Uranium isn't running out unless you mean in the same sense that the sun is running out. Even if we only recycled the uranium left in our spent fuel it would still last for centuries. With regard to cost I addressed this in my previous post. Wind power fails to compete with Nuclear in Sweden, despite the former being heavily subsidized and the latter being taxed. Swedish nuclear plants also have to pay for their own waste storage and the construction of a repository, so that addresses the waste issue.
Btw, a nuclear reactor refuels about once a year, so even if you ran the thing for 3 centuries you could easily store all the spent fuel on-site, and with reprocessing the fuel reaches bellow uranium ore levels within that time. I agree we need several sources of energy, I just don't think wind is one of them. Hydro, Nuclear, Carbon capture & Storage, Waste incineration, Geothermal and spill-material from the forest industry seems to be the most promising ones. Solar heating could be useful in some climates, but photovoltaics just isn't cutting it ( worldwide photo voltaic production replaces roughly one large hydroelectric dam ).
"The $90 million Loess Hills Wind Farm".... "is eventually expected to generate 16 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year"
So 16GWh in a year... or, the same amount of energy a 660MW nuclear reactor can produce during a single day ? I mean, ok nuclear reactors are more expensive to build, but if you were to try to scale this wind farm to replace a moderately sized reactor it would need 365 of them, and it would cost you $33 billion.
...the French are powering the entire fucking country through Nuclear.
Seriously, wind power is just a waste of money unless you do some real fudge counting Greenpeace style. Over here in Sweden we have strong winds most of the year, wind power is heavily subsidized, nuclear power is taxed, and STILL people using wind turbines without it being some feel-good government project is the exception rather than the norm. Unless you are going to argue that nuclear power is unacceptable (which typically involves some serious truth-bending with regards to putting things in perspective ) wind power simply isn't worthwhile.
I think the main problem is people don't understand the scale of things. A large wind turbine ( and when I say large I mean the blades are several meters long ) can produce maybe 1MW at peak wind speed, 300kw on average. In comparison a single nuclear power plant can produce between 500MWe - 3000MWe with a capacity factor close to 90%, and in some plants a single reactor can produce more than 1000MWe, and then there is some 2000MW of spill heat you could use for district heating on top of that. Thus if you are planning on replacing nuclear generating capacity in a country such as France, you will literally need hundreds and thousands of wind turbines at the very least, and likely millions or tens of millions if you are to guarantee an adequate supply around the year. Now keep in mind, this is not "one on each rooftop" millions, this is giant offshore, interferes with marine life and shipping routes millions. This is before you start considering the energy needed to replace petroleum in our cars, oil used for heating etc...
Now, given that the only way to make these things actually survive is through large subsidies ( typically around 100% of the electricity price or more ) start trying to figure what this will mean when you have not 0.1% wind power, but a large share of your electricity supply from it. Somebody is going to have to pay for that, and that money will have to come from elsewhere.
That isn't a problem because the difficulty is to detect when the reactor is off thou they claim it isn't. During normal operations a reactor will run close to full power for up to a year at a time, but if you want to produce nuclear weapons you must keep shutting it down to refuel since leaving the plutonium in the reactor for too long severely degrades its suitability in a bomb. Thus all the detector needs to do in order to blow the whistle is to show that the reactor operated in a very unusual pattern rather than the continuous high power mode that is more common.
Furthermore, for baseload plants like large nuclear power stations you can't just change the power output as you like because the type of turbines used do not spin up and down very easily. Special load-leveling plants ( typically natural gas or hydroelectric ) are used for this purpose, so if somebody is running a large baseload nuclear plant at 50% power it would almost certainly attract suspicion.
Not in the IT industry. Drives used to come in sizes measured in the same units as system memory. Now while the latter cannot easily be adjusted, some manufacturers decided to CHANGE how they described their drives to get a competitive advantage. What I am arguing is that the manufacturers in this case knew people would misinterpret it, they knew this would make their drives look bigger, and THAT IS WHY THEY DID IT. Does anybody seriously believe they decided to change the measurements of their drive size from what system memory uses to SI units because they care about the SI system? Please, give me a break. They did this because they figured they could sell more drives by making people think they get more storage than they do. It is wrong and it should be punished accordingly.
Whenever this discussion crops up people start talking about which definition is "more appropriate" or whatever. This is in fact irrelevant because it is outright obvious WHY device manufacturers use base-10 when every other part of the IT industry uses base-2, they are trying to deceive their customers selling devices with less storage space than the customer thinks they get. As a physicist I have a lot of respect for the SI units, but we also use other units every now and then because it makes sense in context. We use electron volts rather than joule when we talk about photon energies, we use barns rather than square meters when talking about nuclear cross sections, and in particle physics we often use units where c = 1 because it makes the algebra easier. This works because everybody knows what to expect from the context ( well most of the time ).
What happened with hard drives was that some manufacturers got greedy and decided to screw with a long established trend inside the IT sector because they wanted to fool the customers. You can argue about which unit is better but does anybody seriously believe device manufacturers started using base-10 because they had a burning desire to be consistent with the SI system? It is plain obvious what happened, they deliberately tried to deceive their customers to get a competitive advantage, and the courts decided this was illegal. Quite right if you ask me.
Why the hell would you use a JVM in Javascript when there are Java plugins for every major browser anyway? The only good use I could think of is if you want Java to run on some user hostile DRMd machine that doesn't let you do Java but lets you do javascript.
Amateurs, like anyone else, can fairly easily register any work which they create with the copyright office.
Even if you live in Sweden? Just think about it for 3 seconds, what if ALL countries did this? Should you have to register in all of them? America != the world.
How the fuck is this supposed to work internationally ? Oh , sorry the copyright holder isn't American so the US copyright office doesn't know him, his work is now free for all ? So let me see if I get this right, US media companies can put threaten our ministers, bribe our police force, and launch DDOS attacks against our web-pages, then ignore the copyright of Swedish artists without consequences, and apparently we are supposed to feel bad about file-sharing because we ought to respect international treaties? Perhaps they care to explain why we shouldn't just declare all US media "free for all" until Washington starts recognizing that there are other sovereign countries in the world?
I'm now offering the opportunity to fulfill my every sexual desire. This is a non-paying position with no benefits, but I'm willing to negotiate on allowing you to take charity from friends and/or family of mine who feel bad for you.
You may have been moded funny but you would be surprised how many people get responses to similar offers...
but I have a feeling that Heisenberg will come along to put the kibosh on those dreams...
Quite. Quantum mechanical models for alpha-decay of radioactive nuclei agree quite well with the Schrödinger equation, and unless there is something fundamentally wrong with the postulates of quantum mechanics this effectively means that the time it will take for any particular radioactive nucleus to decay is truly random. I.e, the moment upon which it will decay is not a well defined function of its initial conditions.
Now, some people may argue that we can't ever know anything for certain, and that this includes if quantum mechanics is true or not. I will merely point out that such a statement is quite a naive interpretation of the philosophy of science, and that it can't in fact be true if logic is to be considered valid. Now if you really want to you could doubt the validity of fundamental logic. In case, will you tell Kant that he's a bastard when you see him ?
While there has been a number of very serious comments and good points about this, I feel like making a slightly more spontaneous contribution to the discussion:
Not a chance we can call this ourselves. It will be down to what evidence Tesla has for its allegations. If their claims are true then I have little sympathy for the guy ( forget trade secret laws, fraud and sabotage alone should land him a decent slap if proven true ). If these accusations cannot be proven, on the other hand, then Tesla deserves a great kick up the arse for making such accusations against a competitor without reliable evidence.
Uhm, by those statistics Nuclear gets about 4 times the money of renewables despite contributing many many times more energy. I.e, when you consider subsidies per unit of energy generated, nuclear receives far less than renewables. What next, are we to pay the same amount for one wind turbine as for one nuclear power plant and then call the nuclear plant subsidized because you didn't spend any money on solar ?
By that standard we shouldn't build windmills or factories producing solar cells either. While one single windmill may not be much of an issue, you need thousands of them to replace a single nuclear power plant ( and a single nuclear plant can replace ALL solar cells currently operating in the world ). Now while it won't get as much media attention, people die working with windmills. Some fall down servicing them, people die during steel mining etc... Saying a major accident WILL occur, is about as useful to the argument as me saying sooner or latter all windmills WILL catch fire simultaneously as the weather is windy after a long drought. The resulting fires could kill BILLIONS. It could happen, but it is so unlikely that you would rightly call me crazy if I considered it a reason not to build wind farms.
Btw, even a meltdown wouldn't necessarily hurt a single person in a modern nuclear power plant. A meltdown simply means the metal fuel in the core melts due to overheating. It doesn't necessarily mean the pressure vessel leaks, it certainly doesn't imply an explosion, and they have occurred without significant environmental consequences in the past ( Three Mile Island ). While the Chernobyl plant did not have any means of dealing with such a situation, modern western reactors are all built inside airtight concrete structures capable of withstanding a direct hit from a large airliner. A meltdown would be costly in the sense that you would ruin your expensive and fancy power plant, but it is unlikely it would have any major off-site consequences.
I didn't say it doesn't have advantages, I'm sure it has major advantages... most of them economic. What it doesn't have and never will have is as low a probability of meltdown as water moderated reactors or as low a severity of the results in the case of such a melt down.
Uhm, they already do. Sodium cooled reactors have demonstrated that they are able to safely shutdown even with complete loss of control over their instruments, failure of all cooling pumps, and simultaneous failure of all control rods. The core simply heats up and expands until it is no longer able to sustain the chain reaction, at which point the decay heat from the radioactive fuel is dissipated from natural convection that is aided by the much greater heat conductivity of sodium. In contrast many existing PWRs would eventually melt down due to the decay-heat from fission products if forced circulation of the coolant was lost.
Furthermore, if the core would somehow melt ( say you somehow actually manage to block the coolant from circulating ) then the sodium cooled reactor is at essentially atmospheric pressure, while the water cooled designs would likely have to vent primary coolant to prevent pressure buildup. Sodium is also better at retaining fission products, as they dissolve in the liquid metal.
As for Pollonium in the lead... could you give me some numbers? The probabilities of complete exposure of the primary coolants in the first place for both types of reactors and the differences in environmental impact between partial vaporization of the lead and near full burn up of the sodium.
Uhm, you don't have two types of reactors, you have perhaps hundred or so proposed designs for each type. I guess the most sane comparison for western reactors at the moment would be to compare ELSY ( European Lead Cooled System ) with the Advanced Burner Reactor , suggested in the US. The systems have essentially the same base design ( big primary coolant pool , heat exchangers for secondary coolant inside the primary vessel ). See http://www.gnep.energy.gov/images/advancedBurnerReactorWeb.jpg , the big green pipes are the heat exchangers hanging inside the pressure vessel ( dark blue ).
I dunno which is more likely to leak really. Sodium has a higher vapor pressure for the same temperature (i.e lower boiling point ), but lead is more corrosive and puts more stress on the reactor vessel. In either case a leak would be very bad ( and a PR disaster ) , but unlikely to compromise the containment structure, so I'd say it is mainly an issue of which is more likely to leak to begin with.
Right, so France and Japan spending billions to research sodium cooled reactor technology is the reason water cooled reactors are profitable in Sweden ( despite being taxed ) while Solar is not? The money spent on research during the last 2 decades is to be considered a subsidy to the plants that were built 40 years ago ? Give me a break. As for the instances that inspect power plants do you seriously think these costs get anywhere close to that of the power plants? Heck, ok, I'll bite and let you add a 10% cost to nuclear based on inspections ( and that really is a massive estimate ). Wind power is still massively more subsidized receiving close to half its revenue from government sources in some jurisdictions.
As for insurance, how many accidents have there been in the western world that resulted in a payout from this insurance? Care to estimate ( in percent ) how much this is compared to the overall budget of nuclear power generation?
What you have done is to parrot a bunch of lose claims that nobody has ever been able to back up as significant. The perhaps most silly claim is the so often repeated that renewables would be competitive if more money was spent researching them. Perhaps by the same token we should put equal amount of money into perpetum mobile machines, expecting them to start being successful if they just got the same amount of funding as those over subsidized renewables ?
It could work, the problem is that if you want to use it for thermo-chemical hydrogen production you need to push temperatures above 800C. At those temperatures the protective oxide layers that prevent the steel from corroding dissolve into the lead coolant. Furthermore the steel itself starts losing its strength, which is a major issue if you use a heavy metal like lead. There is research into using ceramics and special metal alloys with silicon dispersed into its crystal lattice, but this is experimental at best.
Since sodium is much lighter than lead it doesn't cause as much stress on the equipment. Since lead has a density of 11, even a modest system height of 10 meters would give rise to a coolant pressure of 110 atmospheres at the bottom of the system
That is of course supposed to be 11 atmospheres. Typos always happen at the worst place...
a) They are likely to be cheaper than existing reactors due to a simpler plant layout. b) Nuclear is profitable many places where it isn't subsidized, in Sweden it is even taxed and still runs at a profit. c) Solar/Wind are subsidized more than nuclear ( in terms of money per kwh ) in virtually every country that use them to any large extent.
To put it in terms of another poster, if Solar / Wind is so cheaper than nuclear (which is itself competitive with coal ), why isn't your house exclusively powered by them? Why do you wait for the government to do it for you when you could just go out and buy solar cells yourself? Given that both wind turbines and solar cells are heavily subsidized in many countries, and since they are allegedly cheaper than using other energy sources, one would think that it would be the deal of a lifetime , yet at best people use them to supplement their energy supply, and close to nobody actually use them exclusively. Care to tell me why ?
For starters it is FAR less corrosive to steel than is water, lead or molten salt. Now since I suspect Monju will be mentioned again, yes a sodium fire can MELT the steel ( this is what happened at monju ), but in terms of chemical corrosion sodium is second only to helium. As per the Monju accident you're not going to have me believe the same accident would have been a non-issue had it used lead instead. Sure, the lead may have caused less damage to the steel structures, but I seem to recall that airborne lead is not a particularly pleasant substance, and especially not after intense neutron radiation which gives rise to Po-210 ( yes , it is lower in pure lead than lead-bismuth, but the amount that is emitted to the air is also increased since the lead will necessarily be maintained at higher temperatures).
Sodium has excellent thermal conductivity and quite a decent heat capacity, which means natural convection will be greatly improved. It also has a relatively large volume change when heated, which further aids heat removal through natural convection.
Since sodium is much lighter than lead it doesn't cause as much stress on the equipment. Since lead has a density of 11, even a modest system height of 10 meters would give rise to a coolant pressure of 110 atmospheres at the bottom of the system
Unlike lead, sodium doesn't produce any long lived activation products under neutron activation. In contrast, lead will produce Pb-205 with a halflife of 1.53×10^7 years.
Because lead and salts have much higher melting points than sodium ( 97C for Sodium , 327 C for lead, 300C-500C for most molten salts considered ) it is a lot easier to prevent coolant solidification in a sodium cooled system. This is important since accidental "overcooling" could cause solidified coolant from the heat exchangers to clog up the system, causing local hot-spots in the core. Lead-Bismuth eutectic has a lower melting point than pure lead, but in return it is also much more corrosive, and more Polonium-210 is formed as it is irradiated.
Perhaps most important, however, is that sodium technology is compatible with zirconium-metal fuel. In contrast both lead and molten salts dissolve zirconium, so if the fuel is to be bound to the cladding by small layer of coolant ( and you want this to ensure adequate heat conductivity ) lead or salt cooled reactors would have to use ceramic fuels. Eitehr nitrides, oxides or carbides. Ceramic fuels do not only have poorer heat conductivities than metal fuels, they are also more difficult to reprocess , and they tend to form Carbon-14 from neutron capture ( this is especially true for nitride fuel, the fuel of choice for lead cooled systems, which would likely have to be isotropically enriched in order to prevent excessive C-14 formation ). Finally metal fuel is much easier to produce remotely than is ceramics, you just cast it.
Basically lead/salt has two huge advantages over sodium. Higher boiling points and lower reactivity with water and air (and transparency in the case of salt). In all other respects, however, sodium beat them hands down. Not even the lower neutron cross section of lead is much help due to the limited flow speed from corrosion concerns, which in practice means you need more lead in the core, thus countering the advantages from lower cross sections.
Right, sorry for the nitpick, but "so many bits" is actually quite a few. First of all if you take a fairly typical iron atom, say Fe-56 , then it consists of 26 electrons, 26 protons and 30 neutrons. Each of the nucleons are in turn composed of 3 quarks, and these quarks exchange virtual gluons (we think ). The nucleons themselves exchange virtual pions. Now, in its ground state iron has 4 electron shells, each of which has sub-shells and orbitals etc... If you stick the atom in a magnetic field then the Zeeman effect will give rise to further energy levels. There are similar effects for a strong electric field. Similar effects occur for protons and neutrons in the nucleus.
Now to make matters worse, we don't really understand the strong nuclear force yet ( best theory at the moment is Quantum Chromo Dynamics ) which means that the assumption that an atom can only have a finite number of states is, well, an assumption.
It is only bound to get worse if we start taking gravity into consideration (btw, are we allowed to consider neutron stars atomic nuclei ? ).
Of course, this has little to do with holographic storage, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if it turns out you can store more information on a single atom than using modern hard-drives ( ok, maybe a little ).
One of the major issues with global warming is that the hydrogen used to produce amonia and subsequently artificial fertilizer, is currently derived from natural gas. The process emits a lot of CO2 , and it isn't really feasible to stop producing hydrogen as it could result in a collapse of agriculture due to drastically increased fertilizer prices.
Two generation IV reactors, the very high temperature reactor, and the gas cooled fast reactor, are aimed to resolve this by dramatically improving the efficiency of electrolysis of water. This can be achieved through so called thermochemical hydrogen production ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur-iodine_cycle), but it requires temperatures exceeding 800 C.
While it is likely that thermal reactors with helium coolant ( such as the pebble bed reactor ) could achieve this, it gets more tricky for fast reactors. Fast reactors have about 100 times less waste, better uranium utilization and the waste decays to safe levels between 100 and 1000 times quicker than for thermal reactors. The main catch is that the MUCH higher power density and neutron flux makes it difficult to find suitable materials. Sodium coolant doesn't work for hydrogen production since it boils before reaching the necessary temperatures, lead has corrosion issues especially at high temperatures and its high mass density makes it difficult to find materials that are strong enough at the temperatures required. Helium works, but because it has a much lower heat capacity than molten metals the reactor would likely reach higher temperatures under accident scenarios, and thus materials that can withstand a very strong neutron flux at high temperatures is absolutely necessary for a gas cooled fast reactor to be feasible.
"We would like to screw our customers some more and need changes in law to do so. Here is a doomsday prophecy you can use as an excuse to remove some of the regulations that currently stand in our way."
Slashdot Mirror
Uranium isn't running out unless you mean in the same sense that the sun is running out. Even if we only recycled the uranium left in our spent fuel it would still last for centuries. With regard to cost I addressed this in my previous post. Wind power fails to compete with Nuclear in Sweden, despite the former being heavily subsidized and the latter being taxed. Swedish nuclear plants also have to pay for their own waste storage and the construction of a repository, so that addresses the waste issue.
Btw, a nuclear reactor refuels about once a year, so even if you ran the thing for 3 centuries you could easily store all the spent fuel on-site, and with reprocessing the fuel reaches bellow uranium ore levels within that time. I agree we need several sources of energy, I just don't think wind is one of them. Hydro, Nuclear, Carbon capture & Storage, Waste incineration, Geothermal and spill-material from the forest industry seems to be the most promising ones. Solar heating could be useful in some climates, but photovoltaics just isn't cutting it ( worldwide photo voltaic production replaces roughly one large hydroelectric dam ).
So 16GWh in a year... or, the same amount of energy a 660MW nuclear reactor can produce during a single day ? I mean, ok nuclear reactors are more expensive to build, but if you were to try to scale this wind farm to replace a moderately sized reactor it would need 365 of them, and it would cost you $33 billion.
...the French are powering the entire fucking country through Nuclear.
Seriously, wind power is just a waste of money unless you do some real fudge counting Greenpeace style. Over here in Sweden we have strong winds most of the year, wind power is heavily subsidized, nuclear power is taxed, and STILL people using wind turbines without it being some feel-good government project is the exception rather than the norm. Unless you are going to argue that nuclear power is unacceptable (which typically involves some serious truth-bending with regards to putting things in perspective ) wind power simply isn't worthwhile.
I think the main problem is people don't understand the scale of things. A large wind turbine ( and when I say large I mean the blades are several meters long ) can produce maybe 1MW at peak wind speed, 300kw on average. In comparison a single nuclear power plant can produce between 500MWe - 3000MWe with a capacity factor close to 90%, and in some plants a single reactor can produce more than 1000MWe, and then there is some 2000MW of spill heat you could use for district heating on top of that. Thus if you are planning on replacing nuclear generating capacity in a country such as France, you will literally need hundreds and thousands of wind turbines at the very least, and likely millions or tens of millions if you are to guarantee an adequate supply around the year. Now keep in mind, this is not "one on each rooftop" millions, this is giant offshore, interferes with marine life and shipping routes millions. This is before you start considering the energy needed to replace petroleum in our cars, oil used for heating etc...
Now, given that the only way to make these things actually survive is through large subsidies ( typically around 100% of the electricity price or more ) start trying to figure what this will mean when you have not 0.1% wind power, but a large share of your electricity supply from it. Somebody is going to have to pay for that, and that money will have to come from elsewhere.
That isn't a problem because the difficulty is to detect when the reactor is off thou they claim it isn't. During normal operations a reactor will run close to full power for up to a year at a time, but if you want to produce nuclear weapons you must keep shutting it down to refuel since leaving the plutonium in the reactor for too long severely degrades its suitability in a bomb. Thus all the detector needs to do in order to blow the whistle is to show that the reactor operated in a very unusual pattern rather than the continuous high power mode that is more common.
Furthermore, for baseload plants like large nuclear power stations you can't just change the power output as you like because the type of turbines used do not spin up and down very easily. Special load-leveling plants ( typically natural gas or hydroelectric ) are used for this purpose, so if somebody is running a large baseload nuclear plant at 50% power it would almost certainly attract suspicion.
Not in the IT industry. Drives used to come in sizes measured in the same units as system memory. Now while the latter cannot easily be adjusted, some manufacturers decided to CHANGE how they described their drives to get a competitive advantage. What I am arguing is that the manufacturers in this case knew people would misinterpret it, they knew this would make their drives look bigger, and THAT IS WHY THEY DID IT. Does anybody seriously believe they decided to change the measurements of their drive size from what system memory uses to SI units because they care about the SI system? Please, give me a break. They did this because they figured they could sell more drives by making people think they get more storage than they do. It is wrong and it should be punished accordingly.
Whenever this discussion crops up people start talking about which definition is "more appropriate" or whatever. This is in fact irrelevant because it is outright obvious WHY device manufacturers use base-10 when every other part of the IT industry uses base-2, they are trying to deceive their customers selling devices with less storage space than the customer thinks they get. As a physicist I have a lot of respect for the SI units, but we also use other units every now and then because it makes sense in context. We use electron volts rather than joule when we talk about photon energies, we use barns rather than square meters when talking about nuclear cross sections, and in particle physics we often use units where c = 1 because it makes the algebra easier. This works because everybody knows what to expect from the context ( well most of the time ).
What happened with hard drives was that some manufacturers got greedy and decided to screw with a long established trend inside the IT sector because they wanted to fool the customers. You can argue about which unit is better but does anybody seriously believe device manufacturers started using base-10 because they had a burning desire to be consistent with the SI system? It is plain obvious what happened, they deliberately tried to deceive their customers to get a competitive advantage, and the courts decided this was illegal. Quite right if you ask me.
Why the hell would you use a JVM in Javascript when there are Java plugins for every major browser anyway? The only good use I could think of is if you want Java to run on some user hostile DRMd machine that doesn't let you do Java but lets you do javascript.
Even if you live in Sweden? Just think about it for 3 seconds, what if ALL countries did this? Should you have to register in all of them? America != the world.
How the fuck is this supposed to work internationally ? Oh , sorry the copyright holder isn't American so the US copyright office doesn't know him, his work is now free for all ? So let me see if I get this right, US media companies can put threaten our ministers, bribe our police force, and launch DDOS attacks against our web-pages, then ignore the copyright of Swedish artists without consequences, and apparently we are supposed to feel bad about file-sharing because we ought to respect international treaties? Perhaps they care to explain why we shouldn't just declare all US media "free for all" until Washington starts recognizing that there are other sovereign countries in the world?
did somebody just use "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" where appropriate? ZOMG!
You may have been moded funny but you would be surprised how many people get responses to similar offers...
Quite. Quantum mechanical models for alpha-decay of radioactive nuclei agree quite well with the Schrödinger equation, and unless there is something fundamentally wrong with the postulates of quantum mechanics this effectively means that the time it will take for any particular radioactive nucleus to decay is truly random. I.e, the moment upon which it will decay is not a well defined function of its initial conditions.
Now, some people may argue that we can't ever know anything for certain, and that this includes if quantum mechanics is true or not. I will merely point out that such a statement is quite a naive interpretation of the philosophy of science, and that it can't in fact be true if logic is to be considered valid. Now if you really want to you could doubt the validity of fundamental logic. In case, will you tell Kant that he's a bastard when you see him ?
While there has been a number of very serious comments and good points about this, I feel like making a slightly more spontaneous contribution to the discussion:
BOOOM! HEADSHOT!
Not a chance we can call this ourselves. It will be down to what evidence Tesla has for its allegations. If their claims are true then I have little sympathy for the guy ( forget trade secret laws, fraud and sabotage alone should land him a decent slap if proven true ). If these accusations cannot be proven, on the other hand, then Tesla deserves a great kick up the arse for making such accusations against a competitor without reliable evidence.
Uhm, by those statistics Nuclear gets about 4 times the money of renewables despite contributing many many times more energy. I.e, when you consider subsidies per unit of energy generated, nuclear receives far less than renewables. What next, are we to pay the same amount for one wind turbine as for one nuclear power plant and then call the nuclear plant subsidized because you didn't spend any money on solar ?
By that standard we shouldn't build windmills or factories producing solar cells either. While one single windmill may not be much of an issue, you need thousands of them to replace a single nuclear power plant ( and a single nuclear plant can replace ALL solar cells currently operating in the world ). Now while it won't get as much media attention, people die working with windmills. Some fall down servicing them, people die during steel mining etc... Saying a major accident WILL occur, is about as useful to the argument as me saying sooner or latter all windmills WILL catch fire simultaneously as the weather is windy after a long drought. The resulting fires could kill BILLIONS. It could happen, but it is so unlikely that you would rightly call me crazy if I considered it a reason not to build wind farms.
Btw, even a meltdown wouldn't necessarily hurt a single person in a modern nuclear power plant. A meltdown simply means the metal fuel in the core melts due to overheating. It doesn't necessarily mean the pressure vessel leaks, it certainly doesn't imply an explosion, and they have occurred without significant environmental consequences in the past ( Three Mile Island ). While the Chernobyl plant did not have any means of dealing with such a situation, modern western reactors are all built inside airtight concrete structures capable of withstanding a direct hit from a large airliner. A meltdown would be costly in the sense that you would ruin your expensive and fancy power plant, but it is unlikely it would have any major off-site consequences.
Uhm, they already do. Sodium cooled reactors have demonstrated that they are able to safely shutdown even with complete loss of control over their instruments, failure of all cooling pumps, and simultaneous failure of all control rods. The core simply heats up and expands until it is no longer able to sustain the chain reaction, at which point the decay heat from the radioactive fuel is dissipated from natural convection that is aided by the much greater heat conductivity of sodium. In contrast many existing PWRs would eventually melt down due to the decay-heat from fission products if forced circulation of the coolant was lost.
Furthermore, if the core would somehow melt ( say you somehow actually manage to block the coolant from circulating ) then the sodium cooled reactor is at essentially atmospheric pressure, while the water cooled designs would likely have to vent primary coolant to prevent pressure buildup. Sodium is also better at retaining fission products, as they dissolve in the liquid metal.
Uhm, you don't have two types of reactors, you have perhaps hundred or so proposed designs for each type. I guess the most sane comparison for western reactors at the moment would be to compare ELSY ( European Lead Cooled System ) with the Advanced Burner Reactor , suggested in the US. The systems have essentially the same base design ( big primary coolant pool , heat exchangers for secondary coolant inside the primary vessel ). See http://www.gnep.energy.gov/images/advancedBurnerReactorWeb.jpg , the big green pipes are the heat exchangers hanging inside the pressure vessel ( dark blue ).
I dunno which is more likely to leak really. Sodium has a higher vapor pressure for the same temperature (i.e lower boiling point ), but lead is more corrosive and puts more stress on the reactor vessel. In either case a leak would be very bad ( and a PR disaster ) , but unlikely to compromise the containment structure, so I'd say it is mainly an issue of which is more likely to leak to begin with.
Right, so France and Japan spending billions to research sodium cooled reactor technology is the reason water cooled reactors are profitable in Sweden ( despite being taxed ) while Solar is not? The money spent on research during the last 2 decades is to be considered a subsidy to the plants that were built 40 years ago ? Give me a break. As for the instances that inspect power plants do you seriously think these costs get anywhere close to that of the power plants? Heck, ok, I'll bite and let you add a 10% cost to nuclear based on inspections ( and that really is a massive estimate ). Wind power is still massively more subsidized receiving close to half its revenue from government sources in some jurisdictions.
As for insurance, how many accidents have there been in the western world that resulted in a payout from this insurance? Care to estimate ( in percent ) how much this is compared to the overall budget of nuclear power generation?
What you have done is to parrot a bunch of lose claims that nobody has ever been able to back up as significant. The perhaps most silly claim is the so often repeated that renewables would be competitive if more money was spent researching them. Perhaps by the same token we should put equal amount of money into perpetum mobile machines, expecting them to start being successful if they just got the same amount of funding as those over subsidized renewables ?
It could work, the problem is that if you want to use it for thermo-chemical hydrogen production you need to push temperatures above 800C. At those temperatures the protective oxide layers that prevent the steel from corroding dissolve into the lead coolant. Furthermore the steel itself starts losing its strength, which is a major issue if you use a heavy metal like lead. There is research into using ceramics and special metal alloys with silicon dispersed into its crystal lattice, but this is experimental at best.
That is of course supposed to be 11 atmospheres. Typos always happen at the worst place...
a) They are likely to be cheaper than existing reactors due to a simpler plant layout.
b) Nuclear is profitable many places where it isn't subsidized, in Sweden it is even taxed and still runs at a profit.
c) Solar/Wind are subsidized more than nuclear ( in terms of money per kwh ) in virtually every country that use them to any large extent.
To put it in terms of another poster, if Solar / Wind is so cheaper than nuclear (which is itself competitive with coal ), why isn't your house exclusively powered by them? Why do you wait for the government to do it for you when you could just go out and buy solar cells yourself? Given that both wind turbines and solar cells are heavily subsidized in many countries, and since they are allegedly cheaper than using other energy sources, one would think that it would be the deal of a lifetime , yet at best people use them to supplement their energy supply, and close to nobody actually use them exclusively. Care to tell me why ?
Sodium has a couple of major advantages actually.
For starters it is FAR less corrosive to steel than is water, lead or molten salt. Now since I suspect Monju will be mentioned again, yes a sodium fire can MELT the steel ( this is what happened at monju ), but in terms of chemical corrosion sodium is second only to helium. As per the Monju accident you're not going to have me believe the same accident would have been a non-issue had it used lead instead. Sure, the lead may have caused less damage to the steel structures, but I seem to recall that airborne lead is not a particularly pleasant substance, and especially not after intense neutron radiation which gives rise to Po-210 ( yes , it is lower in pure lead than lead-bismuth, but the amount that is emitted to the air is also increased since the lead will necessarily be maintained at higher temperatures).
Sodium has excellent thermal conductivity and quite a decent heat capacity, which means natural convection will be greatly improved. It also has a relatively large volume change when heated, which further aids heat removal through natural convection.
Since sodium is much lighter than lead it doesn't cause as much stress on the equipment. Since lead has a density of 11, even a modest system height of 10 meters would give rise to a coolant pressure of 110 atmospheres at the bottom of the system
Unlike lead, sodium doesn't produce any long lived activation products under neutron activation. In contrast, lead will produce Pb-205 with a halflife of 1.53×10^7 years.
Because lead and salts have much higher melting points than sodium ( 97C for Sodium , 327 C for lead, 300C-500C for most molten salts considered ) it is a lot easier to prevent coolant solidification in a sodium cooled system. This is important since accidental "overcooling" could cause solidified coolant from the heat exchangers to clog up the system, causing local hot-spots in the core. Lead-Bismuth eutectic has a lower melting point than pure lead, but in return it is also much more corrosive, and more Polonium-210 is formed as it is irradiated.
Perhaps most important, however, is that sodium technology is compatible with zirconium-metal fuel. In contrast both lead and molten salts dissolve zirconium, so if the fuel is to be bound to the cladding by small layer of coolant ( and you want this to ensure adequate heat conductivity ) lead or salt cooled reactors would have to use ceramic fuels. Eitehr nitrides, oxides or carbides. Ceramic fuels do not only have poorer heat conductivities than metal fuels, they are also more difficult to reprocess , and they tend to form Carbon-14 from neutron capture ( this is especially true for nitride fuel, the fuel of choice for lead cooled systems, which would likely have to be isotropically enriched in order to prevent excessive C-14 formation ). Finally metal fuel is much easier to produce remotely than is ceramics, you just cast it.
Basically lead/salt has two huge advantages over sodium. Higher boiling points and lower reactivity with water and air (and transparency in the case of salt). In all other respects, however, sodium beat them hands down. Not even the lower neutron cross section of lead is much help due to the limited flow speed from corrosion concerns, which in practice means you need more lead in the core, thus countering the advantages from lower cross sections.
Right, sorry for the nitpick, but "so many bits" is actually quite a few. First of all if you take a fairly typical iron atom, say Fe-56 , then it consists of 26 electrons, 26 protons and 30 neutrons. Each of the nucleons are in turn composed of 3 quarks, and these quarks exchange virtual gluons (we think ). The nucleons themselves exchange virtual pions. Now, in its ground state iron has 4 electron shells, each of which has sub-shells and orbitals etc... If you stick the atom in a magnetic field then the Zeeman effect will give rise to further energy levels. There are similar effects for a strong electric field. Similar effects occur for protons and neutrons in the nucleus.
Now to make matters worse, we don't really understand the strong nuclear force yet ( best theory at the moment is Quantum Chromo Dynamics ) which means that the assumption that an atom can only have a finite number of states is, well, an assumption.
It is only bound to get worse if we start taking gravity into consideration (btw, are we allowed to consider neutron stars atomic nuclei ? ).
Of course, this has little to do with holographic storage, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if it turns out you can store more information on a single atom than using modern hard-drives ( ok, maybe a little ).
Out of the generation IV proposals it is probably the gas cooled fast reactor that will benefit the most from this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_cooled_fast_reactor
One of the major issues with global warming is that the hydrogen used to produce amonia and subsequently artificial fertilizer, is currently derived from natural gas. The process emits a lot of CO2 , and it isn't really feasible to
stop producing hydrogen as it could result in a collapse of agriculture due to drastically increased fertilizer prices.
Two generation IV reactors, the very high temperature reactor, and the gas cooled fast reactor, are aimed to resolve this by dramatically improving the efficiency of electrolysis of water. This can be achieved through so called thermochemical hydrogen production ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur-iodine_cycle), but it requires temperatures exceeding 800 C.
While it is likely that thermal reactors with helium coolant ( such as the pebble bed reactor ) could achieve this, it gets more tricky for fast reactors. Fast reactors have about 100 times less waste, better uranium utilization and the waste decays to safe levels between 100 and 1000 times quicker than for thermal reactors. The main catch is that the MUCH higher power density and neutron flux makes it difficult to find suitable materials. Sodium coolant doesn't work for hydrogen production since it boils before reaching the necessary temperatures, lead has corrosion issues especially at high temperatures and its high mass density makes it difficult to find materials that are strong enough at the temperatures required. Helium works, but because it has a much lower heat capacity than molten metals the reactor would likely reach higher temperatures under accident scenarios, and thus materials that can withstand a very strong neutron flux at high temperatures is absolutely necessary for a gas cooled fast reactor to be feasible.
"We would like to screw our customers some more and need changes in law to do so. Here is a doomsday prophecy you can use as an excuse to remove some of the regulations that currently stand in our way."