The Rise of Small Nuclear Plants 490
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.
This is good. (Score:3, Interesting)
Nuclear energy is probably the best chance we have are breaking our addiction to oil. Nuclear energy is also relatively clean. I don't know why the government doesn't just fund the development of a bunch of nuclear power plants and put them on the coast or on the ocean somewhere. We could generate enough power to power the entire country, not to mention we could probably put hundreds of thousands of nuclear power plants in the desert.
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.
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:put them all over as the power grid is not setu (Score:4, Informative)
I can't imagine investing in a national nuclear infrastructure without also overhauling the distribution grid.
did no one RTFA?
Oh yeah this is slashdot.
The idea is as Coal Plants get decommissioned you can use most of the same equipment, Which I assume means the same generators. Which make the nuke plants cheaper then overhauling the coal plant.
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You can reuse the steam turbines and electric generators with solar thermal power plants as well.
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You can reuse the steam turbines and electric generators with solar thermal power plants as well.
Haven't you ever played sim city? You can't replace a Coal Plant with Just one solar plant.
A solar plant with the same foot print as the coal plant might get 50 Mwatts, Where the coal plant it's replacing is usually around 500 Mwatts.
Whereas most nuke plants are like 1000-2500 Mwatts.
Re:put them all over as the power grid is not setu (Score:5, Informative)
In the US in situ leaching is used.
Basicly you pump a mix of water and baking soda into the ground and the uranium disolves in it.
Then you pump it back up and extract the uranium.
Baking soda isn't high on my list of things I'm afraid of getting in my water.
Pretty clean and safe.
waste storage wouldn't be too hard if it was treated as a technical problem, unfortunatly politicians who consider the words "nuclear" and "satanic" interchangable screwed that one up.
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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 -
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.
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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."
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Except, given the *current stock* of nuclear fuels, we have enough to power the world for at least the next couple thousand years. That's not to say we currently have the reactors to burn that fuel; nonetheless the fuel supply is plentiful.
Its one thing to say "peak uranium", its quite another thing to say, "peak nuclear fuel". The first may or may not be true. Many suspect its not. The later is most definitely is not true.
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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.
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The EnviroWackos would never allow that. Think of the Turtles!
Re:This is good. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll just pick on one obvious mistake (Score:3, Informative)
It is correctly called nuclear waste because the potential benefit of having it is a lot less than all the work required to separating it out. Machining very strong, hard, highly radioactive materials is incredibly expensive as the French have shown despite about thirty years of trying to make their reprocessing methods viable.
Re:I'll just pick on one obvious mistake (Score:5, Informative)
And that is why you toss it back into a feeder reactor as fuel to and let the neutron radiation break it down for you.
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That is why it is seen as waste and not fuel.
Hopeful dreaming and not a done deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Russian and Japanese experience: (Score:4, Informative)
You mean like the liquid sodium Russian BN600 (600 MW electric fast breeder power plant) that's been running since 1980?
It's had some problems, but nothing that couldn't be repaired and put back online.
Or maybe like the Japanese Monju plant? It had a sodium fire, but that was due to a bad design on a temperature sensor rather than anything to do with sodium itself as a coolant. It's back online now. Much of the reason it took so long was due to a scandal with the management covering up and the resulting court cases. It wasn't the technical problems that stopped it for all that time but the legal/political ones.
Sodium reactors have been around since the 50s at least. Yes, there are problems with embrittlement and the reactivity of the coolant, but it's hardly a show stopper. They're known and manageable problems.
What led to the shutdown of the program was the opposition of John Kerry and others, not technical problems with the sodium coolant.
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There's plans for a larger one but I'm not sure what stage they are up to.
Very frequent repairs and replacements, which is my entire point about problems that need to be solved with large liquid metal reactors.
Did the temperature sensor actually weaken the structure and cause the leak? Obviously not. It
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Never mind hydrogenation - flour is a remarkably explosive substance as is custard powder and people eat those things!
Bring on the plutonium!!!
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"The coolant was liquid metal, sodium or lead. These elements don't moderate the neutrons, they fly unhindered through the pile."
It's not all roses. For one thing these metallic coolants will all become highly radioactive themselves due to neutron activation, sodium is extremely chemically reactive (spontaneous ignition in air or H2 generation in water that then burns -- choosing non-reactive materials to go in the reactor primary coolant loop is a challenge too), and starting up/shutting down these things
Sodium coolant neutron activation: non-issue: (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, sodium gets activated by the neutrons. Yes, it's highly radioactive then. But, it's quite short lived (15 hours for Na-24, 2.6 years for Na-22) so it's not as big a problem as you imply. Na-22 is a beta decay, so that's not problematic. Na-24 is the one that has dangerous radiation as it emits gammas. But with a 15 hour half life, it decays very quickly.
The daughter products aren't a problem either (Ne-22 and Mg-24), they're both stable.
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.
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> As for Libertarianism, do you have a better suggestion?
Gladiator fights. I'll give three:one odds on the teabagger in the SUV over the treehugger with the polar bear.
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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.
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:5, Interesting)
ADM Rickover thinks differently [wikiquote.org]:
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
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We have been hearing that claim for thousands of years. Human society will last a lot longer than that.
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:This is good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if you use all our nukes someone will still make it.
Depends on how you use them.
If the cold war had gone hot, most of those nukes would have been aimed at targets in the northern hemisphere, with several warheads per target (as insurance, in case some didn't launch, didn't work, or got shot down). Contrary to popular belief, most of the targets were military, rather than civilian - cities were a low priority, missile silos were a high priority, for reasons that should be obvious. Post nuclear losses due to radiation poisoning, starvation and infrastructure collapse would probably have been higher than the actually death toll inflicted by the bombs, and as you correctly say, people would survive. Contrary to some predictions, nuclear winter would not have been likely, but we didn't know that at the time.
Now, if you actually wanted to achieve total human genocide using the worlds current nuclear arsenal, I'm not at all sure you couldn't. Don't bother with the cities, just hit all the arable land, and let starvation take its course. Of course that is a very morbid thing to consider, and is sufficiently horrible, not to mention suicidal, that we'd never actually do it, but you were discussing whether it was possible, rather than whether it was likely.
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Of course that is a very morbid thing to consider, and is sufficiently horrible, not to mention suicidal, that we'd never actually do it...
Don't underestimate the perversity of our species. There are people right now, on this earth, at this very moment, who would answer the question "Should all human life on this planet be destroyed?" with a resounding "YES!".
To paraphrase Terry Pratchett... if you put a button deep in a cave somewhere and put up a painted sign next to it saying "End of world button, do not
Your sig (Score:4, Funny)
You couldn't have a better sig for that post!
Re:This is good. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it's even easier, add cobalt to several nukes on site, blow them up on site and let winds and currents take care of the rest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb [wikipedia.org]
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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.
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Re:This is good. (Score:4, Informative)
Clean coal cannot exist. What are you going to do with all the waste? What will you do with the CO2?
It is a freaking PR job by the dirtiest industry in the USA. They top off mountains and dump the remains into peoples drinking water. Then they store hazardous waste in open ponds and let that run onto people's property. These folks make the nuclear industry look like saints.
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:5, Informative)
Nuclear power is cheap and clean. It is cheap enough that France exports large amounts of electricity to Italy, Germany, and the UK. The importing countries closed or scaled down their nuclear power investments to placate local enviro-weenies but are OK importing it, even if the reactors are right next to the border. France has some of the cheapest electricity costs [www.cbs.nl] in Europe. So I do not get where you are coming from.
Check the DOE energy reports. In the US nuclear power generates more electricity than wind, solar, hydro and other renewables combined [wikipedia.org]. If CO2 is considered a pollutant there is no clean coal.
Re:This is good. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not defending the GP's post but to describe nuclear power as cheap, at least historically, is not true.
The reason France's electricity is so cheap is because the government sets the price and has subsidised the cost. Recently EDF have been investigated for price fixing [french-property.com] because of this.
The real reason why no nuclear power plants have been constructed for decades in many countries is mostly because gas and coal were cheaper. The fact that some considered it to be unsafe was a secondary issue. Now that gas prices are rising and there is growing concern about the environmental effects of coal, nuclear power starts looking competitive again.
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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 e
Re:This is good. (Score:5, Informative)
I'd recommend looking at this post [slashdot.org].
First, the nuclear power industry pretty much has the best safety record going. Per dollar of product produced, it kills the least amount of people. Let's see, in the past decade it's killed, what, 3 people (the 3 Japanese workers in a reprocessing plant that got stupid by using a steel bucket instead of the multi-million machine intended for the purpose). Just this year, in the USA, for oil and natural gas we have the Deepwater horizon, which killed 11. China regularly loses hundreds each year, we lost 25 in the explosion at Massey this year. 34 miners lost their lives the year before in various incidents.
Second - Let's look at Yankee Rowe [wikipedia.org] - third commerical nuclear reactor. Shut down early due to concerns that the reactor vessel might be becoming brittle.
Cost: $36M in 1960, $209M in 2k dollars
Decommission: $450M($567M), worst case. $320M($403M) is the 'basis average'.
During it's life, Yankee Rowe produced 34 Billion kwh, achieving a sub-performing 74% capacity factor - most of the newer reactors still in service are well over 90%.
So, going by an average 3 cents a kwh, that's $1.02B in electricity produced. That leaves $244M for operations and profit during it's time. So not very expensive, though not as good as would be hoped. If you go by the worst case decommission costs. Basis average would be a lot better, as would it have been if the reactor had lasted it's expected lifetime.
Third - You have got to be kidding me. 19.4% in 2007 [doe.gov]
Fourth - So nuclear power needs loan guarantees to proceed. Wind and Solar power need cash subsidies, often in excess of half their cost! Heck, your 'clean coal' got more subsidies [doe.gov] than nuclear - $29.81/MWh for 'clean coal', Solar $24.34 and wind around $23.37, nuclear got only $1.59/MWh
In total dollars:
Refined Coal: $2,156M
Solar: $14M
Wind: $724M
Nuclear: $1,267M
The biggest problem with coal is air pollution. There is technology available to reduce pollution to negligible levels, but nobody wants to use it because it's "too expensive". Instead of flushing a few Billion down the toilet with nuclear power, we could put that money into clean coal technology.
Still have the problems with fly ash and such, so it's still not 'clean', and at that point your 'clean coal' is more expensive to install than nuclear, as well as more expensive to operate.
Build it deep underground, build it on the water. (Score:3)
Think so? I think you are not considering a few facts.
But it's a good start. If we go nuclear we'd be well on our way. There is no better option to produce the same results for the price.
Oil provides about 2% of the electricity we use [culverco.com] in the US. We get five times more electricity from hydro than from oil and coal provides about half the electricity used. Most oil is used for transportation and for various products. I like the thought of electric cars but those aren't going to do away with the need for oil anytime soon.
When electricity is cheap enough, we'll be able to plug our cars into our walls, along with our robot maid.
Building nuclear plants takes time. Lots of time. Even if we started today we couldn't bring enough nuclear plants online fast enough to service the anticipated need for electricity solely with nuclear during the next 15 years.
Thats not necessarily true. The time it takes to build is relative to the cost it takes to build it and the expertise. It could be built in 5 years if we saw it as an emergency. You see how fast all that surveillance technology got built but they can't built nuclear power
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The only people I have come across that support Nuclear are Nuclear scientists, and deluded Slashdot posters, indulging in wishfull thinking.
And the French. Don'f forget the French. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France [wikipedia.org]
Or the Japanese... - http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf79.html [world-nuclear.org]
Or the British even... - http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/apr/15/nuclearpower-edf [guardian.co.uk]
How about the rest of europe... - http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_4710000/newsid_4713300/4713398.stm [bbc.co.uk]
The Navy? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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:The Navy? (Score:5, Informative)
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Cost still factors in to the equation, but it would seem that gas turbines aren't cheap enough to offset the other benefits nuclear provides.
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Nuclear reactors do not need to carry extra fuel, and so the endurance of a ship at sea is not limited by the amount of fuel it can carry. Carrying less fuel, the ship can carry more supplies and ammunition.
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Re:The Navy? (Score:5, Informative)
To minimize sound possibly?
Not even a little. Nuke plants are noisy. This actually poses a problem aboard nuclear subs. Of course a carrier isn't stealthy to begin with, especially not if deployed in a battle group, so the reactor noise isn't relevant.
The GP asked why the navy would use a nuke if a gas turbine would do the job. Fuel is the biggest answer, as a nuclear reactor needs refueling infrequently, and removing the need for large fuel tanks leaves more room for other stuff - in the case of a carrier, the "other stuff" would include aviation fuel and munitions, two things needed in quantity. In the case of a sub, the reactor is desirable in that it lets you stay submerged more or less indefinitely, since you can electrolyze water for oxygen.
Other than those two situations (carriers and subs), naval nuclear reactors are uncommon for exactly the reason given at the beginning of the thread: cost.
Re:The Navy? (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, if you had some way of searching the ocean for faint traces of hydrogen bubbles, and if said bubbles co-operated by not reacting with anything in the meantime. So far as I know we've never developed anything like that. Now, to put on my paranoid hat for a second, "so far as I know" could just mean that attempts to do this were classified, though I think the easier explanation is that nobody has bothered.
I don't want to say it isn't possible, because that's the sort of sentiment that invites the universe to prove me wrong, but lets just say it's a needle in a haystack sort of problem. You'd be looking for faint chemical trace over a vast area, with the trace in question being chemically reactive enough to virtually guarantee it won't linger. At a minimum, your solution would need to be used over a narrow search region.
Now, look at the problem from the opposite direction. Stealth under water is relative. A submarine, however well designed, however well commanded, can be found using existing methods, provided you know roughly where to look for it. Think of how many shipwrecks have been found by searching the general area they sunk, often decades or more after the fact. Now, factor in that those wrecks are on the ocean floor, meaning it's harder to spot them on active sonar than a sub, that the wrecks are utterly silent instead of just mostly silent, and that many of those wrecks were found using non-military hardware (meaning a few boats with active sonar pinging the ocean floor, instead of a fleet of warships and air-dropped sonar buoys).
The key concept here is knowing where to look. If all you know is that a sub is somewhere in the Atlantic, then you aren't going to have much luck finding it. If you know where to look, you don't need anything like a hypothetical hydrogen searching method when more straightforward options exist.
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I've always wondered, I mean I have a vague idea of how nuclear plants work - do subs and warships use the ocean as their water source for the reactor? Is that why it's essentially so small? Does this mean a nuclear sub dumps heavy water into the ocean? (even though its only a drop in the bathtub, so to speak)
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Naval reactors are completely contained, they don't dump anything.
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If anything they dump hotter sea water. They may take in sea water to act as cooling and dump that out. That is about it. The Navy does not want any radioactive material leaking.
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No, the primary loop on a Naval reactor does not use seawater.
Naval reactors are so small because the uranium they use is more highly enriched than the uranium in civilian plants.
Not just one back yard anymore. (Score:2, Interesting)
Brilliant. Instead of needing to get one "back yard", you now need half a dozen.
Actually, this could work out... smaller plant means smaller yard, right? We could put them in rougher terrain away from people.
theres still problems (Score:5, Insightful)
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it all depends on the fuel and the process.
Re:theres still problems (Score:4, Informative)
Not so much. Depending on the design, a nuclear reactor can be self regulating.
As far as producing small nuclear power plant, check out the ones soon to be marketed by Hyperion [hyperionpo...ration.com]
.
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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:Not true (Score:5, Informative)
Really? and how would keep anyone from taking the whole thing breaking it apart somewhere else and selling the valuable fuel grade uranium on the black market?
Or worse yet, using the uranium and all the radioactive parts of the reactor for a dirty bomb?
Or even worse yet, trying to do one of the above, but fucking up and letting all kinds of radioactive liquids drain in the drinking water underground?
In most of these small reactor designs the fissionable material has nearly no value as a weapon. For example, a Pebble Bed Reactor [wikipedia.org] uses balls of graphite and fissionable material which can be difficult to re-process into something other than fuel. A dirty bomb is of little concern because, again, it's much easier to just mine new material rather than use the fuel for these reactors.
Lastly, the modern designs for reactors are extremely safe. They have less chance of contaminating groundwater supply than building solar panels (a process that requires tons of heavy metals, organic wastes, and wastewater) or operating a coal-fired power plant. Not to mention that once you are done using the fuel and reprocessing it into new fuel you are left with a small amount of concentrated waste with either extremely short (degrades quickly to harmless elements) or extremely long (emits nearly no radiation) lifetimes.
The modern nuclear reactor designs are vastly better than the units built 40+ years ago, it's a shame that we haven't been building them. Instead we are maintaining older units because the red tape is too much to bother building new units to replace the aging ones. THAT'S your recipe for disaster!
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.
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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.
The NIMBY effect (Score:3, Insightful)
DIY Nuclear Reactor (Score:2)
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You can buy heavy water, unlike that story claims. United Nuclear sells it.
Macondo blowout? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's call it what it is. The BP disaster.
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The Macondo blowout is more specific. If you just say the BP Disaster, people aren't sure whether you're talking about the Alaskan Pipeline Incident, the explosion at the Texas City refinery, or the Macondo Blowout.
Deepwater Horizon Blowout (Score:5, Funny)
Why not call it the Deepwater Horizon blowout? That's the phrase everyone else seems to be using.
It's more specific than 'BP Blowout' (for obvious reasons)
It's also more specific than 'Macondo Blowout' (The Macondo Prospect, as wikipedia tells me, is the name of the field, which presumably might still have another blowout at some point in the future. Deepwater Horizon, having sunk to the bottom of the ocean, is unlikely to have any future blowouts.)
Waste of Uranium (Score:3, Interesting)
As much as nuclear energy would help reduce CO2 emissons, the the anti-nuclear crowd has to be seen as a "force of nature" making new power plants less likely. The idealist would fight against irrationality, but as a realist I would redirect that energy elsewhere, e.g. against the NIMBYs who think wind turbines ruin the coastlines and kill birds or bats.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
the anti-nuclear crowd should be renamed the anti-braincell crowd
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.
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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 th
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.
Geothermal Power (Score:3, Informative)
Geothermal power plants [wikipedia.org] are the best substitute for nuke plants. They're highly efficient, create practically no emissions (especially once they're built), are fast to build and put online, present practically no security or pollution risks, and generate continuous baseloads. They don't depend on finite supplies of dirty fuel mostly produced in dirty ways mostly in foreign countries. All at scales only nuke plants have delivered. With a smart electric grid routing power around the country, even the few places where they can't be built at all (because of faultlines) can still get their power.
Sigh (Score:3)
Right now, Nukes provide about 18% of our electricity. As such, it provides less than 10% of total energy. Ideally, we would bri
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.
Thorium Power (Score:5, Interesting)
The future of energy is in thorium. It a) cant be weaponized, b) is cleaner, c) does not need to be throttled up like uranium. They are developing these plants in other parts of the world such as india.
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Re:un-American (Score:4, Funny)
Yes. That's why in my bathroom you have to climb up a ladder to get to the toilet seat, then hang on for dear life for fear of falling into the swimming-pool sized bowl.
It also has a bidet function, which isn't wimpy and French; it's got a firehose pump powered by a small nuclear plant.
Re:un-American (Score:5, Funny)
It also has a bidet function, which isn't wimpy and French; it's got a firehose pump powered by a small nuclear plant.
Ya almost had me up to that point, ya cheese-eating pansy!
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Read my comment again.
You should now have seen your mistake and should be calculating when peak thorium will occur.
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.
Re:Nuclear waste (Score:5, Informative)
WRONG. The technology to reprocess nuclear fuel has existed for more than half a century and is currently employed the world over. Just not in the U.S. In fact breeder reactors [wikipedia.org] incorporate reprocessing into the design to use a fraction of the fuel and produce a fraction of the waste of those reactor types permitted in the U.S.
The problem with nuclear waste is one of politics, not of technology. Following on the heels of Gerald Ford's ban of commercial plutonium reprocessing, Jimmy Carter signed an order to ban the reprocessing of spent commercial nuclear fuel. Regan overturned the ban in 1981 but there was no funding provided to start up reprocessing facilities nor has the DOE provided license for anyone to do it. While they've waffled a bit during the Bush-Obama presidencies the DOE presently doesn't want domestic reprocessing. This has accordingly put a rather big crimp in the success of the GNEP [wikipedia.org] which had closed loop nuclear power as a primary goal.
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Standard Amory Lovins: (Score:3, Informative)
Lovins isn't just against nuclear for the (IMHO rather simplistic) economic arguments he gives here.
Back in the 80s he was asked what he would think of a truly cheap, clean and plentiful source of energy. He said it would a great disaster. Why? Because he felt that given any concentrated source of energy, humans would use it to wreak havoc on nature. Thus, it would be better to only have diffuse and limited sources.
So I'm a bit skeptical of his real motives in putting this out.
I will give him this, he's at
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
With some eco-aware folks ...
As soon as someone uses the term "eco-aware" or a variant of it, that's generally a sign that the associated opinion needs to be taken with a heavy grain of salt. Right from the start, things are framed not as a disagreement between different sides analyzing the facts, but as those who are "aware" and those who are not. Would you talk about a dispute between, say, C programmers and PHP programmers, and describe the former as "compiler-aware"?
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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. S