China Goes Nuclear 1058
Rei writes "Wired reports that the People's Republic of China has announced plans to build 30 new nuclear reactors by the year 2020, and by 2050 have almost as much nuclear power as the entire world produces today. The reactors are to be pebble bed reactors, in which helium replaces radioactive, pressurized water. A Chinese research institution demonstrated the safety of their test reactor against meltdown by shutting off the coolant."
Nuclear energy works! (Score:4, Interesting)
Que unfounded paranoia
warning : sig contains ad you may not like, but i'll give you a gmail account if you sign up
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:4, Insightful)
And we all know that rockets never blow up or otherwise fail on launch.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Funny)
That is why we have Superman to fly the waste up and out of our atomosphere and fling them at the sun.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Insightful)
Like the Sellafield reprocessing plant? (Score:5, Interesting)
See, the thing is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Insightful)
A few things worry me about it.
Firstly: It appears we have some of the stuff wrapped in aluminium foil and aren't entirely sure where it is.
Secondly: Some of this stuff will be dangerously radioactive for longer than any form of government has been in existence for. Realisticly this means there is no gurantee we can successfully pass the information on about where we have buried the stuff for the required length of time.
Possibly we are intentially hiding (read: losing) this information because the companies don't care or possibly to avoid terrorism. OR maybe both.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Funny)
Hell, in America screwing future generations of humans is a primary operating principle...and we like it that way
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Insightful)
A Geiger counter might help there. If you can't detect it, you probably don't need to worry about it.
Secondly: Some of this stuff will be dangerously radioactive for longer than any form of government has been in existence for. Realisticly this means there is no gurantee we can successfully pass the information on about where we have buried the stuff for the required length of tim
So? Human-built structures have been around for longer than any form of government has been in existence for. The Egyptian pyramids, or Stonehenge, among others. Just build a pyramid on top of the stuff, with appropriate warnings about it being cursed.
Besides, there's an inverse relationship between the intensity of emitted radiation and how long that radiation lasts. Potassium (K40) is radioactive with a half-life in the billion year range, but the intensity is generally negligible. (I once read that you'll pick up more radiation from sleeping with somebody (from their K40) than you would living next to a nuclear plant, but I haven't done the math.)
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:4, Informative)
You gotta be kidding. You must go to the ostrich school of nuclear waste disposal, just bury it, out of sight out of mind, trust us it will be OK.
I'm 100% for nuclear power because its ones of the few ways your going to produce power for this planet once fossil fuels run out but you either need to develop clean fusion power or figure out some way to really deal with the deadly waste from fission reactors. As some have pointed out China's government can probably sweep it under the rug for a while, they can store it wherever they want and imprison anyone who complains, but it is a problem that for all practical purposes never goes away.
Most of the high level toxic waste that was supposed to go to Yucca Mountain will be lethal for up to a quarter million years. It will probably outlast civilization as we know which hasn't lasted 10,000 years yet. One of the study issues for Yucca Mountain is how do you mark deadly waste so that someone ten thousand years from now will deduce that is lethal and leave it alone.
There was marked low level waste in a UN sealed site in Iraq from the 1980's. As soon as anarchy broke out after the invasion looters went in and dumped it all over the place in order to steal the barrels, poisoning themselves and the whole area.
The only way you can bury it is to find container technology that will hold it for tens of thousands of years, unattended, and we simply don't have it. As soon as a container corrodes, cracks or otherwise ruptures that waste is going to be headed for the water table and when it reaches the water table it travels and it poisons everything over a wide area. There have been bad attempts to engage in short term storage of waste at most of the nuclear weapons sites in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R and they are littered with case of corroded and ruptured containers. We really haven't been able to store waste 50 years let alone tens of thousands of years.
The U.S. has spent billions studying Yucca Mountain and its failed miserably in meeting the criteria as a long term waste disposal site and in the U.S. there is no alternate sight in consideration.
From a Mother Jones article on the plight of Nevada and Yucca Mountain:
Repealing the Apocalypse
Once again, it was the water that was the problem, only this time it wasn't a shortage. Yucca Mountain, it turned out, was all wet, and a truly lunatic place to put seventy-seven thousand tons of high-level nuclear waste.
The government created the nuclear power industry with a promise to reactor operators that the essential crisis of the industry, the dangerous, exceedingly long-lived waste it produces, would be taken off their hands. In all the subsequent decades of nuclear power production, spent fuel rods have been piling up in "cooling ponds" onsite, while the operators waited for the government to make good on its promise to get rid of the stuff (mostly located in the population-heavy, resource-light East). Three New England reactors are already suing the government for failing to come up with a dump.
For more than two decades, the Department of Energy (DOE) has done everything it can to create one of the most scientifically dubious dumpsites imaginable, at Yucca Mountain, about ninety miles north of Vegas on the northern edges of the Nevada Test Site, where all those nuclear bombs were detonated (and will be again if Bush has his way).
The initial plan was to compare sites in three western states and choose the safest one, but two of the states -- Texas and Washington -- had the political clout to get out of the competition. So the "comparative study" never studied anyplace but Yucca Mountain, and yet the longer it was studied the less suitable it seemed even for the mandated 10,000 years it was supposed to keep us and the waste apart (forget the quarter million years the stuff would actually remain dangerous). Somehow, this never seemed to stop plans from proceeding. For a lot of geologists, the fact tha
The Canadian Shield (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Canadian Shield (Score:5, Insightful)
But the point is, why put it in long term storage? We might want the stuff in a hundred or two hundred years. Just look at what happened with the "useless" oil - was useless two hundred years ago.
Re:The Canadian Shield (Score:5, Interesting)
What do you think the chances are Canadians are going to tolerate the U.S. and the rest of the world shipping their nuclear waste to Canada for disposal. The problem with nuclear waste is the stigma is so bad no one wants it near them even if someone does figure out a safe way to store it or reprocess it.
I'm a little skeptical any mine shaft will prove long term viable. Its extremely hard to keep them dry, especially if you allow for the possibility that the civilization that has to fund maintaining the storage site may not last as long as the waste.
Re:The Canadian Shield (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Informative)
MOST of the stuff disposed there is cleanup stuff. Cloths. Rags. Containers. ***REALLY*** mundane stuff. The next biggest percentage is those filters that I mentioned earlier. Every ounce of radioactive non-volatile fluid to be buried is first run through what basically amounts to a HEPA filter for water. So, those particulates infact become solid waste. What's left of the water is boiled off, and the remnants get packaged too (mostly regular mineral deposits)
The high level wastes are encapsulated in glass or copper in such amounts that there is not enough for that material, or it's decomposited forms to cause a situation of critical mass. Lots of radioactive stuff in one spot can cause quite alot of heat, right? So they limit the quantities of high level radioactive waste to a certian amount PER CONTAINER. Fortunately, Very very very very *VERY* little of what is buried is this form of waste. Less than 20%, and maybe 2% of any given container is highly radioactive... And quite honestly, most of the stuff they treat like this does not at all really need to be treated so carefully.
If Carter's nuclear recycling ban was lifted, that 20% number could be easily dropped to 5% or probably less.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Funny)
This looks like a job for goatse.cx!
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Informative)
> Scientists have always said that Yucca Mountain
> was a disaster-in-the-making, even leaving aside
> those 50 million Americans living within half a
> mile of the shipment routes the Yucca-bound
> nuclear waste would travel on for decades to come,
> or the 90 to 500 estimated accidents of unknown
> scale that statistics suggest would take place en
> route over the years. (Who needs terrorist dirty
> bombs when our own tax dollars can supply them?
I call FUD. Have you *seen* the containers that they've created to hold the nuclear waste? They've taken them and rammed them into walls at 80 MPH on the top of tanker trucks, dropped them on large iron spikes, fired SAM missles at them - all to no avail. Hardly made a dent in them.
These things are multi-million dollar containers that are about an order of magnitude thicker than your average tank. Given that they are going to be escorted by police and military convoys, I sincerely doubt that anything serious is going to happen.
I truly worry about the US if we let ourselves fall behind on this - misplaced anxiety is really going to do us in in the next century. I can only hope that calmer heads prevail.
horos
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Informative)
Geez. Another one. Please get an education in physics or read the radiation hazard page at Wikipedia. The worst part of the waste is not the one with the long half-life elements (i.e. Plutonium, Uranium). But the short half-life elements (Iodine-131, Strontium-90).
Usually the faster something decays, the more radiation it releases per unit of time. Something that takes a long time to decay is usually just somewhat warm to the touch. Like plutonium.
The ultimate proof of course, is that elements with an infinite half-life (want even higher half-life than that?) like Au-197 (plain Gold) emit zero radiation.
If you just leave the waste in a pile, it will eventually be a very pure tolerable radiation hazard uranium + plutonium mine and a very valuable resource. The shorter half-life elements will have decayed already.
Regarding Plutonium toxicity, it is way overblown. Sure it is a heavy metal, so is Lead, yet we don't get into a hissy fit about it. Last I heard, they still used Lead to make solder. You aren't going to be allowed to make plates and forks from the stuff, or have it in easily inhalable or drinkable powdered or soluble form (like they used to have in Gasoline), but as long as you use proper procedure it is not that big a deal.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Informative)
I guess I'll chalk my wrongness up to media and public antipathy to nuclear power. But that antipathy rose for a couple pretty good reasons. Fission reactors have in fact proven very dangerous numerous times so no one trusts them any more, or the people that build them and advocate them. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl killed fission reactor credibility. Three Mile Island was noteworthy because they came close to a Chernobyl scale accident and the people involved were lieing about the danger and what was happening throughout. Chernobyl's left a dead zone that shows what Three Mile Island could have done if it had gone only slightly further.
The problem is maybe the new designs are safer but at this point no one believes it or is going to trust them. The nuclear industry assured us the old ones were safe and they weren't so they've burned their credibility. The fact is most existing reactors are complex systems, they are extremely fallible and they've proven themselves to be extremely dangerous. How are you going to convince people they are safe at this point. China can do it because they don't have to convince anyone, they can just build them and deal with anyone that complains.
From the LBL source above:
Ingestion of plutonium
For acute radiation poisoning, the lethal dose is estimated to be 500 milligrams (mg), i.e. about 1/2 gram. A common poison, cyanide, requires a dose 5 times smaller to cause death: 100 mg. Thus for ingestion, plutonium is very toxic, but five times less toxic than cyanide. There is also a risk of cancer from ingestion, with a lethal doze (1 cancer) for 480 mg.
Inhalation of plutonium dust
For inhalation, the plutonium can cause death within a month (from pulmonary fibrosis or pulmonary edema); that requires 20 mg inhaled. To cause cancer with high probability, the amount that must be inhaled is 0.08 mg = 80 micrograms. The lethal dose for botulism toxin is estimated to be about 0.070 micrograms = 70 nanograms. [1] Thus botulism toxin is over a thousand times more toxic. The statement that plutonium is the most dangerous material known to man is false. But it is very dangerous, at least in dust form.
How easy is it to breathe in 0.08 mg = 80 micrograms? To get to the critical part of the lungs, the particle must be no larger than about 3 microns. A particle of that size has a mass of about 0.140 micrograms. To get to a dose of 80 micrograms requires 80/0.14 = 560 particles. In contrast, the lethal dose for anthrax is estimated to be 10,000 particles of a similar size. Thus plutonium dust, if spread in the air, is more dangerous than anthrax Ð although the effects are not as immediate.
This source also has an interest section on breeder reactors:
Breeder reactors
The Pu-239 is usually not considered nuclear waste, because it can be used itself to run a nuclear reactor. It is nuclear fuel. Moreover, if you put it in a nuclear reactor, you get three neutrons per fission instead of two. In a reactor, operating at constant (not exponentially growing) power, you want only one neutron per fission to produce another fission. What do you do with the extra two neutrons? Answer: put U-238 in the reactor, and make more plutonium.
Thus a reactor can make (out of U-238) more Pu-239 fuel than it consumes! Such a reactor is called a breeder reactor. It has the potential of turning all uranium, not just 0.7% of it, into nuclear fuel, and thereby increase the available fission fuel by a factor of 140.
There has been public opposition to breeder reactors. The two most common objections are:
1. The plutonium economy. Breeder reactors would allow much greater use of nuclear power, but it means that plutonium would be widespread. Besides the fact that plutonium is ra
One good reason at least (Score:4, Interesting)
Risks! I say, Risks! This new thing is RISKY! We'd be all for it if it didn't make insects get real huge and glow and stuff. But since atomic energy is so RISKY we'd better stay with fossil fuels, shall we?
After all, burning coal and oil is perfectly safe!
-- MarkusQ
Re:One good reason at least (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately Three Mile Island and Chernobyl proved they were right. They are risky. They are extremely complex and very fallible.
"After all, burning coal and oil is perfectly safe!"
Obviously it isn't but coal fired power plants don't leave huge uninhabitable dead zones like Chernoybl did and have the risk of killing large numbers of people all at once, or make people flee their homes...forever.
Fossil fuel pollution is a slower and harder to quantify risk. Maybe in the end if the Greenhouse effect proves to be real fossil fuels will prove to be even more dangerous and threaten the whole planet, but by the times its an undeniable problem it may be to late to stop it.
Please inform yourself. (Score:5, Informative)
As soon as you write this, it's clear that you are Not Paying Attention. At all. The disposal plan is to mix the waste into molten glass and/or ceramic, and cast solid lumps of this glass or ceramic. This can not corrode (natural glasses (tektites) are known to survive unchanged for over a billion years in sea water) there's nothing to rupture, and if it does crack, so what? You've just got two little lumps of impervious radioactive glass instead of one big one.
What everyone else said about the silly hyperbole of it being dangerous for "a quarter million years"...
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:4, Informative)
You gotta be kidding.
You should take a look a the links. From pbmr.com [pbmr.com]: The PBMR will generate about 19 tons of spent fuel pebbles per annum, of which less than one ton is depleted uranium. The spent fuel is much easier to store than fuel rods from Pressurized Water Reactors, because the silicon carbide coating around the fuel particles will keep the radioactive decay products isolated for approximately a million years. This is longer than the activity of any of the radioactive products, including plutonium.
The PBMR system has been designed to deal with nuclear waste efficiently and safely. There will be enough room for the spent fuel to be stored in dry storage tanks within the PBMR building. All the spent fuel that the PBMR generates during its 40-year life will be stored on site. This means that no spent fuel will have to be removed from the site. After the plant has been shut down, the spent fuel will be safely stored on site for another 40 years before being sent to a final repository, where the following factors will ensure safe storage:
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Informative)
Reprocessing it is a whole different and more complicated thing. The issue with reprocessing are so complicated and varied you aren't going to do it justice in a Slashdot thread.
Depending on the methods you choose you still get waste of various forms, different waste sure, but there is still a lot of waste from reprocessing. In particular you are going to get plutonium of various grades from weapons grade to plutonium suitable for fast breeder reactors. The only way you get rid of the plutonium waste in the near term is to put in bombs or burn it in reactors designed to burn it.
A key reason reprocessing has such a stigma attached to it is its historically and still is in some places used to harvest weapons grade plutonium. It is a key avenue for nuclear weapons proliferation and weapons grade plutonium is far more dangerous in the wrong hands than the waste so its not like you want every country on the planet doing it.
There is some value in the way reprocessing its being used in France, India and Japan to recycle the fuel and reuse it in fast breeder reactors but there a whole set of issues with that path two.
Pyroprocessing is the new holy grail and it might prove to be a better route than the current PUREX and UREX reprocessing but its not exactly a proven process and it a potential accident waiting to happen too.
Here [world-nuclear.org] is a technical brief on the methods though its written by a pro nuke group and needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
You might be able to reduce the dangerous lifespan of a of of waste to 500-1000 years, and burn some of it in reactors but to hold it out as the final solution to nuclear waste is a stretch at this point.
Warmonger problem! (Score:5, Insightful)
if you look at the examples of "good" nuclear countries like Japan or France they have little or no MILIITARY interest involved in their nuclear programs...so they design to be easy and safe... and are very successful at it. kinda makes you wonder who the "real" good guys are in all this nuclear mess.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the waste we are talking about here isn't uranium, its plutonium and a host of other exotic metals and isotopes. Plutonium is lethal in extremely small quantities, and with reprocessing its highly sought after to produce nuclear weapons or dirty bombs. You can't just dump it back in a whole in the ground. Like most things you dump in the ground there is a high probability some of its going to end up in the ground water which people drink, and is used in agriculture to grow food for people to eat.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:4, Interesting)
During the 40's and 50's in particular the U.S. was in an extreme hurry to develop the bomb before Hitler did and to build more bombs than Stalin so they were more than a little messy while they were in a hurry. They also processed small mountains of Uranium and hefty quantities of plutonium. Rocky Flats and Hanford were a plutonium reprocessing facilities which are especially messy. If I recall Hanford [state.or.us] has a plume of radioactive waste working its way towards the Columbia river which is a water source for major cities in the Northwest. It is a study in A. how hard it is to store radioactive waste safely and B. the danger of letting it just get dumped in the ground as some here have proposed.
There are horror stories about Rocky Flats where they apparently mixed low level waste with water and pumped it into sprinklers to water the grass in out of the way parts of the facility.
I think Rocky Flats is being turned in to a wildlife park as we speak. It is in close proximity to the cities of Denver and Boulder.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Insightful)
there are a number of clever idea's about how to deal with it including one which disposes of it in the giant fusion reaction that is our Sun.
except everyone is way too afraid to put anything radioactive on a rocket. what happens if it explodes and rains down radioactive waste upon a city? i agree however that fear of nuclear power is exaggerated. the only reason china is building plants and the US is not, is because no one wants one in their backyard. in china they dont have much choice in what the government determines for them.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Insightful)
How about supergun or space elevator? (Score:5, Interesting)
How about the space elevator I keep hearing about here on Slashdot?... No explosive danger there either! Small/medium sized containers could be hoisted to orbit, then directed towards the sun with just a little force. Could make the containers or lift cars with some type of balistic parachute too, so if the cord breaks, the containers land safely in the sea where they can be recovered without exposure.
I'm not too fond of the idea of exploding radioactive bottle-rockets, but the way things are going, we may not have to think like that for too much longer. There are lots of new technologies that could help us safely get our waste to the sun. Best part about that...it's not on earth anymore! No need to worry about theft from the terrorists now and no need to worry about warning the the rabbit-people 50,000 years from now. Yucca mountain may just become a "low-level" waste type site for materials that just don't need to be hoisted to the sun, like all those slightly used Tyvec suits and minimally contaminated whatnot.
The idea of putting our nuclear waste on the sun isn't so far fetched. We just need to come up with a safe way of handling it until it gets there.
Re:How about supergun or space elevator? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dump it on the Moon. It's still safely out of the hands of bad people, it still won't get into the ground water, and despite Jules Vern's stories, there is nothing living there to care about the radiation. Plus, this has the added benefit of being retreivable. Who knows, in a few hundred years there may be a good use for all of that stuff, or a good way to recycle it. If it's on the Moon, all it requires is a short trip, and a nice stroll in a spacesuit, to get it back; if it's in the Sun, its a further trip, a more difficult landing, and the stoll in the spacesuit is far less comfortable. <bad joke>Unless we go at night, but landing in the dark would suck.</bad joke>
In the end, I think nuclear power is inevitable. Sure, solar, wind, and geothermal have their place, and maybe a big one, but we are still going to need nuclear to fill in the gaps.
Re:How about supergun or space elevator? (Score:5, Insightful)
We have recycling and reusable goods, but its more convient to throw it in the trash. All of this trash has to go somewhere, and nobody seems to care. There's many reasons to conserve: You save money, the environment, and feel good about it. I'm not anti-science, but I feel like 95% of the crap we manufacture today is complete crap. We live in huge houses, own 4 cars per family, several TV sets and multiple computers. We've gotten all this stuff within the past century. Before that, we didn't even have electricity. Its disappointing to see that because we can spend more, we feel that we must consume more. There's a direct correlation between the two and I would like to know why.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Insightful)
Any overclocker would know that the noise a fan makes is proportional to the rpm of the fan, or inversely proportional to the size of the fan if you keep airflow constant. Besides, the reason fans are loud, aside from the motors themselves, is because they are creating air motion, aka sound. Outside, there is already a hell of a lot more air motion than a fan could ever hope to make, we call it wind, and it's already loud.
Where does all this misinformation about wind power come from? (I'm from Alberta which is, from my anecdotal evidence, one of the most wind-power-friendly places in Canada)
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Informative)
It does, and as far as I know... (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the whole "yeah but you don't want to live next to one", true enough but on the whole I would rather live close to a nuclear power plant than close to a coal or oil one.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an incredibly smart move by China. They can clearly see the problems our dependence on foreign oil has caused. When oil hits $75/barrel in several years, Americans are going to look at China's cheap nuclear power facilities and say "Why didn't we think of that?".
-B
Why? (Score:5, Informative)
That, combined with the scare factor, is the reason the US is so bleh about nuclear power. We have coal, more than we can use in a long time, so why not just keep burning it? I mean nuclear is all evil and scary and shit.
But no, oil going up won't crunch our grid, it'll crunch our cars.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you ever driven through Gary Indiana? Or downriver detroit? Or the Bronx? Or East LA? Or Washington DC east of the Capital? Or any number of smelly places near petroleum refineries? There's millions of people who live near things a whole lot worse than a nuke plant.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:4, Interesting)
I must agree! And so does the wildlife: There's about a dozen deers living within the fenced area around the Bruce "B" nuclear power plant here in Ontario. And why not! the radiation levels around nuclear power plants are *lower* than those found in cities.
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:3, Insightful)
And in China, of course, there won't be any of those pesky worker protests, singing:
"Come gather round children
it's high time you learned
bout a hero named Homer
and a devil named Burns.
We'll march till we drop
the girls and the fe
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:4, Insightful)
It took Eastern Europe to alert the world that there might be problem at Cherynobl. Do you think the Chinese govnerment will be seeking public input on were and how to store the waste?
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Informative)
From this article [ornl.gov], "the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants."
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:3, Interesting)
It is also almost impossible to carry out any "clean up", even if the money was available.
Having said this, I personally believe the chances of an accident in a modern reactor are very low. If they could be sited in useless land (e.g. desert) as well, they benefits would outwe
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Informative)
These are not your traditional nuclear reactors, they don't suffer from a run-away failure mode, they're designed such that even if all control rods are removed and the coolant gets shut off the increased temperature itself slows down the reaction to a stable idle - below the temperature at which the fuel or reactor melts. Ie they inherently can't blow up or go into meltdown.
Additionally the coolant used is helium, an atom that has very low neutron absorbtion, meaning in the case of a leak there is no atmospheric or groundwater contamination.
Additionlly-additionally the nuclear fuel is at a much lower density, compared to a conventional reactor, greatly simplifying refueling and disposal. Each 210 g pebble contains 9g of uranium grains, sealed inside an exetremely tough ceramic casing that doesn't burn or break - hence no radioactive dust or smoke in an accident.
These things seem very safe and very clean. My main concern will be the lack of public criticism and independant oversight in a country such as China.
Alex
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm surprised that noone has mentioned subduction zones yet... I mean, most of the dangerous isotopes are heavier than iron and will sink, so what is the big problem? We don't need to drill down to the mantle; just down to where the crust starts to softe
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope, not at all. What you should see is that 3,000 deaths were caused because of a poorly planned test in a nuclear reactor. These test were performed by tired operators who disabled all of t
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:3, Insightful)
Nuclear not Nature (Score:3, Funny)
don't worry, there is an answer. we can rocket all our water into the sun and, with a bit of luck, put that thing out (okay... we might need a bit more water... but it can't be that much more). no sun would mean
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:5, Informative)
In 2000 64,000 tons of Uranium were consumed, while 3,600,000,000 tons of coal were produced. Even if Uranium and coal posed the same danger to miners, there'd be about one-fifty-thousandth the deaths.
REALITY (Score:5, Interesting)
REALITY 2:
All the plants in this country have run past their intended design lives, AND are 30-40 years out of date with modern technology.
REALITY 3:
Modern bead reactors of the type the chinese are building are VASTLY less likely to meltdown than any reactor currently running in the US. The coolant in a bead reactor actually catalyses the reaction, so without coolant, there is no reaction.
People in this country are totally irrational when it comes to nuclear power. We need this stuff, if only to replace the seriously aging reactors we already have. This is one place where I want to beat the snot out of all the left-wingers who won't be happy with anything that doesn't run on fairy dust and pot.
Re:REALITY (Score:4, Insightful)
When we have a permanent place to store nuclear waste, then I think that we can look to the future of Nuclear reactors in America, but until that point, it has to wait.
Re:rediculous (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering all nuclear accidents so fa
Re:rediculous (Score:4, Funny)
Hey, hey.
Nevada has had hundreds of nuclear reactors in its history. Of course, they were all of the prompt critical variety, and only ran for a few microseconds, but that still probably adds up to more nuclear reactors than the rest of the country put together!
Re:Nuclear energy works! (Score:4, Informative)
Nice (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, pebble bed reactors are very safe.
I just wish nuclear power wasn't politically dead in the USA. It's really the only way to replace all the coal and oil we burn to produce the huge amount of electricity we use.
Re:Nice (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nice (Score:3, Insightful)
Couldn't be done in U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Couldn't be done in U.S. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Couldn't be done in U.S. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Couldn't be done in U.S. (Score:3, Insightful)
Excellent news (Score:5, Insightful)
China is showing that it is forward-thinking enough to look beyond fossil fuels for its electricity. This can only be good for the environment and global warming in particular.
I hope this reopens the nuclear power debate in the West. The USA and Europe should seriously consider comitting to new nuclear power plants for both economic and environmental reasons.
Re:Excellent news (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe if the Earth's population was at the level it was in 1850, there would be no environmental problems and no global warming.
It might be difficult to convince the rest of the world that this was the solution, however. It seems like the "solution" proposed by most is that "those guys" are using too many resources and need to be "scaled back", sometimes drastically. Sort of how Dresden was "scaled back" in WW II. We need to take the initiative and show the rest of the world that we are forward looking enough to address the problem unilaterally.
Of course, this means we need 75% of the US population to report to euthanasia centers, but what the heck, we are talking about the survival of the planet here.
Re:Excellent news (Score:3, Insightful)
USA syndrome? (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully they stay the course. (Score:5, Insightful)
Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
You think China -or- the US wants to duke it out over $100+ barrels of oil in the next few years?
Re:Good! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good! (Score:3, Insightful)
Nuclear power is great(I'm a liberal, but I cringe when the hippies start protesting about it), but it's not an end all to all of our energy problems. THe world really needs to diversify, that way if something happens to one source of energy, there will still be other sources to tide humanity over till more alternatives are found.
Space (Score:5, Funny)
Safety test (Score:3, Insightful)
And what would have happened (other than the obvious) had done had their safety system failed?
Re:Safety test (Score:5, Informative)
Tm
Will they never learn? (Score:3, Funny)
This gives all new meaning to the term... (Score:3, Funny)
The link for pebble bed reactors is a bit slow... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now only if... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nah, that would never happen!
Instead, their socialist buddies claim the Bush administration liberated Iraq for oil, althought Bush-Chenery energy policy has been, since the 2000 election campaign, to increase the number of nuclear reactors.
Re:Now only if... (Score:5, Insightful)
These people protest and call this a "war for oil". Well when they fight like hell to prevent expansion for nuclear energy, it doesn't leave Bush many options. Remember how Bush wanted to drill in the frozen tundras of Alaska? The Alaskans were on television saying what a good idea this was and that the land they were going to drill was just a frozen tundra anyway.
Bush and his cabinet have been pushing for nuclear power and moving off foreign dependency for oil all along and people who just jump on the eco bandwagon don't know what they're talking about half the time.
More radiation has leaked into the environment from burning coal then nuclear waste. More people have died as a result of coal mining and oil drilling than from nuclear power. We spent all this money years ago to develop nuclear power and now no new plants are being built because of these enviro-nuts.
Helium. (Score:3, Interesting)
Though, I do wish them luck. I hope that USA will re-examine nuclear power combined with energy storage.
"Pebble bed" article is slow, so... (Score:3, Informative)
stop comparing these to Chernobyl (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a really great development, and I hope it gets presented accurately in the press. The Wired article is very well written, though the blurb on the cover about the relationship between these plants and hydrogen is completely bogus. There is no more relationship between these plants and hydrogen than there is between any other power source and hydrogen.
Re:stop comparing these to Chernobyl (Score:5, Informative)
good long-term energy policy (Score:3, Interesting)
China is in the middle of an enormous boom, and it's excellent to see that they have learned from the mistakes of their neighbours, and aren't heading down the path that the rest of us seem intent on going down.
Misspelling (Score:3, Funny)
2050? (Score:5, Funny)
prediction (Score:5, Funny)
this is a very good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
these pebble bed reactors just can not melt down, the design is such that their no possibility of a run away self-sustaining chain reaction taking hold
do antinuclear types like the alternative? middle east conflicts fueled by oil prices? air pollution and smog?
and proponents of green energy do not seem to understand their science: you can't scale up geothermal, wind, solar, tidal, ocean thermal gradient, etc, to meet one tenth of the modern world's energy needs
the much vaunted vaporware hydrogen promise: where do hydrogen proponents think the hydrogen comes from? i don't know why people don't understand such a simple concept: you need to spend more energy freeing hydrogen from water or hydrocarbons than anything you gain from using it as an energy medium
biodiesel sounds interesting to me, and fusion is always the holy grail, but these are unproven technoogies today... if you are a true green energy believer, then get to work here, and roll up your sleeves working on fusion or biodiesel: this is where the most promise lies for your efforts
and of course, the "just use less energy" crowd: when you figure out how to tell people to stop using gas and nuclear and start riding bikes, get back to me
meanwhile, i applaud the chinese, they see the writing on the wall: an overactive economy, demanding more and more gas and coal, and skyhigh oil prices and a volatile middle east... for the chinese, a pebble bed reactor commitment is a no-brainer
now if only the nimby types in the us could understand the wisdom of embracing pebble bed nuclear energy to combat reliance on middle east oil
but of course, simple fear of the unknown and ignorance of simple tech means the us will be left dependent on volatile undependable oil and gas and coal, while the chinese enjoy a safe, stable, cheap energy source
apparently, the nimby crowd in the us sees less risk in sending their sons and daughters to iraq than building a nuclear reactor of new design without any chernobyl or 3 mile island implications
this is not silkwood or the china syndrome folks, the stakes are accutely high in today's world: adjust your antinuclear opinion appropriately please
Better than what they do now... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this is a much much better solution for them, both economically and especially environmentally. There were stories that they could only ramp up the turbines from stop(a process that took about 6 hours) at night, because the resulting ploom of yellow sulfur smoke couldn't be seen. Once the burner was at full temperature by dawn, no more yellow smoke, and thus no more concerned citizens.
Australia missing its mark (Score:5, Insightful)
For more than a decade, the federal government have been unable to create low or medium-sized respositories for nuclear waste anywhere in the country. Every time the issue comes up opposition parties (including of course so-called green parties) hammer it for all its worth from the most superficial angles imaginable. Even the South Australian Liberal government got in on the act a few years ago, chanting "Not in *our* back yard" despite the middle of the Australian desert being no closer to Adelaide than high-level nuclear stores in France are to Prague.
So instead we have low-level nuclear waste scattered in sites all around the metropolitan area of several cities, which leads to situations like that of us having substantial waste stores sitting in the bottom of the university of Adelaide and Royal Adelaide Hospital, both of them right next to a river. This inconsistency is one of many that shows up scum political forces who harvest stupid people's irrational fears about nuclear issues.
If Australian green politicians were genuinely passionate about our global environmental responsponsibilities they'd be comfortable with the idea of Australia as a major player in nuclear power and as a site for waste disposal.
The above opinions guarantee I would have no hope of ever making it in politics.
Re:great... (Score:3, Informative)
wikipedia link (Score:4, Informative)
Here's the wikipedia article for pebble bed reactors [wikipedia.org], including a discussion of their safety.
-jim
Re:Communism is good for something (Score:4, Insightful)
At least in China people can't bitch about how dangerous nuclear energy is. I'm not saying communism is good, but in this case it is. Plus i'm sure oil lobbyists would play a role in the US, not so in China (I think).
I dont mind dumb people bitching about things they have at least a little knowledge of, but I hate ignorant people who bitch about things they have no clue about.
Re:Communism is good for something (Score:5, Interesting)
You ask who cares?
Well, China is playing a game of accepting limited market economy while still controling many economic things, including some prices, as it sees fit. China is accepted by business interests because it has made committments to the WTO and other institutions. However, it is still classified as a developing country and therefore gets a lot of slack from the WTO. This also means it gets a lot of development loans at great rates and other things. If all it did was preach communism, it would not be in this position. There have been real changes in China, some incomplete, but many progressive.
Regardless, Lenin, Mao, Marx, etc. would probably not consider current China (PRC) communist. If communism to you means a socialist state controlled by one party of elites and the military interactive in the market economy, then yes it is. Otherwise, I wouldn't so easily label it.
Re:Seems much more of a threat to the US than Iraq (Score:5, Funny)
it says: 32 ounce.
aw crap.
Re:While we clang our cymbals.... (Score:3, Insightful)