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."
Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Future (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Efficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
From what I understand, current methods are remarkably inefficient.
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:3, Insightful)
How much are people willing to pay for Gas? 'Cause finding it, drilling it, pumping it, transporting it, refining it, transporting it again, then pumping it into your car is expensive too. I'm not sure how Hydrogen would be much more wasteful than Gas
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear power has promise, though. Especially if we can get IFR reactors going. There is sufficient fuel to power IFR type facilities for many many years. This results because the IFR is a breeder reactor which can utilize uranium 238 and damn near anything else that's densely radioactive. There isn't much of a future for standard fission reactors, and fast breeders are politically insane - but Integral Fast Reactors could really be the ticket for quite some time.
Or, at least until the oil gets so expensive we can't build computers to control the reactors...
RS
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:5, Insightful)
>more energy to make H than what you get from burning it. Therefore it is an
>energy sink, esp. if you get it from cracking H2O. It's better to simply use the
>electricity you make to crack the water As Electricity to Do Work than to blow it
>on H.
Hydrogen has the potential of being a way of tapping resources that are otherwise not easy to exploit. Iceland, for example, has huge geothermal potential but it isn't exactly easy to export that electricity out of the middle of the atlantic. Making H could be a decent way of doing so.
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:3, Insightful)
-matthew
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:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, they *sound* nice and clean, but for hydroelectric power you need a large valley with nothing in it that you particularly want to keep. Huge areas of Scotland were submerged in the 1950s and 1960s to form hydro-electric dams. No-one knows what may have been lost, because the areas weren'
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:5, Informative)
Cities block wind much more than wind farms ever could. The concerns you raise are simply ridiculous.
It has become a fashionable trend to look for downsides to all new solutions, equating tiny and/or unknown downsides of the new solution with the large and known downsides of the existing ones. It is a lot like Luddism.
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:3, Insightful)
I think one of the problems with these nabobs is they just don't have any idea of scale. The oceans are really, really huge. So is the Sun. It would take tidal powered installations many orders of magnitude larger than what could be built in the next hundred years to make any difference.
Wind power does have its drawbacks, but where it is used well it is quite useful. Off of Cape Co
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:5, Informative)
Do me a favour. Have you any idea how large the oceans are? (about 1.37 billion km^3) Besides, they are already about 45,000 commercial vessels at sea, each using on average, say, 10MW's for propulsion. If only half of them are at sea at any one time, they're still pumping over 200GW into the oceans, and have been for years. Also the energy in the sea is renewable as it derives from the Sun (heating) and the Moon (tides) so we can never deplete all its energy.
Would this be like the effect buildings have on airflow? Do you think it would be any worse than building a town? Besides, how big is a wind farm going to be? The atmosphere continues up to about 90km (the mesopause). In reality a wind farm has no more effect downstram than a small forest would, so perhaps it would be a good thing as so many forests have disappeared. As for cooling the air, the effect is minimal, but hopefully it would make up for all the heat we are pumping into the atmosphere from other sources.
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, Informative)
Waves are created by wind, so harnessing wave energy is indirectly harnessing wind energy.
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:5, Insightful)
While they don't release toxic gasses into the atmosphere directly, the contribute to vast water pollution problems by blocking the natural flow and aeration of rivers. A quickly flowing river is like a sewage treatment plant -- you can dump quite a bit of organic waste into it upstream, and it will be clean by the time it runs into the ocean. However if you dam that river and make long stretches of it stagnant, the water flowing downstream of the dam will be much more polluted.
This is a significant problem in Maine, which has high amounts of organic waste from paper mills. This wouldn't be a big problem, and is not in excess of what could be handled by many rivers (e.g. the Androscoggin) except that hydropower projects have removed many rapids on the river and cause the pollution to remain. There are experiments to artifically aerate the water behind dams, just as you'd do in a fish tank, by pumping air down to the bottom and allowing it to bubble up, but they're not nearly as effective as rapids used to be. And of course you pretty much kill the native fish population overnight, if they are one of the species that swims upstream to spawn.
I can imagine in other areas that organophosphate pollution from fertilizers is a similar problem when you dam a river. Plus regular old sewage effluent can be problematic if the river isn't flowing quickly.
There is a public perception that dams are "clean energy" but in reality this isn't precisely true. There are huge ecological downsides to hydropower projects, which are not normally considered (and definitely weren't considered when many of them were constructed, in their defense). Arguing against nuclear power by saying "build more hydro dams!" isn't a particularly useful response.
To be perfectly honest, although nobody wants any sort of power generation facility in their back yard, I'd much prefer to have a nuclear power plant in my neighborhood, than to have my neighborhood be under 20' of polluted water.
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not going to stop charging my cell phone battery simply because it's a "net energy loss". The fact that I have transformed the energy into a nice chemical bundle is well worth the loss of energy in the process.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:3, Informative)
That's why we shouldn't be building old-style slow reactors that do only a single reaction on the fuel. The US government has been against breeder reactors because they can be used to generate munitions-grade plutonium, but there are newer types of breeder reactors which generate contaminated plutonium, perfectly useful for continuing the reaction, but not for building bombs. And re-reacting the fission products will get rid of long-lived
Re:Nuclear Power and Hydrogen - The Way of the Fut (Score:3, Insightful)
this is a longterm stop-gap (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:this is a longterm stop-gap (Score:5, Informative)
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:this is a longterm stop-gap (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand there were never any huge, organized anti-nuclear protests in France, which was hit very hard by the first oil price hike in 1973. Anti-nuclear protests in recent years have been confined to sites where nuclear wastes wer
Re:this is a longterm stop-gap (Score:5, Insightful)
Like it or not, we throw most of our energy away needlessly. People make no effort to save energy, and the energy consumption is rarely a factpr is purchase deicisons for consumer devices. This needs to change, and the best way to do this is to shift more of the tax burden onto energy by means of a carbon tax.
Building nuclear power so we can keep on throwing energy away is madness. Lets do the sensible thing and clamp down more on our wastefull consumption of the stuff.
Re:this is a longterm stop-gap (Score:3)
This has been true for decades, and it hasn't changed. What makes you think it's going to change now?
Environmentalists have been talking about reducing energy consumption since the 70's. Guess what's happened since then? Huge increases in the amount of energy consumed. What makes you think it's going to be any different going forward. I don't think that "c'mon guys, this time I really mean it!" is going to change anyt
Re:this is a longterm stop-gap (Score:3, Insightful)
You're reacting as if energy were scarce. It isn't. If more would be useful, build more power stations.
BTW, if I haven't made it clear, your arrogant use of first-person-plural disgusts me. Allow me to bring to your attention the important question: whose property is this energy? And the important answer: not yours. So who a
Europeans (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Disaster. Nuclear engineers say that the chance of a meltdown is very small, but this argument is worthless after Harrisburg and Chernobyl. People in general are mathematically clueless, but they do know that the risk is real and not small after these two events.
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 stored for thousands of years. Shooting it out in space is not an option to most, having pictures of an explosing 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 nuclear power is thus the pragmatic way to go. People will still be afraid of it, though.
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.
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!
Re:The Windscale pipeline (Score:4, Insightful)
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 nee
Re:Bad idea: volcanoes (Score:4, Informative)
Re:get rid of waste (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems a little extreme, especially considering that enriched uranium waste becomes only as radioactive as natural uranium in only 100 years. Which is a fraction of the time it takes for material to sink into the mantle.
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.
Re:Europeans (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the problem is that you have to store it for some 10,000 years. That's 2500 warehouses of pretty dangerous stuff, that you have to protect for a very long time. Protect it from criminals, terrorists, natural disasters. Again for 10,000 years!
And that's only the dangers we think of at the moment. Are you really so sure we will have a stable enough government for 10,000 years to come to guarantee just the basic protection of the waste storage sites?
It is beyond me to estimate the dangers of running a nuclear power plant, whether it is worth the risk. But the nuclear waste problem is what makes me want to get rid of nuclear power.
(But then, I am from Germany, probably the country most critical of nuclear power all over Europe.)
Re:Europeans (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Europeans (Score:4, Insightful)
That was made a lot worse by proponents greatly overstating their case, effectively arguing that any accident is utterly theoretic and could never, ever happen in reality. When it did - two larger accidents, in Three-Mile Island and in Chernobyl, and numerous smaller incidents (like the Darwin Award winners in a Japanese plant that carted radioactive materials in ordinary buckets) - that effectively destroyed the credibility of the nuclear industry.
When people today say that 1. "Current reactor designs are a lot safer than the 30+ ones we use now"; and 2. "The risk is very, very small", people will say that 3. "You lied through your teeth to get us where you wanted the last time, and we bet you're doing the same this time around"
Re:Europeans (Score:4, Informative)
Chernobyl was because they ignored repeated safety mechanisms while doing an experiment with intentionally making the reactor in a Bad State - even repeatedly turning the failsafes off (I don't recall the exact number, less than 10 more than 5). This was mainly due to failure of the different experts to communicate (not really thier fault - it was illegal for them to do so). The engineers who "caused" the disaster had no idea what was going to happen, had the nuclear engineers been there things would have most likely been different. In the free world I imagine those nuclear engineer would have done something fairly drastic to stop it. Nor would that type of expirement ever have been allowed, and that is especially true now (no nuclear engineer would allow it to happen).
Three-mile was a true accident of a nuclear reaactor. The reason it is irrelevant is that the danger was exxagerated. A great example of this was the fear about a possible explosion because of the reactor filling with hydrogen. Reporters reported what would happen if that amount of hydrogen were to ignite, pointed out that a simple spark can cause it too. However, there was no oxygen present - it was designed to work in that manner. No engineer was worried about it. Problems with cameras was also a big story, but yet again was greatly exagerated (most of the ones that were out were tertiary systems - the engineers and disaster crews was never in the dark about what went on in the reactor). But I suppose "We are gonna dieeeeeee!!!!" made better news than "It's being contained, working like it is supposed to, don't worry". Not that everything was perfect, but there was little real danger to surrounding people and the environment. Hell, I'd be more worried about some of the high energy physics experiments out there - at least they are pushing the envelope, nuclear reactors are a pretty mature technology.
It's not even so much that reactors are much safer now (true none the less), but that reactors were *never* as dangerous as public opnion has them. Only if multiple layers of failsafes along with intentional criticality (such as Chernobyl) is there any real danger from an accident. Plus we can recylce much of the waste produced now into other isotopes so that is slowly going away, even then it has less impact overall and easier to contain than coal.
Re:Europeans (Score:4, Informative)
I believe you. There are a few problems however.
The first problem is that a planet relying on nuclear power for its long term energy needs is going to need a large number of reactors for a long time. The more reactors, the more chances for the odds to come up; the longer we use them, the more likely a failure. Reactors could be much safer than ever before and still be unacceptably dangerous over time and widespread deployment.
The second problem is that the consequences of failure are so severe. A bad reactor incident could render some european nations uninhabitable in their entirity. With stakes like that, some people are disinclined to roll the dice at all.
The thrid one is that, as already observed, there is a perceived shortage of trustworthy information. Salemen are, of course, going to say the risk is vanishingly small, politicians have a tendancy to to present as facts anything they think will serve their political ends and scientific reports that don't report the results desireced by those who commissioned them rarely see light of day. It seems as if the only way any of us can ever really have any confidence in reactor design would be to get a PhD and a job working on reactor design. Sadly, that's not an option for most of the populace, while those that do are contractually prohibited from sharing their findings.
The lack of trust is, assuming the figures add up, the showstopper. It's hard to see how we can have confidence in any design review, to say nothing of operational procedure after a plant is commissioned. Come up with an answer to that - and I don't mean a bug ad campaign - and we might get somewhere. In the meantime, I can't help sympathising with the NIMBYs
Re:Europeans (Score:3, Funny)
Exactly, There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.
Re:Europeans (Score:4, Informative)
YES! The moderator is gone! Oh, wait you apparently don't know what a moderator is for. It is there to slow down the neutrons, so they can initiate another fission reaction if the neutrons are not slowed down the U-235 doesn't absorb them, resulting in a halting of the fission reaction. So, burning off the graphite moderator will halt the fission reaction. Melting the Uranium together will also halt the fission reaction for the same reason.
Oh, and the fuel is not metallic uranium it is uranium oxide with a melting point of 2800C. Not likely to happen. Oh and if you read more of the wikipedia entry you would have noted the layer of inflammable silicon carbide in the pebble that is not flammable, and thus acts as a fire break.
So, basically the entire danger in the pebble bed reactor is a chemical fire. And, said fire would occur on the outside of the pebbles, the pebbles and the grains within them would likely be mostly intact due to the silicon carbide layer. Even if the pebbles broke down the grains inside would not leave the reactor as they are too big to float on air. And, have not melted let alone vaporized. And, the loss of the graphite results in the halting of the fission reactions. So, basically a chemical fire near radioactive material, which while extinguishing by menas other than waiting for the fuel to burn off may be difficult does not result in the release of radioactive material... Well no more radioactive material than any other fire.
This is the key to newer reactor designs. The goal is to require constant intervention to keep a reaction going, if any or every human intervention is removed (moderators, coolants, etc...) there is no reaction.
Re:Europeans (Score:3, Insightful)
It's interesting you'd bring up Harrisburg as support for your statement. Three Mile Island was a non-event. Despite the operators shutting off safety systems, ignorning warning signs, and basically doing everything they could do to screw thi
Re:Europeans (Score:5, Informative)
The idea that nuclear waste might need to be protected "for thousands of years" has driven a lot of the debate. This is unfortunate, since it doesn't turn out to be particularly true.
One of the fundamental laws of radioactivity is that elements that are highly radioactive lose their radioactivity quickly, and elements whose radioactivity lingers a long time don't emit much radiation. The danger, of course, is those things that are in the middle along both axes. But as a point of comparison, it turns out that there is essentially no radiation left [rerf.or.jp] from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
It is true that the concentrated fission products and neutron-activated junk from current fission reactors would still be pretty hot after 20 years, but I suspect they'd be way less dangerous to climb around in than a 20-year-old dioxin spill [greenpeace.org]. I think the evidence suggests that dumping the stuff deep-ocean in 50-year barrels would be a perfectly reasonable disposal method; it would be hard to convince the general public of that, though. Kind of sad, really—in many ways, nuclear power is our safest and most environmentally friendly energy alternative.
Re:Europeans (Score:5, Insightful)
At the same time, we have an energy source right in our vicinity which is, for all practical purposes, non-depletable and delivers several thousand times more energy [wikipedia.org] to our planet in every second than we are currently using. It would be the most logical thing to switch everything over to that energy source as quickly as possible -- since before long, we'll have to do that anyway.
Keep reeding... (Score:4, Insightful)
As a bonus, breeder reactors are much safer since the core can't achieve cain reaction on it's own and therefore can't cause a melt down.
That's all the *confirmed* *economic* reserves... (Score:5, Informative)
- It's way, way more expensive than anything we're currently using, including wind power. That's why wind farms have been going up all over the place, not solar arrays.
- We can't store energy cheaply enough, and on a large enough scale, to run an electricity grid.
- Neither of these problems are going to be solved quick enough to prevent China and India, particularly, building the biggest set of coal-fired power stations, belching lethal pollutants (which will kill millions of their own citizens) and greenhouse gases (which might just send the US and Europe into an Ice Age, flood much of Bangladesh, send Australia into perpetual drought, and so on...), the world has ever seen.
Nuclear energy is the only thing that's available now that can replace coal and gas at anything like a comparable cost and without releasing greenhouse gases.Containing a catastrophic failure is the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Generally anyway, when things work as they are supposed to. But things happen. People worry about a catastrophic failure of a nuclear plant. A catastrophic failure of a coal-fired electric plant would result in minimal environmental damage and could be easily cleaned up. A catastrophic failure of a nuclear power plant on the other hand ...
Re:Containing a catastrophic failure is the proble (Score:2)
You can't just look at the worst disasters. You have to look at the average pollution output over an extended period of time. Your argument is like saying planes are less safe because when one crashes a lot more people die than in a car crash. If you analyze it on a per pass
Re:Containing a catastrophic failure is the proble (Score:4, Informative)
The last time I brought this up here some brainwashed loony started going on about how fly ash should go into some sort of nuclear waste repositry instead of building materials, automotive putty etc.
Remember, anyone that talks about a one true energy source is selling something or has been conned.
Re:Containing a catastrophic failure is the proble (Score:5, Informative)
Peer reviewed science:
Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants [jstor.org] J. P. McBride, R. E. Moore, J. P. Witherspoon, R. E. Blanco
Science, New Series, Vol. 202, No. 4372 (Dec. 8, 1978) , pp. 1045-1050
Abstract
Radiation doses from airborne effluents of model coal-fired and nuclear power plants (1000 megawatts electric) are compared. Assuming a 1 percent ash release to the atmosphere (Environmental Protection Agency regulation) and 1 part per million of uranium and 2 parts per million of thorium in the coal (approximately the U.S. average), population doses from the coal plant are typically higher than those from pressurized-water or boiling-water reactors that meet government regulations. Higher radionuclide contents and ash releases are common and would result in increased doses from the coal plant. The study does not assess the impact of nonradiological pollutants or the total radiological impacts of a coal versus a nuclear economy.
GAS Alternatives (Score:2)
Re:GAS Alternatives (Score:2)
with all that and with the fact that europe imports only about 30% of its gas from russia it is a non-iss
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 regula
Re:Time to reduce consumption (Score:3, Insightful)
They Aren't Alone (Score:5, Insightful)
(We worry about things like the increasing amounts of radioactive waste in our dumps, possible indications of higher incidences of leukemia and cancer in areas like Sellafield, and risks of a serious accident.)
North Sea gas is gone (Score:3, Informative)
Britain developed the North Sea oil and gas in the 70s, this largely saved its economy by providing three decades of cheap oil and natural gas. However, the good times are now about to abruptly end. Oil production is down dramatically- nearly 50% since 1999.
In fact it fell 13% in just the last year! http://realtimenews.slb.com/news/story.cfm?storyi d =630622 [slb.com]
In fact the North Sea is now well down on its peak p
Re:They Aren't Alone (Score:2, Funny)
Clearly the answer lies in the trouser press!
Nuke power safety (Score:2, Insightful)
1) It's not cost efficient, even when compared to wind.
2) It's dangerous [disinfo.com]. (That's a really good article, by the way. It should be required reading for anyone commenting on this Slashdot story.)
We really need to look toward alternatives (wind, solar-thermal, solar tower, wave, tidal, biomass...) if we intend to keep consuming power at current rates. (alternatives are also great for generating hydrogen, because the hydrogen can be a sto
Re:Nuke power safety (Score:2)
IMO, we need nuclear fission energy to bridge the time we need to develope fusion. We can't afford to let society collapse in the meantime.
Re:Nuke power safety (Score:3, Informative)
The sun delivers several thousand times more energy to the earth in every second than we are currently using. Increasing use of hydroe
Re:Solar panels are no good either. (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.ecotopia.com/apollo2/pvpayback.htm [ecotopia.com]
More modern cells are even better, typical payback of a couple of years depending on location.
On the other had financially speaking you are talking about 25 years to recoup the cost of installation, which is why adoption has to be promoted by governments as very few people are prepared to think that far ahead!.
Re:Nuke power safety (Score:5, Informative)
> Yet it has displaced more people than any other power source.
As opposed to coal which "displaces" 30,000 people into their graves each year [ecomall.com] for just the US alone?
Re:Renewables cannot replace baseload (Score:3, Insightful)
Solar towers are more pie-in-the-sky dreaming. Sure it might work in some places in the world, at fantastic cost; but not useful for 99% of the worlds population.
The supply of oil and gas is a huge factor- the price is about
The russians are partly to blame (Score:4, Insightful)
In the European union there is now a debate going on each country having to produce more of its own energy. also the need to form a Musketeer agreement to stand against potential energy-blackmailing or catastrophes. Nuclear power is for most of the larger European countries a very viable sollution. that will greatly reduce the dependency of other countries.
Re:The russians are partly to blame (Score:2)
And the winner is.. (Score:2, Insightful)
My two $ 0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, so, then a disaster happens. Well, chances are very slim for a disaster. Today, we have a higher safety regulation for operating of nuclear power plants, and we are not competing on who gets to restart the turbines faster (check this [stanford.edu]) without using safety measures.
Besides disaster possibility, the problem is also waste dispossal as a poster pointed out before me. Where to put it. You simply cannot dissolve the waste, or this is to expensive. And I don't think the problem with space dumping is the image of Columbia blowing up. Waste baskets can be made that whitstand such blasts. It's more of the awarness that we can't already pollute the space, since we fuc*** up mother Earth. And it's becoming an increasing security concern too with all the terrorists roaming around. Imagine a break-in into the waste storage facility. It's easy to make a dirty bomb [howstuffworks.com]. Breaking into the plant itself is much harder, although it's still a possibility.
In conclusion, I think we have to accept the risks of possible danger (we fly with airlens, but those also crash don't they?) if in turn, we get back a possibility for a cleaner environment. And until we develop things than can use all the free enegry [amasci.com] just lying around and as long as we use things that rely on our supply of power (computers among other things
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.
it's really not about the pollution (Score:2)
So, when talking about building new nuclear power stations in europe, one has to thing about two things as causes:
- cheaper energy,
- lesser dependency on russian gas (as recent russian-ukrainian developments have shown).
People of course are afraid of anything nuclear, and why shouldn't
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-
On the Feasibility of Coal-Driven Power Stations (Score:4, Funny)
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?
Energy Efficiency = More Capacity (Score:3, Insightful)
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
OK, here's the new rule (Score:3, Insightful)
That's completely ridiculous of course and so are most of the arguments against developing nuclear power it's interesting to note that more people were killed on 9/11 than at Chernobyl and unlike the Chernobyl figures, which have been spun into fantasy by anti-nuclear environmental groups we can actually say that around 3000 people died on 9/11 because we found dead bodies or pieces thereof unlike Chernobyl where most of the body counts are the result of statistical extrapolations. But enviros haven't called for a cessation of air travel, probably because so many of them are rich and white and like to fly to places like Costa Rica for their vacations.
solution for waste (Score:3, Informative)
First some terminology:
Natural uranium......... 99.3% U238, 0.7% U235
Depleated Uranium....... 99.7% U238, 0.3% U235 (varies: 0.2%-0.4% U235)
Reactor grade uranium... 96.0% U238, 4.0% U235 but this varies also.
Slightly enriched(CANDU) 99.1% U238, 0.9% U235 (varies: 0.9%-2.0% U235)
Spent fuel.............. 95.0% U238, 1.0% U235, 1.0% Pu, 3% crud (varies)
Reactor grade here refers to Low Enriched typically used for the USA light water pressurized reactors.
In the spent fuel, the U235 fraction can be as low as 0.4% and the Pu fraction is composed of Pu239 and Pu240. The Pu isotopes are practically impossible to separate and the Pu240 is so reactive that it is questionable - although probably possible - to have use as a bomb. A dirty weapon is possible.
The Candu fuel cycle starts with 99.3% U238 and 0.7% U235. The spent fuel is about 0.23% U235 and 0.27% Pu.
The Thorium fuel cycle converts Th to U233 which is as good as U235 for weapons and which can be easily chemically separated from the thorium.
---------------
It should be painfully obvious to just about everyone that only about 3% of the mass of the spent fuel is crud. This is the nuclear waste and it _can_ be burned up several ways including spallation. The _other_ 97% is fuel. Furthermore the spent fuel from a light water pressurized reactor would generally be considered enriched for a CANDU reactor.
Fuel reprocessing removes the "crud" and allows over 97% of the "spent fuel" to be elegible to be stuffed right back into the reactor.
So why isn't reprocessing used? Well - in Europe it is. The USA in a magnificent display of stupidity and circular thinking decided to go it alone and proclaim that a once through fuel cycle is the _only_ way to go. Part of of the political support for this stems from the build up of stock piles of "spent fuel" which the public is told has no use. It does - its future reactor fuel. By analogy - if someone were to dump a litre of crud in a barrel of oil we certainly wouldn't call it "spent oil"! We'd figure out a way to remove the crud. However I can remember my father dumping "waste oil" on the ground - hopefully we now collect it and re-refine it.
So one faction of the anti-nuclear crowd realised that keeping large stockpiles of deemed "waste" around gave them something to point their fingers at. Another faction perhaps with some justification just didn't want anyone to develop the technology to recycle the fuel because this does involve building plants that can separate the Plutonium. Also - by shortening the exposure time of the fuel mix the ratios of Pu 239 to Pu 240 can be controlled with the Pu 240 fraction reduced to under 7%. This is weapons grade plutonium. Yet another faction didn't want competition from a viable nuclear industry so they supported anything that generally doesn't make much sense.
Now the thing is to look at the issue of depleated verses natural uranium. The enrichment process is expensive and still leaves about 1/2 of the original U235 in place.
As such - there is very little difference in radioactivity between natural and depleated uranium. To say one is "safe" and the other is "unsafe" is splitting hairs. They are about the same.
In fact - if we look at "spent fuel" and reprocess it to remove the highly radioactive fraction - then what is left over is very similar to both "natural" and "depleated" uranium... it just has a little plutonium. The 1/2 life of plutonium makes it more radioactive than uranium. However one must also realise that since both uranium and plutonium are very heavy metals, they act as excellent sheilds for radiation... more effective for instance than lead.
What this all boils down to is that there is very little r
Yeah, right. (Score:3, Funny)
But not exactly to glowing reviews.
Umm? (Score:3, Informative)
The French already love nuclear power (Score:3, 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.
Re:-1, Pro-Nuclear Propaganda (Score:2)
But there are current designs that have no chance of melting down. 20 years makes a lot of difference.
Re:-1, Pro-Nuclear Propaganda (Score:2)
O well-named one... just south of here, (Score:5, Informative)
Tell me, O Zoltar, what would happen if a nuke plant mislaid 12 kilos of Uranium?
Yes, nuclear power plants suck. But they suck an awful lot less than any of the currently viable alternatives. If sticking in nukes now makes for a far-less-painful transition to solar or whatever in two decades, then I'm all for it. Even if it doesn't, I'm still all for it because of the coal, oil and gas plants (and mines, refineries, tailings dumps, transportation facilities etc) which won't get built because they weren't needed.
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/GaiaTheoryMotherE arth.htm [prototista.org]
The problem with losing 12 kilos, these days, is that it could be used to produce a dirty bomb.
X.
Re:O well-named one... just south of here, (Score:3, Insightful)
But hey, coal sucks, too, no doubt about it. The primary solution to the energy problem is using a lot less energy, not hoping for a way for it to be produced cleanly.
Re:-1, Pro-Nuclear Propaganda (Score:2, Funny)
If you've ever been near to a coal fire you'll know that it releases a LOT of radiation in the infra-red and visible light spectra. Scary but true.
For safety purposes, it's best to keep the room convection cooled and to wear dark glasses, to avoid the hazards of getting warm or being able to see.
This has been a public safety post.
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.
Re:-1, Pro-Nuclear Propaganda (Score:3, Informative)
Not to count the amount of pollution. This very article shows that radioactivity alone is a lot bigger when burning fossil fuels -- and then add all chemical-based emissions, which are none for nuclear power.
Nuclear power is like having a vial of concentrated poison in a closed bottle, fossil fuels are like taking a bucket of the same p
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ohh puhlease... (Score:3, Insightful)
Orwell was just 20 years early in his predictions...
This is insane. All resources that better be spent on combatting ordinary crime are spent on this invisible "terrorism" thing.
What has the average Dutch citizen seen of terrorism? Nothing. The killing of Theo van Gogh? Describing that as an act of terrorism is just bending the definition to force a fit.
Meanwhile, people are robbed on the street, bu
Re:About the article (Score:4, Funny)
Mark
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
Re:Dear Editor ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dear Editor ... (Score:3, Insightful)
jumping up and down to fit those filters and buy expensive "clean" coal as
soon as the russians retreated.
Get a clue.
Re:The real problem is not fossil vs nuke, it's.. (Score:5, Informative)
For example, most people in the US were farmers just 100 years ago, but today barely 2% of Americans are farmers, yet they are farming more food. The amount of food produced per area has tremendously increased as well. Technological advances to allow this include pesticides, better crop types, better irrigation, more efficient irrigation techniques, better soil planning, GPS-based maximization of resources, and much more.
Already the Green Revolution [wikipedia.org] has saved a billion people from starvation based on seeds from first-generation genetic engineering (using radiation and mutagens).
Across the planet, hunger is mostly a function of bad economies, and occur in countries where economic freedom is low and corruption is high, as well as during times of war. While famine events are set off by environmental issues, when these same issues happen to countries with well-developed economies they are easilly shrugged off.
There is plenty of food in the world, and as more people become richer and can acquire new technology, these people will produce even more food.
Re:Tired old canard (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact I sat on the Berkeley decommissioning panel for a time. You seem to think there are great tasks involved in decommissioning but in fact most of it is a standard industrial demolition job. The high level waste (mostly the spent fuel) has long gone. The reason for the long time scales you mention is *not* because the tasks a