Europe Warms to Nuclear Power 706
FleaPlus writes "The CS Monitor reports that for the first time in 15 years a European nation has started building a nuclear reactor, with six more likely to be built in the next decade. France is also planning to develop a safer and more efficient "fourth generation" reactor by 2020. This is in light of rising fossil fuel prices and a desire to reduce CO2 emissions. Still, a majority of EU citizens are opposed to nuclear energy, primarily for environmental reasons, even though nuclear power releases less radioactive material than burning coal."
this is a longterm stop-gap (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:-1, Pro-Nuclear Propaganda (Score:3, Interesting)
Right. Try telling that to the folks who used to live in Chernobyl.
Beautiful straw man there. Read this: How many died? [magma.ca] Oh, and while we are at it, lets compare the number of deaths due to the mining of coal....
I think you will find that Nuclear power (as long as it is not used as a weapon) is considerably safer than coal on the whole.
Time to bite the bullet (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course we could drastically reduce the power needs of the populace if we just saved more energy. Leaving computers on all night, and worse monitors, is shockingly wasteful and we need tax incentives to insulate the current housing stock and regulation on new building projects. I'm over in Finland a lot and they are the puppies packet at this sort of thing; the average modern home needs one or two wood stoves to meet most energy needs.
It's also important to remember that the major cost on nukes comes not in building the things, but in dismantling them and storing the waste - something that the pro-nuke lobby often forgets.
Re:-1, Pro-Nuclear Propaganda (Score:3, Interesting)
That's bad. But not as bad as the number of lung cancers caused by soot from coal or oil powerplants.
get rid of waste (Score:5, Interesting)
Recycling at it's finest. Nuke materials under miles of seawater + about 100 feet of mud, getting deeper all the time.
Just put it in a casing shaped like a torpedo, beefed up with an armor penetrating nose, and drive it to the sea floor. It'll be going fast when it hits, and it'll keep going down a long way.
Good luck digging that up again.
hanzie.
Re:O well-named one... just south of here, (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember the guy who was behind the Gaea hypothesis actually proposed dumping it in forests. Seriously...:
http://www.prototista.org/E-Zine/GaiaTheoryMother
The problem with losing 12 kilos, these days, is that it could be used to produce a dirty bomb.
X.
Re:Europeans (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Waste storage. Where do we put the waste products after burning it?
The waste material isn't actually that much of a problem. It's dangerous stuff, and you can't really "dispose" of it, I.E. leave it somewhere and forget about it. You've gotta live with it. Hundred of thousands of tonnes. But actually, it's not that much. Almost all of France's waste for the past 40 years sits in a place the size of a large warehouse.
The real concern, IMO (I studied electrical engineering), is more with the irradiated powerstation components. Older plants are virtually impossible to dismantle; your only option is to basically bury them on site.
About the article (Score:1, Interesting)
Or does the writers of this article presume that Europe is one single country.
It's in here Finland too they're building it.
Re:this is a longterm stop-gap (Score:5, Interesting)
The sad truth.
Part of their popularity comes from the fact that scientists and engineers have a much higher status in France than in America. Many high ranking civil servants and government officials trained as scientists and engineers (rather than lawyers, as in the United States), and, unlike in the U.S. where federal administrators are often looked down upon, these technocrats form a special elite. Many have graduated from a few elite schools such as the Ecole Polytechnic. According to Mandil, respect and trust in technocrats is widespread. "For a long time, in families, the good thing for a child to become was an engineer or a scientist, not a lawyer. We like our engineers and our scientists and we are confident in them."
Re:Europeans (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Disaster. Fossil engineers say that the chance of a chemical accident is very small, but this argument is worthless after Exxon Valdez in 1989 and the London explosion this year. People in general are mathematically clueless, but they do know that the risk is real and not small after these two events and hundreds of others in the past century.
2. Waste storage. Where do we put the waste products after burning it? People are afraid it might pollute the environment, perhaps not now but for furure generations. It will have to be pumped into the atmosphere, with carbon dioxide inducing global warming and soot particles (a lot of which are radioactive) causing millions of deaths around the world. Shooting it out in space is not an option to most, having pictures of an exploding Columbia in the mind.
Attitudes are changing now because people have to choose between a rock and a hard place, in the light of tough economic times and rising energy prices, and fossil power is thus the pragmatic way to go. People will still be afraid of it, though. Or are they?
Not nearly the first in a while (Score:1, Interesting)
The Windscale pipeline (Score:5, Interesting)
The UK Windscale nuclear plant - now the Sellafield reprocessing plant, and soon probably to be re-badged the Ravengalss Wildlife park or something like that has a pipeline that put dissolved low-level waste into the sea. At first this sounds like a really, really bad idea. However, the Atlantic has about 10^13 curies of mixed radioactive stuff in it - a lot of it a duterium, tritium, C14, and a mess of heavy metals. You could dump all the waste that had ever been produced into the Atlantic, and provided you mixed it in well, you would never be able to detect the difference. The 1950's solution was to stick a pipe far enough into the ocean to get the waste into some of the fast currents in the north Irish sea, which should sweep it out into the Atlantic. It has been argued since that this did not qork quite as designed, but at the time this bit of the Irish Sea had been surveyed as well as anywhere. The other UK solution was to stick the stuff into drums and drop it into the mid-Atlantic. The drums were designed to burst half-way down, again dispersing the material into the fast ocean currents.
Compare this to the US idea of chucking solid waste into a concreted drum, and sending it right to the bottom. The bottom of the oceans are often quiet places where the water hardly moves. Fish and crustacea live in the rusting cans, and lay their eggs on the concrete. We are trawling for deep sea fish like grenadiers these days as the cod has virtually gone, so we may be getting it all back again - we don't know.
We seem to have lived through an age when Science was trusted to do anything, and the nuclear budget could be underwritten by weapons work; then through an age when Science was not trusted at all, and anything nuclear was controlled by evil warmongers. We might actually be heading for a balanced view. Coo!
Bad idea: volcanoes (Score:3, Interesting)
So unless you want volcanoes of nuke waste (!) it might be better to bury it in a geologically stable area, such as the middle of a continent.
Logically, if they started reprocessing waste, it would be such a small amount you would only need a single salt mine or similar.
Limitless energie (Score:2, Interesting)
A point I haven't read in this discussion yet:
I find it rather funny, when after the recent gas troubles German politicians proposed nuclear power as a means to make Germany independent from resource imports.
I realy would like to know where in Germany the uranium mines are located! The European countries have to import uranium as they have to import oil!
And even for those countries who have there own uranium sources, uranium is as finite as oil and gas, estimates range from twenty to sixty years. Considering the price for the development and building of new power stations and the waste problem (including the old plants!) I realy wonder if it is worth it!
A Little Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
As a young science geek (I was born in 1952), I was excited by the possibilities of nuclear technology - power generation, of course, but also less obvious things like, say, canal excavation or spacecraft propulsion. Those were heady times, looking forward to the atomic age.
A few years later, we had developed a better understanding of some long term problems, most seriously the storage of radioactive waste. (High-level wastes are small in volume, but pretty much inimical to life; there are in addition large quantities of low-level waste and irradiated materials to deal with). I had also learned a lot more about the gulf between idealized science and the behavior of those governments and large corporations who were actually capable of building nuclear installations. I decided the risks were just too great to accept.
Today, with much more sophisticated reactor technologies, and at least a glimmering of real solutions to the waste storage problem, I think the risks of operating nuclear plants have become justifiable. And faced with the worsening consequences - moral, environmental, and political - of our world-wide petroleum addiction, nuclear power is the best alternative we have.
A little radiation is actually good (Score:4, Interesting)
This is called radiation hormesis. And this theory started after they found that people who lived in such a distance from hiroshima and Nagasaki that they received low radiation doses. And, years later, this population, exposed to radiation, had much lower cancer rates than non-exposed similar populations.
You can check some references:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v5/n1s/full/7
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00019A
http://www.angelfire.com/mo/radioadaptive/inthorm
http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/2004/Hormesis-
Re:Silly little paranoid moi. (Score:2, Interesting)
Every one of the UK's coal mines eventually closed down, and every one of the UK's coal miners went on the dole. Coal was imported from abroad, and gas boilers were {secretly} subsidised to reduce the demand for coal as a heating fuel for buildings. Even some power stations were converted from coal to gas.
The coal mines can't even be re-opened as private concerns, because modern health and safety legislation -- and the hordes of ambulance-following lawyers with their "Blame and Claim" mantra -- effectively makes coal mining in the UK next to illegal. To do it "by the book" would make burning pound notes more cost-effective than buying coal.
Re:My two $ 0.02 (Score:4, Interesting)
The story goes, my next door neighbor is actually a Safty analyst up there. Whenever he comes around for the odd cup of tea he enlightens me on a few facts, which i feel speak fairly generally for most of the western nations with reactors. A few of the major points are
1. The nuclear industry has grown up ALOT since the cold war era, and today there are rewards in place for safty record tracks, rather then being able to maintain the highest production levels.
2. A literally massive portion of the nuclear waste is infact harmless, various items used not even close the the reactor have to be carefully disposed off under government legistlation, even though they contain little more radiation then that absorbed by a shirt from a day on the beach.
3. The disposal methods avaliable for the classical highly radiactive waste have matured greatly without much public notice. The whole "to the moon theory" is as much of a joke as it is an insult to the industry in the 21st century, for one theres simply not enough waste produced to warrant it economically, let alone the safe risks involved in useing space dumping. Alot of people ignore the fact that alot of todays waste is going back into the earth from whence it came, and is as dangerous to people as raw amounts of uranium are if dug up intentionally. It comes out radioactive, it goes back radioactive. And in the proces generates electricity, industrial and medical materials. My neighbor is far more concerned about the pollution levels effecting peoples asthma.
4. My neighbor also conceeded at nuclear technology might not be as economical as other forms of energy production, but we both came to this conclusion. It is worth going that extra mile to ensure that we no longer produce greenhouse gases adversly affection the worlds environment and also, that in many circumstances renewable energy fails in terms of practicality and maturity.
So, for a more energy hungry world, that even having africa covered in wind farms couldnt feed, nuclear power seems to be the practical, and *arguably* economical choice for decreasing our reliance on fossile fuels and our harm to the environment. At least until *possibly* reaches maturity in the next 50 years or so.
That's rubbish (Score:2, Interesting)
This is misleading - naturally occurring uranium is much less radioactive than products from nuclear fission. I would quite happily pick up a fuel rod before it goes into a power plant but I wouldnt go near one once it comes out. The uranium from coal combustion is relatively harmless.
---
The point is that if you put uranium into a reactor, some of it undergoes fission into other substances. It turns out that a lot of these substances are very radioactive. OTOH anything radioactive in the earth would have decayed ages ago so naturally occurring stuff is not really very radioactive, relatively speaking anyway.
Dear Editor ... (Score:1, Interesting)
In europe we have
laws
to keep the environment clean.A european coal plant
filters
its exhaust. If the coal contained radioactive material it is in the ashes afterward. And far more important: nor all coal is radioacive contaminatedangel'o'sphere
Re:nuclear credit (Score:3, Interesting)
Not if the electricity required to do it comes from a nuclear plant.
Besides which , last time I looked mining, transporting and refining
fossil fuels took energy too.
"One of the estimates for the amount of fuel left in easlily mineable conditions would give us nuclear power for some 50 years or so"
I would suggest you go read up on nuclear fuel reprocessing.
"Peak sun is in my personal guess still not for another 3.5 billion years."
Yeah , solar cells will work well in the artic circle in winter.
Wiring houses for 12V DC (Score:2, Interesting)
Most of the electricity-using devices in the house are anachronisms and the discrepancy between what we actually use and what is practical will increase.
I'm wondering how long it will be before houses and other buildings will get re-tooled completely for energy efficient devices. A second set of wiring for 12 V DC or something similar would be one option, if done right. I'm seeing all kinds of power-eating wall warts that consume power as long as they're plugged in, regardless of whether the device they power is active or not.
nuclear power in Africa (Score:1, Interesting)
Koeberg's bolt blunder to be investigated
Helen Bamford
January 08 2006 at 01:14PM
"A loose bolt has apparently been bouncing around inside a generator at Koeberg nuclear power station and may have caused the "major equipment failure" that now threatens the Western Cape's electricity supplies.
It may have punched holes found in the rotor of the generator and may also have been the cause of a short circuit.
Now an investigation into the faulty generator is under way. It will check whether poor maintenance may have contributed to the problem, according to a source at the plant.
The loose bolt was found lying inside the generator when it was stripped down by experts looking for the problem this week.
The generator fault, which was discovered during the unit's return to service after a scheduled shut-down for refuelling, maintenance and modifications last month, has raised fears of more power cuts in the Western Cape.
Koeberg has referred to the fault as a "major equipment failure" of the Unit 1 generator. Late last year a series of major power failures caused widespread chaos and financial woes for the regional economy.
Specialists from France are currently in Cape Town to try to establish the cause of the fault at Koeberg's Unit 1.
Last week when problems with the generator were discovered, staff at Koeberg were recalled from leave and the French experts were called in.
A staff member, who asked not to be named, told Sunday Argus that there was also great concern about whether the fuel in Unit 2, which is the one currently being used, would last until the other unit was back in use - the nuclear fuel is only expected to last until April 30.
"Nuclear fuel does not run out like petrol in a motor car but it can only last so long," said the staff member.
He added that once fixed, Unit 1 would still have to run for a month before Unit 2 could be taken offline for its scheduled maintenance.
"Koeberg may have to import power from upcountry again which could result in sporadic blackouts."
Unit 2 has already been described as a "problem unit" which increased the likelihood of something going wrong.
Concern has been expressed that any major surges could cause the unit to trip.
The staff member said that investigators were looking at whether the loose bolt had knocked holes in the rotor arm of the generator, which would have to be sent to Rotek in Gauteng for repairs.
Rotek is a subsidiary of Eskom and provides maintenance services to Koeberg.
"With the bolt bouncing around it could have also caused a short," he said.
The source said there was concern that a lot of experienced staff had left the company and that current maintenance staff lacked experience.
"People are thrown in at the deep end," he said.
Eskom spokeswoman Carin de Villiers said it was impossible to comment at this stage because "scenarios were changing on a daily basis".
"I can't confirm or deny anything. We want to finalise the investigation and then make a complete statement," she told Sunday Argus at the weekend.
De Villiers said they were planning to hold a press conference at which their specialists would be available to answer any questions.
This would only take place once the investigation was complete."
Yeah, but what happens to the ash? (Score:1, Interesting)
Releasing less radioactive material than coal? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, until the waste containers start leaking and leach material into water tables [state.or.us].
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for nuclear power, but I'm not convinced that we've got a decent mechanism for storing the waste yet. Maybe we could team up with these guys [guardian.co.uk].
Incidentally, is there a nuclear physicist in the house? How does the waste from pebble reactors compare to traditional rod reactors when it comes to waste disposal? --- SER
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:5, Interesting)
That's of course assuming that energy would otherwise remain in the earth's rotation. Given that the water actually is stopped by the continents anyway, I doubt that. After all it's a fact that earth's rotation is slowed down through tidal forces about 5*10^-8 s/day (2 ms/century), i.e. the tidal forces dissipate about 5*10^15 Terawatt (well, actually part of that energy is not dissipated, but used to move the moon away from earth; I'm now too lazy to calculate that).
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:4, Interesting)
So don't refrigerate it. Fill balloons with it, let them float to mainland, drain hydrogen, and bulk ship the empty balloons back to Iceland.
Re:On the Feasibility of Coal-Driven Power Station (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this still true? My understanding is that many of the newer designs could easily economically satisfy small community needs, must like gas and coal plants do today.
Any know?
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're plugged in somewhere, sure. I think the ancestor post was looking for something more portable; yes, there are batteries, but those have their own environmental concerns for production.
The French already love nuclear power (Score:3, Interesting)