The Rise of Small Nuclear Plants 490
Posted
by
kdawson
from the small-neutrons-a-specialty dept.
from the small-neutrons-a-specialty dept.
ColdWetDog writes "The Oil Drum (one of the best sites to discuss the technical details of the Macondo Blowout) is typically focused on ramifications of petroleum use, and in particular the Peak Oil theory. They run short guest articles from time to time on various aspects of energy use and policies. Today they have an interesting article on small nuclear reactors with a refreshing amount of technical detail concerning their construction, use, and fueling. The author's major thesis: 'Pick up almost any book about nuclear energy and you will find that the prevailing wisdom is that nuclear plants must be very large in order to be competitive. This assumption is widely accepted, but, if its roots are understood, it can be effectively challenged. Recently, however, a growing body of plant designers, utility companies, government agencies, and financial players are recognizing that smaller plants can take advantage of greater opportunities to apply lessons learned, take advantage of the engineering and tooling savings possible with higher numbers of units, and better meet customer needs in terms of capacity additions and financing. The resulting systems are a welcome addition to the nuclear power plant menu, which has previously been limited to one size — extra large.'"
Small nukes (Score:2, Insightful)
Great for pumping stations and desalination plants... probably the cheapest way.
put them all over as the power grid is not setup f (Score:3, Insightful)
put them all over as the power grid is not setup for having a lot of power in one place.
theres still problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Navy? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would assume the nuclear plants found on submarines and large warships both provide a lot of energy and are not in the category of 'extra large.'
Nor are they in the category of "economical", which is what was meant by "the prevailing wisdom is that nuclear plants must be very large in order to be competitive." Economically competitive, you see. Something the Navy cares about far less than, well, basically every other factor that goes into the design of a naval nuclear power plant.
The NIMBY effect (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is good. (Score:2, Insightful)
Solar, wind, geothermal, pumped storage all have their place but really the national grid should be designed to better accomodate micro-generation and 'unreliable' generators like wind turbines - efficient power plants that can easily reduce their output in a way that actually saves fuel so that no wind or solar energy ends up wasted.
Macondo blowout? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's call it what it is. The BP disaster.
Re:The Navy? (Score:2, Insightful)
The Navy's plants are "not economical" for a pretty big reason. They have to be able to withstand a shock loads (aka bombs exploding) and resulting impact of the water hammer that hits it, and not fail. Of the US Naval vessels that have sunk, I don't believe any of them have leaked contamination into the seas. They also now make plants that last for 30 years with out being refueled. Oh yea, they're also freakin WARSHIPS, maybe that contributes to the cost as well.
Re:This is good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Peak Uranium? So then we move to thorium, or get uranium out of the sea, or burn our spent fuel. This is a solvable issue.
Re:put them all over as the power grid is not setu (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't imagine investing in a national nuclear infrastructure without also overhauling the distribution grid.
Re:theres still problems (Score:3, Insightful)
it all depends on the fuel and the process.
Re:Waste of Uranium (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, if oil is non-renewable because it takes millions of years to re-form, then nuclear fuels are the ultimate non-renewable with a "when is the next supernova due?" regeneration period. And the energy density and relative ease of use is just too good to waste it powering our washing machines and slashdot browsing. Maybe in a few hundred years outer solar system exploration will be in a serious crunch because the lack of a good power source after all the uranium, thorium, plutonium etc. has been used up.
That's kind of a silly argument, no one is in favor of renewables -just- for the renewable aspect. It's the fact that the widely used non-renewables are mostly dirty.
You have a point about using up the nuclear power sources, seems we always consume resources faster than we expect and only think about what's next until it's crunch time. I'd say though that we have to get through the current transition we need to do first. I'm no expert, but it seems that the experts are convinced that nuclear is one of the only viable solutions at this point, nothing else would be able to generate most of the power that coal is now. At least, that's what I've heard. And we probably will be facing the same crunch when it's time to get off nuclear power, but at least we'll get to that stage if we use nuclear now.
Re:Titles are useless (Score:4, Insightful)
Because there is hydrogen and carbon in space.
Peak oil is not about running out of oil, it is about running out of oil that is cheap and easy to get. Those hydrocarbons in space are too expensive to bother with, especially when we have all this uranium and thorium laying around.
Re:This is good. (Score:3, Insightful)
We have been hearing that claim for thousands of years. Human society will last a lot longer than that.
Re:Not true (Score:3, Insightful)
Dirty bombs are not that big a deal. Oh noes we need to clean up some contamination what ever will we do! Leakage would be a far bigger deal.
What black market is there for fuel grade uranium?
If you have to go to the black market to get it, you probably don't have the money to do anything with it anyway.
Re:This is good. (Score:0, Insightful)
there is this farsical disscuion that always gets recycled about uranium, that there is only 50 years supply left. yes, there is 50 years of KNOWN AND DEFINED ore body. there has been almost zero exploration done in the last 40 years due to hard campgaining against uranium mining and nuclear power. it's dishonest of the green lobby to succeed in banning uranium mining in most countries then claim short supply as a problem for nuclear power. In australia alone we have massive deposits that aren't properly explored, and there's no doubt there are more deposits we don't even know about.
Re:This is good. (Score:4, Insightful)
No one had the technology to kill everyone on earth until the mid 70s, so that was a pretty implausible claim for all but the last 40ish of those thousands of years.
Re:Not just one back yard anymore. (Score:1, Insightful)
Personally, I've always thought military bases would be a good place to site small nuclear plants.
Re:Titles are useless (Score:3, Insightful)
Read my comment again.
You should now have seen your mistake and should be calculating when peak thorium will occur.
Re:This is good. (Score:1, Insightful)
Guilt by assocation and an ad hominem attack without addressing one of the arguments offered. Nice.
Re:Waste of Uranium (Score:4, Insightful)
the anti-nuclear crowd should be renamed the anti-braincell crowd
I get frustrated by statements like this.
I'm pro-nuclear: I took classes to become a nuclear power plant operator, once long ago, and if someone were willing to let me put a TRIGA-sized power-producing reactor in my back yard I'd jump at the chance if I got free power out of it.
With that said: most of the people who oppose nuclear power aren't stupid. They just have a faulty set of data from which they're making judgments.
If you believe that the potential failure mode of a process is completely unacceptable, then it's perfectly logical to be dead set against that process. Think of a Hindu trying to convince an atheist to jump off a cliff, because, the Hindu says, if it doesn't work you'll just come back as something else, so what's the risk? The atheist, however, considers the failure mode completely unacceptable, and will, rightly, refuse the gamble.
Same thing with many opponents of nuclear power. They're not dumb, they just think a nuclear accident is an epic catastrophe. Under those circumstances, flat-out opposition is a reasonable position.
As we've recently read on slashdot, trying to use facts to change their minds *probably* won't work.
But calling them anti-braincell *certainly* won't.
Re:This is good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying nuclear won't fulfill our needs because of "peak Uranium" is at best stupid, at worst a lie to try to stop development of nuclear power. We likely have enough fuel (Uranium, Thorium, Plutonium, etc) for _thousands of years_ at our current energy consumption. That's the electrical grid, cars, everything. If we can just make everything run on electricity and build the best reactors our scientists can design, we would be fine for hundreds of years at a _minimum_. And I think it's safe to assume we'd be switched over to fusion by then :)
The problem is not the technology, it's not the resources, it's the regulations and the industry. We aren't building new plants because power companies aren't willing to invest large sums of money. Because regulations make it hard for them to _acquire_ large amounts of money (limits on how much profit utilities can take in.) We can't build breeder reactors because, for an extremely short period of time, they produce enriched uranium. Without breeder reactors, we can't take care of the waste problem because it lasts freakin' forever (without breeder reactors) and nobody wants it stored or transported anywhere within a thousand miles of them.
If you got a bunch of engineers and said "figure out how to solve our energy problem", they could throw together a nuclear power system that could power the world into the next millennium - and it would be cheap, it would be clean, and it would be safe. It's only restrictions like "you can't create highly radioactive products, even for a few seconds, you can't build anything big, you can't build anywhere near populated areas, and you can't use the word 'radioactive' or 'nuclear'" that causes problems.
Re:This is good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure if we could, but the reality is no one wants to think that far ahead. If they did many of our deserts would already be covered with solar thermal plants.
Re:This is good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Fourth, and maybe most telling of all, is the Obama administration's recently proposal of $8 Billion in loan guarantees for the nuclear power industry. Translation -- nuclear power is such a bad investment that nobody wants to give them any money.
Of course it's 'bad investment' from the perspective of people looking to make money. Building infrastructure is always a 'bad investment.' Yet we all benefit from it. Nuclear power is still the safest and cleanest energy out there. Clean coal has been shown again and again to be a lie. Nuclear power is used in Japan and throughout Europe. Let's take the plunge!
Re:This is good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Part of this energy problem is socieconomic. Virtually no one is discussing the obvious problem of cenralizing power.
It is not going to work.
What should be happening is every home should have its own power system, and should be self sufficient, connected to a grid which can resell excess energy per household back to the grid for use.
The idea of central authorities controlling all the power of whole regions is economically as well as politically dangerous.
For example, lets talk about Obama's terrorist boogieman. What is easier to pick off, central power plants owned by a wealthy few? Or everyone's home self sufficient which provides its own energy with no one point to attack?
Our own socieconomic models are designed for the military industrial complex to provide a reason for its existence.
Technology could be developed to provide homes that generate all the energy they require, but it is being denied due to these and other facts which would destroy the wealthy's power structure so it cannot be permitted.
Combinations of natural gas turbines, solar power, gas, oil, solar and wind and geothermal, nuclear and space could easily be distributed by regions household based on what energy sources are cheapest or practical.
Change isn't hard. It is hard though when 14 families control all of the worlds energy supplies and do not look kindly upon ideas that threaten the status quo.
-Hack
Re:This is good. (Score:1, Insightful)
Relaxing regulations and restrictions certainly worked for the oil industry! Or the financial sector!
I agree with you that a bunch of engineers could probably solve the problem and make nuclear safe and reliable. However, engineers don't run power companies. I also think nuclear is going to be a major player in our energy future, but frankly, imagining some modern power companies building and operating plants freaks me out a little bit.
It's probably also worthwhile noting that regulation is not a good thing or bad thing. It's only detrimental when it's operated incompetently by people who don't have society's best interests in mind. Knee-jerk "regulation bad" type responses are just as bad as ineffective regulation.
Re:This is good. (Score:3, Insightful)
heya,
Your first point, I'm not going to argue on, because I don't know of the cases you're referring to. I assume here you mean recent ones? Perhaps you could cite examples.
Your second point - it is actually quite cheap, if you look at the whole picture, both the initial outlay and the ongoing cost. And it is relatively clean - the public likes to drum up the fears about nuclear waste, but the actual amount of waste is considerably less than that from the coal industry. A few pounds of nuclear material is enough to power a small city for a year. You compare that to the amount of coal you have to burn, and hundreds of metric tonnes of resulting pollution.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html [pbs.org]
And assuming you find safe ways of getting it out of the way, it doesn't pollute the air and contribute to lung cancer. France themselves are leading pioneering research in recycling/reprocessing their nuclear waste. In the US, I believe there's a moratorium on reprocessing dating from the Carter Era, over fears that widespread proliferation of such technology might make it easy for terrorists to get nuclear weapons.
Your third point - that's the current situation. Isn't the whole point of this article to try and look as possibly increasing that percentage?
Fourth - as mentioned above, there's a massive outlay, obviously. It's not like you're just digging up rocks from the ground and burning them in a giant pit. And also, I think you're being a bit disingenious and selective with the facts here - the government also funds the coal industry...lol....and to a much larger amount. E.g. see this earlier story, when they were up in arms, when the Congress-funded U.S. Export-Import Bank denied them several hundred million dollars in loan guarantees:
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/06/27/obamas-promise-to-bankrupt-coal-industry-to-cost-1000-jobs-in-upper-midwest/ [hotair.com]
http://blogsforvictory.com/2010/06/27/obamunism-coal-industry-jobs-lost-because-of-obama-policy/ [blogsforvictory.com]
(Yes, I've noticed both of those blogs seem to be pro-coal, or pro-global warming, if that makes sense...haha).
Cheers,
Victor
Re:Not true (Score:3, Insightful)
How are you going to dig up a thousand ton block of concrete buried twenty feet down and load it onto a flatbed without a spy satellite picking up your equipment and an assault team being dispatched? Just because they are not guarded, doesn't mean they won't be monitored.
Re:This is good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ya know, you had me there for a while--right up to your sig. Now I just figure you're another Libertarian nutcase, "the autistics of politics."
In other words "You know, your ideas about energy are wonderful, but I must assume they are terrible because you have a different political ideology than me."
Thanks for pointing out for the world to see just how big a fucking moron you are.
Replacement for IN-CITY coal plants (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, nimby will still be an issue, but most ppl will prefer a nuke over a coal.
Re:put them all over as the power grid is not setu (Score:3, Insightful)
You can reuse the steam turbines and electric generators with solar thermal power plants as well.
Hopeful dreaming and not a done deal (Score:5, Insightful)
IFR cancelation: (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought it was interesting the reason given when the cancellation of the IFR was mentioned in Clinton's first state of the union speech. It was that we would never need it, and thus it was a waste of money.
To say the least, I disagreed.
Re:This is good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Although I agree in general that nuclear is the way to go for the short and mid-term (and switched electricity providers to one that offers 'red' electricity (as opposed to 'green'), your statement..
"Peak Oil? So then we move to natural gas, or get the oil out of shale, or recover oil from plastics. This is a solvable issue."
Only nonsense if it's used as nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
You've been misled by manipulative bastards pushing some agenda into misunderstanding a very simple term describing a simple problem.
Unit size (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a few useful sizes at which to build such things as nuclear reactors. One useful size is what can be transported on a railroad car or a heavy-equipment transporter truck. That's as big as you can get and still build the thing in a factory, which has substantial cost advantages over on-site construction. The upper limit for this seems to be around 135 MWe.
Wind turbines have a size problem, too. Somewhere around 3MW, they become too big to transport assembled by road or rail, even with the blades shipped separately. Better generator design seems to help with this. Enercon has been able to get up to 10MW or so with a no-gearbox generator design and still ship the parts by road. The very large machines require more on-site assembly.
Not energy efficiency: fear efficiency. (Score:3, Insightful)
First: if you're not reading The Oil Drum, you should be.
But on to my point. The controlling factor for building nuclear power plants is not money or power, but fear. Fear of contamination controls the decade-long permitting process. Fear of terrorist attack or accident controls the number of guards, monitoring personnel, and operators who work at the plant on a daily basis. The majority of the expense of actually building the plant goes into safety and security systems.
Now, some of these fears are reasonable. But that's not the point: the point is that a small power plant is just as scary as a large one.
The best power plant is not the most energy efficient one, or even the one that's strictly speaking the safest. It's the one that produces the least amount of fear per gigawatt. And that means building gigantic plants.
Re:This is good. (Score:1, Insightful)
Even if they wouldn't put the waste in a breeder reactor that doesn't mean it has to be buried in the ground, it could still be used as fuel in Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators. There is no such thing as nuclear waste, there is only nuclear fuel people choose to waste.
Re:Since they're small, (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, that's the problem. No matter what the size of the reactor, NIMBY.
And since NIMBY is so hard to overcome, if you do manage to overcome it, you might as well build a honking big one instead of a small or medium sized plant.
And in the US, tack on a few more acres for storing the waste indefinitely, as the Federal Government is unlikely to get it's act into gear and actually create a storage facility for it anytime soon.
Re:Nuclear waste (Score:3, Insightful)
We should be doing research into this now. Sure its not a done deal, and a clear waste management plan is needed. But once though fuel cycle is completely retarded. Its that kind of wastefulness that gets us into these problems in the fist place.
People seem to think 100 years is a long time. The hotel i stayed in Italy last year was build in 720AD. The wine cellar in Czech has been producing wine since at least ~800AD.
Re:This is good. (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you "hit arable land"? Fold it up and poke it into a black hole? Don't think that you couldn't grow and eat crops around Chernobyl. We are talking about survival, not healthy eating.
I remember reading a comment in memoirs of a British WWI soldier. He said the rats in the trenches survived everything the Germans could throw at them, even poison gas. Come to think of it, most of the soldiers survived too.
Killing people is hard.
Re:Since they're small, (Score:3, Insightful)
Smaller plants can of course get by this problem by running low reaction, low temperature reactors. For example if you were to pulse the reaction rather than have a sustained reaction you can substantially reduce the temperature of the reactor whilst increasing the life of fuel and use a hydrocarbon lubricating reactant (liquid to vapour) in a closed cycle turbine, where the nuclear reaction is enclosed within the main active turbine blades and the reaction then drives an array of passive turbine blades. So a shipping container sized reactor ie many smaller, simpler, safer, reactors in a power plant (they are safer because of course the substantially reduced operating temperatures and the fuel rods last the life of the reactor, no refuelling).
Re:put them all over as the power grid is not setu (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:put them all over as the power grid is not setu (Score:2, Insightful)
If I lived next to a coal-burning power plant, I would jump at the chance to have it converted to nuclear.
That's an awfully hard way to do it: (Score:3, Insightful)
Far easier to steal a medical source. There are more of them, they're widely distributed under varying security conditions, the containers they're in aren't as robust and the radioactive materials are more effective when dispersed.
Stealing even a small nuclear power plant doesn't strike me as particularly easy.
Re:Thorium Power (Score:3, Insightful)