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Will Future Nuclear Power Plants Float? (thebulletin.org)
Russia isn't the first country to launch a floating nuclear power plant. 50 years ago America's army built a floating nuclear power plant to supply energy to the Panama Canal Zone. Even though it's now being dismantled in Texas -- a four-year job -- China has plans to build as many as 20 floating nuclear power plants.
Gayle BAS quotes the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Proponents say that floating nuclear plants have major advantages over land-based power plants: They have easy access to cooling water and can be quickly installed near coastal cities with rapidly growing energy demands. And unlike other types of energy that produce relatively few climate-altering emissions, nuclear power plants can run 24/7.
But as with onshore nuclear reactors, the closely related issues of safety and economics could be showstoppers.
Gayle BAS quotes the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Proponents say that floating nuclear plants have major advantages over land-based power plants: They have easy access to cooling water and can be quickly installed near coastal cities with rapidly growing energy demands. And unlike other types of energy that produce relatively few climate-altering emissions, nuclear power plants can run 24/7.
But as with onshore nuclear reactors, the closely related issues of safety and economics could be showstoppers.
Yes, the US Navy hasbeen doing it since before commercial reactors existed.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
You don’t seem to understand what happened at Fukushima. The reactors where fine, it was the emergency generators that were destroyed which are required for decay heat cooling that caused the whole accident. On a ship based reactor, these would be inside and protected or not necessary with a natural circulation design (this is also possible on a land based design like AP1000).
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
... the other half wants to take them off line.
This is a First World problem. There are few anti-nuke protests in India, and none in China. North America and Western Europe have zero to negative growth in energy demand, so they don't need new nukes anyway. Most future demand growth will be in Asia and Africa, and most of that demand will be within 200 km of the coastline.
These power ships solve much of the NIMBY problem. A big risk with land-based nuke plants is that they take a decade or more to build, and voters may cancel them before they are complete, leaving investors with a huge sunk cost. But floating nukes can be towed anywhere, so they can just sell the completed reactor to someone else.
Just because we have super sensitive detection devices that allows us to detect radiation doesn't mean that radiation is at a harmful level.
> just a single homeowner does all the mechanical aerobics exercises each day to not need a power company bill
A fit human being at peak output can generate anywhere from 100-200 watts of recoverable power depending on the person. Go look at your power bill and see how many KwH you use a day. You're insane if you think an average dwelling - even a crazy efficient one - could be powered by humans alone.
Nuclear energy needs community support and a plan for maintenance lasting thousands of years.
No, it does not.
The fission products from uranium is not a dumping out of the periodic table and all it's isotopes. We have observed what kind of isotopes are produced and the number is quite small. There are the short lived products that last seconds, minutes, or perhaps a few months. Those we allow to decay in the spent fuel cooling pools on site. A good "rule of thumb" is that in 10 half lives any given isotope is effectively "gone". So keep the fuel in these pools for perhaps a dozen years, we know we can do that because that's standard practice now.
Next are the medium lived products, and there are only a handful of those. Many of which have useful industrial or medical uses and we'd be idiots to just throw them away. These have half lives in the decades and so a "rule of thumb" danger on them if we did throw them away is about 300 years. We've managed projects for 300 years before. Again, this is assuming we did something stupid like throw this stuff in a hole and were guarding it from scrap metal scavengers and curious children.
With the long lived fission products there is a big leap in the length of the half life, we go from decades to millions of years. With half lives this long it's not considered a radiation hazard. This kind of stuff occurs in nature. That doesn't mean we should eat it, no more than people should eat dirt, but it's not a radiation hazard. We can simply landfill this stuff. If we want to take extra care we can encase it in glass or concrete first. If we feel the material has exceptional value then we can use it industrially. This might be true of the more plentiful fission products like zirconium and palladium.
If anyone believes I am mistaken then point to the fission products that concern you, and the half life of those isotopes.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I think we need to understand that nuclear power failed in the United States because of the market.
Correct, natural gas drove most everything else out of the market. That won't last forever. We are already seeing the price of new nuclear go down as old plants go offline and new ones come online.
It proved itself expensive and unreliable.
If that's what you believe then you didn't read anything I linked to.
And that was without considering the permanent waste storage problem that we still haven't solved.
The storage problem has been solved. All we needed was a POTUS and Secretary of Energy that wanted the problem to be solved. The problems are all political. We'll just need new politicians to smooth over the problems further. I give that about 6 months.
There are lots of tortured arguments from proponents for why nuclear power is better than wind or solar.
Then you read nothing I linked to. Give your own links refuting these "tortured" arguments.
But both those technologies continue to be cheaper to build and more reliable in operation.
I have no doubt they will get cheaper but as of right now nuclear is already cheaper than both, require far less labor and material, and we simply cannot wait for wind and solar to catch up.
Until that changes, it doesn't matter whether it floats or not, nuclear power is going to remain at the bottom of the list for new investment.
Then you haven't been paying attention. There's plenty of new nuclear construction all over the world and plenty more planned for the near future.
As for the "material" used by nuclear power, have you ever been to an open pit mine? Yes, it probably requires digging up less material than a coal mine for similar output. But why would we care?
You should care because wind and solar take easily 100 times as much material for the same energy as nuclear. We can likely see improvements in wind and solar technology but nuclear power is just as likely to improve as well.
Maybe wind and solar is our future, our distant future. As of right now nuclear power is the only viable option we have to provide electricity that is both inexpensive and low in CO2 emissions.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
A household of 3 persons in Germany uses over a year on average 4250 kWh. That is close to 11kWh per day. So you obviously could generate that yourself if you wanted ...
But who wants to ride a bike at home after work for 4 hours to recharge the batteries ... that went down during work time.
I am so angry at how bad your math is right now, I could spit acid. I want to take a math book with the word "average" highlighted and beat your damn head with it. Let me show you why.
11kWh per day. Okay, now take the sum of these numbers in kW. (0.34, 0.38, 0.39, 0.41, 0.42, 0.41, 0.43, 0.45, 0.51, 0.53, 0.59, 0.53, 0.52, 0.51, 0.53, 0.59, 0.48, 0.47, 0.47, 0.46, 0.46, 0.4, 0.36, 0.36). They add up to 11 kW, right? Also note there are 24 values, that's because that 11 kWh a day doesn't mean we use 0.46 kW every hour. It means over a 24 hour period we use what would on average add up to 11 kWh. That spread could be... (0.11, 0.13, 0.14, 0.41, 0.42, 0.43, 0.54, 0.53, 0.51, 0.53, 0.68, 0.71, 0.68, 0.67, 0.66, 0.67, 0.66, 0.57, 0.52, 0.53, 0.51, 0.11, 0.13, 0.15) Again, those add up to 11 kWh, but now we have really low times, but that has to be offset by really high times to get to the 11 kWh average you specified.
And we could change this spread however we like the point being is it has to come up to 11 kWh to hit your average per day. Which if you wanted to do this over a four hour period, like you said, you would need to pedal 2.75 kWh each hour, not the 0.46 watts you calculated, and 2.75 kWh could not be done by a family of three.
Please never pretend to do math ever again.
Try again. All the operating reactors shut down safely after the earthquake. In fact the emergency generators for unit 6 survived the tsunami and kept both unit 5 and 6 from melting down. Suggest you see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Small reactors have all the same problems as large reactors without any economy of scale. Consequence, they cost more per Wh and therefore will never proliferate. Nuclear power is barely profitable as it is, and like coal it's already only profitable if you get to ignore externalities like the environmental impact of uranium mining, and of waste disposal. And decommissioning has fixed costs as well as scaled costs, and already consistently costs more than estimated (and budgets) at construction time. Now multiply the number of reactors, and see how costs expand...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The distribution system that would allow external power connection was destroyed by the tsunami. Discussed where citation 8 is used here https://carnegieendowment.org/...
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.