In fact, recent reports tell us that most nuclear power plants are not even aware that they are required to report accidents, and many many accidents in the US are unreported.
Citation required. IAEA collects these reports. As in these plants that don't think they need to files accident reports *are* reporting accidents.
The only two pebble bed reactors that have been tried did *not* do well at all with respect to safety (or any other metric for that matter). They are not the fail safe design for nuclear power that you seem to think they are.
Says the guy with an engineering degree and a MBA?
So you have *at least* these qualification then? Since you have made a statement in the same vein, which according to the book of angel'o'sphere is a minimum requirement for making such a statement.
Renewable look great if you only need to present a 40min fluff piece on discovery channel. But once you run the numbers, they look terrible and fantastically expensive.
A big turbine is 5MW, so you would need about 940 turbines to replace the Fukushima I Nuclear power station (note there is another plant about the same size 11km away as well). Oh, and you only have full power on perfectly optimal wind days, to much and you have to feather them, to little... well its just less. The average is *well* below 5MW per turbine. So lets be really stupidly unrealistic in favor and assume the average power per turbine is 2.5MW. Now you need only about 1880 turbines and a massive energy storage facility. And that will replace just *one* (ok quite large) nuclear instillation. Now consider the cost of buying and maintaining all that. All that steel, copper and other resource that sit at the top of a expensive mast working well below there design capacity for most its working life. All the cabling and road access requirements. Not to mention that you need somewhere to put all 1880 turbines and they don't like begin close together. Oh and you still need a pretty big energy storage facility, they don't come cheap.
The problem is that people don't understand the sheer scale of energy we consume to have our current lifestyle. There are almost no places left for Hydro, and dams and earthquakes have done *worse* than nuclear and are not zero environmental impact. Solar thermal is expensive, very expensive and you make your power a long way from where you need as well as the energy storage issues. Tidal power is limited to just a few places in the world and requires massive structures and again pretty serious environmental impacts. Energy storage won't solve capacity problems and currently proposed systems don't come even close to dealing with the massive amounts of storage needed for wind or solar.
Seriously you have only a few choices. Blackouts, fossil fuels or nuclear. The numbers don't lie.
And lets not forget, lies, dam lies, and then statistics. I don't know about this study (I have too much on), but a lot of medical research has very poor statistics if not just plain outright wrong.
I was with a group that was suppose to support the medical R&D with statistics and the like for their publications. It was hard working getting them to do anything more than plug a few numbers into a website for a t-test. One guy came with a data set and asked us to show the difference in some measured parameter between the control and experimental group. We could show that there was no statistical difference. The guy said, and i really am quoting him here, "That's why people don't bring you their data!", and stormed out of the meeting room.
For some reason a lot of people, people in science even, in particular medical science, think that if two groups of data have a different mean, they are different.
Yes it will take some time to get new fission reactor designs validated. Yes we may have fusion working at a place like ITER, but it will be another 20 years to get something commercially viable from that.
It seems they did burn as well U233. However every reference i have checked explicitly states that there was no breading blanket for the MSRE. The U233 source is not clearly disclosed, but was most likely from solid breading blankets used at other facilities.
You can burn actinides in a molten salt reactor. The reason you can't in solid fuel reactors, or fast reactors is that you end up with very difficult to control dynamics (ie hotter means more fission events). There are other designs that permit burning of actinides as well. You still end up with fission products after that, but its a lot less material per kWh and generally shorter decay times (100s of years IIRC).
I have nothing against a Th fuel cycle, but a lot of the proponents at least here on/. make a lot of claims that are simply false, or totally untested. It is not a magic bullet of nuclear energy. It is not proliferation resistant.
I do get free drivers for all my nvidia cards... Oh you mean the other free... Yea well the other free driver for this ATi card in a laptop i have inherited is completely crap. I will continue to buy nvidia products when i have a choice- because i can get a working, and free drivers for them.
Which part of moderated by water is changed by that? Heavy water is used because is absorbs less neutrons, normal water would not work because of the extreme neutron economy requirements. This also does not affect the void coefficient.
Well when someone says water proof. And then you get hit my a 10m (>30 feet) wall of water, you tend to have things like the door is blown in from the pressure. Or the walls and roof collapse.
Water proof is *not* tsunami proof. What they really need is enough passive cooling within the main containment vessel.
Also, CANDU reactors can produce weapons-grade plutonium much more easily than the designed used in Japan.
No they can't. In fact because CANDU designs are so tight with neutron economy, they can't afford to lose neutrons to U238 capture. That is why they use a thermal spectrum than will generate far less Pu that a reactor that can be a little more lax with neutron economy.
In general thermal designs produce less fuel than they burn (so less than 0.7% Pu after all the U235 is burnt--but then some of that is burnt too), you need a fast neutron spectrum to breed.
CANDU is banned in the US because it has a small positive void coefficient when initially fueled.
Citation required. When you use water as a moderator and you are ruining with such an extreme neutron economy, my numbers say that its always a negative void coefficient. That is excluding doppler broadening as well.
If you are using a MSR or any homogeneous reactor, you can safely burn actinides even with U235/Pu239 fuel cycles. So many of the advantages can be realized for all fuel cycles. This is a good thing since a Th based MSR will need to be bootstrapped with U235/239
WTF are you talking about. The molten salt reactor never used any Th. It used U to save money since the Th was going to be in a separate breeding blanket. They made enough U233 from Th in experiments (probably breeding blankets) to make and test a bomb from it.
Note that many of the "advantages" of Th are just from using a MSR/LFTR reactor, and you can use U235/Pu239 fuels with similar advantages. In fact you have to start with U235/Pu239 since you need to breed your U233 from the Th232.
Th has very real issues. It is just another fuel cycle and you *must* breed U233 to make it work. It produces similar wastes and the whole 10-1000 times lest waste is only if your compare once through with reprocessing and you get the same results regardless of the fuel (U235 compared to U233). In fact a huge chuck of the "Benefits of Th" is from using a molten salt reactor. You get the same benefits if you use U in a molten salt configuration as well.
Also these plant designs can fail just as badly as the Japanese plant did. Additionally if using fluoride salts, which is the norm, you get hydrogen production with any contact with water...
About the only really good about a Th fuel cycle is that there are so many people out that don't have a clue, and are telling everyone else without a clue that its awesome, safe and secure. And PR matters.
Also straw man does not mean what you think it means.
This is not true. Th232 is not a fuel, it is fertile. You smack a neutron into it to get P233. You *need* to separate out the Pa233 as its created, otherwise you end up absorbing too many neutrons. Pa233 decays into U233. Now that you can use as a fuel... or in a bomb. In fact they did use it in a bomb. Since you can separate out the Pa233 as its created, you can have rather pure Pa233 with almost no Pa234 --the problem with Pa234 is that it decays into U234, which is not a fuel and is a horrible gamma ray emitter. You don't want it around even in a nuclear plant, so your going to be getting that Pa233 out as soon as you can.
If i have a bunch of Pa233, i just wait a few 100 days, and now i have almost 100% pure U233.... nice of making bombs.
Proliferation resistance of a Th cycle is wishful thinking at best.
It is also a different way of doing nuclear. Lots of smaller self contained plants that come and go as a single unit. This removes the massive capitol cost with nuclear that dominates the cost of energy from a plant. You also get economies of scale, because you are building the same design many times.
If you are going to push a design that is "safe" and "this" and "that can't happen". Then you can't really start saying, "well that demonstrator didn't work because the pebbles are designed wrong". Your back at square one. Its not safe if you didn't think of everything. In particular pebble bed reactors are useless for anything but once through cycles, and quite frankly if we really are going to go nuclear, that's silly.
They had serious problems in plant that didn't have a earthquake and a tsunami.
Oh and when the earthquake cracks the main coolant loop and your helium leaks out? Then you have a nice graphite fire...
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In fact, recent reports tell us that most nuclear power plants are not even aware that they are required to report accidents, and many many accidents in the US are unreported.
Citation required. IAEA collects these reports. As in these plants that don't think they need to files accident reports *are* reporting accidents.
The only two pebble bed reactors that have been tried did *not* do well at all with respect to safety (or any other metric for that matter). They are not the fail safe design for nuclear power that you seem to think they are.
Traveling wave, or previously breed and burn reactors can save you the expensive reprocessing step.
Renewable is med and long term much much much cheaper than anything we do and have right now.
Citation required. One with the numbers and sources.
To get the ball rolling he is one that is against this assertion. Sustainable Energy -- without the hot air [PDF warning] or the main website and i think the book in html.
Says the guy with an engineering degree and a MBA?
So you have *at least* these qualification then? Since you have made a statement in the same vein, which according to the book of angel'o'sphere is a minimum requirement for making such a statement.
Renewable look great if you only need to present a 40min fluff piece on discovery channel. But once you run the numbers, they look terrible and fantastically expensive.
A big turbine is 5MW, so you would need about 940 turbines to replace the Fukushima I Nuclear power station (note there is another plant about the same size 11km away as well). Oh, and you only have full power on perfectly optimal wind days, to much and you have to feather them, to little... well its just less. The average is *well* below 5MW per turbine. So lets be really stupidly unrealistic in favor and assume the average power per turbine is 2.5MW. Now you need only about 1880 turbines and a massive energy storage facility. And that will replace just *one* (ok quite large) nuclear instillation. Now consider the cost of buying and maintaining all that. All that steel, copper and other resource that sit at the top of a expensive mast working well below there design capacity for most its working life. All the cabling and road access requirements. Not to mention that you need somewhere to put all 1880 turbines and they don't like begin close together. Oh and you still need a pretty big energy storage facility, they don't come cheap.
The problem is that people don't understand the sheer scale of energy we consume to have our current lifestyle. There are almost no places left for Hydro, and dams and earthquakes have done *worse* than nuclear and are not zero environmental impact. Solar thermal is expensive, very expensive and you make your power a long way from where you need as well as the energy storage issues. Tidal power is limited to just a few places in the world and requires massive structures and again pretty serious environmental impacts. Energy storage won't solve capacity problems and currently proposed systems don't come even close to dealing with the massive amounts of storage needed for wind or solar.
Seriously you have only a few choices. Blackouts, fossil fuels or nuclear. The numbers don't lie.
But this has to be the biggest load of shit I've ever read on /.
You must be new here. Either that or it was the first time you have read an article.
And lets not forget, lies, dam lies, and then statistics. I don't know about this study (I have too much on), but a lot of medical research has very poor statistics if not just plain outright wrong.
I was with a group that was suppose to support the medical R&D with statistics and the like for their publications. It was hard working getting them to do anything more than plug a few numbers into a website for a t-test. One guy came with a data set and asked us to show the difference in some measured parameter between the control and experimental group. We could show that there was no statistical difference. The guy said, and i really am quoting him here, "That's why people don't bring you their data!", and stormed out of the meeting room.
For some reason a lot of people, people in science even, in particular medical science, think that if two groups of data have a different mean, they are different.
Yes it will take some time to get new fission reactor designs validated. Yes we may have fusion working at a place like ITER, but it will be another 20 years to get something commercially viable from that.
It seems they did burn as well U233. However every reference i have checked explicitly states that there was no breading blanket for the MSRE. The U233 source is not clearly disclosed, but was most likely from solid breading blankets used at other facilities.
/. make a lot of claims that are simply false, or totally untested. It is not a magic bullet of nuclear energy. It is not proliferation resistant.
You can burn actinides in a molten salt reactor. The reason you can't in solid fuel reactors, or fast reactors is that you end up with very difficult to control dynamics (ie hotter means more fission events). There are other designs that permit burning of actinides as well. You still end up with fission products after that, but its a lot less material per kWh and generally shorter decay times (100s of years IIRC).
I have nothing against a Th fuel cycle, but a lot of the proponents at least here on
I do get free drivers for all my nvidia cards... Oh you mean the other free... Yea well the other free driver for this ATi card in a laptop i have inherited is completely crap. I will continue to buy nvidia products when i have a choice- because i can get a working, and free drivers for them.
Which part of moderated by water is changed by that? Heavy water is used because is absorbs less neutrons, normal water would not work because of the extreme neutron economy requirements. This also does not affect the void coefficient.
Well when someone says water proof. And then you get hit my a 10m (>30 feet) wall of water, you tend to have things like the door is blown in from the pressure. Or the walls and roof collapse.
Water proof is *not* tsunami proof. What they really need is enough passive cooling within the main containment vessel.
Well if it is in wired it must be true then.
Also, CANDU reactors can produce weapons-grade plutonium much more easily than the designed used in Japan.
No they can't. In fact because CANDU designs are so tight with neutron economy, they can't afford to lose neutrons to U238 capture. That is why they use a thermal spectrum than will generate far less Pu that a reactor that can be a little more lax with neutron economy.
In general thermal designs produce less fuel than they burn (so less than 0.7% Pu after all the U235 is burnt--but then some of that is burnt too), you need a fast neutron spectrum to breed.
CANDU is banned in the US because it has a small positive void coefficient when initially fueled.
Citation required. When you use water as a moderator and you are ruining with such an extreme neutron economy, my numbers say that its always a negative void coefficient. That is excluding doppler broadening as well.
If you are using a MSR or any homogeneous reactor, you can safely burn actinides even with U235/Pu239 fuel cycles. So many of the advantages can be realized for all fuel cycles. This is a good thing since a Th based MSR will need to be bootstrapped with U235/239
WTF are you talking about. The molten salt reactor never used any Th. It used U to save money since the Th was going to be in a separate breeding blanket. They made enough U233 from Th in experiments (probably breeding blankets) to make and test a bomb from it.
Note that many of the "advantages" of Th are just from using a MSR/LFTR reactor, and you can use U235/Pu239 fuels with similar advantages. In fact you have to start with U235/Pu239 since you need to breed your U233 from the Th232.
Th has very real issues. It is just another fuel cycle and you *must* breed U233 to make it work. It produces similar wastes and the whole 10-1000 times lest waste is only if your compare once through with reprocessing and you get the same results regardless of the fuel (U235 compared to U233). In fact a huge chuck of the "Benefits of Th" is from using a molten salt reactor. You get the same benefits if you use U in a molten salt configuration as well.
Also these plant designs can fail just as badly as the Japanese plant did. Additionally if using fluoride salts, which is the norm, you get hydrogen production with any contact with water...
About the only really good about a Th fuel cycle is that there are so many people out that don't have a clue, and are telling everyone else without a clue that its awesome, safe and secure. And PR matters.
Also straw man does not mean what you think it means.
This is not true. Th232 is not a fuel, it is fertile. You smack a neutron into it to get P233. You *need* to separate out the Pa233 as its created, otherwise you end up absorbing too many neutrons. Pa233 decays into U233. Now that you can use as a fuel... or in a bomb. In fact they did use it in a bomb. Since you can separate out the Pa233 as its created, you can have rather pure Pa233 with almost no Pa234 --the problem with Pa234 is that it decays into U234, which is not a fuel and is a horrible gamma ray emitter. You don't want it around even in a nuclear plant, so your going to be getting that Pa233 out as soon as you can.
If i have a bunch of Pa233, i just wait a few 100 days, and now i have almost 100% pure U233.... nice of making bombs.
Proliferation resistance of a Th cycle is wishful thinking at best.
1000 tons is not that much.
It is also a different way of doing nuclear. Lots of smaller self contained plants that come and go as a single unit. This removes the massive capitol cost with nuclear that dominates the cost of energy from a plant. You also get economies of scale, because you are building the same design many times.
If you are going to push a design that is "safe" and "this" and "that can't happen". Then you can't really start saying, "well that demonstrator didn't work because the pebbles are designed wrong". Your back at square one. Its not safe if you didn't think of everything. In particular pebble bed reactors are useless for anything but once through cycles, and quite frankly if we really are going to go nuclear, that's silly.
They had serious problems in plant that didn't have a earthquake and a tsunami.
Oh and when the earthquake cracks the main coolant loop and your helium leaks out? Then you have a nice graphite fire...
You mean highly toxic beryllium, that also burns in air. Not really an improvement over graphite.
In many countries this is perfectly legal.
A 1 GW transformer is still much cheaper than 1 GW of DCtoDC conversion. AC still has an advantage.