Small Nuclear Power Plants To Dot the Arctic Circle 255
Vincent West writes with news of a Russian project currently underway to populate the Arctic Circle with 70-megawatt, floating nuclear power plants. Russia has been planning these nuclear plants for quite some time, with construction beginning on the prototype in 2007. It's due to be finished next year, and an agreement was reached in February to build four more. According to the Guardian:
"The 70-megawatt plants, each of which would consist of two reactors on board giant steel platforms, would provide power to Gazprom, the oil firm which is also Russia's biggest company. It would allow Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit some of the remotest oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas. The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years."
Re:Nuclear submarines (Score:5, Informative)
The west needs some all nuclear ships to ply the route between America and EU (no real chance of pirates) and perhaps across the pacific. This would drop CO2 emissions a great deal.
Re:Nuclear submarines (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nuclear Power (Score:5, Informative)
oh wait what?
The power plant produces 70MW.
Assume that the equivalent of this energy is dissipated as heat.
Sunlight on the Earth surface is on average 164W/m^2, though at polar circle this drops to 80-100W/m^2. Snow at best reflects 90%, absorbing 10%.
70,000,000/(80*0.1)=8,750,000m^2=8.75km^2
So one power plant is an equivalent of sunlight collected over 8.76km^2 area. Arctic ocean is 14,056,000km^2. Power plant increases the amount of heat absorbed in the area by .00006%
Alternatively the same amount of power would have to be produced by the same Gazprom using -- guess what? -- things that Gazprom happens to produce, namely fuel.
Not the Arctic Circle (Score:1, Informative)
The Arctic Circle is not a good place to dot with floating nuclear power plants. Check the map [wikipedia.org] to see why.
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:1, Informative)
Oh really? Who told you that?
The only serious nuclear incident in USSR history, Chernobyl, happened in Ukraine, and was a result of combination of idiocy never seen before or after it anywhere near a nuclear installation. In fact, this amount of mishandling would cause a meltdown of any reactor, even one that is supposed to be completely "meltdown-proof", or a similarly disastrous incident on a non-nuclear facility such as chemical plant or oil refinery.
The rest is pretty much the same as in any other country that did any kind of development related to nuclear weapons or nuclear energy -- US included.
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Only one problem.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh really?
Yes, really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Zemlya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Peninsula
HTH,
HAND
Re:Nuclear submarines (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not surprised that nobody uses nuclear for cargo ships. You need to spend a lot more money on your shipboard engineering crew (more people, higher salaries, more training), you need to build and maintain shore facilities to handle nuclear plant maintenance, and nowadays you'd need a respectably-sized security force on board and at the shore facility to make sure you didn't lose control of your nuclear materials to people that want to do something other than push cargo with it.
The US Navy decided to stop using nuclear power on cruisers because it was cheaper to use conventional power for some of the reasons above. Note that the power requirements for a cruiser [wikipedia.org] and a large container ship [wikipedia.org] are about the same.
The ongoing negative public sentiment towards nuclear is probably another big deciding factor.
Re:Nuclear submarines (Score:1, Informative)
Once the reactor has been operating for any length of time, there's a lot of nasty stuff in there, and if you really tried and knew what you were doing, you could get it out into the local environment.
And it would last a lot longer than the oil spill.
The harms of a little radioactivity has been greatly exaggerated. I wouldn't want to be around the A-bomb (or its fall-out), but there are so many things in nature that are radioactive, that I doubt contents of a single nuclear reactor, dispersed through the ocean, would cause any noticeable harm.
"Dirty bomb" is good for creating panic in the mindless mob, but not for any kind of actual damage. Did you know that your smoke detector in your home contains radioactive material (americium)? And not too long ago, people used plates painted with paint containing uranium, and played around with radium like it's glow-in-the-dark fluorescent paint. Of course, we don't do these things (except smoke detector) any more because, well, routine exposure to significant radioactivity isn't healthy, after all.
But as far as a single disastrous incident goes, dirty bomb's most destructive effect would be the explosive aspect of it, not the radioactive material in it.
I don't doubt the contents of nuclear reactor can be used to kill a few even tens of people. But, for ecological disasters, I would still stick with oil tankers. Even the most harmful radioactive material did come from nature. The real harm is in the vast quantity we can accumulate these things in one place, and this vast quantity is what a nuclear reactor should lack.
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh really? Who told you that?
The only serious nuclear incident in USSR history, Chernobyl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_Disaster [wikipedia.org]
You are wrong on so many levels (Score:4, Informative)
1) The main reason for the Chernobyl disaster was a bad reactor plant design. A SCRAM should never ever bring the reactor to explosion. After the disaster, the control rods were heavily modified. Also, the control team never did anything against the reactor user manual.
2) This problem with the design was known a couple of years before the Chernobyl accident. Both the reactors of Leningrad nuclear power plant and of the Ignalina nuclear power plant, reactors of the same type, had serious accidents of the same type (SCRAM caused a nearly runaway reaction). At this point the problem became known, the designers were informed of it and even got some recommendations how to redesign the control rods to avoid this kind of problems in the future. The designers decided that since they were very important, well-known and highly-decorated scientists, they don't have to listen to "common people". The result is known.
3) There were some other nuclear accidents in the USSR. The most prominent is Mayak.
Nonetheless USSR was one of the nuclear reactor pioneers. The first commercial nuclear power plant was a soviet one. And there were some decent reactors like the current VVER line.
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:5, Informative)
As you suggest, there are now a number meltdown-proof reactor designs. These are not merely engineered with "infallible" safety mechanisms, but are fundamentally meltdown-proof by their very design. As long as the laws of physics hold, which is a reasonably safe assumption, there is no risk of meltdown.
While the Pebble bed reactor is safe though, the nature of the pebbles make for very difficult reprocessing, and otherwise still pose a long term waste management problem.
Nuclear is the clear winner for clean, environmentally friendly energy production, but I would recommend pointing people to the Integral Fast Reactor [wikipedia.org] instead. An added benefit would be that such a design could also solve our current nuclear waste problems, by recycling it for use in such reactors. The true waste after recycling is both very minimal and very short lived by comparison.
Re:No maintenance? (Score:3, Informative)
</rant> Yargh. I'll probably get modded flamebait, but I just finished reading Fallen Angels, so I'm pretty mad at uninformed and unthinking environmentalists like the anti-nuclear crowd right now. I'll simmer down in a few days I'm sure.
Re:You are wrong on so many levels (Score:3, Informative)
You should read more current technical reports. Back then IAEA received misinformation and blatant lies from the soviet government. All blame was shifted on the operators because of the "Communist Tech Cannot Fail" - syndrom.
Now we know, that although the operator shouldn't have altered the test programme in his own initiative, the crew actions never went against the reactor user manual (which I have also read - Russian is my native tongue).
Also, it wasn't reactor overheat which caused the rows to bend, it was a runaway reaction because graphite rod tips dispaced cooling water. Water is a much better neutron absorber than graphit, so when the water was displaced with the graphit, the reaction spiked twentyfold within three seconds and THAT caused the core to overheat. Because the control rod insertion mechanism was quite slow, the control rod tubes were warped at that second and that, in turn, caused the control rods to struck in their position, further boosting the reaction. Two seconds later it went boom.
Re:You are wrong on so many levels (Score:3, Informative)
Not at all.
The test was only to look whether the energy won of the spin of the turbine in a shutdown process is enough to drive the cooling pumps for the time the backup diesel generators are starting (they need about a minute to go to full power). The test was fully approved and the reactor had adequate cooling for all time. To be absolutely correct, since according to the test plan additional water pumps were activated, the reactor was cooled much better than usual. The presence of so much water, which is a neutron absorber, together with the xenon poisoning, caused the reaction to slow down so much, that all control rods had to be pulled to sustain the reaction at all. If the crew would let the control rods in the reactor, the reactor would have shut down at this low power level.
The problem is, that at this point, only cooling water and the xenon poisoning were controlling the reaction. After the test was done (and it came out that the spin of the shutting down turbine is not enough to power the cooling pumps) a SCRAM was ordered. The control rods were inserted slowly, the water was displaced with graphite tips, reaction spiked suddenly and everything went boom.
Current user manual for RBMK reactor forbids operating the reactor at a power lower than AFAIR 700MW thermal because at low power the reactor could not be controlled anymore (as you could see from the discription above). The older user manual which was current at the time before the accident, never had that restriction (although, as I mentioned, after the accident at the Leningrad power plant, the problem was known but ignored by the authorities).
Re:Nuclear submarines (Score:3, Informative)
Even the most harmful radioactive material did come from nature ...
So where do we mine Plutonium again?
Somebody please take the Informative moderation away from this comment. The highly radioactive fission products of a nuclear reactor have half times too short to occur naturally in any significant amount. Even an element like plutonium with the longest lasting isotope having a half time of 24,100 years decays way to quickly in comparison to the earth's age to have any meaningful deposits left. You can only found trace amounts close to uranium deposits because it can result form Uranium decay. Uranium is the only radioactive element that occurs naturally in significantly large quantity because it longest lasting isotope has a half time of 4.47 billion years. Most other naturally radioactive materials are - just like plutonium - decay products of uranium and only present in trace amounts in the earth's crust. As with most other things deadly it is the concentration that kills. The contents of nuclear fuel rods if spread so that they are ingested can kill many thousands - and we are talking slow agonizing radioactive poisoning and cancer deaths.
There is no natural equivalent of the density and intensity of radioactive matter that can be found in spend nuclear fuel. Last time this happened naturally was 2 billion years ago in Africa a truly catastrophic event [wikipedia.org].
BTW I am totally in favor of responsible use of nuclear fission technology. But spreading ignorance like this does nothing to further this cause.
Re:Nuclear submarines (Score:3, Informative)
As the AC pointed out, the bulk of the radioactivity will be in fission products. [wikipedia.org] For a shiny new reactor that's been operating for only 1 year at 70MW, consider the amount of Sr-90 and Cs-137 (which have half-lives in the neighborhood of 30 years) that is left sitting in the reactor:
(70e6 watts)/(200 MeV per fission)*(31,556,926 seconds) = 6.89370014e25 fissions
(6.89370014e25 fissions)*(.045 Sr-90 atoms per fission + .06 Cs-137 atoms per fission) = 7.4451961512000006e+24 atoms
With a half-life of ~30 years, this amount of two medium-lived isotopes produces
(log 2)/(30 years)*(7.4451961512000006e+24) = 5.451119e15 decays/sec = 147,000 Curies
That's already an order of magnitude above 10k curies, and that's just considering two medium-lived isotopes that will be a problem for decades without any cleanup. The shorter-lived isotopes will produce disproportionately more activity due to a shorter half-life, and would easily push the total activity over a million Curies.
Granted, a significant chunk of that million+ Curies will be gone after a year just from decay, but the longer-lived stuff is enough to make a place unusable for many years. Even with a big decontamination effort, it would probably take a long time to get the activity down to levels that would be considered acceptable for public use.