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Next-Gen Nuclear Power Plant Breaks Ground In China
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Apr 20, 2009 01:09 AM
from the plenty-safe-bye-now-call-later dept.
from the plenty-safe-bye-now-call-later dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The construction of first next-generation Westinghouse nuclear power reactor breaks ground in Sanmen, China. The reactor, expected to generate 12.7 Megawatts by 2013, costs 40 billion Yuan (~US$6 billion; that's a lot of iPods.) According to Westinghouse, 'The AP1000 is the safest and most economical nuclear power plant available in the worldwide commercial marketplace, and is the only Generation III+ reactor to receive Design Certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.' However, Chinese netizens suspect China is being used as a white rat to test unproven nuclear technologies (comments in Chinese)." Update: 04/20 07:28 GMT by T : As several readers have pointed out, this plant will generate much more than 12.7 Megawatts -- more like 1100 MWe.
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Submission: New Gen Nuclear Power Plant Breaks Ground in China by Anonymous Coward
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Units? (Score:5, Funny)
12.7 MW sounds a bit low. Even a DeLorean could generate 1.21 GW.
But seriously, my home entertainment center uses more than that. Well, OK, not so seriously. But still, I'm just sayin.
Re:Units? (Score:4, Insightful)
From a related article [xinhuanet.com]:
So it appears that the real cost is closer to 5.88 / (2 * 1.25) = $2.35 per watt. Still expensive, but not outlandish. I'm in the process of installing a 4kw grid of solar panels on my own roof for a cost (after subsidies/rebates) of $17k, so $4.25 / watt. For greener energy, I think the premium is worth it.
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Re:Units? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm in the process of installing a 4kw grid of solar panels on my own roof for a cost (after subsidies/rebates) of $17k, so $4.25 / watt. For greener energy, I think the premium is worth it.
$4.25/Watt-peak, not Watt. It's not the same.
Also, the Nuke power plant gives 1.2gW constant. Day and night. Sunny or rainy.
Not quite a good comparison.
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Re:Units? (Score:5, Informative)
solar panels on my own roof ... For greener energy, I think the premium is worth it.
Except for all the lead, mercury and cadmium needed to produce PV cells.
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Re:And if they sold the heat as well as electricit (Score:4, Informative)
If you don't get rid of the heat then you don't have such a big temperature difference so you can get a lot of energy in the first place. While you can get a bit from power plants as industrial heat you really need a really reliable heat sink such as evaporative cooling (those big towers) or sea/lake water.
The second point has been shown in practice by the French - reprocessing of highly radioactive material is very difficult and very expensive since for one thing everything has to be done remotely. Lead lined gloves aren't enough - the stuff might as well be on Mars because it has to be handled so it doesn't get near anybody. That was really the thing that killed Superphoenix (where the waste was far more radioactive again and even more difficult to handle) and the idea of a commercially viable fast breeder reactor. What that has meant is that even though it takes a lot to make the fuel in the first place it is far easier to do that than reprocess. Accelerated Thorium is a different story since it appears that far less handling of fuel materials is required and it can apparently use up discarded weapons materials and uranium fuel rods.
IMHO the answer is less money on PR and more on R&D. Having nuclear power pushed by brainwashed zombies into conspiracy theories that think it was all perfect in 1970 is counterproductive.
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Re:And if they sold the heat as well as electricit (Score:5, Informative)
I did some reading on wikipedia about the various nuclear reactors recently. So being a lay-person, there's some existing common wisdom.
The placement of the nuclear reactor to the sea is a safety issue. You NEED guaranteed large cool water in the condenser stage or reactor goes boom. Wiki says thermal heat is regularly used as hot-water heaters - similar to geothermal heating in iceland. Whether anybody actually uses this is anybody's guess.. Obviously you'd need to pipe the hot water to end locations, so existing suburbia obviously isn't anywhere near able to handle this.
As for breeder reactors:
A) All fission reaction is of a breeding nature. The ratio of bred material is what the different processes produce. The bred ratio varies from 0.5 to 1.2. Where 1.01 is the accepted min ratio to be called a breeder reactor (producing more fissile fuel than originally introduced).
B) Any of the high breeder reactors utilize some aspect of fast-fission. Canada, India and Russia (and France?). Fast fission requires the ABSENCE of water, as water (either light or heavy(deutreonic)) captures energetic neutrons. Instead reaction-neutral coolants are used such as sodium, molten lead, etc. The problem here is related to safety. It is harder to produce intrinsic stability into non-water-based fission. Namely, in boiler-based reactors, when a greater ratio of steam is produced, the reaction naturally slows down, thus naturally regulating the system if electronic control mechanisms don't catch and compensate the control rods in time. With non steam based systems, you use complex chemical fission-poisons (in high-pressure based reactors as found in subs) or are fully reliant on control-rod actuators. (possible single point of failure). (note: I could be wrong about liquid metal based systems not having alternate backup mechanisms such as fission-poisons)
C) Chernobyl was a fast-fission reactor. And it's melt-down was related to the inability to shutdown quickly enough.. (specifically pressure-valve failures and insufficient monitoring which would have initiated the shutdown sooner) The environmental DAMAGE, however was due exclusively to the fact that it was a warhead manufacturing site, and the construction apparatus is too large to enclose with a hardened concrete barrier.
D) 70% of Thorium is in India. Thus, even though Thorium is (likely) a less efficient starting process for a breeder reactor, it's a better long-term strategy for India so as to provide energy independence. This isn't true of most countries.
E) Breeder reactors are the basis of nuclear warheads, thus it's an extremely hot-button issue. The US and Russia specifically discontinue their breeder reactors to comply with arms control. Russia now strip-mines their old warhead supply to fuel existing reactors both domestically and abroad. I suspect that China is not indifferent to this topic as well. The french reprocessing plant is actively/heavily monitored by the UN (IAEA).
F) The French rebreeding process is apparently NOT cost effective by any measure. The reason they do it is similar to the Indian Thorium objective - international energy independence.. China is not likely to be short-supplied of uranium mineral deposits - but I'm not aware of their status. I know Canda has massive Uranium supplies.
Currently boiler and pressure based reactors are 'cheap' to build and are cheap to operate (so long as raw Uranium ore is cheap). They both require 'pre-processing' of the ore to increase the concentration of U-235 to a sufficient level. So it's slightly more expensive in the long run as both ore prices will increase over time, and the added cost of pre-processing.
heavy-water and liquid-metal and inert-gas based reactors facilitate 'raw' Uranium, (e.g. U-238 and possibly thorium), and thus make the operating costs MUCH cheaper, but they don't have the longevity of trivial passive boiler-based plants, and thus the high capital costs are for shorter terms - and thus the average cost is higher.
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Re:And if they sold the heat as well as electricit (Score:5, Informative)
Not true. India has constructed thermal breeder reactors that use thorium-uranium fuel and heavy water moderator / coolant.
Nope. You just need to ensure you don't moderate the neutron spectrum. Supercritical water coolant has a high enough heat capacity and low enough neutron absorption cross section to make this feasible. Google for the Fast SCWR if you doubt me.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Chernobyl was a thermal spectrum reactor that was heavily moderated with graphite and cooled by water. Wikipedia has a good article about the causes of the chernobyl disaster. In summary it was caused by a heavily over moderated design ( the opposite of a fast reactor ) in combination with flawed control rod design and the lack of a containment building.
U-233 in thorium fuel has a much better capture to fission ratio than U-235 and Pu-239 which means you don't need a fast reactor to set up a breeding cycle. The waste products are also less long lived since the thorium cycle only produces trace actinides.
Every single plutonium based nuclear weapons program in existence has used low-burnup thermal reactors and not fast reactors. Furthermore most designs of fast reactors are not practical to be run on a frequent refueling cycle, making them substantially less suitable to produce weapons grade plutonium than more traditional methods. The reprocessing methods needed to recover the minor actinides are also unsuitable for separating pure plutonium, making the entire fuel cycle significantly less prone to proliferation than the thermal + PUREX cycle.
Russia has commercial breeder reactors in operation and actively develops fast breeder technology, including their BREST project based on lead coolant and dry reprocessing.
Only if you compare it to coal or traditional nuclear. Compared to wind and other low-co2 energy sources it works out cheaper. In addition the French programs currently aim for research. Commercial reactors would likely use different designs to optimize economics rather than flexibility of the experiments that can be run. In addition they use the PUREX process for recycling the waste as opposed to newer dry-reprocessing methods. Because dry reprocessing uses salt rather than water ( a moderator ) criticality problems are heavily reduced allowing the plant to be smaller and cheaper. Furthermore while liquid sodium reactors are indeed more expensive than pressurized water reactors, it is fully possible to use other coolants such as Lead or Supercritical water. These would with high probability lead to a much cheaper plant ( by 30% or so ) since the lack of a phase change in the coolant allows the plant to be simpler and smaller. In addition the higher temperature increases the efficiency to about 45% as opposed to 33% for more traditional designs.
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Re:Units? (Score:4, Insightful)
It may have achieved 97% fuel use, which is very good, but it most certainly did not achieve 97% mass to energy conversion. (I'd have to check, but I'm fairly certain that's not even theoretically possible with the nuclear reactions used.)
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Re:Units? (Score:4, Informative)
If a nuclear weapon of Tsar bomba's size achieved that it would be a hell of a lot stronger than 50 megaton. The energy in a fusion based weapon comes from the very slight difference in mass between the reactants ( usually deuterium and lithium ) and the products ( usually helium isotopes and neutrons). If you somehow achived 97% energy to mass conversion you would up the energy released by a factor of 1000 or so and a weapon of Tsar bomba's size would then produce a staggering fifty gigatonnes, exceeding the collected potential energy of the world's collected nuclear arsenal. I say most likely you confused the numbers with the fact that Tsar bomba derived an unusually large proportion of its energy from fusion whereas most weapons get a great share of it from uranium fission.
This also illustrates the amount of energy that can be stored as antimatter. about 10kg of antimatter annihilated with the same amount of matter would produce a blast that exceeds the world's collected nuclear arsenals.
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Does Steve Jobs know... (Score:3, Funny)
That iPods have become an international currency? Maybe I should cash out my collection of iPods...
Re:Does Steve Jobs know... (Score:4, Funny)
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Oops (Score:3, Funny)
Next-Gen Nuclear Power Plant Breaks Ground In China
So... it was a surface detonation instead of a standard air detonation?
No! (Score:3, Interesting)
... suspect China is being used as a white rat ...
By now everyone should know it's the rats that are using us (or the Chinese in this case).
Re:Western Nuclear Technology is Safe (Score:4, Insightful)
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The AP-1000 reactor isn't a "next generation" unit (Score:5, Interesting)
The AP-1000 isn't a new technology reactor. That's the whole point. It's a conventional pressurized-water reactor. It's built mostly from existing Westinghouse components which Westinghouse had type-approved by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, so that multiple identical units could be built without going through a full design review for each one. So far, nobody has ordered one. Until now.
Most US reactors are unique designs, which is a headache. France has 34 reactors of the same design, which has cost and maintenance advantages, although there's been at least one common design flaw found.
Westinghouse is no longer a US company. It's owned by Toshiba.
iPods? WTH? (Score:5, Funny)
Since when did iPods become a unit of measurement?
"That kid was hit by a 2-ton truck. That's a lot of iPods!"
The numbers are all wrong.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a 1.2GW plant. The current order is for four reactors, for 8 billion dollars. The price is expected to fall to about 1 billion per reactor. China has a goal of building 100 reactors by 2020. IF the USA built that many, it would cut power plant greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, or the equivalent of nearly a million windmills.
Re:The numbers are all wrong.. (Score:4, Insightful)
> No offense, but nobody in Europe has done anything that bold since France abandoned its colonies in the 50's.
So the opening of the iron curtain, German unification, replacement of several currencies with the Euro, standing up to a certain US OS producer is not ?
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Re:The numbers are all wrong.. (Score:4, Insightful)
> The Iron Curtain was lifted by the Russians.
IIRC the iron curtain was established by the USSR to keep it's people in. The collapse start in the late 80s in Hungary, and cascaded as other states saw people travelling behind the curtain then leaving to the west through the nearest "hole". I.e. it collapsed state by state, like a dam burst growing from a small hole.
> German unification is just a process that all involved parties agreed to.
True neither within German, nor outside of Germany.
> The Euro was a matter of mutual benefit.
Mutual to whom ? The states, the people, multinationals ? The Euro is not universally popular by any means, and has been refused by some countries.
> And standing up to a weak, foreign company (namely Microsoft)? I don't see any signs of bravery here. :-)
OK, I confess: that was a Slashdot-pleasing throw-away comment from a European to the US readers
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Re:The numbers are all wrong.. (Score:4, Informative)
I don't have time to search for the exact reference or the numbers, but there was a European study of the total life cycle environmental costs, including CO2 and other pollutants, of various energy technologies. In terms of CO2, hydro was lowest. Nuclear, solar, and wind were roughly the same. (I believe nuclear was computed two ways, once with gaseous diffusion--still used, but being phased out--for enrichment and once with gas centrifuge. Gas centrifuge produced lower CO2 emissions, but neither figure was astoundingly high.) I believe nuclear (and wind and solar) come in at around 6% of coal. The concrete and steel use in a nuclear plant was taken into account in the study, as were emissions from mining. There is also a Swedish environmental report with similar conclusions.
As for what percentage CO2 reduction in US power plant emissions could be expected, that would depend on how much of the new capacity replaced gas, and how much replaced coal. Any (expensive) gas used for base load would be the first candidate for replacement. That would reduce the impact on CO2 because baseload gas fired plants, expecially the combined cycle plants most useful for base load generation produce less (half?) the CO2 per unit of electricity generated of coal plants, though still far more than nuclear plants. Once you cut into coal, which produces about 50% of US electric power, you see some serious CO2 savings.
Two other comments:
The statement was that there would be a 30% reduction in emissions from POWER plants. I think electric power plants only account for about half on US CO2 emissions, so you would only get a 15% or so reduction in overall CO2 emissions.
From your question, I suspect you are being misled by a discredited Dutch study which claims ridiculously high CO2 emissions for both nuclear plant construction and uranium mining.
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Ah cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Stimulus and "sustainable energy" (Score:4, Interesting)
China is building up powerful clean power-stations, while the US is wasting billions on bullshit projects [washingtonpost.com] intended to keep people working, rather than doing something useful.
Why aren't we building these stations so as to be able to stop polluting the atmosphere with coal and whatever else gets burned to produce electricity here? The Chinese bloggers suspect, we aren't sure of the technology and want to test it in China first, but the truth is much less sinister — and much more worrying...
We have simply lost the drive and our ability to take bold steps and initiatives. Would I like a nuclear plant in my backyard? Yes, as a matter of fact, I would certainly prefer it to a coal-burning one (with its radioactive smoke [sciam.com]) or to a wind-turbine, which would take up the entire plot to produce enough electricity for a single light-bulb.
Wind power costs the same, with no nasty cleanup (Score:4, Informative)
Now let's look at a new wind farm. A 50 MW wind farm would cost around $96 million [google.com] (at $1923/kW [doe.gov]), which yields an annual capital repayment of $7.5 million [google.com] (assuming a lifetime of 25 years). If the plant runs at a 35% capacity factor [awea.org], it will produce 153 million kWh per year [google.com]. So the total cost will be $0.049/kWh [google.com].
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant that might go over budget, might leak radiation at some point during its life, whose waste will need to be carefully controlled and permanently stored somewhere that hasn't yet been identified; or a wind farm whose costs are much more certain and which comes without all those ancillary risks?
Yes, any individual wind farm will not provide a firm supply of power. But if a lot of wind farms are used, and they are combined with solar, geothermal and other renewable resources, they will provide a fairly stable power supply. There is also a lot of potential for reshaping electricity loads to match the supply of power (e.g., recharge electric vehicles when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining). And finally, if you must have a firm supply of power, you can convert a wind farm into a completely firm supply (at 35% of its nameplate rating) by spending about 10% extra and building rarely-used natural gas peaker plants ($634/kW [doe.gov] * 35% = $222kW).
Re:Wind power costs the same, with no nasty cleanu (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's look at two numbers here:
8.9 billion kWh per year
and
153 million kWh per year.
And - oh wait, there's just the trivial need to have them...
combined with solar, geothermal and other renewable resources, they will provide a fairly stable power supply
A nuclear power plant needs none of this to provide a *very* stable power supply, and is neatly placed in one spot, with a much smaller overall infrastructure build than a miscellaneous hodge-podge of various power sources scattered wherever the environment is suitable for them. It's also proven to work very well at base load generation.
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant that might go over budget, might leak radiation at some point during its life, whose waste will need to be carefully controlled and permanently stored somewhere that hasn't yet been identified; or a wind farm whose costs are much more certain and which comes without all those ancillary risks?
I would prefer to spend my 4.9cents per kWh on something that will reliably produce base load power 24/7 thanks. Come back in 20 years when some other sucker^W fearless forward-thinker has lost a pile of cash getting the tech tamed and into the markeplace.
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Re:Wind power costs the same, with no nasty cleanu (Score:4, Insightful)
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant that might go over budget, might leak radiation at some point during its life, whose waste will need to be carefully controlled and permanently stored somewhere that hasn't yet been identified; or a wind farm whose costs are much more certain and which comes without all those ancillary risks?
Remember China doesn't have the NIMBYism that the US and Europe has. The waste will be recycled when possible and put in the ground when not possible.
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Re:Wind power costs the same, with no nasty cleanu (Score:5, Informative)
You've started with wrong numbers. The 40 billion Yuan cost is not for one reactor; it is for two of the same kind.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-04/19/content_11217433.htm
So in fact, under your assumptions, the levelized cost of these reactors is 1/2 the cost of wind.
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:4, Funny)
In all seriousness, 12.7 MW seems rather small for a $6 billion price tag.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Either way, people may want to consider getting on the nexr plane out of China...
Hope they've got all their paperwork in order; from what I understand, simply leaving can prove problematic for those folks.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:5, Insightful)
Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. That's the only one you have to know
TMI's operator's insurance company payed out US$40M in lawsuits. Not much, even in 1980 dollars.
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:5, Informative)
I doubt investors viewed a nuclear plant that's completely shut down for the better part of 6 years for cleanup as a sound investment.
You're correct. Nuke plants must be designed like modern chemical plants, which are more complex than nuke plants, handle boatloads of hazardous chemicals and have high availability.
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who invokes Chernobyl as an argument against modern nuclear power had better have a good grasp of what actually happened at Chernobyl and why it isn't applicable outside of Chernobyl.
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:4, Interesting)
The technology may have been different, Chernobyls technology may have been inferior to modern nuclear power, but considering both the Chernobyl accident and three mile island were caused by human error, it doesn't bode well for any kind.
In the case of Three Mile Island, "The mechanical failures were compounded by the initial failure of plant operators to recognize the situation as a loss of coolant accident due to inadequate training and ambiguous control room indicators." (here [wikipedia.org] ) and in the case of Chernobyl, they set up a reactor test which ran overdue and it was left to the undertrained and underskilled night-shift to handle the plant at the time (here [wikipedia.org])
In both cases, better training and adhering to safety protocols would have saved lives and possibly the reactor. So don't go dismissing Chernobyl as an argument against Nuclear power. It's an argument against cutting corners and the lowest-bidder mentality that still exists today in the building of new nuclear plants.
"How cheap is safe enough?" is something few people want to ask, and even fewer people want to answer.
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, Chernobyl was largely not caused by human error. It was due to pure bloody mindedness inherent in the USSR and a dangerous reactor design that made even more dangerous by disabling critical safety systems.
Everyone likes to paint TMI as a huge disaster that should be ranked with Chernobyl, yet TMI was no more serious than a small, controlled release of radioactive gas which quickly dispersed into the atmosphere. Which funnily enough is the exact sort of thing that coal plants do all the time yet nobody appears to live in mortal terror of them. TMI is only considered major because the danger was inflated and the government instilled panic by evacuating large numbers of people. Combine that with a little lobbying from coal and oil companies and you get the current disaster that is US policy on nuclear energy.
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrongo Bub.
TMI was a huge disaster for the nuclear industry, as it revealed that the status quo was totally inadequate.
So many aspects of the design, thought to be first rate, turned out to be totally foobar. The stuck valve, a critical item, turned out to be prone to sticking, as it was based on a valve designed to handle high-fat raw milk, an excellent lubricant.
The control room design was worse than useless, with critical water-level guages hidden off in a corner. A computer system that ran 20 minutes behind real-time. Dozens of blinking and hypnotizing alarms, with no hierarchy of priority.
Total unmitigated disaster.
Investors rightly saw that what had been touted as the best of all possible worlds was actually quite awful.
And it was not a "small controlled release". The original overflows into the auxiliary buildings was uncontrolled and could be measured at 15 times above background level many miles away.
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet despite all of this, it didn't go "bang" and it hasn't happened before or after. I'm not arguing that accidents can't happen, or that reactor design is perfect and can never go wrong, but what TMI shows is that even when things do go wrong, they can be managed.
On a scale of 1-10 there is still a huge, huge gap between TMI and Chernobyl. The two can't be compared at all.
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:5, Insightful)
TIn both cases, better training and adhering to safety protocols would have saved lives
Saved lives at Three Miles Island? Who died?
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:5, Interesting)
New pebble bed designs using Silicon Carbide "Pebbles" and helium heat transfer offer incredibly more safety than previous designs. These plants are designed to be literally "Run Away" proof, in fact, left fully engaged they will automatically reach top operating temperature then ramp down, never reaching supercritical temperatures or levels on nuclear reaction.
As well, because of the functional design, these reactors can be used as safe breeder reactors, meaning the there will be little nuclear waste to deal with.
I think this is absolutely one of the better energy alternatives we currently have before us.
Apparently, cold fusion seems to be making a solid comeback (in case you didn't see 60 minutes this last Sunday, A number of companies are producing very real products using cold fusion technology, and DARPA has verified the cold fusion technology, and plans on using it for a number of portable high energy power cells.
Seems we are at a very interesting place in our history.
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:4, Insightful)
When the prevailing opinion on a subject matter is contrary to your own, the onus is on you to demonstrate the facts and "win hearts and minds."
Getting e-angry and insulting your detractors isn't going to help change popular perception of nuclear safety in the slightest.
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:4, Insightful)
The entire industrial nuclear cycle has to be taken into account when making that assertion. If you take the view of the last twenty years of reactor operation, you can say that that because you are examining the most trouble free portion of a reactors lifespan for the vast majority of reactors around the world. Basis design issues are mostly identified, Accident sequence precursors are known. However all that changes as the reactor enters the last ten years of it's operation.
So when you include Uranium mining, Fuel enrichment and long term containment of radioactive isotopes, the long term safety record for the nuclear industry looks increasingly pessimistic. I'm not saying they can't be fixed (given funding and political will) but along with ageing reactor design and operational issues aside, every aspect of the industrial nuclear cycle has very sobering issues attached to it when looked at pragmatically.
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:4, Funny)
It's a quote from Lethal Weapon 4, spoken by a Chinese no less. Damn mod needs a frontal labotomy ... or perhaps he's already had one !
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
12 MW, 1200 MW, big deal.
Doc Brown doesn't care (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah. At the end of the day, they're both guitar amps that'll blow you across the workshop.
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Re:12.7 Megawatts? (Score:4, Interesting)
The brochure web page for the AP1000 [westinghousenuclear.com] also says much the same thing, 1154MWe.
It also states that this is a Pressurized Water Reactor, so it's probably more about generating by-products (esp. tritium) than it is about generating energy.
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Re:12.7 Megawatts? (Score:5, Informative)
It also states that this is a Pressurized Water Reactor, so it's probably more about generating by-products (esp. tritium) than it is about generating energy.
What are you talking about? If the control rods are Li then you get T. But if you want more interesting byproducts you leave the water out and go for a fast neutron spectrum *and* you get more tritium.
Its pretty clear that this is about generating electricity.
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Tritium? No. Reduced Radiation? Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
I work at a pressurized water reactor so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies....
No, seriously, I'm not an expert on the radionuclide table, but that's hardly why one would choose a pressurized water reactor over a boiling water reactor. (Those are the two big established types. The United States has dozens of both varieties in commercial operation.)
One big reason to pick a pressurized water reactor is that you limit your contamination to the primary reactor coolant loop and it's support systems. The steam plant- the electricity generating side- stays completely radiation free.
This makes servicing the steam-electricity side of the plant much cheaper and simpler.
Most electricity generating power plants in the US operate on steam power.
In a pressurized water reactor, there's a separate reactor coolant loop that passes heat through metal tubes, boiling 'feed water' in the steam generator, and the steam spins the turbine that makes electricity. The primary coolant and the feed water/ steam do not come in contact.
In a boiling water reactor, the reactor directly boils the water that spins the turbine. One big advantage of this is cheaper construction.
Both types 'burn' Uranium to generate the heat that boils the water. Pressurized Water Reactors simply have an additional segregated loop of water.
There are probably a number of advantages to either type that other folks could fill you in on. I assure you though, as an operator of an American Westinghouse Pressurized Water Reactor, tritium is nothing more than an occasional annoyance.
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Re:Tritium? No. Reduced Radiation? Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
I work at a pressurized water reactor so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies....
No, seriously, I'm not an expert on the radionuclide table, but that's hardly why one would choose a pressurized water reactor over a boiling water reactor. (Those are the two big established types. The United States has dozens of both varieties in commercial operation.)
One big reason to pick a pressurized water reactor is that you limit your contamination to the primary reactor coolant loop and it's support systems. The steam plant- the electricity generating side- stays completely radiation free.
BWRs have a number of advantages:
advantage that uncovering fuel rods does not automatically lead to clad failure (in fact a portion is not covered by water during power operation as it turns water into steam); even a fully uncovered core could be steam cooled to prevent meltdown.
Refueling is also easier since the rods go in the bottom so there are no CRDMs to pull to pop the vessel head.
No Boron.
Those are few that come to mind.
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