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Setback For Small Nuclear Reactors: B&W Cuts mPower Funding
mdsolar (1045926) writes with news that funding for the mPower, a Small Modular [Nuclear] Reactor, has been cut due to the inability to find investors interested in building a prototype. From the article: "The pullback represents a major blow to the development of SMRs, which have been hailed as the next step forward for the nuclear power industry. ... All told, B&W, the DOE, and partners have spent around $400 million on the mPower program. Another $600 million was needed just to get the technology ready for application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for licensing. ... B&W plans to continue low-level R&D on the mPower technology with a view to commercial deployment in the mid-2020s, said CEO James Ferland. But without a major shift in the business environment and in investor perceptions of the risks and rewards associated with nuclear power, that seems fanciful."
Well?
Still insisting on the same basic concept that gave us reactors that use just 0,5% to 1% of mined uranium and have the concept of a meltdown.
Even the most advanced water cooled reactor today still does that.
B&W mPower reactor is just a smalled version of the same.
When will this people learn ?
We need a breeder / near breeder reactor that is able to use bare minimum 10% of uranium mined, or much more.
liquid fuel instead of solid fuel, with the fuel molten in the coolant means meltdowns are impossible and heavy neutron poisons (noble gas fission products) can be collected from the reactor quickly, resulting in minimal neutron losses, the lower the neutron losses are, the better the fuel burnup can be (increasing that 0,5% to 1% utilization to much higher levels), plus the less neutron poisons are kept in the reactor, the less excess reactivity exists on the reactor, minimizing the risk of prompt neutron criticality scenarios.
That's why I don't support any reactor except for molten salt or molten metal coolant designs.
The AP1000 and similar Gen III+ are plenty safe enough for my taste, but if you honestly discuss even the most remote risks a gen iii+ reactor with non technical people, they will still be against nuclear power. Plus water cooled reactors demand lots of expensive active safety systems like hydrogen+oxygen recombinants, pressurizer, emergency spray, emergency water injection, the list goes on, making the reactor far more expensive than necessary. Perhaps with the mPower being a much lower power reactor, it can do away without some of those systems, but they can't all be eliminated unless the reactor has low pressure operation (only possible with molten salt or molten metal cores).
Nurse, I think he's off his meds again.
suitcases that generate megawatts of Xrays "FOR BIRD WATCHING."
Better idea: sell them to the DHS, so law enforcement vehicles can be equipped with them in order to Xray all vehicles on the street looking for suspicious materials
To whom it may concern,
Feel free to compete in the FREE MARKET...Nuclear or Fossils fuel...! ;-)
the,
Solar Industry
So you hate nuclear power and have no interest in properly learning about it, instead taking your knowledge from Hollywood sensationalization of radioactivity and nuclear power. We find those by the bucket nowadays. The difference is most don't dare speak, because the aren't sure. Those that actually think they got it right are the most dangerous.
Here is a source for serious information on nuclear power, without any BS:
https://class.coursera.org/nuc...
...maybe it's because 400 million dollars later you have nothing to show for it. Who the fuck wants to throw another 600 million at a project that is clearly not going anywhere?
That's because investors don't want to develop a product to compete with something that already exists (and is very well funded) but is having regulatory issues:
That rant was all emotion-fuelled fallacies.
1) No-one was suggesting making "suitcase nukes" and sending them around, because nuclear bombs and reactors necessarily work differently. That's why the worst case scenario in a nuclear power plant is a meltdown, not a nuclear explosion.
2) Fukishima was not a nuclear disaster, it was a huge tsunami damaging a nuclear facility, complicating the existing natural disaster due to risks of radiation exposure. The technology being researched was not featured. There were also no terrorists (or unicorns or fairies) involved.
3) Nuclear fusion is promising and exciting but has net negative power production at the moment, as opposed to fission which has had massive net positive power production for a long time.
4) People researching small nuclear reactions want to merge Yahoo and Myspace to make megawatt xrays for bird watching? You'll have to ask your unicorns and fairies about this one because it doesn't sound like anything on this planet.
5) Spouting insults at people doesn't make them wrong nor you right.
There are real risks to using nuclear power, but if you are to ever understand them you need to calm down and accept their actual nature, scale and likelihood instead of conflating everything with the word "nuclear" in it with the explosion of nuclear weapons. As an advanced course you can compare individual approaches fairly to their practical alternatives (which all have their own issues) before making a judgement.
Every nuclear power setback is directly tied to paranoid maniacs who immediately start thinking about nuclear weapons and how it might destabilize the carefully-cultivated balance of power that keeps the US at the top.
"megawatts of xrays"
You're a useless fucking toolbox with so little knowledge of anything the very best thing you can do for humanity is to hang yourself from the nearest load-capable tree branch. I mean it. Useless shitsacks like you have no business speaking, let alone breeding. You lower the mean IQ of the planet substantially. If branch is not available, smashing yourself in the head with the nearest acceptably massive object will also do.
Thank you for making Earth a better place.
The"portable" reactors are encased in tons of concrete. And I'm pretty sure would be built so that WHEN a nuke-wanting country stole one as you say, a remote signal could "accidentally" trigger a nuclear detonation in whatever country they took it to...
Given the work China and India are doing on molten-salt Thorium cycle reactors, I can't see why anyone would spend another dime on a pressurized water reactor again.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You're insane, but you have a point. The safety and security headaches this thing would cause would be formidable, even if it was only deployed in the USA. And there are newer, better nuclear technologies than PWR worth looking into. Frankly, I'm not in the least surprised, and quite happy, that they didn't get enough investors.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Direct money toward large nuclear reactors!
Who the hell wants a ton of little reactors all over the place that when they run out of fuel we basically bury it and hope no one stumbles upon it.
Stick with the big plants, just use the new safer designs and BUILD them. This was a complete waste of money. This idea was never going to fly and still won't. As a strong proponent of nuclear power, I don't even like this idea (due to the waste left behind.)
At least SOMEONE gets it. SOMEONE lives in reality, which is precisely where terrorists have been proven to reside. If you take the amount of staff it would take to guard a small nuclear reactor so that the fuel isn't stolen and instead put those staff members of stationary bikes with alternators, you'd actually get more power than from the reactor. That's how fucking stupid of an idea this is. You might as well build an artificial black hole on Earth's surface, it's slightly safer.
There is no such thing as a non-radiactive tritium reactor. That is a fact and a law of physics.
There is also no such thing as a non-radioactive sandwich, that's a fact and law of physics. (C-14 for instance.) What has that got to do with anything? That you use scare words like "unbelievably dangerous", "terrorists" and "suicidally stupid" only makes you seem less informed. You are just a greenpeace troll. Nothing to see here.
"There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
They were in a rush to get them up, a popular story was the critical job of building the dome to one of them, 24 hour round the clock overtime to gold plate that puppy. A friend of mine was studying to operate the reactors when in class they were told to grab their stuff as they no longer had a job and don't let the door swing into you on the way out. The dome was later cut up and sold as salvage, as was the rest of the equipment used.
"Energy Northwest (formerly Washington Public Power Supply System) is a United States public power joint operating agency formed by State law in 1957 to produce at-cost power for Northwest utilities. Headquartered in Richland, Washington, the WPPSS became commonly known as "Whoops" due to over-commitment to nuclear power in the 1970s which brought about financial collapse and the second largest municipal bond default in U.S. history."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
A lot of people got hurt over that one.
"$2.25 billion. Washington State. Bonds issued to finance a nuclear power plant defaulted. Bondholders recovered about 40 percent of their principal and interestnearly 10 years later."
http://money.usnews.com/money/...
Some small nuclear reactors can be quite stable and run for a long time...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A meltdown is bad enough. If serious enough, it means containment breach and release of radioactive contamination into the environment.
But actually we have living proof that meltdown is NOT the worst case scenario. I give you Chernobyl. You can have a steam and/or hydrogen gas explosion, scattering nuclear fuel rubble and other contamination all around. I give you Fukushima, another series of steam and/or hydrogen gas explosions involving scattering contamination. There have been other explosions.
RISK of exposure? How about very real documented exposure as a fact? I'll tell you what Fukushima is. Fukushima is a testament to the sad reality that, whatever you consider to be the worst scenario you deem it worthwhile to protect against, something much worse WILL beset your creation. The only question is when. That goes for natural events, human failings and ignorance, and human evildoing.
The positive side of that is that people are already shipping expensive rockets to terrorists and they just lay them down on bits of wood to launch instead of sticking them in tubes - thus making them less accurate than a rocket from the mid 1800s. What would such a person do with plutonium? The cleanup of a satellite crash in Canada showed how easy it would be to deal with a "dirty bomb" so that's not much of a problem.
Fukushima was a nuclear disaster. Even if you want to write off anything that happens because of Ma Nature, that doesn't matter since good management post-tsunami could have easily prevented the melt-down and massive release.
I'm sympathetic to the nuclear industry, but industry proponents really need to get a grip. Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were operated by morons. That just can't happen. It should never happen. There are plenty of smart folk, do what it takes to make sure one of them is in charge the next time a tsunami hits. Follow the damn regulations root out corruption. Bluster and sticking your head in the sand just isn't going to cut it anymore.
Play Command HQ online
There is no such thing as a non-radiactive tritium reactor. That is a fact and a law of physics.
There is also no such thing as a non-radioactive sandwich, that's a fact and law of physics. (C-14 for instance.) What has that got to do with anything? That you use scare words like "unbelievably dangerous", "terrorists" and "suicidally stupid" only makes you seem less informed.
You are just a greenpeace troll. Nothing to see here.
I'd mod you up as the voice of reason if I had any mod points.
the builders of the reactor that failed at Three Mile Island can't get funding for a new reactor design.
booo hoo
Your level of knowledge about nuclear power seems based on technology born of nuclear weapons. The world is trying to move on from that, although most people are blithely unaware of that fact. Modern nuclear power generation systems will assist in removing "bad" waste from old reactors. This should be a good thing but apparently you are so far in denial or suffer from lack of knowledge that you fail to understand this. I suggest that you never get on a boat in case you fall over the edge of the world.
Nos Morituri te salutamus
Chernobyl had the exact same effect of a very large dirty bomb. Probably at least 10 times the dirty bomb size predicted by likely terrorist scenarios. So far it killed around 100 people and caused a few thousand cancers.
Far from the scenarios of tens of thousands of deaths. Ok, so Chernobyl wasn't in Moscow or NYC, but the Green Peace alarmists managed to predict one million deaths.
Until nuclear regulatory agencies accept logical arguments that radiation safety standards are way too stringent it will lead to all of those absurdities.
The current radiation standards essentially consider living in Denver, SLC, in front of a Monazite beach too be an unacceptable risk to life.
The cost is probably much less, considering the same division makes very similar products (probably maybe even REEEEAAALLY similar) AND won a big percentage of the posted (in this article) price in a government grant. The reason is that the company wants outside investors is because it wasn't getting a $15mil/year match from uncle sam. Always invest someone else's money. /AC for a reason, former labor pool
Alone the thyroid treated children in germany are already far over 10,000. So your claim about cancer rate (and death rate, considering that most of the few thousand clean up workers are dead since decades) is grossly wrong.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"unbelievably dangerous and radioactive fuel"
OMG, and they dig it up out of the ground!!!! Who put it there, that's what I want to know. Which bastard put this unbelievably dangerous rock under my feet!?!?!?!! We need to know so we can sue them for the irreparable damage to the environment they caused.
oh wait...
I can't see why anyone can afford to spend another minute thinking that thorium is going to be economic.
further clarification: economic in the US and its vassal states tied by such shackles as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
When China and/or India (smirk) start running a major portion of their economy on "pure green clean thorium" I expect the US will implement a raft of hasty patent reform bills, maybe with IV facing RICO charges as inducement to turn over thorium patents for the "benefit of mankind"/national security.
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
Seriously, why is it every power generation and transmission technology known to man is called mPower. Yeah, we get it, it's like empower but without the e...that was cool the first 100 million times.
Various 4th generation reactors are under or about to begin construction. Proof of concept reactors are already operating.
Relative to current nuclear power plant technology, the claimed benefits for 4th generation reactors include:
Nuclear waste that remains radioactive for a few centuries instead of millennia
100-300 times more energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel
The ability to consume existing nuclear waste in the production of electricity
Improved operating safety
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
Of particular importance is that these 4th generation reactors can use as fuel the long lived very dangerous waster ***that we already possess*** and don't have good long term plans for.
"Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000-7.04 million deaths and 80-240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces."
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/...
"Fukushima is a testament to the sad reality that stupid people will ignore safety protocols and keep an ageing reactor going for years after it should have been decomissioned because it's cheaper that way" - TFTFY.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Alone the thyroid treated children in germany are already far over 10,000.
Given that the thyroid cancer rate in the US (for example) seems to be about 13 per 100,000 people year and the population of Germany is about 81 million we'd expect about 10,530 thyroid cancer cases in Germany per year.
So 10,000 cases in children since 1986 is pretty damn low.
I'd mod you down as the voice of logical fallacy if I had any mod points.
In this case, the fallacy of the excluded middle.
Sagan knew, why don't you?
http://www.xenu.net/archive/ba...
If it's a scale error then you are either 3, or a troll yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Not so much. Fukishima could have been a year old and it wouldn't have made much of a difference. Because it wasn't designed to handle the sort of disaster that was geologically common to the area.
Hey, I volunteer for Greenpeace (not the GP), and I am most certainly open to sensible discussion. The GP is just a normal troll, not necessarily associated to us :)
Fukushima is a testament to the sad reality that people who couldn't find their own asses if they had blinking neon signs pointing at them still get to make decisions about the safety measures for industrial installations.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
If they think there will be any need for this by the mid-2020s, they're in for a rude awakening and a nasty financial loss.
Solar panels have dropped in price by 65% in the last two years. They're expecting another 60% price drop by 2020, and efficiency isn't being sacrificed - it's only getting better, with 25% being achieved in the lab now. Research is also much cheaper - researchers ask for grants such as $5 million or $15 million, not the $1 billion mentioned in the article.
Combine wind farms, hydro power, solar thermal, and the recent improvements with storing energy, both as potential energy and in batteries, and I doubt any one will want to invest in "small" nuclear reactors, either now or 10 years from now. Solar panels aren't the fix for everything, but they will make it uneconomical to put in place big, expensive nuclear reactors, which are only small and cheap by comparison to even bigger ones.
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
If you can figure out how to remove corruption and stupidity from governmental and/or corporate organizations you'd probably get Nobel Prizes in several categories.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You are comparing apples and oranges: first, natural cancer incidence is different in different geographical locations. Second, you compared children thyroid cancer incidence with thyroid cancer incidence over an entire population. It should be logical that cancer rates should be lower for organisms with lower "mileage".
The point is radioactive != dangerous. Just as projectile != lethal weapon.
You're mad as a hatter.
Clueless is not the same as morons. Well informed and humble morons would probably fare much better. It is always: "Who'd thought THAT could happen (to us, geniuses)?" In Chernobyl, they were gamblers. In Fukushima, they were bureaucrats who covered their asses with scientists' guesses (which are never final).
But all that are just minor faults. The nuclear fission technology is insecure by design, because it concentrates all the energy (fuel) it will need in one place, and then it tries to slow the release down to the measure it can successfully dissipate. It is easier that way, because you don't want to refuel daily, because the fuel is dangerous to haul and keep around. It is like if we had natural mineral explosive substance (fuming and toxic too) that spontaneously goes off when you pile it up, but there is a way to put it in a slow-motion mode by adding something in the mix. However, if something interferes with the setup, or it releases too much energy in too short time, or you fail to remove the energy from it, it just blows and scatters around. Of course it will happen, eventually!
Nuclear engineers have to rethink the reactor. It has to be fed on the spoon, one little chunk a time, and it has to choke without adding anything, just by cutting off supply of something, be it nuclear fuel chunks, or neutrons from a fusion cell. NPINPO - No Power In, No Power Out!
I'm sorry that anyone has to experience cancer, especially a child. I've personally been on the receiving end of one of those diagnosis. However, the statistics show that the cancer rates have not increased any statistically significant amount over the background rate. This has been verified by numerous studies by independent groups from different countries. I'm sure a handful of those cases are caused by the additional environmental pollution from Chernobyl; but, it's in the 10's range. The deaths of the clean up workers are mostly well documented. Thousands did not die; again, the number is in the 10's order of magnitude.
Then, they're part of the problem. The problem being, uncleanable nuclear waste. Virtually permanent biocontamination. And some interesting charge-enhanced mechanical effects.
Why not develop better cleaning and containment. Without fucking everything up as they always do. Then claim it wasn't their fault. They can't do more than far from enough. And dump (often literally) the mess in the environment, and on society.
A pity they don't "innovate" in cleanup and prevention. The vapor-stuff they're trying to hawk will still be criminally poisonous. And they'll do their best to also make it genocidal, and deny it, as usual.
"which have been hailed as the next step forward for the nuclear power industry"
Yes, after the same was claimed for Gen II reactors, fast-breeders, liquid-metal reactors, gas-cooled reactors, heavy water reactors, pebble-bed reactors, travelling-wave reactors, and any number of variations on thorium.
Wake me when someone actually builds one and we can see if the product lives up to the hype.
So your argument against carbon-neutral energy production technology that we have now and that has been done successfully for decades, is "because TERRORISTS!?"
Are you fucking serious? Do you realize that all nuclear isotopes are not made equal, and "reactor grade" is far more common than "weapons grade"?
Do you have a fucking clue about any of this?
While the NIMBY people and the nuclear-luddites do their best to keep us well entrenched in the stone age [1], scientists are working on fifth gen reactors, as well as thorium reactors.
Comparing a modern, fourth or fifth gen reactor to the ones in production is similar to wanting to ban all cars because a Model T or a Trabent is unsafe.
We can go a long ways with this technology... right now, we are similar to where we were in the '60s when silicon started being doped and transistors came into common use. Just wait until the equivilent of ICs, VLSI, and other improvements kick in. However, until we get the paranoics out of the picture, we will still be using fossil fuels and ensuring that our subsequent generations have far less of a quality of life than we do.
[1]: Except for deaths per terawatt generated. Nuclear is insanely off the scale compared to everything else. 0.04 deaths are just too much compared to the reasonable 100 deaths/TW that coal has or the 36 of oil. People just don't die enough for nuclear for it to be viable. /sarcasm.
> Fukushima was a nuclear disaster
Slight correction:
Fukushima was a *man made* nuclear disaster. None of what happened had to. All of the reactors were in the process of shutting down properly. Errors introduced after the fact were the cause of everything that followed. The tsunami *started* the problem, but it isn't the *cause* of what happened.
The *cause*, in the case of reactor 1 for instance, was incorrectly setting the IC valve contrary to very specific instructions in the manual. Had they not improperly operated that valve, and left the IC turned on throughout, it is highly unlikely anything would have happened. Had the crew actually examined the IC, they would have opened it again. Alternately, had they done *anything* to make up for the closed IC, like core venting or seawater pumping, nothing would have happened. But they didn't, they turned off the IC and didn't do anything to make up for the cooling it provided *specifically for the problem they were having*.
Had any of those things happened, today people would be talking about how Fukushima proves that nukes are safe. Instead
You are just a greenpeace troll
Not everyone that wanted to keep the Japanese and Norwegians from slaughtering sentient marine mammals or the French from irradiating Polynesian atolls prefers coal, oil and ecologically-disruptive hydropower to responsible nuclear technology (thorium-salt and pebble-bed designs come to mind)... nor should you even assume that they're all "bleeding heart left-wingers who want the government to save us" so you can take your blatant generalizations and over-used memes and stick them back where they clearly came from. ;)
I agree, unfortunately I think that's the core of the best argument *against* nuclear reactors. We can make them safe so long as nobody does something incredibly stupid - but we're nowhere close to being able to prevent even smart people from occasionally doing incredibly stupid things.
Now, some of the self-regulating liquid salt reactors,etc. that have been proposed have potential - design the reactor so that the only possibility of a meltdown is intentional, ongoing sabotage and you have something that *might* avoid real world idiocy-based meltdowns. None of this "flipped the wrong lever then forgot about it malarky. Until then, well you have an obvious unaddressed safety concern that has been responsible for most reactor disasters to date.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Sure radioactive means dangerous, but dangerous != harmful. There is always risk. Gasoline is dangerous, you handle it carelessly and you can get a big explosion. Refineries are dangerous. Coal mines are dangerous, etc. The question is not "is it dangerous", but how dangerous is it? How can we mitigate risk? Is it worth the risk?
Protip: the Greenpeace of today isn't the Greenpeace of decades ago. If that bothers you, then make an organization that still upholds the ideals of the old one and join it so you don't feel bad about being part of an organization that is no longer in line with your ideals.
Shall we contrast the total number of human lives lost to Coal Mining / Steam Generated Electrical Production with the total number of lives lost to Nuclear power production? Go ahead, say it doesn't matter. Then say it to the family of a dead coal miner.
HAHAHA... Types the troll on his electronic device created with, powered by, and connected to a network powered by beloved Coal, Oil and Ecologically-disruptive hydropower. Hypocrisy perfected. Delusion sustained.
H2O is DANGEROUS it kills countless thousands of people every year. How many people died of Nuclear power production last year? 0 Zero. In binary... 0
I've seen cue balls with more of a point than your last statement.
Do you know what a centrifuge is and how many countries have enough of them? Obviously not.
Another instance showing the high costs and low returns of nuclear power. Nuclear power is not affordable. It gets more expensive over time. The "learning curve" is negative. It relies on massive government subsidies and has serious unsolved problems with waste.
OTOH, solar and wind are getting cheaper and are now less expensive than nuclear.
It just doesn't make sense to invest in nuclear when solar and wind are cheaper, have fewer problems and are already scaling rapidly.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I agree, but the nuclear industry is blase about it. Putting uneducated pencil pushers in charge of nuclear reactors is not an unfortunate anomaly, it's business as usual.
Plant operators should be as well qualified as airline pilots. They should be in simulators half the time dealing with as wide a variety of fake disasters as can be imagined. They should be tested and tested and tested, and quietly retired when they can't hack it anymore.
Play Command HQ online
Harvesting the power of the sun is as old as our first ancestors who dried food in the midday sun to preserve it. Harnessing the power of the sun is the key to unlimited renewable Green nuclear energy. Sadly the Green energy pixie still speaks to the masses during their latest bong fest. Nuclear energy is the future. This project is the bridge to hydrogen energy and finally fusion energy. BTW who doesn't think Fusion is nuclear energy?
A big part of the problem is we are hooked on viewing nuclear power as a space aged ego gratifying source of electricity, just like Captain Nemo had. There are probably lots of good uses of a cylinder that gets dropped into a concrete sleeve in the ground providing simple very hot water.
... the nuclear-luddites ...
No, they are more accurately called the nuclear deniers. They are every bit as politically motivated and misrepresent science and make false scientific claims as the climate deniers, they are merely coming from the other political extreme.
Chernobyl Death Toll: 985,000, Mostly from Cancer and still counting as of (April 26, 2010) from just 6 Megaton's worth of Fission Byproduct release into the biiosphere.
Imagine what would happen if their was a significant release of the 150,000 Megatons of Fission Byproducts humanity has lying about at/in/near NPP's!
Germany alone treated around 10k children in the years after the catastrophe, I'm pretty sure Switzerland and Italy did the same. That can easy be googled.
Regarding clean up workers: in the first weeks they died to the hundreds every day. No idea why today every one has forgotten that. Unofficial death counts go up to a million, most russians or ukrainians I know, know one or more people who died and they unisono say that minimum 100,000 people died but it might be far more.
Considering the amount of radiation that was distributed it is completely insane to assume no one (or just ten clean up workers) died.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That where ten thousand children in the first few years after the accident. Not in total over the last 30 years. And I did not mean german children but ukrainian and russian that got treated in Germany (for free, well payed by help organizations)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Meanwhile, at the time of the bidding for the funding, Westinghouse was working with an actual investor interested in potentially building their project. Somehow, the company with a business plan didn't get selected for the funding... Well done DOE.
Nuclear power is all about safety and security, which are or should be the costliest items on the budget, the fuel is relatively cheap, and processing would be cheap too if it weren't for the safety and security issues. Doing it large-scale in high security lock down zones enhances safety, as opposed to, as the above poster says, trying to keep track of lots of mini-reactors being shipped to many places, fueling hospitals and such, all over the place, getting stolen/lost/loaded on an airplaine and slammed into a building in NY 9/11 style. When there are too many mobile reactors, keeping track of them becomes difficult, and the safety risks are huge. All civil nuclear power should be non-mobile as a first rule. Any nuclear material leaving a high security facility on a train or an arm-guard-cash-truck or in any way is a safety issue.
But there is a need for mobile small scale nuclear power, the most important example being military submarines, which simply cannot function on diesel, as they have to get oxygen from the air, and their tactical situation may require deep underground stays for weeks at a time. Also nuclear fuel needs recharging only every few years, as opposed to every other week with diesel. That's a very important military consideration, as half of all military issues relate to logistics, and supply of materials to the battlefronts. Only nuclear power makes sense for a submarine, and it has to be mobile and small scale. The logistics issue of bi-weekly diesel fuel deliveries also requires carriers to be nuclear powered, needing only a biannual refueling. Do we really need submarines and carriers? Yes. As long as you have a military, sea power is essential, and the battleship is obsoleted by both the airplane carrier and the submarine. Small scale mobile nuclear reactors are an absolute necessity for submarines, not as much a necessity but a very good idea for carriers, and I would even go as far as saying it might also make sense in the future for military airplanes of the slow, long-haul freight kind, which are big like a submarine, and similar but air cooled units could be used in both. Having freight airplanes with guaranteed uptime/availability regardless of availability of diesel can be a lifesaver in the future is diesel prices hit over $20/gal, and the world gets militarily tense over that high price. I mean the $20 in year 2000 US dollar values, not in an inflation world, where, if minimum wage hits $380/hr, and monthly rent is 38,000, and the Dow Jones is at 1,400,000, then $20/gal wouldn't be a big deal, would it.
Besides the military, there are very few civilian requirements for small scale mobile nuclear units, a major hospital being maybe the only such example. A major hospital of at least a certain size should service every area of the country as a last resort to send patients to if power fails to the whole region of the country including the branch hospitals and the major hospital itself. A major hospital should have reserve batteries to last at least 20 minutes, then reserve diesel to last two weeks (when electricity goes out natural gas may still be available indefinitely, so generators based on that should be run before diesel stores are touched, (the same generator should be able to run both diesel and natural gas), but if both electric and natural gas is lost then you need), with ability to request the military to deliver one of these or a couple of these air-cooled airplane-engine units in a high security, heavy military defended way, operated by military personnel until power connections to regular power plants can be reestablished, or if not, indefinitely guarded. The air cooled part is what would take up 95% of space, the reactor itself being very small, as availability of water cooling cannot be guaranteed, the hospital may be lucky to sustain its water supply from local wells, if the water-pipeline/sewer infrastructure also fails. Groundwater wells should be mandatory for such hospitals, and empty spaces should be reserved within a mile range of hospitals to acco
I'm sorry but that book is not based on reproducible, verifiable facts. WHO, IAEA, NIH, and a dozen others refute those numbers, putting the upper bound for death's directly attributable to the accident at between 5000 and 8000 people. On the order of 45 people died in the immediate aftermath. Not hundreds of thousands.
This is nonsense. Treating 10k children by giving them prophylactic iodine and periodically checking thyroids is not treating them for cancer. Several hundred children in the surrounding area did get thyroid cancer based on the result I just re-read. Almost all of them responded to treatment (they did not die).
Hundreds did not die daily in the cleanup. A million people did not die in the immediate aftermath. The amount of radioactive material released was large; the "liquidators" received an average dose of 16.5 REM. That's high but not at all lethal. It carries an increased cancer risk of a few percent at most. The city was evacuated but people continued to work in the plant for a decade afterwards, with at least two of the reactors remaining online generating power.
Current nuclear sub designs are not refueled. The cores are designed to last the 30 year life of the sub.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
WHO, IAEA, NIH, et al.. haven't refuted anything. The book was a compilation of several hundred scientific papers written in the appropriate non-english languages authors covering the affected area and population.
Nobody of any scientific reputation outside of those incestuous organizations agrees with any of the conclusions.
It would be easier if we followed the same principle as captains of ships used to have. Have an administrator, who is responsible for the running of the plant and the following of the regulations that pertain to that plant have to be on site during any emergencies. If he makes sure that people who know what they're doing are in charge of the right things, and he doesn't try to cut any corners, this won't be an overly onerous requirement. If he doesn't, well, he will get his termination notice from a doctor.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Fair point.
You mix up precautions with actual cancer.
And the rest of you post shows: you never eber tried to get an educated opinion.
http://www.kinder-v-tschernoby...
http://www.erftstadt-hilfe-tsc...
http://www.tschernobyl-kinder....
Perhaps you like to put this one into google translate: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wis...
http://www.tschernobyl-kinder....
http://ukrainischekinderkrebsh...
http://www.sos-kinderdoerfer.d...
I'm to lazy to make a detailed search for the happenings from 1986 till 1995 ... you can do that your self.
Well, if you meet a still living liquidator make sure to touch his hand, he is one of less than one permille who has survived it. No idea where you get your idiotic ideas from.
The nuclear/radioactive material surrounded them in terms of metric tons ... several thousand times more stuff than the remainings of the Nagasaki or Hiroshima bombs.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
These small reactors already are designed and in production:
The S6W and its line of small reactors are reliable and safe. The rector compartment on a typical submarine is about 30' in diameter and 30' in length.
These generate ~ 50 Thermal Megawatts which translate into about 40,000 horse power or about 29 megawatts of electricity.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
You've gotta admit that your initial comment wasn't very clear. "thyroid treated children in germany".
It's well known that the Soviet authorities fucked up by not issuing iodine tablets in the days immediately following the accident (as iodine 131 has a half life of 8 days you better get on the job fast. Poland did and saw no increase in thyroid cancer after the accident).
Very different.
They should be going full steam ahead. A number of companies have to shot down their current nuke reactors. BUT, they have the sites set up for nukes. IOW, it is EASY to add reactors to these sites. As such, mPower should be approaching a number of them pushing their reactors and pushing to get them in CHEAP.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I live not far from Corvallis Oregon. Off the top of my head I think DOE just announced big awards in SMR. But not to the people who are crying in the story.
Around here we name our streets Gaia and hate nukes. And some locals picked up a quarter billion from DOE for SMR The first one will be in Montana.
Story might not be complete.
Yeah, they did not even admit there was an accident for three days.
I don't know if germany did distribute iodine tablets. I was 18 then, or 17 and I did get none. However I lived in the middle of germany, only the south got hit really badly.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Reading the article, its just the same here in the UK. It is almost impossible to do anything new in nuclear research or technology and stupidly ridiculously expensive. The problem is insane Nuclear over-Regulation. The only solution is obvious, we need to destroy the current nuclear regulators (both national and UN level) and replace them with a sane sensible workable system.
A few Facts -
- Coal is roughly 1000x more dangerous than nuclear (per unit generated) but is about 100x less regulated.
- Since WWII coal and other fossil fuels have killed something like 50 to 80 million people through air pollution alone.
- Even taking the absolute worst case estimates and including Chernobyl, Fukushima, plus Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear power in total has killed something like 250,000 to 500,000 people worldwide.
- Since the mid 1970's the global anti-nuclear 'green' campaign has effectively forced the world back towards fossil fuels and this has indirectly killed something like an extra 5 to 8 million people worldwide. In this the anti-nuclear lobby and the (anti) nuclear regulators are equally culpable.
- So far Anti-nuclear campaigners have actually killed something like 10 times the number of people as nuclear weapons.
- So far Anti-nuclear campaigners have actually killed something like 10,000 times the number of people as nuclear power.
Conclusion : In general Anti-nuclear campaigners (& the nuclear regulators) are far more dangerous than nuclear power.
Yet which is it the simple people fear? nuclear power. (The reasons why are another article but the anti-nuclear campaign has always relied on the use of black propaganda - panic fear lies and hysteria.)
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Do you have trouble to read?
They got treated for cancer and a smaller part for leukomenia, I did not say they got iodine.
They where in our hospitals and got anti cancer treatment, what ever that is in case of thyroid cancer.
How many liquidators died and what dose they got, no one knows. After the first few hundret confirmed deaths (second day of clean up) there was a complete news stop.
You seem to forget that at that time the sorviet union still existed and that they did everything to let get no news out how bad the accident was.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.