preliminary injunction continuing a prohibition on the Trump administration proposal to make available blueprints for so-called ghost guns, untraceable weapons
The Trump administration makes no such proposal to make available blueprints for so-called ghost guns.
The term "ghost gun" gets tossed about so much that it's definition seems to keep changing, much like "net neutrality" and "assault weapon". I've seen "ghost gun" defined as a firearm lacking a serial number that can be traced back to who made it, who bought it, and the when and where that happened. By this definition a 3D printed gun is a "ghost gun" because they were not made by a licensed manufacturer that keeps records of their manufacture and sale for review by government regulators.
California wanted to pass a law that required every firearm made in the state, including those made at home by private citizens for their own use, to have a serial number and be registered with the state government. This "ghost gun ban" is going to fail because the criminals that want a gun will simply make them without the permission of the state government.
There is no stopping these untraceable "ghost guns". Right now the 3D plans that Defense Distributed wants to publish are near worthless for producing anything that would be considered a durable, reliable, and accurate weapon. The guy that runs the company, Cody Wilson, knows this. He merely sees this as a proof on concept and is fighting this court case to set a precedent for the future. He's making money selling milling machines that can turn a block of aluminum into a receiver for a rifle or handgun. If he wins this case then he can sell more mills. He's called himself an "anarcho-capitalist" and believes that the government needs to stay out of business as much as possible. That includes allowing people to make money selling small arms.
I've seen this guy on Youtube doing interviews and he comes off as foul mouthed and just smart enough to make trouble for the government but stay out of prison while doing it. I don't know if that makes him a genius or a fool but I wish him all the success he can muster.
The Trump administration acknowledging the rule of law?
Please, they make up the law as it suits them, and they can't even take responsibility for their own choices.
That's what happens when you have a Congress that creates such a large executive branch with so many rule making departments.
It's only now that they don't have one of their own in the White House that congresscritters are getting so upset. Here's an idea, roll back some of the executive powers and Trump can't do so much damage. He'd likely still be a bull in a china shop but the shop would be much smaller with less china to smash.
Here's another idea, roll back some of the federal authority and leave more to the states. Seems like whenever gun control comes up we have congresscritters shouting for "states rights", that is until some state removes limits on gun ownership and then the petty tyrants in Congress just get short circuits in the brain.
Congress seems to be fine with a tyrannical president, that is until the "tyranny" brings down unemployment and raises wages. That they cannot tolerate, as it exposes the lie that only Congress can fix things.
It is not illegal to make a gun. It's illegal to make a gun and sell it.. But, what if you make the gun, use it for 20 years, give it to your son, and he sells it?
My guess is that the insane anti-rights people would put the son that inherited the gun in jail for ten years, and also dig up the now deceased father and put the corpse in prison for 10 years to make some kind of point.
Technology is moving too fast for this dinosaur of a government we've allowed to develop. A dinosaur as in big, slow, and unable to adapt to a changing climate. It's time to shave it down to the size of the box it came in, the box with the dimensions as defined in the US Constitution.
That's easy. While cosmetically it was relatively unchanged from previous models it had a larger ROM, improved graphics with a separate video buffer from RAM, and an improved controller for accessing storage. An increase in RAM was also standard. Also internally was room for a hard drive or second floppy, as well as ports for external floppy and hard drives. The keyboard and mouse ports were replaced with ADB, and the serial ports were standard (if uncommon at the time) 8-pin DIN sockets that were capable of LocalTalk. The SE also had an internal slot for adding things like Ethernet, video, and math coprocessor, which could expand it's capability considerably. RAM was still limited to 4MB max but upgradable by most anyone handy with a long handle Torx 15 screwdriver.
Honestly I wish they'd just go USB-C since the lightning cable provides zero real benefit to me as a user other than being better than micro-USB (which sucks).
It wasn't until fairly recently that USB-C supported alternate modes for audio and/or video. Until that was added to the spec such devices would need an external USB adapter, which added cost and complexity. Apple brought out Lightning in 2012, 2 years before USB-C was introduced, and it supported audio and video modes from the start. Remembering this history explains why Apple adopted the Lightning port to begin with. Keeping the port allows Apple to differentiate their devices from others, such as avoiding fried phones from out of spec cables in the early days of USB-C (and still lingers on for those that buy cheap).
I expect Apple to stick with Lightning until they come up with something that's beyond USB-C. USB-C is great, and I like it a lot, but devices are already hitting limits on speed and power. Apple is no doubt working on a new Thunderbolt update that will require a connector other than USB-C to bring faster speeds and more power. I'm guessing Apple will introduce this new Thunderbolt connector and have it as a common port on phones, tablets, and laptops. Desktops will no doubt adopt it as well but also have some "legacy" USB-C and other ports to go with.
I don't much care if Apple stays with Lightning or adopts USB-C, it's all the same to me. I'm thinking that maybe Apple should have put Lightning ports on the MacBooks to go with the USB-C so that they could share accessories with the iDevices. Then again this might be coming with whatever Thunderbolt 4 works out to be.
As oppose the other complaint of Apple devices? More expensive titanium/gold/unobtainium devices with a more expensive screen/touchbar/camera?
This is just the expected Apple bashing. If Apple came out with a cures for breast cancer, sickle cell, and juvenile diabetes then they'd be pilloried for doing nothing for old white guys.
I heard in addition to no headphone jack and no home button they have removed the microphone and speaker as well. You just have to drive to a cell phone tower and yell at it...
You laugh now but I could see this happen, except for the yell at the cell tower part, perhaps not from Apple though.
People have become accustomed to using Bluetooth headsets for their cell phones, as well as other wireless accessories, and so there might not be a need for a speaker and microphone on the phone itself. Wireless charging is now a thing, as well as interfaces that don't use buttons. I'm not even sure the "home button" on recent models are a button any more. I think that they are just a capacitance sensor, with maybe a fingerprint reader, and use a small transducer inside to "wiggle" the phone a bit to give an impression that the button moved. Facial recognition and/or pass codes on a touch screen can secure the device just as well as a fingerprint detecting home button. There will be a camera and touch screen but the internal speaker and microphone could be replaced with a wireless headset, a "wristwatch" device, or whatever.
I expect this new iPhone to have a speaker and microphone, the next model though... who knows?
That's because it's a rather petty complaint. If the complaint is the need for access to water then this is the same complaint for any thermal plant, whether that be coal, natural gas, or concentrated solar. There's plenty of places for nuclear power yet. If they can get water for the boilers at the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility out in the desert near Las Vegas then they can find water for any nuclear power plant where ever they choose to put one..
With current technology, nuclear runs at 500K whereas natural gas and coal runs at 1000K.
With current technology there's probably a half dozen third generation nuclear designs being built right now. The AP1000 reactors that just went online at Vogtle run at about 500K, probably lower than that even. In South Korea they spec them at about 620C, or about 890K. That's not quite 1000K that some coal power plants reach but darn close. The complaint with some second generation nuclear power plants was that they ran too hot. Running over 650C or so is considered too close to where the hot water could start to burn through the zirconium cladding on the fuel rods, which has been the case in likely every notable nuclear power accident you can come up with. Lowering the temperature for those built in the last decade or so is considered a feature, not a bug.
I'm thinking that if the nuclear reactors ran at 1000K that you would complain that running so hot would be unsafe. I consider the temperature they run at a very petty complaint because nuclear power at every temperature is still as inexpensive, low CO2, safe, and reliable, as anything else we have, if not far better. We'd be wise to build as many third generation nuclear power plants as we can until we work out the details on building fourth generation nuclear.
At 1000K you can run the "cool" side above 400K if need be, so you can do things like district heating or use cooling towers.
That's true. With these proposed molten salt reactors we can expect to be able to reach even higher temperatures. Temperatures that can allow for ease of running air cooled systems that don't need water to run efficiently. Temperatures that, if water is available, can produce desalinated drinking water or synthetic fuels. Temperatures that allow for efficient thermal energy storage and the load following systems that come with it.
At 500K that is unviable.
At 500K current second and third generation nuclear power is still very affordable, safe, clean, and (again) we'd be wise to keep using what we have so long as it is safe to do so and build more until we get fourth generation designs proven.
As to load-following, economy kills that idea. There are no savings from running below full power output, so the owners would be idiots to load-follow unless electricity prices go negative.
You are speculating. You can't say for certain anything on the economics of technology that isn't on the market yet. I've heard from nuclear power plant operators that current nuclear power can load follow just fine, and do so economically, if only the steam systems allowed for them to load follow. The savings in having nuclear follow load is not having to burn natural gas. Natural gas boilers are very cheap to run but they also have steam systems that prevent them from following load. Natural gas turbines can follow load but they burn twice as much fuel as the boilers for the same electrical output.
Solar has the same characteristics, except it manages to stay economical without producing unwanted power at night.
Citation needed. My brothers have considered investing in solar power but they found out that it's not all that great. One brother simply gave up on the idea, the other had to scale back on his plans once he found out that the tax rebates wouldn't be as big as he though
That doesn't really account for the volume of energy trading between Germany and other countries. For example, in 2017, Germany generated 142 TWh from solar and wind and 50 TWh from natural gas, but only imported 27 TWh. (By your "logic", they'd have to import over 200 TWh to compensate for the capacity factors.)
Or, export 100 TWh to compensate. Which it appears is what they've been doing.
The majority of the wind fleet in Denmark and Germany is very new, and considering the learning curve, the older units were more expensive (and had to be subsidized at that point). The majority of France's nuclear fleet is old (and already amortized). Nothing odd about this. At a comparable level of development, wind power will definitely be cheaper than nuclear.
Yes, I know, we've established that wind is expensive and nuclear is cheap. The why is not all that important. Claiming wind will catch up is speculation. This discussion is in response to an announcement by Bill Gates of a new kind of nuclear power very much unlike anything done before. The game has changed and wind power has nothing to offer that could compete.
As I mentioned above, this inference is nonsensical, that's not how capacity factors works.
I know how capacity factor works, and I gave an overly simplified example to prove a point. I stated it was not a real world example but it does play out similarly in more complex real life examples. I've read studies and news articles on wind power, and wind power will not lower CO2 output without access to sufficient hydro capacity or other low CO2 backup. The trend is now that every 5 MW of wind needs 4 MW of reserve on hand. Germany addresses this by exporting their excess wind power at low rates only to have to buy some of that back at higher rates. A nation with access to plenty of hydro can manage a lot of wind and still see lower CO2 but if the backup is natural gas turbines or spinning reserves of coal then a nation can see increased CO2 output with this excess of wind production.
I bring up Germany because it pushes "angel's" buttons but this has been playing out all over the world and very few people are willing to admit to the problem. Wind will not lower CO2 without access to hydro for storage. Prices for electricity will rise with wind power precisely because of the need for backup reserves. What is promising is that new thermal storage energy systems are coming to solve this. What happens though is that this technology mates well with molten salt nuclear reactors. If we have cheap nuclear with thermal energy storage, and the load following capability that comes with that, then wind looks even less attractive than it does now.
The difference is that the source of the heat is either inadequately hot, as in current designs, or consists of a molten corrosive salt, as in the modern designs that no one can get to actually work.
How do you mean "inadequately hot"? There's over 400 of these "inadequate" nuclear reactors around the world right now providing 10% of the electricity we use. You do realize that the DOE has just funded a company that claims to have solved the problem you brought up? There's a lot of smart people at the DOE and I'm guessing they gave them these funds, and access to government facilities, because they believe these problems have been solved. Included in these smart people are Bill Gates, his friends at TerraPower, Southern Company, ORNL, a handful of well known universities, and on and on. I'm guessing that they have considerable confidence in that this works, or that they can get it working soon.
In current designs, you are stuck trying to get a decent amount of energy out of low-pressure steam, rather than proper high-pressure 1000K steam from a nuclear or gas plant. Suddenly your major concern isn't dealing with the stresses from the power that you generate, it is simply to get rid of the waste heat that dwarfs the actual power output. It's doable if you have a body of water nearby, or if you can boil off water in cooling towers. If you build 2 every month you'll be out of suitable sites in a decade.
First, there's plenty of good sites for nuclear power plants with current technology. These run on the same steam cycles as coal and natural gas so if that's a problem for nuclear then it's a problem for electrical power generation generally. Second, these molten salt reactors use the same molten salt that has been proposed for concentrated solar thermal power. If it works for solar power then it works for nuclear power, and vice versa. This means no need for water cooling, it's air cooled and we aren't going to run out of air, and no need to be near a body of water. It can follow changing loads, which is what's been something of a holy grail for solar power for a long time.
Add to that that you'll be littering the country with useless buildings that have to be guarded and maintained for a long time. Denmark is currently taking apart the tiny experimental reactors at RisÃ. The cost is astronomical. Thankfully Denmark does not have actual power producing reactors to deal with.
The reactors that TerraPower propose are suppose to be moveable by trucks and trains. They'll simply pick up the valuable parts and ship them off to a secure site when they are finished with them. Which is far better litter management proposed than for wind and solar so far.
Get nuclear power plants up to a decent temperature and find a way to avoid the littering, then we can talk. Before 2030, so solar cells won't have taken over the world.
That's precisely what the article proposes that's being done. Did you even read the article? I know this is Slashdot but you are simply raising every problem that TerraPower says they've already solved. All they are doing now is building a small scale prototype for the government to look over.
Good luck.
Thanks, but I'm not the one doing the work. And, it looks like the people doing the work have it figured out.
No, nuclear *must* demand a higher price because of its high operating costs compounding its high capital costs.
What you fail to understand is that nuclear demands a higher price and people are willing to pay for it. Yes, they must demand this price because of operating costs. They get paid this price because nuclear power offers a level of reliability, clean air, and safety that no other energy source can offer.
What we are seeing now are people like Bill Gates, TerraPower, and Southern Company, working together to bring the cost of nuclear power down. This technology also promises the ability to load follow like natural gas turbines, because it shares a lot of technology with it. Oh, and these reactors "eat" the waste from old nuclear reactors as fuel.
That would be alarming if it weren't the case that nothing can stand alone today.
And tomorrow? It's quite possible that these molten chloride fast reactors can stand alone. It's impossible for wind and solar to offer that. Then what? What does wind and sun offer? These people want to have a commercial scale prototype by 2030. Assuming the competition doesn't beat them to it we are about 15 years from wind and solar power becoming obsolete.
Not in Germany. Germany really doesn't have massive amounts of natural gas power. Gas is too expensive in Europe to be wasted on generating electricity whenever you want to. Germany only generates something like 13% of its electricity in gas plants. Considering that it generates 2.5 times as much from wind and solar, "proxy" clearly doesn't describe the relationship unless Germans can somehow conjure electricity from nothing.
Easy answer to that. Germany "conjures" this by selling electricity cheap to Sweden when Germany has an excess of sun and wind production, which seems to happen often with the large subsidies for wind and solar, and buying essentially that same electricity back from them at a higher price when there is a shortage. This isn't just Sweden in on the deal, they just make a good example because Sweden has a lot of hydro to balance their national grid and store the electricity that they bought cheap from Germany. France exports a lot of electricity too, which comes largely from nuclear power. Italy imports as much cheap electricity from other nations as they rely heavily on expensive natural gas.
Seems odd to me that nations that rely heavily on "cheap" wind power, like Denmark and Germany, pay such high prices for electricity when nations that rely heavily on "expensive" natural gas and nuclear, like France and Italy, pay much less.
This sentence is absolutely nonsensical. One can't make an inference like that from any level of wind capacity factor.
Sure you can make this inference. If wind power has a capacity factor of 50% then the rest has to be made up with load following natural gas turbines for a constant output. If the same electricity is produced by combined cycle natural gas 100% of the time, and with twice the efficiency of the turbines, then either way you'd be burning the same amount of fuel for the same consistent output. If the wind power has a capacity factor lower than 50%, which is almost always the case, then you'd be burning more fuel in the turbines with wind than if you had simply done without the wind and use the combined cycle natural gas production. That's an overly simple case that would never happen in real life but it does show how too much reliance on wind can increase a nation's CO2 output.
Not anymore. At least in certain regions. Those will increase in size over time, though. Very recently, price even in German auctions was around 4-5 Euro cents per kWh, much less than what is requested by prospective nuclear power operators from states as a guaranteeed feed-in price (in my country neighboring to Germany, a guaranteed price of 10 Euro cents per kWh was requested by the nuclear plant operator as a condition for building two new reactors).
Wind is cheap because wind is not reliable. Nuclear power can demand a higher price because it is reliable. Adding storage, load following power sources, arranging for shedding of load, or importing and exporting with nations with such load management, costs money. If the nuclear power plant was so "expensive" they why did anyone agree to this price guarantee? The answer is because it's more expensive to have to rely on "cheap" wind power.
It doesn't take a molten salt reactor to use thorium as fuel. It's just that thorium and molten salt reactors have properties that make the two go well together.
As I recall Canada and India have active government programs to use thorium in solid fuel reactors. I also recall the USA had experimented with a solid fuel thorium breeder reactor that was considered successful. Thorium is an excellent fuel for nuclear reactors whether that be molten salt fuel, solid fuel, or whatever other form the fuel might take. Thorium is plentiful and therefore inexpensive. Alone it's not fissile, it needs plutonium or enriched uranium to get the process going but after that it "just works". There's no such thing as "enriched thorium" because there is really only one isotope that exists in nature. It's worthless to make weapons and difficult to turn into weapon grade material, therefore inherently resistant to weapon proliferation. Because it's "lighter" than uranium it produces fewer difficult to handle "heavy" fission products.
I also have no problem with more MSRs. I do have a problem with the reluctance of numerous governments, including my own, to allow the use of thorium for fuel.
This "contaminated water" is tritiated water, water with tritium (hydrogen-3) in it. It's safe in small quantities as it occurs naturally. No one is quite sure what levels of tritiated water is safe, and there is no doubt it is safe because, again, this stuff comes out of every faucet in the world. This water has been filtered of everything but the water, but it's still "contaminated" because it's the water itself that's radioactive and it's exceedingly difficult to remove the radioactive water from the not radioactive water. This highly dilute heavy water is probably not something you'd want to make your coffee with but it is certainly safe to dump in the ocean, which is precisely how they wish to dispose of it.
Holding this water in tanks is just stupid. Probably dumping it all at once might be stupid but they could at least dump it out as quickly as the rainwater is collecting in the open top tanks so the problem isn't getting bigger.
This was a problem they figured out decades ago. Just dump the water. There's various legal limits around the world on how much can enter the environment because of limited information on it's toxicity but we do have at least some idea on how much is safe, because (yet again) this stuff occurs naturally.
Small scale reactor development has been pretty heavy for the last 20 years or so.
No, small scale nuclear development has been pretty heavy for 70 years, that's not two decades but seven decades. The USS Nautilus, the first nuclear powered submarine, was launched in 1954, first laid down in 1952, had the contract for construction awarded in 1951, and plans for its construction going back to 1947. That submarine had a 10MW reactor and development of new designs never stopped, with modern submarines having power plants of about 250MW.
The US Navy has used over two dozen different reactor designs, operated hundreds of these small reactors since 1950, and did so with a great safety record. Oh, and there's at least four different companies competing right now in this long existing market for small modular reactors.
When it comes to civilian power plants there's a "sweet spot" of both economy of scale and keeping a power plant from getting too big to handle, which is in the gigawatt range. Most every nuclear power plant will have multiple reactors that are run by a shared team of engineers, technicians, and managers. With small modular reactors this would simply mean something like a dozen of these reactors instead of just 2, 3, or as many as 6, on one site.
Sure newer designs are inherently better protected against stupid, but are they enough?
Yes, absolutely.
Second generation designs like at Fukushima and Chernobyl it was possible to force them into an unsafe condition by disabling safety mechanisms. As these safety mechanisms required electrical power to operate this means denying these systems power can render the reactors unsafe. Fukushima lost power from being overwhelmed by a wave of seawater, Chernobyl had power removed from safety systems by a wave of hubris and incompetence.
Third generation nuclear are in most every way built and operated like a second generation plant but the design parameters are such that make it impossible, or nearly impossible, to force an unsafe condition. This is by things like having moderator rods held up by magnets and lowered under gravity, if power is lost then it will shutdown. Heat removal is done by the heat within the reactor. The reactors at Fukushima had an early version of this but it only worked until the temperature dropped to a certain level, once the systems stopped they could not be restarted again without electricity and the temperatures rose again, to a point of failure. Third generation reactors also often have a more sensible means to counteract a "China Syndrome" event where the fuel inside gets hot enough to burn through the primary containment vessel, the floor underneath would be made with neutron absorbing "poisons", which will keep the fuel from becoming critical again, and sacrificial materials, which melt and/or boil off to remove heat. This is a last ditch safety mechanism since at this point the reactor would be damaged far beyond any repair.
MSRs, a fourth generation nuclear technology, simply cannot be rendered unsafe. As temperatures rise the fuel expands to slow fission, it naturally moderates to the heat removal. If the temperatures rise too high then a safety plug at the bottom melts and the fuel drains into a tank with both active and passive cooling. A reactor core is designed to keep the fuel in a state to maintain fission, and allow the heat to only leave through the coolant loops that drive the turbines. With liquid fuel in MSRs the fuel can be drained from the core to a tank that has a shape that denies it the ability to continue to fission. Some designs will add "poisons" to this drained fuel to soak up neutrons that could keep fission going. Every system I've seen has a primary cooling system that is driven by electric pumps to keep it cool but this is only to allow increased safety and reduce the time before it is safe for people to enter and inspect the reactor. Secondary cooling is by convection and so long as there is air and gravity it will be kept cool. A last ditch final and beyond all doubt safety mechanism is this, if the fuel gets far too hot it will simply boil away from the core, which again has the properties required to keep the fuel critical. This would be exceedingly bad since this means a plume of radioactive gas rolling out and condensing on everything it touches, but it will mean that fission stops very quickly, heat will be removed with the boiling off of the fuel and/or moderator, and the radiation that escapes will be very small, and the heavy gasses will not rise and float away. Unless the designers were exceedingly stupid and had no proper containment structure, like at Chernobyl, no radioactive material could leave the reactor site. As everything is operating at near atmospheric pressures, perhaps even a slight vacuum, it would be impossible for the containment to be cracked open violently like at Fukushima.
Fourth generation nuclear is defined by the lack of water as a primary coolant. Water is very bad in nuclear accidents as both hydrogen and oxygen make very good neutron moderators and reflectors, which encourage fission. Water also likes to burn metals under high temperatures and release explosive hydrogen gas in the process. Boiling water will expand to 1000 times the volume of the li
German CO2 emissions rise in 2015 despite renewables surge
That's only a surprise to anyone that hasn't figured out that wind and solar power are just proxies for natural gas. Wind is unreliable, and as the winds shift the difference between it and the load have to be made up by something. This "something" needs to be able to react quickly to the changing supply to meet demand and we have only two energy sources that can do this, natural gas turbines and hydroelectric dams. Natural gas turbines are not very efficient, about 30%, while natural gas combined cycle plants are nearly twice as efficient. Given the low capacity factor of wind power it's often been shown that just burning the natural gas in a combined cycle plant will nearly always have a lower CO2 output than if natural gas turbines were combined with wind.
Solar is "reliable" in that we know when the sun will rise and set but "unreliable" in that we can't just tap into that whenever we want. Despite claims of the sun's output matching demand this is only true in the most general sense. People do use more power during the day than at night but there are peaks in electrical demand every morning and evening, I'm guessing as people make coffee and toast for breakfast and then put something to eat in ovens every evening. Solar output peaks at noon, right when people turn off stuff to break for lunch. This also means relying heavily on natural gas for people that lack ready access to hydro power.
I know people will want to bring up batteries as a means to match supply to demand but I mentioned hydro and natural gas energy sources that can shift output quickly. Batteries are not a source of energy. They cost money, lots of money, but make no power, in fact they lose some of it in the process. This makes them a money loser twice over. Oh, and a source of CO2 emissions in their construction.
Nuclear power is reliable, low CO2, and cheaper than solar power. Since Germany has very little hydro electric power available to them they will continue to see electricity prices rise, and CO2 emissions rise, until they reverse this self imposed ban on nuclear power. That is, perhaps, unless they replace much of their coal and "renewables" with combined cycle natural gas power.
Not only am I convinced that the deaths from the Fukushima Diiachi meltdown is zero, so are the experts at the United Nations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Annex A of the UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee for the Effects of Atomic Radiation) 2013 report to the UN General Assembly[49] states that the average effective dose of the 25,000 workers over the first 19 months after the accident was about 12 millisieverts (mSv). About 0.7% of the workforce received doses of more than 100 mSv (Chapter II A(b) paragraph 35). No radiation-related deaths or acute diseases have been observed among the workers and general public exposed to radiation from the accident (Chapter II A(b) paragraph 38). Adults living in the city of Fukushima were estimated to have received, on average, an effective dose of about 4 mSv (Chapter II A(a) paragraph 30). No discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected among exposed members of the public or their descendants (Chapter II A(b) paragraph 39). Average annual exposure in the region from naturally occurring sources is about 2.1 mSv, and average lifetime exposure is 170 mSv (Chapter II A(2) paragraph 29). For comparison, the average dose from an abdominal and pelvic computed tomography (CT) scan, with and without contrast, is 30 mSv.
In the tsunami there were 16,000 people dead and missing. In all of that chaos and death people focused on the relative non-event that happened at the nuclear power plant. I will emphasize that didn't say the meltdown was a non-event, only that in the aftermath of the tsunami anything that happened at the power plant is minimal by comparison. I recall hearing of dead bodies found on the site of the power plant, the circumstances were such that it is suspected they drowned there in the flood. Again that's my recollection, go find something counter if you like as I already pointed to a report by the UN that no one died as a result of the accident.
There's another report out there that considered the evacuation around Fukushima to have caused more deaths than if everyone had stayed. Maybe the area should have been evacuated but it should have been done more slowly, and with greater care, to avoid the deaths from over exertion, traffic accidents, and so forth, that happened in the mad dash out of the area. We've learned to be more cautious in ordering evacuations, because the risks of deaths from an evacuation is not zero.
Think about that. It's quite possible the Japanese government caused more deaths in the evacuation than could have been caused if everyone stayed in place. We've gotten so scared of nuclear power that we are killing more people to "keep them safe" from it.
So, sure, I'll agree that claiming there were zero deaths from Fukushima is "bullshit". More people died fleeing the radiation than if they had all refused to leave.
Life is dangerous and everything we do carries a risk, and that includes doing nothing. Is there a risk from using nuclear power? Of course. That risk is far lower than using anything else, or using nothing at all.
Because people in China get machine-gunned if they protest?
It seems that there are people that would be fine with harsh treatment of those protesting against nuclear power in the USA. Not gunning them down but locking them up. I've seen video of Bill Nye, "The Science Guy", suggesting we should put people in prison for merely disagreeing with claims that human activity is warming the planet. If we take Bill Nye at his word then he should be fine with imprisoning people protesting against nuclear power.
I'll agree with any claims on man-made global warming, if only to keep Bill Nye from calling for my arrest. I just want to see an "all the above" energy policy in the USA. The Democrats in DC will make happy mouth noises on an "all the above" strategy but when nuclear power comes up they will do everything in their power to keep it from happening. If they were honest then we'd have seen nuclear waste disposal and processing sites get the funding they need, sane policies enacted on new nuclear power plant licensing, people appointed to the NRC and other agencies that would actually issue licenses, and maybe the coal plant they've been using in DC to heat and light their offices get replaced with something far more friendly to the environment. They tried to "greenwash" this power plant and others by mixing biomass fuel with the coal, among other things. It sounds like they might finally replace it with natural gas. If the Democrats were serious about "going green" then they'd be supporting nuclear power.
I won't suggest we jail those that protest nuclear power. I wouldn't be opposed to having them, maybe, perhaps, if they insist on continued protests of the safest and lowest CO2 energy source we know of, getting sedated and put in mental hospitals. That would include protesters holding office in US Congress.
This was probably meant to be "no more materials than a coal plant",
Yes, thank you. Nuclear power is still a thermal power plant like coal and much of natural gas. As such most of the same structures and machines are used, like steam driven generators. The difference is in the source of the heat.
and if you set nuclear and coal plants side by side, it is blindingly obvious. See pages 48-52 for such a comparison of coal with advanced nuclear.
That is an excellent presentation. Thorcon has been a noted advocate for immediate use of thorium for fuel. What makes Thorcon perhaps a bit unique from competitors like Flibe Energy, Terrestrial Energy, and Transatomic, is their very conservative approach. They want to use most everything off the shelf in the construction of a nuclear power plant to keep as many unknowns to a minimum as possible. This helps with licensing and such as well as costs.
Never mind that conventional nuclear already uses a tiny fraction of the resources of renewables, so the comparison with advanced nuclear is even more stark.
I like that article and I expect articles like it to come up more often and eventually be brought to wider audiences. Especially what was said in the last paragraph.
The prospect of climate change and ocean acidification are real, and the long time it takes to implement corrective measures means that we must rapidly decarbonize our energy systems. Our fears of radiation are largely unfounded and have had the deleterious effect of continued use of fossil fuels. Even as we deploy wind and solarâ"the nominally low-carbon sourcesâ"the absence of large scale storage systems have forced us into using natural gas power for back up. The design of natural gas power plants used as spinning reserves are selected on the rapidity with which they can be brought online. These designs are among the least efficient of gas-fired plants, with thermal efficiencies around 33%, and thus high carbon emissions. Gas-fired power plants that operate with a combined steam cycle have thermal efficiencies in excess of 50%. Analysis by Larsen and Rez shows that we would do better in terms of carbon emissions if instead of installing low capacity factor wind or solar systems and backing them with natural gas, we simply used a combined cycle natural gas plant.
Wind and solar power are just proxies for natural gas. This will remain true until technology in storage gets to be cheap enough to compete, which may never happen. Third generation nuclear works now, and fourth generation nuclear promises to be far better. We'll need as much nuclear as we can build now, and we should invest in the next generation nuclear to bring it to market as quickly as we can.
There was a time when the USA could build them "fast enough", and the USA has only grown in population, industrial capacity, and wealth. We can afford to build new nuclear. We can't afford not to. The USA built 99 reactors between 1967 and 1990. That's nearly 5 per year, but they were going online much faster than that at the peak. http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
Just to keep up with the rate of expected closures of old coal and nuclear, and growing electrical demand, the USA will have to build about 2 new nuclear power reactors, of about 1GW capacity, every month. Once we've replaced all the old power plants we will have to keep building them at that rate to replace the ones we build today in 40 or 50 years. This is consistent with EIA projections of 20GW of new natural gas electrical generation capacity this year. https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...
I have heard from a nuclear engineer that a nuclear power plant takes no more materials or engineering than nuclear power. The only difference is in the paperwork. If we can get all the legal hurdles out of the way then we could be building new nuclear like we did in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nuclear power is safe, clean, reliable, and we can build it as cheap as anything. Even with all the current bureaucracy on building nuclear power it is competitive with wind and natural gas, and it's certainly cheaper than solar right now. It's not as cheap as natural gas just yet but it only takes a spike in demand, and therefore prices, to flip that around. I expect that to happen after a couple years of 20GW of more natural gas power coming online every year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It seems all there is to say against nuclear are easily debunked lies. We will have more nuclear power, that not a question any more. The only questions to answer is how quickly we can ramp up production and what kind of nuclear power we will be building. We can build more light water solid fuel reactors like we have for decades, or we can move beyond that and build molten salt reactors.
Nuclear power is by far the safest energy source we have available, that's especially true in the USA. There hasn't been a major incident in the USA with nuclear power since Three Mile Island, and no one died from that. Problems in Japan and with old Soviet reactors are not indicative of anything being built today in the USA. Even so the death count from Fukushima is zero, or so close to it that it's just noise on top of the signal from the tsunami that started it all. A once in a century tsunami that hit a reactor older than Chernobyl is not the metric we should use to measure the safety of nuclear power. Certainly not Chernobyl, a reactor with no containment dome and operated by drunken bureaucrats instead of properly trained technicians.
The question isn't if we should use nuclear power, we don't have much choice not to. The question is how quickly we should be building new nuclear power plants. The nuclear power reactors we have now are getting old and we need to replace them with something. It's going to be nuclear power or the lights will start to go out. Or, at least the lights will go dim. We can build devices to collect energy from wind, water, and sun, but that will never be enough for a society that wants to keep airplanes flying, and explore beyond the atmosphere. In space there is no wind, and even on Mars the sun gets pretty dim.
Using wind, water, and sun for energy might mean survival. Using coal and natural gas will mean continued air pollution. If we are going to keep Earth clean, and go even as far as low earth orbit, then we will need nuclear power.
I think you are confusing Denmark with Norway there.
Oh, and one more thing in addition to the sibling post...
What I mean is that exported "clean" energy from Denmark can displace "dirty" energy that is produced by Denmark's neighbors, neighbors that burn a lot of oil and coal for heat and electricity. This means primarily Germany but there are wires and pipes to other nations for exporting electricity and natural gas. With Germany depending so much on domestic brown coal to get its power it would be best for everyone if Germany bought more nuclear power.
By the way, Germany will have to also embrace nuclear power at some point or be left at the whimsy of the French with their nuclear power or the Russians with their natural gas.
Slashdot Mirror
They'll just build coal plants on the WEST side of the islands. Korea and China won't even notice a difference.
preliminary injunction continuing a prohibition on the Trump administration proposal to make available blueprints for so-called ghost guns, untraceable weapons
The Trump administration makes no such proposal to make available blueprints for so-called ghost guns.
The term "ghost gun" gets tossed about so much that it's definition seems to keep changing, much like "net neutrality" and "assault weapon". I've seen "ghost gun" defined as a firearm lacking a serial number that can be traced back to who made it, who bought it, and the when and where that happened. By this definition a 3D printed gun is a "ghost gun" because they were not made by a licensed manufacturer that keeps records of their manufacture and sale for review by government regulators.
California wanted to pass a law that required every firearm made in the state, including those made at home by private citizens for their own use, to have a serial number and be registered with the state government. This "ghost gun ban" is going to fail because the criminals that want a gun will simply make them without the permission of the state government.
There is no stopping these untraceable "ghost guns". Right now the 3D plans that Defense Distributed wants to publish are near worthless for producing anything that would be considered a durable, reliable, and accurate weapon. The guy that runs the company, Cody Wilson, knows this. He merely sees this as a proof on concept and is fighting this court case to set a precedent for the future. He's making money selling milling machines that can turn a block of aluminum into a receiver for a rifle or handgun. If he wins this case then he can sell more mills. He's called himself an "anarcho-capitalist" and believes that the government needs to stay out of business as much as possible. That includes allowing people to make money selling small arms.
I've seen this guy on Youtube doing interviews and he comes off as foul mouthed and just smart enough to make trouble for the government but stay out of prison while doing it. I don't know if that makes him a genius or a fool but I wish him all the success he can muster.
The Trump administration acknowledging the rule of law?
Please, they make up the law as it suits them, and they can't even take responsibility for their own choices.
That's what happens when you have a Congress that creates such a large executive branch with so many rule making departments.
It's only now that they don't have one of their own in the White House that congresscritters are getting so upset. Here's an idea, roll back some of the executive powers and Trump can't do so much damage. He'd likely still be a bull in a china shop but the shop would be much smaller with less china to smash.
Here's another idea, roll back some of the federal authority and leave more to the states. Seems like whenever gun control comes up we have congresscritters shouting for "states rights", that is until some state removes limits on gun ownership and then the petty tyrants in Congress just get short circuits in the brain.
Congress seems to be fine with a tyrannical president, that is until the "tyranny" brings down unemployment and raises wages. That they cannot tolerate, as it exposes the lie that only Congress can fix things.
It is not illegal to make a gun. It's illegal to make a gun and sell it.. But, what if you make the gun, use it for 20 years, give it to your son, and he sells it?
My guess is that the insane anti-rights people would put the son that inherited the gun in jail for ten years, and also dig up the now deceased father and put the corpse in prison for 10 years to make some kind of point.
Technology is moving too fast for this dinosaur of a government we've allowed to develop. A dinosaur as in big, slow, and unable to adapt to a changing climate. It's time to shave it down to the size of the box it came in, the box with the dimensions as defined in the US Constitution.
Then why did the SE sell so well then?
That's easy. While cosmetically it was relatively unchanged from previous models it had a larger ROM, improved graphics with a separate video buffer from RAM, and an improved controller for accessing storage. An increase in RAM was also standard. Also internally was room for a hard drive or second floppy, as well as ports for external floppy and hard drives. The keyboard and mouse ports were replaced with ADB, and the serial ports were standard (if uncommon at the time) 8-pin DIN sockets that were capable of LocalTalk. The SE also had an internal slot for adding things like Ethernet, video, and math coprocessor, which could expand it's capability considerably. RAM was still limited to 4MB max but upgradable by most anyone handy with a long handle Torx 15 screwdriver.
Does that answer your question?
Honestly I wish they'd just go USB-C since the lightning cable provides zero real benefit to me as a user other than being better than micro-USB (which sucks).
It wasn't until fairly recently that USB-C supported alternate modes for audio and/or video. Until that was added to the spec such devices would need an external USB adapter, which added cost and complexity. Apple brought out Lightning in 2012, 2 years before USB-C was introduced, and it supported audio and video modes from the start. Remembering this history explains why Apple adopted the Lightning port to begin with. Keeping the port allows Apple to differentiate their devices from others, such as avoiding fried phones from out of spec cables in the early days of USB-C (and still lingers on for those that buy cheap).
I expect Apple to stick with Lightning until they come up with something that's beyond USB-C. USB-C is great, and I like it a lot, but devices are already hitting limits on speed and power. Apple is no doubt working on a new Thunderbolt update that will require a connector other than USB-C to bring faster speeds and more power. I'm guessing Apple will introduce this new Thunderbolt connector and have it as a common port on phones, tablets, and laptops. Desktops will no doubt adopt it as well but also have some "legacy" USB-C and other ports to go with.
I don't much care if Apple stays with Lightning or adopts USB-C, it's all the same to me. I'm thinking that maybe Apple should have put Lightning ports on the MacBooks to go with the USB-C so that they could share accessories with the iDevices. Then again this might be coming with whatever Thunderbolt 4 works out to be.
As oppose the other complaint of Apple devices? More expensive titanium/gold/unobtainium devices with a more expensive screen/touchbar/camera?
This is just the expected Apple bashing. If Apple came out with a cures for breast cancer, sickle cell, and juvenile diabetes then they'd be pilloried for doing nothing for old white guys.
I heard in addition to no headphone jack and no home button they have removed the microphone and speaker as well. You just have to drive to a cell phone tower and yell at it...
You laugh now but I could see this happen, except for the yell at the cell tower part, perhaps not from Apple though.
People have become accustomed to using Bluetooth headsets for their cell phones, as well as other wireless accessories, and so there might not be a need for a speaker and microphone on the phone itself. Wireless charging is now a thing, as well as interfaces that don't use buttons. I'm not even sure the "home button" on recent models are a button any more. I think that they are just a capacitance sensor, with maybe a fingerprint reader, and use a small transducer inside to "wiggle" the phone a bit to give an impression that the button moved. Facial recognition and/or pass codes on a touch screen can secure the device just as well as a fingerprint detecting home button. There will be a camera and touch screen but the internal speaker and microphone could be replaced with a wireless headset, a "wristwatch" device, or whatever.
I expect this new iPhone to have a speaker and microphone, the next model though... who knows?
You are ignoring what I am writing.
That's because it's a rather petty complaint. If the complaint is the need for access to water then this is the same complaint for any thermal plant, whether that be coal, natural gas, or concentrated solar. There's plenty of places for nuclear power yet. If they can get water for the boilers at the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility out in the desert near Las Vegas then they can find water for any nuclear power plant where ever they choose to put one..
With current technology, nuclear runs at 500K whereas natural gas and coal runs at 1000K.
With current technology there's probably a half dozen third generation nuclear designs being built right now. The AP1000 reactors that just went online at Vogtle run at about 500K, probably lower than that even. In South Korea they spec them at about 620C, or about 890K. That's not quite 1000K that some coal power plants reach but darn close. The complaint with some second generation nuclear power plants was that they ran too hot. Running over 650C or so is considered too close to where the hot water could start to burn through the zirconium cladding on the fuel rods, which has been the case in likely every notable nuclear power accident you can come up with. Lowering the temperature for those built in the last decade or so is considered a feature, not a bug.
I'm thinking that if the nuclear reactors ran at 1000K that you would complain that running so hot would be unsafe. I consider the temperature they run at a very petty complaint because nuclear power at every temperature is still as inexpensive, low CO2, safe, and reliable, as anything else we have, if not far better. We'd be wise to build as many third generation nuclear power plants as we can until we work out the details on building fourth generation nuclear.
At 1000K you can run the "cool" side above 400K if need be, so you can do things like district heating or use cooling towers.
That's true. With these proposed molten salt reactors we can expect to be able to reach even higher temperatures. Temperatures that can allow for ease of running air cooled systems that don't need water to run efficiently. Temperatures that, if water is available, can produce desalinated drinking water or synthetic fuels. Temperatures that allow for efficient thermal energy storage and the load following systems that come with it.
At 500K that is unviable.
At 500K current second and third generation nuclear power is still very affordable, safe, clean, and (again) we'd be wise to keep using what we have so long as it is safe to do so and build more until we get fourth generation designs proven.
As to load-following, economy kills that idea. There are no savings from running below full power output, so the owners would be idiots to load-follow unless electricity prices go negative.
You are speculating. You can't say for certain anything on the economics of technology that isn't on the market yet. I've heard from nuclear power plant operators that current nuclear power can load follow just fine, and do so economically, if only the steam systems allowed for them to load follow. The savings in having nuclear follow load is not having to burn natural gas. Natural gas boilers are very cheap to run but they also have steam systems that prevent them from following load. Natural gas turbines can follow load but they burn twice as much fuel as the boilers for the same electrical output.
Solar has the same characteristics, except it manages to stay economical without producing unwanted power at night.
Citation needed. My brothers have considered investing in solar power but they found out that it's not all that great. One brother simply gave up on the idea, the other had to scale back on his plans once he found out that the tax rebates wouldn't be as big as he though
That doesn't really account for the volume of energy trading between Germany and other countries. For example, in 2017, Germany generated 142 TWh from solar and wind and 50 TWh from natural gas, but only imported 27 TWh. (By your "logic", they'd have to import over 200 TWh to compensate for the capacity factors.)
Or, export 100 TWh to compensate. Which it appears is what they've been doing.
The majority of the wind fleet in Denmark and Germany is very new, and considering the learning curve, the older units were more expensive (and had to be subsidized at that point). The majority of France's nuclear fleet is old (and already amortized). Nothing odd about this. At a comparable level of development, wind power will definitely be cheaper than nuclear.
Yes, I know, we've established that wind is expensive and nuclear is cheap. The why is not all that important. Claiming wind will catch up is speculation. This discussion is in response to an announcement by Bill Gates of a new kind of nuclear power very much unlike anything done before. The game has changed and wind power has nothing to offer that could compete.
As I mentioned above, this inference is nonsensical, that's not how capacity factors works.
I know how capacity factor works, and I gave an overly simplified example to prove a point. I stated it was not a real world example but it does play out similarly in more complex real life examples. I've read studies and news articles on wind power, and wind power will not lower CO2 output without access to sufficient hydro capacity or other low CO2 backup. The trend is now that every 5 MW of wind needs 4 MW of reserve on hand. Germany addresses this by exporting their excess wind power at low rates only to have to buy some of that back at higher rates. A nation with access to plenty of hydro can manage a lot of wind and still see lower CO2 but if the backup is natural gas turbines or spinning reserves of coal then a nation can see increased CO2 output with this excess of wind production.
I bring up Germany because it pushes "angel's" buttons but this has been playing out all over the world and very few people are willing to admit to the problem. Wind will not lower CO2 without access to hydro for storage. Prices for electricity will rise with wind power precisely because of the need for backup reserves. What is promising is that new thermal storage energy systems are coming to solve this. What happens though is that this technology mates well with molten salt nuclear reactors. If we have cheap nuclear with thermal energy storage, and the load following capability that comes with that, then wind looks even less attractive than it does now.
The difference is that the source of the heat is either inadequately hot, as in current designs, or consists of a molten corrosive salt, as in the modern designs that no one can get to actually work.
How do you mean "inadequately hot"? There's over 400 of these "inadequate" nuclear reactors around the world right now providing 10% of the electricity we use. You do realize that the DOE has just funded a company that claims to have solved the problem you brought up? There's a lot of smart people at the DOE and I'm guessing they gave them these funds, and access to government facilities, because they believe these problems have been solved. Included in these smart people are Bill Gates, his friends at TerraPower, Southern Company, ORNL, a handful of well known universities, and on and on. I'm guessing that they have considerable confidence in that this works, or that they can get it working soon.
In current designs, you are stuck trying to get a decent amount of energy out of low-pressure steam, rather than proper high-pressure 1000K steam from a nuclear or gas plant. Suddenly your major concern isn't dealing with the stresses from the power that you generate, it is simply to get rid of the waste heat that dwarfs the actual power output. It's doable if you have a body of water nearby, or if you can boil off water in cooling towers. If you build 2 every month you'll be out of suitable sites in a decade.
First, there's plenty of good sites for nuclear power plants with current technology. These run on the same steam cycles as coal and natural gas so if that's a problem for nuclear then it's a problem for electrical power generation generally. Second, these molten salt reactors use the same molten salt that has been proposed for concentrated solar thermal power. If it works for solar power then it works for nuclear power, and vice versa. This means no need for water cooling, it's air cooled and we aren't going to run out of air, and no need to be near a body of water. It can follow changing loads, which is what's been something of a holy grail for solar power for a long time.
Add to that that you'll be littering the country with useless buildings that have to be guarded and maintained for a long time. Denmark is currently taking apart the tiny experimental reactors at RisÃ. The cost is astronomical. Thankfully Denmark does not have actual power producing reactors to deal with.
The reactors that TerraPower propose are suppose to be moveable by trucks and trains. They'll simply pick up the valuable parts and ship them off to a secure site when they are finished with them. Which is far better litter management proposed than for wind and solar so far.
Get nuclear power plants up to a decent temperature and find a way to avoid the littering, then we can talk. Before 2030, so solar cells won't have taken over the world.
That's precisely what the article proposes that's being done. Did you even read the article? I know this is Slashdot but you are simply raising every problem that TerraPower says they've already solved. All they are doing now is building a small scale prototype for the government to look over.
Good luck.
Thanks, but I'm not the one doing the work. And, it looks like the people doing the work have it figured out.
Are you drunk? You really shouldn't be posting anything while drunk.
No, nuclear *must* demand a higher price because of its high operating costs compounding its high capital costs.
What you fail to understand is that nuclear demands a higher price and people are willing to pay for it. Yes, they must demand this price because of operating costs. They get paid this price because nuclear power offers a level of reliability, clean air, and safety that no other energy source can offer.
What we are seeing now are people like Bill Gates, TerraPower, and Southern Company, working together to bring the cost of nuclear power down. This technology also promises the ability to load follow like natural gas turbines, because it shares a lot of technology with it. Oh, and these reactors "eat" the waste from old nuclear reactors as fuel.
That would be alarming if it weren't the case that nothing can stand alone today.
And tomorrow? It's quite possible that these molten chloride fast reactors can stand alone. It's impossible for wind and solar to offer that. Then what? What does wind and sun offer? These people want to have a commercial scale prototype by 2030. Assuming the competition doesn't beat them to it we are about 15 years from wind and solar power becoming obsolete.
Not in Germany. Germany really doesn't have massive amounts of natural gas power. Gas is too expensive in Europe to be wasted on generating electricity whenever you want to. Germany only generates something like 13% of its electricity in gas plants. Considering that it generates 2.5 times as much from wind and solar, "proxy" clearly doesn't describe the relationship unless Germans can somehow conjure electricity from nothing.
Easy answer to that. Germany "conjures" this by selling electricity cheap to Sweden when Germany has an excess of sun and wind production, which seems to happen often with the large subsidies for wind and solar, and buying essentially that same electricity back from them at a higher price when there is a shortage. This isn't just Sweden in on the deal, they just make a good example because Sweden has a lot of hydro to balance their national grid and store the electricity that they bought cheap from Germany. France exports a lot of electricity too, which comes largely from nuclear power. Italy imports as much cheap electricity from other nations as they rely heavily on expensive natural gas.
Seems odd to me that nations that rely heavily on "cheap" wind power, like Denmark and Germany, pay such high prices for electricity when nations that rely heavily on "expensive" natural gas and nuclear, like France and Italy, pay much less.
This sentence is absolutely nonsensical. One can't make an inference like that from any level of wind capacity factor.
Sure you can make this inference. If wind power has a capacity factor of 50% then the rest has to be made up with load following natural gas turbines for a constant output. If the same electricity is produced by combined cycle natural gas 100% of the time, and with twice the efficiency of the turbines, then either way you'd be burning the same amount of fuel for the same consistent output. If the wind power has a capacity factor lower than 50%, which is almost always the case, then you'd be burning more fuel in the turbines with wind than if you had simply done without the wind and use the combined cycle natural gas production. That's an overly simple case that would never happen in real life but it does show how too much reliance on wind can increase a nation's CO2 output.
Not anymore. At least in certain regions. Those will increase in size over time, though. Very recently, price even in German auctions was around 4-5 Euro cents per kWh, much less than what is requested by prospective nuclear power operators from states as a guaranteeed feed-in price (in my country neighboring to Germany, a guaranteed price of 10 Euro cents per kWh was requested by the nuclear plant operator as a condition for building two new reactors).
Wind is cheap because wind is not reliable. Nuclear power can demand a higher price because it is reliable. Adding storage, load following power sources, arranging for shedding of load, or importing and exporting with nations with such load management, costs money. If the nuclear power plant was so "expensive" they why did anyone agree to this price guarantee? The answer is because it's more expensive to have to rely on "cheap" wind power.
It doesn't take a molten salt reactor to use thorium as fuel. It's just that thorium and molten salt reactors have properties that make the two go well together.
As I recall Canada and India have active government programs to use thorium in solid fuel reactors. I also recall the USA had experimented with a solid fuel thorium breeder reactor that was considered successful. Thorium is an excellent fuel for nuclear reactors whether that be molten salt fuel, solid fuel, or whatever other form the fuel might take. Thorium is plentiful and therefore inexpensive. Alone it's not fissile, it needs plutonium or enriched uranium to get the process going but after that it "just works". There's no such thing as "enriched thorium" because there is really only one isotope that exists in nature. It's worthless to make weapons and difficult to turn into weapon grade material, therefore inherently resistant to weapon proliferation. Because it's "lighter" than uranium it produces fewer difficult to handle "heavy" fission products.
I also have no problem with more MSRs. I do have a problem with the reluctance of numerous governments, including my own, to allow the use of thorium for fuel.
This "contaminated water" is tritiated water, water with tritium (hydrogen-3) in it. It's safe in small quantities as it occurs naturally. No one is quite sure what levels of tritiated water is safe, and there is no doubt it is safe because, again, this stuff comes out of every faucet in the world. This water has been filtered of everything but the water, but it's still "contaminated" because it's the water itself that's radioactive and it's exceedingly difficult to remove the radioactive water from the not radioactive water. This highly dilute heavy water is probably not something you'd want to make your coffee with but it is certainly safe to dump in the ocean, which is precisely how they wish to dispose of it.
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
Holding this water in tanks is just stupid. Probably dumping it all at once might be stupid but they could at least dump it out as quickly as the rainwater is collecting in the open top tanks so the problem isn't getting bigger.
This was a problem they figured out decades ago. Just dump the water. There's various legal limits around the world on how much can enter the environment because of limited information on it's toxicity but we do have at least some idea on how much is safe, because (yet again) this stuff occurs naturally.
Small scale reactor development has been pretty heavy for the last 20 years or so.
No, small scale nuclear development has been pretty heavy for 70 years, that's not two decades but seven decades. The USS Nautilus, the first nuclear powered submarine, was launched in 1954, first laid down in 1952, had the contract for construction awarded in 1951, and plans for its construction going back to 1947. That submarine had a 10MW reactor and development of new designs never stopped, with modern submarines having power plants of about 250MW.
The US Navy has used over two dozen different reactor designs, operated hundreds of these small reactors since 1950, and did so with a great safety record. Oh, and there's at least four different companies competing right now in this long existing market for small modular reactors.
When it comes to civilian power plants there's a "sweet spot" of both economy of scale and keeping a power plant from getting too big to handle, which is in the gigawatt range. Most every nuclear power plant will have multiple reactors that are run by a shared team of engineers, technicians, and managers. With small modular reactors this would simply mean something like a dozen of these reactors instead of just 2, 3, or as many as 6, on one site.
Sure newer designs are inherently better protected against stupid, but are they enough?
Yes, absolutely.
Second generation designs like at Fukushima and Chernobyl it was possible to force them into an unsafe condition by disabling safety mechanisms. As these safety mechanisms required electrical power to operate this means denying these systems power can render the reactors unsafe. Fukushima lost power from being overwhelmed by a wave of seawater, Chernobyl had power removed from safety systems by a wave of hubris and incompetence.
Third generation nuclear are in most every way built and operated like a second generation plant but the design parameters are such that make it impossible, or nearly impossible, to force an unsafe condition. This is by things like having moderator rods held up by magnets and lowered under gravity, if power is lost then it will shutdown. Heat removal is done by the heat within the reactor. The reactors at Fukushima had an early version of this but it only worked until the temperature dropped to a certain level, once the systems stopped they could not be restarted again without electricity and the temperatures rose again, to a point of failure. Third generation reactors also often have a more sensible means to counteract a "China Syndrome" event where the fuel inside gets hot enough to burn through the primary containment vessel, the floor underneath would be made with neutron absorbing "poisons", which will keep the fuel from becoming critical again, and sacrificial materials, which melt and/or boil off to remove heat. This is a last ditch safety mechanism since at this point the reactor would be damaged far beyond any repair.
MSRs, a fourth generation nuclear technology, simply cannot be rendered unsafe. As temperatures rise the fuel expands to slow fission, it naturally moderates to the heat removal. If the temperatures rise too high then a safety plug at the bottom melts and the fuel drains into a tank with both active and passive cooling. A reactor core is designed to keep the fuel in a state to maintain fission, and allow the heat to only leave through the coolant loops that drive the turbines. With liquid fuel in MSRs the fuel can be drained from the core to a tank that has a shape that denies it the ability to continue to fission. Some designs will add "poisons" to this drained fuel to soak up neutrons that could keep fission going. Every system I've seen has a primary cooling system that is driven by electric pumps to keep it cool but this is only to allow increased safety and reduce the time before it is safe for people to enter and inspect the reactor. Secondary cooling is by convection and so long as there is air and gravity it will be kept cool. A last ditch final and beyond all doubt safety mechanism is this, if the fuel gets far too hot it will simply boil away from the core, which again has the properties required to keep the fuel critical. This would be exceedingly bad since this means a plume of radioactive gas rolling out and condensing on everything it touches, but it will mean that fission stops very quickly, heat will be removed with the boiling off of the fuel and/or moderator, and the radiation that escapes will be very small, and the heavy gasses will not rise and float away. Unless the designers were exceedingly stupid and had no proper containment structure, like at Chernobyl, no radioactive material could leave the reactor site. As everything is operating at near atmospheric pressures, perhaps even a slight vacuum, it would be impossible for the containment to be cracked open violently like at Fukushima.
Fourth generation nuclear is defined by the lack of water as a primary coolant. Water is very bad in nuclear accidents as both hydrogen and oxygen make very good neutron moderators and reflectors, which encourage fission. Water also likes to burn metals under high temperatures and release explosive hydrogen gas in the process. Boiling water will expand to 1000 times the volume of the li
German CO2 emissions rise in 2015 despite renewables surge
That's only a surprise to anyone that hasn't figured out that wind and solar power are just proxies for natural gas. Wind is unreliable, and as the winds shift the difference between it and the load have to be made up by something. This "something" needs to be able to react quickly to the changing supply to meet demand and we have only two energy sources that can do this, natural gas turbines and hydroelectric dams. Natural gas turbines are not very efficient, about 30%, while natural gas combined cycle plants are nearly twice as efficient. Given the low capacity factor of wind power it's often been shown that just burning the natural gas in a combined cycle plant will nearly always have a lower CO2 output than if natural gas turbines were combined with wind.
Solar is "reliable" in that we know when the sun will rise and set but "unreliable" in that we can't just tap into that whenever we want. Despite claims of the sun's output matching demand this is only true in the most general sense. People do use more power during the day than at night but there are peaks in electrical demand every morning and evening, I'm guessing as people make coffee and toast for breakfast and then put something to eat in ovens every evening. Solar output peaks at noon, right when people turn off stuff to break for lunch. This also means relying heavily on natural gas for people that lack ready access to hydro power.
I know people will want to bring up batteries as a means to match supply to demand but I mentioned hydro and natural gas energy sources that can shift output quickly. Batteries are not a source of energy. They cost money, lots of money, but make no power, in fact they lose some of it in the process. This makes them a money loser twice over. Oh, and a source of CO2 emissions in their construction.
Nuclear power is reliable, low CO2, and cheaper than solar power. Since Germany has very little hydro electric power available to them they will continue to see electricity prices rise, and CO2 emissions rise, until they reverse this self imposed ban on nuclear power. That is, perhaps, unless they replace much of their coal and "renewables" with combined cycle natural gas power.
"death count from Fukushima is zero"
Sorry, this is utter bullshit and you know it.
Not only am I convinced that the deaths from the Fukushima Diiachi meltdown is zero, so are the experts at the United Nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Annex A of the UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee for the Effects of Atomic Radiation) 2013 report to the UN General Assembly[49] states that the average effective dose of the 25,000 workers over the first 19 months after the accident was about 12 millisieverts (mSv). About 0.7% of the workforce received doses of more than 100 mSv (Chapter II A(b) paragraph 35). No radiation-related deaths or acute diseases have been observed among the workers and general public exposed to radiation from the accident (Chapter II A(b) paragraph 38). Adults living in the city of Fukushima were estimated to have received, on average, an effective dose of about 4 mSv (Chapter II A(a) paragraph 30). No discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected among exposed members of the public or their descendants (Chapter II A(b) paragraph 39). Average annual exposure in the region from naturally occurring sources is about 2.1 mSv, and average lifetime exposure is 170 mSv (Chapter II A(2) paragraph 29). For comparison, the average dose from an abdominal and pelvic computed tomography (CT) scan, with and without contrast, is 30 mSv.
In the tsunami there were 16,000 people dead and missing. In all of that chaos and death people focused on the relative non-event that happened at the nuclear power plant. I will emphasize that didn't say the meltdown was a non-event, only that in the aftermath of the tsunami anything that happened at the power plant is minimal by comparison. I recall hearing of dead bodies found on the site of the power plant, the circumstances were such that it is suspected they drowned there in the flood. Again that's my recollection, go find something counter if you like as I already pointed to a report by the UN that no one died as a result of the accident.
There's another report out there that considered the evacuation around Fukushima to have caused more deaths than if everyone had stayed. Maybe the area should have been evacuated but it should have been done more slowly, and with greater care, to avoid the deaths from over exertion, traffic accidents, and so forth, that happened in the mad dash out of the area. We've learned to be more cautious in ordering evacuations, because the risks of deaths from an evacuation is not zero.
Think about that. It's quite possible the Japanese government caused more deaths in the evacuation than could have been caused if everyone stayed in place. We've gotten so scared of nuclear power that we are killing more people to "keep them safe" from it.
So, sure, I'll agree that claiming there were zero deaths from Fukushima is "bullshit". More people died fleeing the radiation than if they had all refused to leave.
Life is dangerous and everything we do carries a risk, and that includes doing nothing. Is there a risk from using nuclear power? Of course. That risk is far lower than using anything else, or using nothing at all.
Because people in China get machine-gunned if they protest?
It seems that there are people that would be fine with harsh treatment of those protesting against nuclear power in the USA. Not gunning them down but locking them up. I've seen video of Bill Nye, "The Science Guy", suggesting we should put people in prison for merely disagreeing with claims that human activity is warming the planet. If we take Bill Nye at his word then he should be fine with imprisoning people protesting against nuclear power.
I'll agree with any claims on man-made global warming, if only to keep Bill Nye from calling for my arrest. I just want to see an "all the above" energy policy in the USA. The Democrats in DC will make happy mouth noises on an "all the above" strategy but when nuclear power comes up they will do everything in their power to keep it from happening. If they were honest then we'd have seen nuclear waste disposal and processing sites get the funding they need, sane policies enacted on new nuclear power plant licensing, people appointed to the NRC and other agencies that would actually issue licenses, and maybe the coal plant they've been using in DC to heat and light their offices get replaced with something far more friendly to the environment. They tried to "greenwash" this power plant and others by mixing biomass fuel with the coal, among other things. It sounds like they might finally replace it with natural gas. If the Democrats were serious about "going green" then they'd be supporting nuclear power.
I won't suggest we jail those that protest nuclear power. I wouldn't be opposed to having them, maybe, perhaps, if they insist on continued protests of the safest and lowest CO2 energy source we know of, getting sedated and put in mental hospitals. That would include protesters holding office in US Congress.
This was probably meant to be "no more materials than a coal plant",
Yes, thank you. Nuclear power is still a thermal power plant like coal and much of natural gas. As such most of the same structures and machines are used, like steam driven generators. The difference is in the source of the heat.
and if you set nuclear and coal plants side by side, it is blindingly obvious. See pages 48-52 for such a comparison of coal with advanced nuclear.
That is an excellent presentation. Thorcon has been a noted advocate for immediate use of thorium for fuel. What makes Thorcon perhaps a bit unique from competitors like Flibe Energy, Terrestrial Energy, and Transatomic, is their very conservative approach. They want to use most everything off the shelf in the construction of a nuclear power plant to keep as many unknowns to a minimum as possible. This helps with licensing and such as well as costs.
Never mind that conventional nuclear already uses a tiny fraction of the resources of renewables, so the comparison with advanced nuclear is even more stark.
I like that article and I expect articles like it to come up more often and eventually be brought to wider audiences. Especially what was said in the last paragraph.
The prospect of climate change and ocean acidification are real, and the long time it takes to implement corrective measures means that we must rapidly decarbonize our energy systems. Our fears of radiation are largely unfounded and have had the deleterious effect of continued use of fossil fuels. Even as we deploy wind and solarâ"the nominally low-carbon sourcesâ"the absence of large scale storage systems have forced us into using natural gas power for back up. The design of natural gas power plants used as spinning reserves are selected on the rapidity with which they can be brought online. These designs are among the least efficient of gas-fired plants, with thermal efficiencies around 33%, and thus high carbon emissions. Gas-fired power plants that operate with a combined steam cycle have thermal efficiencies in excess of 50%. Analysis by Larsen and Rez shows that we would do better in terms of carbon emissions if instead of installing low capacity factor wind or solar systems and backing them with natural gas, we simply used a combined cycle natural gas plant.
Wind and solar power are just proxies for natural gas. This will remain true until technology in storage gets to be cheap enough to compete, which may never happen. Third generation nuclear works now, and fourth generation nuclear promises to be far better. We'll need as much nuclear as we can build now, and we should invest in the next generation nuclear to bring it to market as quickly as we can.
You can't produce nuclear plants fast enough.
Sure we can.
There was a time when the USA could build them "fast enough", and the USA has only grown in population, industrial capacity, and wealth. We can afford to build new nuclear. We can't afford not to. The USA built 99 reactors between 1967 and 1990. That's nearly 5 per year, but they were going online much faster than that at the peak.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
Just to keep up with the rate of expected closures of old coal and nuclear, and growing electrical demand, the USA will have to build about 2 new nuclear power reactors, of about 1GW capacity, every month. Once we've replaced all the old power plants we will have to keep building them at that rate to replace the ones we build today in 40 or 50 years. This is consistent with EIA projections of 20GW of new natural gas electrical generation capacity this year.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...
I have heard from a nuclear engineer that a nuclear power plant takes no more materials or engineering than nuclear power. The only difference is in the paperwork. If we can get all the legal hurdles out of the way then we could be building new nuclear like we did in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nuclear power is safe, clean, reliable, and we can build it as cheap as anything. Even with all the current bureaucracy on building nuclear power it is competitive with wind and natural gas, and it's certainly cheaper than solar right now. It's not as cheap as natural gas just yet but it only takes a spike in demand, and therefore prices, to flip that around. I expect that to happen after a couple years of 20GW of more natural gas power coming online every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It seems all there is to say against nuclear are easily debunked lies. We will have more nuclear power, that not a question any more. The only questions to answer is how quickly we can ramp up production and what kind of nuclear power we will be building. We can build more light water solid fuel reactors like we have for decades, or we can move beyond that and build molten salt reactors.
Forbes claims to know how deadly each energy source is to people.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
Nuclear power is by far the safest energy source we have available, that's especially true in the USA. There hasn't been a major incident in the USA with nuclear power since Three Mile Island, and no one died from that. Problems in Japan and with old Soviet reactors are not indicative of anything being built today in the USA. Even so the death count from Fukushima is zero, or so close to it that it's just noise on top of the signal from the tsunami that started it all. A once in a century tsunami that hit a reactor older than Chernobyl is not the metric we should use to measure the safety of nuclear power. Certainly not Chernobyl, a reactor with no containment dome and operated by drunken bureaucrats instead of properly trained technicians.
The question isn't if we should use nuclear power, we don't have much choice not to. The question is how quickly we should be building new nuclear power plants. The nuclear power reactors we have now are getting old and we need to replace them with something. It's going to be nuclear power or the lights will start to go out. Or, at least the lights will go dim. We can build devices to collect energy from wind, water, and sun, but that will never be enough for a society that wants to keep airplanes flying, and explore beyond the atmosphere. In space there is no wind, and even on Mars the sun gets pretty dim.
Using wind, water, and sun for energy might mean survival. Using coal and natural gas will mean continued air pollution. If we are going to keep Earth clean, and go even as far as low earth orbit, then we will need nuclear power.
I think you are confusing Denmark with Norway there.
Oh, and one more thing in addition to the sibling post...
What I mean is that exported "clean" energy from Denmark can displace "dirty" energy that is produced by Denmark's neighbors, neighbors that burn a lot of oil and coal for heat and electricity. This means primarily Germany but there are wires and pipes to other nations for exporting electricity and natural gas. With Germany depending so much on domestic brown coal to get its power it would be best for everyone if Germany bought more nuclear power.
By the way, Germany will have to also embrace nuclear power at some point or be left at the whimsy of the French with their nuclear power or the Russians with their natural gas.