy slowly, is no danger - you'd need to sit next to it for 500 years for it to have time to release significant radiation. On top of that, the long-lived stuff tends to be alpha radiation. Alpha particles are stopped by air, paper, skin, and most other materials. As long as you don't swallow it, you're fine - your skin provides adequate protection.
Solar power people are as deluded as the religious zealots they hate so much. Ever looked up what it takes to produce a solar cell? The amount of silver? The mining of the silver is so destructive that solar power is one of the worst forms of energy for the environment. Coals worst of course. Nuclear is almost totally nurtral. The few accidents we've had with it have been on 40yr old 1st generation reactors, all of them. Modern reactors can't fail. We, unfortunately, don't build any of them however. Because people like you drag your misinformed hippy mother earth religion into the frey. I'm sick of it, if solar worked my roof would be covered with solar cells and I'd be getting rich of selling it to all my neighbors. What do I get instead? A $30,000, very ugly roof so I can save $30 a month on my electric bill. It's THAT GOD DAMNED OBVIOUS.
it's well established that Germany is covering over 25% of their energy demands with wind & solar. They're planning to nearly double this within 10 years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...
That's the wrong Yun Zhou. The Yun Zhou who wrote this article has a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering.
What I'm getting from your article is that theoretical technologies, combined with outsourcing power production to a geo-politically hostile region, combined with dubious power transmission, could supply Europe's baseload (note: read your own article, it was focusing on parabolic dish collectors, not PV cells).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Research Interests: Gender; sexuality and feminist theories; inequality and stratification; comparative sociology; quantitative methodology.
Those types go nuclear all the time . . . with little or no activation energy required.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Sociology professor Yun Zhou can't figure out what to do with nuclear waste. Maybe she should contact someone in the physics department.
or we could just do away with centralised power production.and distribution and go back to mant more,small,local generators. er,am i going to be the first to mention small thorium reactors? a cluster round high level dumps could help.get rid of that problem,while others could be getting rid of low/mid level waste thst is ok to transport safely. we use most power localy,it makes more sense to produce power localy than it does to centralise. small nuclear power stations are much cheaper to build,dont need to be sited right next to sea/lake and could feed waste direct to thorium reactors nearby,helping solve two problems at once.
Modern reactors can't fail.
This. Right here. This is the attitude that makes so many people distrustful of nuclear proponents.
I know you said we don't actually build "modern" reactors, but ANY design of reactor can fail, because people run them, boards that demand profit oversee management, and sometimes people fly airplanes into buildings.
Nothing theoretical about them. The geopolitics is an issue but it shouldn't be in places like the US. HVDC lines have been built and work great, and are being built in many places around the world.
Bottom line boys and girls, we're drowning in energy whether shining from on high or blown in by the wind.
Yeah, covering thousands of square miles with solar panels would provide a significant amount of power - from 11AM to 2PM. For the other 21 hours per day, the choices are coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear.
You do far more harm to your cause than the good you're trying to do when you mistakenly or purposefully misrepresent its capabilities. Solar is a good way to supplement primary power sources, in some situations. In a few cases, like a cabin in the wilderness, it makes sense as a primary power source. If you sell solar on its actual capabilities, it can reduce fossil fuel use by 5%. That's significant. That's something to try to accomplish.
When you post bull about solar replacing natural gas, about powering cities primarily from solar, most readers know you're full of it and they see another example of either a solar loony or a solar scammer. BILLIONS have been lost to solar scams and Obama's "solar" slush fund. You guys have a SERIOUS credibility problem right now and the way to solve that is to pitch solar's benefits while frankly acknowledging its limitations. Blowing smoke, pretending those limitations don't exist, just puts solar in the same category as snake oil.
So a SINGLE person in the Senate has caused the waste of billions of dollars and left nuclear waste all over the country instead of using the money already collected to store it safely?
So he basically embezzeled billions, lied to the people, put them at risk, and its the OTHER party against the little guy?
I'm afraid the author of that article got the facts grossly wrong, in a couple of different ways. DOE has a wealth of statistics in easily readable reports you can look at. Bottom line, by tripling the cost of electricity, Germany now gets about 3% of their energy from solar.
The author confused ENERGY with ELECTRICITY, and confused GOALS with RESULTS. Germany tried to reduce electric usage (via huge surcharges) and increase solar usage (via huge subsidies) so that solar would be a larger percentage of electricity. They could have just turned off all of the non-solar electric plants to get 100% solar electric (but a huge electricity shortage). That's essentially the same as what they did, but they were a little less extreme. Their goal was 25% of ELECTRICITY would be solar. To do that, you've got to dramatically reduce electric usage - no electric cars, for sure.
So........have you even finished reading your own article yet?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So because you don't like the answer but can't be bothered to pull out any proof...a nice personal attack. Bravo.
Photoelectric isn't there yet. Might not be in my lifetime.
But solar thermal? A black pipe and a mirrored trench? Works for anyone, developed or otherwise. No, it's not cheaper than the price of natural gas today, but no rush. No, you can't really do it at home scale, but as an inexhaustible low-tech power generation solution to fall back on? It's got us covered.
Personally, I think fossil fuels will be fine for the 50-100 years that fusion is still 20 years away, but just in case I'm wrong, the fallback plan of solar thermal just isn't that bad. (And while a magic battery would be nice, molten salt works OK, as does plants that are natural gas backed when needed to take up the slack.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I think he meant, new reactor designs do not fail catastrophically. The built in *PASSIVE* safety of these new designs would mean it take a deliberate act (sabotage) to cause a reactor to fail in a way that involves the release of radioactive materials.
You can't put fail and sabotage together and say the reactor is unsafe. *ANYTHING* is unsafe if it's sabotaged correctly.
comets have killed 0 people in the last 50 years... With nuclear the probability for a serious accident is non zero, and the stakes are much higher than coal for instance.
it can and should be done, but let's not whitewash the risks here. it's sufficiently risky that perhaps it should be done on a government level, and letting private companies cut corners on safety and inspections isn't in our best interest.
I'm very much pro-nuclear and pro-reprocessing -- but i don't think that it's wise to say that because nothing serious has happened yet, means that something serious won't happen at all.
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/Special/AIB_Final_WIPP_Rad_Release_Phase1_04_22_2014.pdf
So where should we put all this waste?
yes go away
If you're going to reference black lung and damn failures, you should really reference similar things in the nuclear industry. How many people have died from mining uranium? And yes the Navajo are people so should be counted. Unluckily it is hard to count as they usually die later from cancer and such and the government and especially private industry don't want to admit that radon exposure kills as well that Uranium causes heavy metal poisoning.. Then we can get to accidents such as Church Rock, killed one hell of a lot of cattle and sheep and the kids were playing in the same water but they weren't white so why care.
You don't do your argument much good if you downplay nuclear to make it seem perfectly safe when it isn't and stating that much of the mining was for weapons doesn't change that in the future it may well be for energy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Do you think that mining uranium is safe? Radon exposure, heavy metal poisoning, then there are the acids etc that are used. Don't be misled by the people who claim that nuclear is perfectly safe without mentioning accidents such as Church Rock as if someone is lying, why believe anything they say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The process has major advantages. It uses an inherently safe reactor design and is net energy positive.
Don't understand why there is only on place on earth where this is seriously investigated and scaled up.
Church Rock mine? Are you kidding?
Coal mining: 500,000 victims of black lung
Hydroelectric: 300,000+ killed
Church Rock and all other uranium mining: 0. Maybe a cow.
Yeah, the uranium sure as heck looks like the safest option to me.
I'm afraid you underestimate the staggering power of the grand daddy of all nuclear power plants
You know who doesn't underestimate that power? All of the birds dying at California solar plants.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> With nuclear the probability for a serious accident is non zero, and the stakes are much higher than coal for instance.
Higher than coal, you day. Let's compare coal. There have been about 500,000 casualties from black lung, and the indirect, environmental damage is incalculable. Compare to about 200 people from nuclear power. Right now there are 600 nuclear power plants operating, and we've had nuclear power for about 50 years, so we have a good basis of comparison. Nuclear is, by the numbers, at least 2,000 times safer than coal.
Are there risks with everything? Of course! Nuclear has risks. Modern designs don't have the catastrophic risks of 1950s designs, but of course there are risks. We need power, though, so we need to look at the safEST options. Nothing is perfectly safe - taking a shower kills a lot of people. Of the available options, nuclear is safER than anything else that can produce the gigawatts of stable, reliable power that we need.
Solar, Water, Wind are all completely renewable sources of energy that upon failure...don't destroy the ecosystem around it.
Friend, please take a look at my mini-essay Electricity in the Time of Cholera.
We're talking about 7 billion people here. We all want access to clean water, sanitation, washing machines and electric lights. Half of the women in the world today wash clothes by hand. In rural areas 7 of 8 Africans, half of all South Asians, in total an estimated 1.5 billion people lack access to electricity.
What is the combined ecological impact of 1.5 billion rural people living without hope of electrification? They're burning charcoal, inviting short-sighted development practices. Embracing coal mining. Speaking of the United States, if we had not embarked on a massive endeavor to electrify rural areas in the 20th century a large area of our South and Midwest would still be without clean drinking water.
Never mind Water unless you live next to an un-dammed river whose inhabitants would love to be swallowed by a lake, and some powerful distant city has plans for the water, too. Will Solar and Wind deliver electricity to these people... or to anyone? Every time I see a windmill I imagine it as it will look like in 5 years, rusted and frozen. This is farming country, there are quite a few around and none are spinning, guess the cost of operation caught up. Every time I see a photo of a solar panel and hear talk of how it's made of common sand and we should be replicating them by the billions I think of the megatons of silicon tetrachloride that need to be dumped somewhere for this to happen. And the little elves who would wire them together out in the elements with ten pounds of electronics to make megawatts. During the day. And for watt? No real watts to speak of. NO ONE can afford PV and Wind because it will NOT run a water treatment plant for your local school let alone millions of people 24/7. Period. They are simply 'off the table'.
Nuclear energy -- even from water reactors as it has been produced in North America and Europe -- is the cleanest, safest viable form of energy on the table. But with the Molten Salt Reactor we have the opportunity to take it to greater levels, without the risks of nuclear energy that are most terrifying. Electricity is a centralized industrial-scale process and must stay that way. The math does not work otherwise.
If we do not revitalize our grid get or on track with an acceptable new source of base load energy that could transform the world, end the age of steam and fossil fuel... we could lose it all, you know.
___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Your smoking something. Unless of course you're talking about a "power plant" that only operated from 11AM to 1PM. In some places, solar IS a nice supplement during those hours.
Absolutely. If people gave a shit about the environment they'd use and promote solar thermal, which actually works. It can be as simple as an exterior water tank painted black, so it preheats the water before it enters the natural gas water heater.
Becauseit's simple and actually works, it's less fun to talk about than perpetual motion, aliens, Nikola Tesla, and magical solar panels that work at night.
i'm not against nuclear, at all.
Would you like to build your house in such a place, 500 years after the last dump of nuclear waste?
Transatomic Power is a startup from MIT that has a design for a new type of nuclear power plant that "burns" nuclear waste (spent fuel rods) and consumes over 90% of the available energy in the rods. These reactors are molten salt-based so their failure modes are safe (basically they cool down and solidify), and they could generate enough electricity to power the whole world for decades simply from existing stocks of toxic nuclear waste.
I would dearly love to see these reactors built.
haha! served.
It was 171,000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure). The problem in this discussion is seeing energy only in large-scale production. One large source for one large city may be logical, but given the current state of the art, it would certainly be far safer and cheaper if each building or neighbourhood had its own power source rather than relying on nuclear, oil or coal. The technology for small-scale production already exists and will almost certainly get more efficient with time. They are the future, not an energy source that either pollutes an already polluted atmosphere or a source that can unleash widespread destruction.
~_~ Not tonight, dear, I have a modem.
Why not stick to the traditional methods? put the depleted uranium into munitions and fire it at Muslims
Please tell me you didn't just claim "OMG TERRORISM" as a reason to abandon a source of power. That is just delusional. If anything what nuclear has told us that with multiple reactor meltdowns having caused but a handful of deaths around the world it's one of the least likely terrorism targets around.
Now what we really should be doing is outfitting every hydroelectric dam with frigging lasers. Those things are deadly if the terrorist get their hands on it, or the x-men start waging a war inside them.
I don't need to be mislead. The data published is in the form of deaths per terra-watt-hours generated. Taking into account mining nuclear is MUCH safer as you can generate a crapload more power from a smaller mining operation.
I really hate the one sided propaganda the greenies spout about nuclear mining. In Australia they took a whole brigade of people into the bush and showed them the wonders of nature, then they took them to a uranium mine and said "Nuclear bad mkay!" No one mentioned that you could close 6 similarly sized coal mines if nuclear generation was used instead.
You want to talk Church Rock? Why don't you count all the uranium mine spills, deaths, fires, and other disasters that have ever happened in uranium mining and I'm willing to bet you can find the same figure for Coal mining except quoted as per annum.
Is this what the world is coming to? Yeah Yun Zhou from the Department of Sociology comes up as the first result, but Yun Zhou from the Belferd Centre of Science is the second result. You couldn't read 1/8th of the way down the page?
You can list all the safety statistics you like but when planes crash (and they always seem to, due to people attempting to cut costs and corners) it kills hundreds of people. In comparison: cars are almost never responsible for hundreds of deaths.
Risk is harm*probability. Now consider the maximum harm caused by sabotaging, say, a 1 GW nuclear plant, a 1 GW coal/NG plant, or a few thousand wind turbines. Except for the first option, you won't come up with a mode of sabotage that will take a few decades to clean up the resulting mess.
Yes, I know, "totally infeasible due to launch costs". However, this uses the premise of current launch system and that the waste actually has to be in solid/liquid form.
Has anyone considered building an ion accelerator and shoot the waste into space as a stream of ions? The energy necessary for the waste to disappear into space would be a couple of magnitude below scientific particle accelerators. The only large obstacle is earths atmosphere.
Solar power people are as deluded as the religious zealots they hate so much. Ever looked up what it takes to produce a solar cell? The amount of silver? The mining of the silver is so destructive that solar power is one of the worst forms of energy for the environment. Coals worst of course. Nuclear is almost totally nurtral. The few accidents we've had with it have been on 40yr old 1st generation reactors, all of them. Modern reactors can't fail. We, unfortunately, don't build any of them however. Because people like you drag your misinformed hippy mother earth religion into the frey. I'm sick of it, if solar worked my roof would be covered with solar cells and I'd be getting rich of selling it to all my neighbors. What do I get instead? A $30,000, very ugly roof so I can save $30 a month on my electric bill. It's THAT GOD DAMNED OBVIOUS.
I want some of the drugs you're taking. Even if we built a "perfect" nuclear plant - and we don't bother to build "perfect" anything elses, the PHB's would staff them with Homer Simpsons, just like we outsource critical technology projects to whatever not-entirely-friendly country happens to provide the cheapest labor.
And what's silver mining got to do with solar? Silver is not only one of the more expensive electrical materials, it oxidizes. Safer/cheaper conductors can be employed and generally are.
As for your expensive, ugly house, well I too would never buy an automobile. Nasty foul things that have to be manually cranked and steered by an awkward tiller. Give me a good old fashioned horse-drawn buggy any day! (you, circa 1890).
> Solar power people
I've never met anyone that's solar powered.
> Ever looked up what it takes to produce a solar cell?
Yes.
> The amount of silver?
Is tiny. There's about 10 billion ounces mined every year, of which about 100 million is used in cells. What is used in cells is easily recycled.
> Nuclear is almost totally nurtral
Glad to hear it.
> Because people like you drag your misinformed hippy mother earth religion
I think it has a lot more to do with the overnight costs and the fact that we're still mired in what he UK calls "the credit crunch".
But posts like this, from the "deluded [snip] religious zealots", is one of the other big problems for the nuclear industry. They've been overpromising and underdelivering for 50 years. The costs of the plants on an inflation-adjusted basis has gone up about 6 times since the 1960s, which has decimated the LCoE in spite of excellent capacity factors. And that's about that. Do you think Morgan Stanley cares about the hippies? They don't. All they care about is the ROI, and that's where nuclear has fallen flat.
> if solar worked my roof would be covered with solar cells
Well let's see
1) where do you live
2) what are the dimensions of the part of your roof that's "the most south pointing".
I'll be happy to run the numbers for you at that point, or you can do it yourself following these basic instructions:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/grid-parity-in-ontario/
> Photoelectric isn't there yet. Might not be in my lifetime.
Isn't where? It's reach parity for about half the planet, and the other half's maybe 5 years out.
> But solar thermal? A black pipe and a mirrored trench? Works for anyone
For very specific roles. Unlike PV, solar thermal is effectively a heat engine, and therefore is dependant on the energy difference between the input and the output (sink). In the case of concentrators, this means they only really work in bright direct sunlight. So if they're in the desert they are very competitive, but anywhere else they have serious problems with capacity factors.
No, you can't really do it at home scale.
You most certainly can, for hot water purposes. It doesn't outright replace other power sources, but it does drive down energy usage significantly during times when there is enough sunlight.
but that option isn't really practical for the developing world.
This is why we have the IAEA.
> You couldn't read 1/8th of the way down the page?
Looking over my own stats on Google Webmaster Tools "no".
When the waste spent fuel rods pool on the upper floors of the collapsing core melted 3rd reactor at Fukushima finally succumbs to the brittleness induced by heavy radiation, the resultant release of cesium 235 through contact with oxygen will depopulate Japan and likely much of the pacific coast, or any other areas the atmospheric and ocean currents take the plume.
So much for radioactive waste disposal as there will be no one left alive to dispose of it. Since the technology to begin dealing with Fukushima will not be available for another half a century it makes you wonder about the total cumulative levels of exposure (there is no save level) and how intelligent the design and use of radioactive materials by apes really is ; )
"The costs of the plants on an inflation-adjusted basis has gone up about 6 times since the 1960s"
But that's your fault, isn't it? (Nothing personal, I mean anti-nuke people) You've piled on really killer regulations, and that's on purpose, intended to kill nuclear. Good job btw. I mean, the price of steel and concrete has not gone up that much.
It is disingenuous for the opponents of nuclear to pile on the costs, and then cite high cost as a reason that nuclear is no good.
The built in *PASSIVE* safety of these new designs would mean it take a deliberate act (sabotage) to cause a reactor to fail in a way that involves the release of radioactive materials.
Not true. The passive designs don't need electricity to begin emergency cooling after shut-down, but that doesn't mean they can't fail. For a start the amount of water available is limited, and more needs to be pumped in at some stage. Fukushima had pumping equipment on site and working (fire engines) but due to a valve being in the wrong position most of the water ended up in run-off tanks instead of the reactor cooling systems. Passive safety does nothing to prevent that kind of mistake happening again.
There is also the issue of damage to the passive cooling system itself. Again, at Fukushima and some other plants the earthquake damaged the plumbing, and it is conceivable that other events like an aircraft strike or military attack could cause similar failures. There is only so much lateral force pipework can take before joints start to fail.
Passive safety systems only address one of the issues, which wasn't even the critical issue that caused Fukushima to be such a major disaster.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If you are going to include the failure of a dam built primarily for purposes other than providing electricity, and for which the hydroelectric system had nothing to do with the actual failure, then we should include deaths from atom bombs in the figures for nuclear. I don't do either because it's ridiculous.
Most cars have a stereo. Generally we don't attribute RTA deaths to FM radio though.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Sure, I already have some radioactive stuff glowing under my bed, and I put that there on purpose. I also put something that is radioactive, emitting alpha particles, in my baby's room. I know it's safe because the smoke detector is more than 2cm from the kid, and the radioactive part has a bit of plastic over the front.
Of course, if one were concerned, you could measure the levels to make sure it is just plutonium - that there is no uranium mixed in from another reactor or something.
For a start the amount of water available is limited, and more needs to be pumped in at some stage.
You're still thinking of old designs. LFTR reactors, like all Molten Salt Reactors, do not require ANY water as a primary or secondary coolant, and can be built anywhere, not just near a river or other large source of water (when the secondary heat exchanger feeds a gas turbine).
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The 25year old windmills around my hometown look quite unrusty. ...
Tetracloride can be used in closed circles, like any sane solar manufacturer does
That a windmill or a solar plant can not run a water treating plant, wow, that is a gross claim. Care to elaborate how the water treating plant knows from what source the power is? Do you even know how water is 'treated'?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm glad you asked. Pages 12-14 contain full list of references.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cbkc...
> Or hydro, or geothermal, or wind, or lots of other things.
You couldn't think of the "lots of other things" because you actually pretty well covered it - geothermal and wind are the two "alternative" sources other than solar*. Each of the three, especially wind and geothermal, can make an important contribution. There is a full exposition in the paper linked above, but each of the three can provide for 3%-5% of our energy needs. Combined, they can reduce fossil fuel use by 9.6%, which is quite significant.
* Maybe one day biomass will become significant, but it hasn't yet. There's ethanol in gas, but that actually reduces fuel economy enough that the net energy production is roughly zero after including the energy to produce the ethanol. Ethanol is a serviceable oxygen donor in gasoline to replace MTBE, but not currently a net energy producer outside of Brazil.
The 18 Gw power facility was certainly one of the two primary reasons that the dam was built.
> Most cars have a stereo. Generally we don't attribute RTA deaths to FM radio though.
I include accidents while running errands in "auto fatalities", even if the car is also used to get to and from work.
Even if, on the insurance paperwork, the owner said the car is "primarily" used to get to work and back.
Perhaps you should read a bit more before posting such nonsense.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Your link supports none of your claims. Your claims are:
SEGS used 90% solar, 10% natural gas
SEGS provided primary power at night
SEGS "was eventually decommissioned"
The wiki article mentions none of those things. The references at the bottom of the article do, however, address those, and they say you are mistaken on all three points.
Nextera Energy say they are still operating the SEGS plants:
http://www.nexteraenergy.com/c...
Other documents in the references section show that the design is that they need to run it on gas 25% of the time. Traditional power plants are used to provide power for those customers when it's not sunny.
What are we the Malon now?
With one of those rail guns.
You can't put fail and sabotage together and say the reactor is unsafe. *ANYTHING* is unsafe if it's sabotaged correctly.
Risk is harm*probability. Now consider the maximum harm caused by sabotaging, say, a 1 GW nuclear plant, a 1 GW coal/NG plant, or a few thousand wind turbines. Except for the first option, you won't come up with a mode of sabotage that will take a few decades to clean up the resulting mess.
So, just build the nuclear plants in the middle of military bases.
If terrorists really want to kill a lot of people all they have to do is steal a strategic nuclear warhead. They're far more effective than sabotaging a nuclear power plant at killing people and contaminating huge areas. The reason terrorists don't do that is that we lock them up, and somehow for the last 50 years both the US and USSR managed to do that in a way that kept the nutcases out.
If security really were the issue with nuclear, it would be easily solved.
Nuclear tests excluded, Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only two nuclear incidents with wide-ranging environmental effects. Chernobyl is mainly due to operator error and reckless disregard for even the most basic safety instructions (postmortem investigation found no evidence of any control rods in the core despite the manufacturer's manual saying a minimum of 20 or so control rods must be inserted at all times), trying to rush a 12+ hours ramp-down procedure in less than four hours while most of Fukushima's problems were due to poor plant layout, running all power feeds in the same conduits and putting most generators in floodable zones, making it impossible to restore power to cooling pumps in a timely fashion.
TMI was an exercise in dumb design with the status light bound to the switch instead of a position sensor to give feedback about the actual valve's state. Relying on thermodynamic tables and flow rates to estimate reactor coolant level which could have been directly observed by a simple float sensor did not help confused operators figure out what was happening either.
Those old "unsafe" plants may not have been as close to intrinsically safe as MSRs but they did not fail on a whim either. Most of those failures could have happened with MSRs too if MSR designers had not learned from others' past mistakes.
I've handed plenty of nuclear waste in the lab which had decayed to safe levels. As long as you understand the composition of the waste and its activity at the time of disposal, simply physics tells you exactly what the hazard of it is. If it only emits alpha particles then it is safe as long as there is a barrier of any kind and doesn't leak into anything you consume. If the activity decays substantially, it is also safe.
Radioactivity is just like any other kind of hazardous material (chemicals, etc). It should not be feared, but it should be treated with care.
I'm generally not a fan of burying most radioactive waste in any case. The more dangerous stuff is better off being recycled. The less dangerous stuff can be buried, but most of that stuff is extremely low-level.
What, you mean anything shiny plus anything that conducts heat?
(I realize the person you replied to specifically mentioned photovoltaics, but in disparaging "solar power people" in general you overstated your case.)
The real issue here is that solar is good and nuclear is good, so the "solar zealots" like the grandparent and the "nuclear zealots" like you really ought to be working together to eliminate coal, not fighting amongst yourselves!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
That's only because for coal, the "take [more than] a few decades to clean up the resulting mess" is the result of normal operations, not sabotage!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I urge you to do some reading on modern reactor designs. Remember the Japanese reactor you are pointing to as an example is first of all an ancient design and secondly is a LWR design, which is idiotic to begin with. A good place to start would be reading about the IFR design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Even if you go with LWR cores can and should be designed to shut down entirely on their own in the event of a melt down. There are several ways to do this but my favorite is providing multiple seperate spaces for the melted core to flow to in the event of a meltdown. The core can only sustain it's nuclear reaction so long as their is a critical mass of fissionable material. When the core melts and flows into the seperate sections you end up with several smaller masses of fuel which no longer has the critical mass necessary for nuclear reactions to continue. And that is a mind bogglingly simple safety feature to implement and disaster proof.
The problem is that the commercial industry went with designs based off a quick and dirty design meant for military applications. And it's safety mechanisms were designed mostly to handle risk by redundancy instead of being passively safe.
You are forgetting that for much of the planet there are these things called clouds which cut solar's ability to generate power down to zero on some days. Plus the energy required to power the devices in homes is too much for the current solar cells. I know all about the solar house project. If you are going to tell people that they need to move into a house that fits inside a shipping container good luck. Solar is a great source of energy. solar needs better batteries to store the power until needed and a way to better transfer the power to where it is needed. Solar doesn't work too well at night. If you are talking space based solar then that solves the night, and weather problem for solar. Now to get get that power down to the planet to be used. And hope some country doesn't shoot down the solar array since they do not want it over them.
Actually, it might be easier to look for one of the many lost warheads. Even easier would be combing the worlds scrapyards for lost radiation sources, which can provide enough material for a dirty bomb.
Also, even the most powerful strategic bombs don't come close to the contamination caused by a reactor belching its contents into the environment. The largest nuclear bomb weighted 27 tons, the fuel load alone of a normal reactor is over 100 tons (plus there might be pools full of spent fuel rods nearby for additional contamination).
If security really were the issue with nuclear, it would be easily solved.
It's one of the many issues. Security, safety, disposal, transport, etc.
If you're going to build a reactor, why not Thorium? Way less expensive to build, doesn't have the radioactive issues that uranium does, you can't 'weaponize' it and you can actually use nuclear 'waste' as a source of fuel if you want to dispose of it. If I recall, the original reason Thorium was put aside was you couldn't weaponize it and the US of A needed MORE missiles with which to intimidate the Red Menace (which, monochromatically speaking, fit nicely both with the USSR and China). Since that is no longer driving factor for Nuclear reactors, I suggest you don't build them to use Uranium.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY
I think he meant, new reactor designs fail safe. For instance, control rods that fall into place using gravity, triple redundancy systems, and closed loop cooling.
So according to you, photovoltaic panels using silver are the only type of solar power that will ever be invented?
How dare the evil federal government demand that nuclear power plants be built and operated safely.
Sure, but there's no "off the net" geek appeal there, was my point.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sure, they're appropriate for utility industrial-scale power generation, not home use. While sun-tracking mirrors are neat and all, a mirrored trench is a fair concentrator, as the working fluid accumulates heat along the length of the pipe (the external input heat source is quite hot, after all, so it's just a matter of heat flow).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I..m.o. there is more than enough evidence that all things nuclear should be banned.
We are leaving an irreversible footprint on the future {that is immoral and should be illegal.
Read the reports from around the globe on the health effects of exposure. the evidence is glaring.
Any person or persons who would place them selves and their needs ahead of the health of of the planet
aught to be removed from positions of influence and power.
"what ever you believe ask this: How well does it serve to further All Life in the Entire Universe?"
Actually, the MSR was designed by the same guy that designed pressurized water reactors (or PWRs - the guy is Alvin Weinberg). Nixon had him fired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory for promoting it over PWRs because he was getting a bunch of reactors built in his home state of California and that meant jobs for Californians. Stalling those projects to redesign would mean a crapload of Californians were out of work, and that was against Nixon's agenda.
Just saying Alvin didn't need to learn by other people's mistakes, they were his own :D
I've actually never heard of a silver solar cell; usually they use the same elements used in computer chips like silicon, cadmium telluride or gallium arsenic.
I have to back that post on the ugly house, though - my parents had solar heat, which was ridiculous because they got about 8 hours of sun during the winter if there was any at all. And at best got 1-2 hours of decent heating for their 6 giant ugly panels. This is my biggest issue with solar - it tends to be off when you need it most (if used for electrical, you need it most in the evening). That said, with decent battery technology it may be worth it.
PV is something that still needs a lot of work, but it's not the only way to exploit the sun, nor currently the most effective one. Although your parents might not be located in an optimal place for solar heating, I can attest that where I am, few days passed this winter where I couldn't get the house up to 75 degrees during the day on sunshine alone - I only had to pay for heat at night and only exceptionally cold rainy days. I've seriously considered getting solar water heating because it would actually be hotter than the law allows for electrically-heated tanks.
I once worked at a place where lunchtime microwave oven access was at a premium. Put frozen dinners on the auto dashboard and by noon, they were well over the safe temperature of 160 degrees. Supposedly 240 isn't hard to achieve in a closed vehicle in Florida, even in January.
I looked into solar-powered (adiabatic cycle) refrigeration after a hurricane caused a multi-day power outage and determined that about 3 square meters would be sufficient surface to produce 10 lbs of ice on an average day, and that's all I needed to keep the ice chest cold.
PV definitely works well with LED lighting, and I have a vision of future homes being lit more creatively than present-day ones simply because you can get a lot more lighting in a lot more flexible configurations with a lot less energy using LEDs.
The big problem with PV is the one that nay-sayers cannot seem to move beyond. Like many alternative energy sources, it's subject to major and minor fluctations. Rather than being whiney little kids about it and proclaiming the helplessness and futility of it all, they should be acting like the fabled hero-industrialists of old and taking it as a challenge. Better salts for capturing daytime heat and saving it for the night. Better batteries for smoothing out electrical demands. Better use of heat-transfer technologies. It's ludicrous that a propane refrigerator costs insanely more more than its electrically-powered equivalent even though they're both ultimately doing the same thing the same basic way. New ways to make an 'effin PROFIT!!!!
In any event, it's foolish to keep all your energy eggs in one basket. The most advanced nuclear power plant in the world won't keep you from freezing to death when a blizzard takes out the power transmission lines and all you have is electric heat.
I think he meant, new reactor designs do not fail catastrophically. The built in *PASSIVE* safety of these new designs would mean it take a deliberate act (sabotage) to cause a reactor to fail in a way that involves the release of radioactive materials.
You can't put fail and sabotage together and say the reactor is unsafe. *ANYTHING* is unsafe if it's sabotaged correctly.
Sorry, you are still missing my point. Subtract what I said about sabotage, you are STILL left with failure modes caused by incompetence and greed. If you think those wonderful designs cannot be compromised by either of those, then you are living in a dream world. Doesn't matter if it's *PASSIVE* safety or not.
Please tell me you didn't just claim "OMG TERRORISM" as a reason to abandon a source of power.
I didn't do anything of the kind. You need to clean your glasses. Or up the amperage in your circuits. Read it again.
What I said was that claims of perfection make people distrustful. Leave out terrorism. Incompetence and greed can easily cause the safest possible design to fail. And... AND... my point was that claiming they absolutely cannot fail makes people suspect you're full of shit.
Is that really so hard for you to understand?
Some of the new designs are not water cooled at all, and the system has to be running for a reaction to continue firing. If something goes wrong (loss of power, damage to the system), the reactors simply cannot continue, they shut down for lack of fissile material, due to the very design of the system, if there's a loss of power to the system, the thing can't keep going, it just shuts down.
Please, try to read up on the new reactor designs such as LFTR and IFR designs. Both address safety in a passive manner and are capable of recycling most if not all of our current spent fuel sitting in pools all over the place. How are these designs NOT the direction we should be going? Nothing is 100% safe, but these are VERY safe, and considering the rather UNSAFE designs of the past which we're using all over the place, and nuclear's rather impressive safety record. I mean, three accidents over the entire life of nuclear power? That is really impressive. And these new designs just take the safety to a whole new level.
Sorry, you are still missing my point. Subtract what I said about sabotage, you are STILL left with failure modes caused by incompetence and greed. If you think those wonderful designs cannot be compromised by either of those, then you are living in a dream world. Doesn't matter if it's *PASSIVE* safety or not.
You're the one in a dream world if you think humanity is going to continue to flourish and prosper -without- nuclear power. We simply will not be a happy species without an abundance of power. This is the answer. Without it, the loss of life from wars over the dwindling resources will far exceed anything imaginable by nuclear power generation.
Wind is a really really bad joke I'm afraid.
It's unreliable, low power generation. It has to be backed up by something else (usually natural gas.) That is fact.
Another fact, just setting aside costs, assuming can build wind without limitations, we'd have to have these things pretty much EVERYWHERE on our planet and it'd take years upon years just to build the things. And how about maintenance for hundreds of thousands of wind turbines? Multiply the failure potential (and harm potential) of wind power by the huge number of new generators. You're going to see a lot more loss of life from building and maintaining hundreds of thousands of wind generators than any nuclear accident could or has caused.
It's the most absurd idea I've come across. It's a really bad joke.
Solar is nicer idea. At least when these things break down, they don't hurt people, but still intermittent, still needs to be backed up by a fossil fuel plant to compensate for intermittence. So its not a real answer, its another bad joke.
Are you kidding? Coal plants are located on the same ( usually ) fresh water resources that nuclear is, and have thousands of tons of radioactive and chemo-carcinogenic ash slurry on site. All you need to do to really hurt an entire regions water supply is get the slurry into the groundwater system. PPM wise the slurry is far more harmful than any subarial radio isotope releases, and quite arguably still worse than isotope leaching into groundwater.
This completely ignores the CO2 and other combustion byproducts that coal / gas fired plants dump into the atmosphere during operation. The argument could be made that the last 5 years or less of coal did more environmental harm than the entire releases of Chernobyl and Fukushima combined... since the Chernobyl explosion and meltdown.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
The depends on where you are. Wind power is the best option if you're in an area that doesn't have plenty of hydro or geothermal resources and is too far north/south of the nearest tropic to make solar the best option.
It's unreliable
Wind power generation is easy to predict, and unlike solar, its output becomes more steady if the generation is spread out over a larger area. The larger the are, the lower the probability of wind power output ever dropping to low single digits of total installed capacity.
Also, the changes in output are much slower than for solar, which makes smoothing them a smaller technical challenge.
It has to be backed up by something else (usually natural gas.)
You'll have to back up _any_ power plant, or you'll be in the dark as soon as your primary plant goes down for maintenance or due to technical problems.
we'd have to have these things pretty much EVERYWHERE on our planet
Not really. You'd se almost none of them in areas with hydro/geothermal/solar resources.
And how about maintenance for hundreds of thousands of wind turbines?
Other types of power plants need maintenance, too, and keeping relatively simple mechanical devices running is hardly rocket science.. And with smaller generating units, you can do maintenance on 50MW of your generating capacity at a time while the remaining 950MW are still available.
Multiply the failure potential (and harm potential) of wind power by the huge number of new generators.
That's just a matter of proper occupational safety, and of course insurance. In fact, the more turbines there are, the easier the business for the insurance company becomes, since they'll get very good statistics on frequency and cost of accidents. Compare this to nuclear, where you won't find any insurance company in the world that will sell you coverage for an INES-7 type accident, or even an INES-6 one.
Solar is nicer idea
It's ridiculously expensive (even compared to wind power) once you're north/south of the 45th parallel. Also, it cycles much more rapidly than wind, and produces power anticyclical to seasonal power demand in these areas (peak power demand is during winter, where solar produces almost nothing).
Of course, if you're closer to a tropic than to a polar circle, it's hard to beat solar. It only has small seasonal variations there, and (due to the prevalence of air conditioning) produces the most power when demand is at its peak.
It's all a matter of looking at the local geographical and geological resources, and making optimal use of them.
Solar can provide about 5% of our energy needs, but for the vast majority of our power, we can choose between oil, coal, natural gas, or nuclear.
[citation needed]
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Consider that the level of security for nuclear warheads you've just described costs money. Tons of money.
Now contrast this:
If security really were the issue with nuclear, it would be easily solved.
with this:
I know you said we don't actually build "modern" reactors, but ANY design of reactor can fail, because people run them, boards that demand profit oversee management, and sometimes people fly airplanes into buildings.
If it cuts into profits, someone will want to cut costs - and corners. That's what frightens me, personally. Not that we can't make things secure, technically. It's human nature at it's worst that will cause a reactor to blow up or be blown up, not problems due to lack of understanding of the science behind it.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
You just have got to be a persiflage of yourself. Honestly. Are you now really complaining about safety regulations when dealing with extremely dangerous nuclear materials?
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
I'm glad you asked.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cbkc...
Pages 12-14 contain full list of references for the data. Earlier pages provide analysis and discussion of the data.
Also, even the most powerful strategic bombs don't come close to the contamination caused by a reactor belching its contents into the environment. The largest nuclear bomb weighted 27 tons, the fuel load alone of a normal reactor is over 100 tons (plus there might be pools full of spent fuel rods nearby for additional contamination).
Somehow given the choice of 100 tons of mess located on the property of a damaged nuclear reactor, or 27 tons of fissionables mixed with a thousand tons of dirt lofted into the stratosphere in the vapor state raining out over half the country, I think most would take the former. Certainly anybody within 10 miles of the blast site would prefer the gigantic dirty bomb scenario you describe.
But hey, I'm not arguing for not safeguarding nuclear waste. I'm just saying that compared to global warming and producing energy, security of a couple of plant sites is a much easier problem to solve.
If it cuts into profits, someone will want to cut costs - and corners. That's what frightens me, personally. Not that we can't make things secure, technically. It's human nature at it's worst that will cause a reactor to blow up or be blown up, not problems due to lack of understanding of the science behind it.
That is a political problem. Just make private ownership of nuclear reactors illegal and it is solved. There may be other ways of solving it as well - the government might just be responsible for reactor security, but not maintenance/operation.
Don't get me wrong - I don't see it happening anytime soon either, and I'm sure we'll just maintain the status quo until we either run out of oil or Manhattan is underwater. However, the issue is that various interests profit from the status quo, not that there isn't a solution to it.
Sorry, you are still missing my point. Subtract what I said about sabotage, you are STILL left with failure modes caused by incompetence and greed. If you think those wonderful designs cannot be compromised by either of those, then you are living in a dream world. Doesn't matter if it's *PASSIVE* safety or not.
You're the one in a dream world if you think humanity is going to continue to flourish and prosper -without- nuclear power. We simply will not be a happy species without an abundance of power. This is the answer. Without it, the loss of life from wars over the dwindling resources will far exceed anything imaginable by nuclear power generation.
I never said I was against nuclear power. In fact, I agree that we need it. I also think that as a species we will have to live with the occasional nuclear "oops". Accidents, sabotage, rogue attacks with weapons made from filched material. Part of the deal.
But you continue to miss my point, because you were looking for someone to berate for not holding the exact same opinion as you.
Keep at it, but play with yourself. I'm not going to correct you again, it's a waste of time.