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Power

Dounreay Nuclear Power Site Available For Reuse In the Year 2333 (bbc.com) 76

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
The site of a Scottish nuclear power facility should be available for other uses in 313 years' time, according to a new report. The BBC reports: Dounreay, near Thurso, was the UK site for the development of fast reactor research from 1955 to 1994. The facility on the north Caithness coast is in the process of being closed down, demolished and cleaned up. However, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority said it would be 2333 before the 148-acre site is safe for reuse. The date forms part of the authority's newly-published draft strategy.

They said "credible options" for the site in future will be developed over the next two years. Buildings to be demolished include the distinctive dome-shaped Dounreay Fast Reactor (DFR). Important stages in the removal of radioactive material from the Prototype Fast Reactor (PFR) are expected to be competed over the next three years. A target date has also been set for the clean-up of a highly contaminated area called the Shaft. Waste is to be removed from the Shaft by 2029, according to the NDA report.
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Dounreay Nuclear Power Site Available For Reuse In the Year 2333 More

Dounreay Nuclear Power Site Available For Reuse In the Year 2333

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  • For the British ruling class to move to ASAP.

  • We need to MOVE AWAY from self-destructive power methods, such as nuclear fission and coal and oil.

    Elon Musk is helping humanity do that. This is an interesting book: Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future [amazon.com]

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by schwit1 ( 797399 )

      Isn't Gen4 nuclear designed to be far safer than the older fission designs and can provide 24/7 power? California is feeling the heat(pun intended) of not having alternative fuels.

      • Generation IV nuclear reactors [wikipedia.org] fix some of the TERRIBLE problems of older nuclear reactors. But, they are still generating radioactive material that requires hundreds of years to be come less radioactive.
      • They are extremely safe, just like all the current fusion reactors. None of them has ever had any malfunction yet.

    • Then you need to move away from... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ...the Solar System, considering how this entire planet is basically a battery powered by something called THE SUN.

    • Re:MOVE AWAY from self-destructive power methods. (Score:4, Informative)

      by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Friday August 21, 2020 @07:44PM (#60428415)

      Dropping destructive power sources would be nice, so... do you know anything safer than nuclear?

    • Elon Musk is helping humanity do that.

      Solar panels existed before Elon Musk bought another company which made them. Other than that he provides no power generation capabilities.

      I love the man for all he does, but he's not helping us solve the power problem in any way. Hell major oil companies provide more green power (wind farms and the like) than all of Elon's power generation capability to date.

      • I love the man for all he does, but he's not helping us solve the power problem in any way.

        Musk develops battery technology which can be used for storage of energy from renewable sources. How is that "not helping us solve the power problem in any way"?

        • A battery doesn't generate power. You still need to generate power. There are many ways of storing energy from renewable sources.

          Musk deserves a lot of credit for what he's done in cars, but right now gets precisely no credit in any power generation space. Even his solar rooftop business is a completely minor player in the power scheme. Batteries are an infinitesimally small players in the energy storage space for power generation.

          Give him credit where credit is due, and no further.

          • A battery doesn't generate power. You still need to generate power. There are many ways of storing energy from renewable sources.

            A battery doesn't generate power? Wow, I did not know that. Thanks for the tip.

            There are indeed many ways of storing energy from renewable sources. Musk is developing and deploying one such way. He is also developing and deploying PV tech. Nobody here has stated Musk is a major player in these sectors, but just because he's not doing it at the scale you like doesn't mean he's not doing it at all.

            You stated "he's not helping us solve the power problem in any way." But you also don't dispute that he's

            • A battery doesn't generate power? Wow, I did not know that. Thanks for the tip.

              You're welcome. I can understand why you think Elon is saving mankind from coal using batteries if you didn't understand that.

              You stated "he's not helping us solve the power problem in any way."

              And he's not. His only power product is a solar panel which he bought. All hail Lyndon Rive the CEO of solar city before Elon bought them. I suppose Trump will save the world from Corona virus by buying the vaccine off the company that developed it too right?

              • I can understand why you think Elon is saving mankind from coal using batteries if you didn't understand that.

                Since I think nothing of the sort, and I have said nothing of the sort, you don't understand much of anything. I responded to "he's not helping us solve the power problem in any way." by noting correctly that grid storage does help solve the power problem. The "power problem" is not, as you keep insisting, just one of generation. It is also one of storage, particularly with regard to renewables. Denying this fact just denies the reality of the situation.

                His only power product is a solar panel which he bought. All hail Lyndon Rive the CEO of solar city before Elon bought them.

                His only power generation products come from SolarC

                • I responded to "he's not helping us solve the power problem in any way." by noting correctly that grid storage does help solve the power problem.

                  Congratulations, you moved the goalposts of what constitutes the power problem all the while failing to realise he's done fuck all in grid storage other than put in place two batteries which ultimately could have been served by any other means.

                  you don't understand much of anything

                  And since all you have left is ad hominem attacks, I'll just end the conversation here with a little coddle. It's okay kid, you won the argument, have an internet gold star.

                  • Congratulations, you moved the goalposts of what constitutes the power problem

                    LOL, if I moved any goalposts, it happened six posts ago. Funny that you're just complaining about it now. But OK, let's limit the "power problem" to strictly the "power generation problem".

                    At one point, Tesla's energy unit was the largest solar installer in the US. Tesla Energy/Panasonic [solarfeeds.com] is still one of the largest manufacturers of PV in the US (10th as of June 2019). But noooo! Musk is not helping us solve the power problem in any way! Your argument boils down to "Musk is not a major player, so he

  • Just say no (Score:2, Insightful)

    by OMBad ( 6965950 )
    We should switch to solar and wind and batteries. They are already cheaper than the legacy alternatives. Plus they don't destroy the planet like fossil fuels! Hopefully we will soon have leadership that understands this.
    • If they are so cheap, start a company get investors and setup in competition. Good luck!! You can be the change bringer. I personally don't think this would work due to cost but if you have done the numbers go for it.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It's a great time to invest in wind. There is a big shift to renewable energy happening and lots of opportunity for innovative companies, especially offshore.

  • We'll just see about that, shall we?

  • My guess... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday August 21, 2020 @08:30PM (#60428485)

    ... is that between now and 313 years from now, technology will have progressed to the point where cleaning this up will be on the level of having your carpets shampooed. Unless you've done something stupid like pour a big block of concrete around it.

    Labor rates:
    $75 per hour
    $100 per hour if you watch
    $250 per hour if you tried to fix it yourself first

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Oh it's far worse than some concrete. I mean there is concrete, but some of it has been blown up by accidental explosions. There is contamination of the sea nearby, parts are flooded with seawater (which corrodes everything) and more. It would be challenging to clean up even if it was ordinary waste.

      They can't completely ignore it either because of coastal erosion.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sique ( 173459 )
      My guess is that 75 years after firing up the first nuclear reactor, we aren't any closer to solving the problem of nuclear waste except for "put it far away and seal it". So in 313 years time, we won't be any closer. Apparently, the Weak Interaction does not only causes CP violations in Theoretical Physics, it also causes all hopes of containment to corrode long term as it corrodes all the materials we think of for sealing our containers.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        Containment is an interim solution. As the materials decay (and the radioactively 'hot' one decay pretty quickly), we run the byproducts through a reprocessing cycle. Before the barrels corrode. This removes a large quantity which is either not radioactive or has an extremely long half life. Which doesn't need to be contained. The hazardous remainder (now much smaller) is repackaged and stored until ts time for the next reprocessing cycle.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Sique ( 173459 )
          Reprocessing does nothing in terms of amount of radioactivity yet to be released. It just tries to split the waste into different fractions, of which some are fissible. On the other hand, reprocessing contaminates new materials that haven't been radioactive before. Basically you have a trade-off: more radioactive material, but better sorted, and some of it can be used in new reactor rods.

          Alas, mining new uranium ore and processing that might get you cheaper fissible material, thus reprocessing is not too

        • everything that has a long half life is a heavy metal, and as such poisonous and needs to be contained.
          And on top of that: the amounts are such absurd, ofc you need to put them somewhere safe. Jut because plutonium is not as "hot" as you say it as caesium, does not mean it is not dangerous. An bomb only needs 9kg ...

    • Labor rates:
      $75 per hour
      $100 per hour if you watch
      $250 per hour if you tried to fix it yourself first

      So... standard residential plumbing rates.

  • The year makes sense, to those who follow Q and gematria.

    God bless.

  • I call dibs. I'm claiming it in 2333. Going to build a swimming pool/spa complex or spaghetti farm there.

  • Or how about they reuse the site right away as a nuclear reactor? The land is contaminated and not really usable for anything else, the grid infrastructure to transport the energy is already there and a modern reactor design is going to be far less messy than the experimental reactors they were running 60+ years ago.

    • Would you want to go to work there?

    • Several reasons spring to mind:
      1) It's perched on the edge of a tall sea cliff
      2) It's about as far away from any electricity consumers as it's possible to get in the UK
      3) There are other sites already in use that are more suitable

    • Grid infrastructure has already been reused (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sidetrack ( 4550 ) on Saturday August 22, 2020 @06:29AM (#60429189) Homepage

      The grid infrastructure that served Dounreay (which was only an experimental reactor with a max output of 14 MW), would be taken up by less than four of the largest wind turbines planned, or already operating in the area (and there are many, many more than that - e.g. currently proposed 28 MW South Kilbraur wind farm at 7 turbines).

  • It's a Tuesday.

  • I've Been There (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Archie Gremlin ( 814342 ) on Saturday August 22, 2020 @02:14AM (#60428965)

    About 10 years ago I was on holiday in Scotland. Dounreay had already been dismantled but they had a visitor's centre open. We dropped in to look around and have a cup of tea. By the time I left, I was incredibly angry and convinced that nuclear power in it's current form is a really bad idea.

    I wasn't angry with the staff at the visitor's centre; I was angry with the people who'd worked at Dounreay in the past. It was primarily a research site. The research produced a certain amount of high level waste. Now they could have disposed of it in some sort of thoughtful manner but instead they used "The Hole".

    Dounreay is perched on a sea cliff. At some point, they'd drilled a shaft down to sea level and tunneled out to sea so they could get lots of nice cold sea water. The shaft is about 65m deep. They didn't need it any more so they blocked off the tunnel to the sea. Then someone thought, how about we just chuck stuff in this nice hole we have?

    They didn't keep any records of what went in. They didn't pack the material in any sort of fashion. They didn't stop the highly reactive metals from meeting the corrosive sea water. Eventually the hole filled up. What to do? The answer was to drop a massive concrete block on the stuff in the hole to compact it. That worked a treat. They threw more stuff in.

    One day the shaft blew up.

    So now, the clean up job consists of trying to remove mangled pieces of highly radioactive material from a 65m shaft without triggering another hydrogen explosion or creating a nuclear reaction. That's the job that going to take decades.

    So that's why I'm angry. There's nothing wrong with nuclear power itself. The problem is that you have pointy-haired managers and scientists who are dying of curiosity in charge of it. These people have to handle tons of material that must be accounted for with milligram precision. It's a recipe for disaster. If we can create nuclear reactors that don't need this level of care and attention then I'll be all for it.

    For more info about the explosion see: https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrKaos ( 858439 )

      Wait till you see what the Russians did with Lake Karachay [wikipedia.org].

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rl117 ( 110595 )

      It's not great. But at least it's mostly contained inside the shaft for future cleanup.

    • The British Ministry of Defence (MoD) dumped just about everything that was dangerous, including chemical weapons, into a couple of spots between Scotland and Northern Ireland shortly after World War 2. It came up recently after Boris Johnson suggested building a bridge [theguardian.com] between the two countries and this was mentioned as one of the hurdles.

      From a New Scientist article [newscientist.com] about what MoD dumped: "the material dumped in the Atlantic includes 17,000 tons of captured German bombs filled with the nerve gas tabun. Th

  • Nuclear is a dead end (Score:3, Insightful)

    by OpinOnion ( 4473025 ) on Saturday August 22, 2020 @04:42AM (#60429067)
    People are not calculating the long term costs to manage the waste and sites honestly when they compare prices for energy generation. In this day and age you are better off with solar and wind because as power storage gets cheaper you will wind up favoring those techs anyway. I'd rather gas peaker plants as short term solution while energy storage rolls in vs nuclear. The nuclear plants are expensive, slow to build, have tons of hidden costs, and cannot easily be exported or globall scaled up. They will be completely outdated by wind/solar and energy storage after only a few years online. If nuclear was much cheaper and faster to build it might be a slightly different story, but you're still mostly throwing money away by investing in a tech that hasn't improved significantly over many decades and isn't projected to improve much vs the competition of renewables and energy storage which have made HUGE gains in cost effectiveness and efficiency as well as are projected to continue to improve quite a lot in the next 20 years. That's all it comes down to. If you look 20 years ahead nuclear power looks like a dumb investment. Not an impossible dumb investment, but a waste of time and money that takes your nation and world in the wrong direction when the right direction is staring them directly in the face. Renewable and energy storage are pretty much booming all over the world right now and THAT is how you get things done, not with a tiny specialized industry that can only particually benefit from mass production and distribution like nuclear. Even just training even engineers and scientists to scale up solar to be solution to the future of energy would take a couple decades. It's a niche industry with only a few nations doing all the work and more importantly you don't want most nations managing nuclear reactors and waste anyway, even the rich and advanced nations can barely do it. If you have limited space in your country like Japan or the UK it's extra stupid! Many of the existing power plants have been built in poor locations on top of all that, plus the whole part where it scares people a lot more and rightfully so seeing how loose ground water contamination regulations really are and what are you going to do if you do poison a water supply.. clean it up... ? NOPE! You gonna wait a couple hundred years, that's a big yearly loss just try to save a couple bucks on nuclear power while renewables fully mature. I'd just go with the slightly more expensive renewable option which will drop in price and rise in efficiency and work with the future of energy generation better. That investment will pay off longer term in not only the products but also investing in the industry that has the clear path to the future. Also.. don't invest in diesel cars, it's a dead end! Stuff like this should be obvious by now, but millions of people still think nuclear has a shot.
  • "However, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority said it would be 2333 before the 148-acre site is safe for reuse."

  • For 2333 years we won't be able to use 148 acres? That's nothing. For some perspective the proposed Carmichael Coal Mine in Australia would utterly destroy 69000 acres of land. The output of coal extracted here will have quite an impact on emissions. Land is currently becoming uninhabitable, farming land is becoming arid and we're actively killing species through our energy consumption like never before.

    Sign me up for another 50 nuclear reactors please!

    • If we take the latest final cost estimate of the only nuclear reactor currently under construction in the UK ("Hinkley Point C"), and apply a 30% discount for economies of scale, then constructing another 50 nuclear reactors will cost approximately US $1,000,000,000,000.

      Since that's a big number, which is a bit hard to grasp. If you took the same amount of money in crisp new (0.11 mm thick) $100 bills, and packed them flat (e.g. made a vertical stack, rotated 90 degrees to the horizontal), then they'd stre

      • That's a big number. Clearly it's impossible that any western nation has nuclear reactors since they are so expensive. Oh wait that number has nothing to do with construction of a reactor and everything to do with overhead.

        Do you have any experience in the nuclear industry? I can give you my first hand example: A nuclear 1E certified safety system upgrade was the best job I was ever assigned to. As a contractor who generates money by creating pieces of paper we were rolling in cash. The project took *many*

  • Dounreay sits on an eroding coastline, about 20m above sea level, maybe it'll be available for reuse by lobsters?

    It's a beautiful area to visit. Maybe take a tour with Google Streetview?

  • I was curious as what made the site safe for general use at 300 years, but not before - but after link chasing, and Google-Fu I am none the wiser. Presumably the timing is due to the decay of radioactive contaminants, but what the contamination level is (and of what nuclides) and what the "general use" standard is I would like to see.

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