The next generation of reactors will use ceramic coated balls of uranium fuel. They will be gas cooled, so there will be NO chance of a coolant leak. This type of reactor will be much more efficient than the current boiling-water or pressurized water types, and will be almost 100% safe. The problem is, we have a bunch of anti-nuclear crazies who are unable to think logically, and who will block the adoption of advanced nuclear technology. Of course, these people will continue to use electricity!
Really, if we are to reduce carbon dioxide generation, we must adopt large=scale nuclear power, and start soon!
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Slight nitpick, they launched the F-4 Phantom into a containment wall not a containment vessel. Here is a link
http://www.nci.org/media/crashtest.rm
It is the video.
I asked my Dad, who ran the above test, is they did the same thing with containment vessels and the answer was no.
The did thourghly test the containers including running a train into a semi loaded with the containers.
Slee
Flowbark: Actually, the CANDU has a number of different fuel cycles. I’m not that up on what they’ve been doing with CANDU for the last while, but I believe it’s still one of the safest and most efficient reactor designs out there. Ontario Hydro claims that its Candu 6 reactor’s lifecycle cost produces power at a cost about 35% lower than fossil fuel plants.
CANDU also has a fuel cycle that is capable of burning natural uranium, which means that you don’t have all the security issues around enriched uranium production.
Possibly even more importantly, CANDU reactors are capable of burning weapons grade plutonium and waste from other nuclear reactors as fuel.
This is the scenario I would envision - as the economy begins to convert to hydrogen fuels (fuel cells, liquid hydrogen for some applications, etc), you will increase electricity production requirements dramatically. Now think about this for a modern, clean power network: Nuclear waste from existing plants is shipped to Nevada. Nevada has a cluster of CANDU reactors, feeding power into hydrogen generating plants. These reactors eat the waste produced by other plants, and are used to destroy weapons-grade plutonium from the shrinking nuclear arsenal. This allows us to recover a lot of energy from the high-level waste being shipped to Nevada, which makes the entire nuclear power cycle cheaper and more efficient, while also shrinking its volume.
The hydrogen produced in Nevada is then shipped to other factories in the area which create fuel cells and other byproducts. This is then shipped around the country to provide power for vehicles and other uses. Eventually, you may want a similar facility somewhere on the East coast to improve shipping efficiency and minimize transport times and distances for nuclear waste.
Nuclear plants are ideal for this type of application. CANDU plants are capable of being refueled at full power, so you don’t have any downtime. They are also modular and designed so that you never have to de-commission the entire plant - the reactor cores themselves are replaceable as they age, and because the plants are located near yucca mountain, disposal of the spent cores is cheaper.
Nevadans would buy into this arrangement if you could show them how many jobs it would create, how much money would come into the economy, etc. And the ability of CANDU to re-process spent fuel from other plants can be used to sell the concept, because it would lower the amount of physical waste going into Yucca.
This is also the type of future energy production you can sell to conservatives, who have historically been skeptical of solar and wind due to the high subsidies such technologies tend to require.
This is an answer to oil dependence and greenhouse gas production that is politically feasible, economically reasonable, and involves nothing more than today’s technology. Unlike solar which still requires material breakthroughs to become competitive, CANDU reactors are available today.
But this scheme requires patience, because it won’t happen overnight. The infrastructure isn’t there to convert the industrial economy to a hydrogen fuel base. We’ll need time to make the market work - when fuel cells start to become available and cost effective, demand for them will start to rise. That demand will start the infrastructure changes required, and stimulate larger-scale production of cells. That’s the time when a plan like this becomes reasonable.
Comments?
Here’s an excellent FAQ on CANDU reactors: http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~cz725/
From this site:
Now THAT sounds like an efficient, intelligent way to power a country.
Sam, m’man, I don’t often agree with you politically. On this, however, I’m with you 100%. I have dreams of a hydrogen-based economy in the US, and globally.
And for what it’s worth, folks, not all self-described envornmentalists are anti-nuke. Conversely, “conservative” and “environmentalist” are not mutually exclusive terms.
I hit preview and my 7-point post was eaten. Arg. Double arg. Let me reconstruct.
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IANAE. Anthracite, where are you?
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CANDU is “a pressurized-heavy-water, natural-uranium power reactor designed first in the 1960’s by a consortium of Canadian government and private industry.” It does not appear to be a breeder.
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I have dreams of a hydrogen-based economy too. And I would love to see a clean, cheap source of energy. “Too cheap to meter!” The question is whether nukes fit the bill.
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I am skeptical of Sam’s website cost claims, as I do not know whether they factor in the costs of catastrophic risk (i.e. is liability capped) and waste disposal. (Thanks for the link though).
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Still, I understand there have been impressive reductions in plant operating costs. In the US, this is connected with establishing national plant managers who can pool the experience of many different plants across the country.
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Three Mile Island was a disaster, given the cleanup costs alone. There were allegations of screwy record keeping during the accident as well. There are reports of plant growth abnormalities in the area, following the event. I have not looked into this issue.
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Sam’s plan turns on whether a cluster of nukes located in one spot can produce power that is sufficiently cheap to overcome the costs of distributing the hydrogen. This issue is empirical. :Skeptical Inspector:
Sure. It may turn out that shipping costs or other production costs make this inefficient. But when you factor in the reduction of externalities (lower pollution in cities, reduction in acid rain, CO2 reduction, etc), it still might make sense.
It also makes sense from a strategic standpoint. Countries that must import energy lose some of their sovereignity. The U.S. is discovering just what a problem this can create in the war on terror. Nuclear power can be home-grown throughout the entire power cycle from raw material through fuel cell production and waste disposal.
Wind and solar have never struck me as particularly intelligent solutions to the energy problem in general. They make sense in some isolated situations, or in areas where there is constant wind and low property costs. Offshore wind farms may turn out to be a reasonable supplement to energy. But they are maintenance-intensive, still expensive, and unreliable. You can’t count on the wind always being there.
Nuclear reactors, on the other hand, can run at a fixed duty cycle for extended periods of time. But they don’t scale down well - you need to run a nuclear plant at near capacity to make it efficient, and that means it’s not very good for providing peak power.
But for fuel cell production, they’re perfect. As the link above showed, the electrolysis produces heavy water, which is used in the reactor. The waste from one industrial operation then provides material to the other. It’s a very efficient power cycle. And because you can run the factories at a continuous power requirement level, you can tune the reactor(s) to produce power at their most efficient rates.
What we may see is a ‘total plant’ design that incorporates a small nuclear reactor and the hydrogen creation facility, engineered as a single, integrated plant. Those could be built anywhere. Maybe moving them all into Nevada near Yucca doesn’t make sense, but the concept of building a hydrogen production facility with its own integrated nuclear power plant could be the most efficient way to produce fuel cells.
<Long post snipped to get to my point>
Um, Nevadans would not buy into your arrangement at all. I live in Vegas and the outrage over the Yucca mountain is pretty much universal. I don’t agree but in Nevada right now supporting Yucca is political suicide.
There are two reasons that it would never fly. They are a)ignorance about the saftey and science of nuclear technology and b) the fact that Vegas is totally dependant on tourism.
A) The Yucca mountain project is a huge issue and all the politicians and evironmentalists are against Yucca because “It isn’t based on science but politics”. The “Screw Nevada” bill, as it is known out here, is either the Repbulicans or Democrates fault, depending on the allegence of the particular person. All of the anti-Yucca crowd claim there are huge holes in the science but they never seem to state what the actual problems are. To give you an idea, in a recent issue of the ‘Las Vegas Review Journal’ they ran an article about all of the accidents involving radioactive shipments in the US since 1970. The article stated that the worst damage to a containment vessel was superficial and that no waste leaked in any of the accidents. In the same issue there was an OP-ED piece by the editor claiming that shipping waste was totally dangerous and would cause the death of a whole lot of people across the country. Pretty ironic, huh?
The anti-Yucca crowd have a pretty standard way of ‘debunking’ the science behind Yucca. It is pretty simple. All they do is ask the scienetists if Yucca is “perfectly safe”. When the scienetists, who are generally honest people, say no, nothing is perfectly safe they get cut off. The key is the word perfect. Nothing is perfectly safe but the odds of a problem at Yucca are way lower than the odds that a person will get hit by lightning. Somehow that is never reported.
B) Vegas is a tourist city. The pols and every anti-Yucca person uses the arguement that if Yucca is put in place tourist won’t want to come to Vegas due to the danger of a nuclear accident. In other words if Yucca mountain happens you’ll lose your job. It’s a good scare tactic.
FWIW, there is only one politician I know running for office in Nevada that is, sorta, pro-Yucca mountain. He is an independant and his arguement is “Yucca is a done deal so we should get everything we can out of it”.
Slee
Well, in reality we’ll use a mix of fuel sources. Electricity demand varies quite a bit throughout the day and nukes are most appropriate for base loading (to the extent they are cost-effective at all).
Solar is plausible for meeting peak (air conditioning) demand, as well as for remote locations.
I’m also not entirely sold on the Yucca Mountain depository, except for the fact that it’s conveniently located outside of my backyard. Some 20 years ago (IIRC) scientists were told to study the matter -but were given no alternative site if Yucca was found to be unacceptable. Furthermore the role of engineering barriers increased over time, after scientists re-evaluated the likelihood of water moving towards the waste site. (Specifically chlorine 36 from atmospheric nuclear testing has been found at the repository level). Other issues (climactic change, the durability of metallic waste packages, volcanic activity (!) ) should reportedly be considered in more depth.
I must admit though, that the 300 CANDU plant idea (for the US, my WAG) / hydrogen fuel cycle concept is kinda neat.
Sorry, on holiday, running around London and playing lesbian vampire in Soho.
Didn’t I see that in a movie?
Marc
OK, stupid question.
Do anti-nuclear activists consider nuclear waste to be worse than uranium ore? If we eliminated nuclear power from the world, would we still have the same problems with uranium ore contaminating the earth as we do with radioactive waste, only less controlled and less concentrated?
Or if we simply dumped all our nuclear waste into old uranium mines, capped them up, and left them, would that cover it?
I grant you could just say NIMBY, since the uranium mines are in South Africa and so forth, but is uranium ore considered to be a natural thing, and therefore we don’t need to worry about it any more than we do volcanoes and their environmental impact?
Regards,
Shodan
Here’s my big concern:
Considering all the cases of corporate malfeasance and cost-cutting that goes on these days, can we really find a large company we can TRUST to run a nuclear power plant safely? Or will most of the ones that are tapped just skate the razor’s edge of danger and trust that it’ll work out? After all, payola goes a long way in DC and in the media, and I’d think it’d be fairly simple to take advantage of lax rules and campaign contributions to make sure that if anything DID happen, the company wouldn’t be liable. So why would they care? History is full of companies who just didn’t care where they dumped their waste or how safe their plants were…
Which leads to another question… how come everyone always complains about waste being taken away from a nuclear plant, but you never hear a peep about fuel being brought to the plant?
This argument often comes up in nuclear power debates in Sweden too. “The nuclear power industry doesn´t pay as much insurance as they should etc etc”
AFAIK that is not the case for other energy sources too (at least in Sweden, don´t know about the US but maybe someone more knowledgeable can find a cite). Hydropower operators also have an insurance cap in Sweden. A bursting dam can cause as much damage and maybe even more than a catastrophic nuclear accident.
Does anyone know if there is a similar insurance cap for hydropower in the US as for nuclear power?
“Considering all the cases of corporate malfeasance and cost-cutting that goes on these days, can we really find a large company we can TRUST to run a nuclear power plant safely? Or will most of the ones that are tapped just skate the razor’s edge of danger and trust that it’ll work out?”
Who do you think runs the existing nuclear power plants in the United States, Zen Buddhist monks?!?
By the same “logic” that all businesses don’t give a damn about safety and will always buy off the safety regulators rather than spend money on safety, airplanes would be falling out of the sky left, right, and center. Oddly enough, they aren’t. :rolleyes:
In the US, the Price-Anderson Act limits nuclear energy to a relaviely low level. http://www.safeenergy.org/oped100501.htm
I do not believe that a similar limitation exists for dams. As Coil says, a dam (particularly an earth-filled dam) can fail all at once and cause enormous disaster.
Quote from December’s Link:
So the cap is equal to about 1 and 1/2 percent of potential estimated damages. (Interestingly, this is based on a 1982 (pre-Chernobal) study. Apparently nuke investigation ebbs and wans.)
What about hydro?
This site appears to imply that legal and moral liability rests with the dam owner. In Wisconsin at least, "Becoming a dam owner means assuming all liability and responsibility of the structure ". I’m not sure what happens if a dam that is owned by a local municipality bursts.
I agree that all energy sources should be required to “pay their way” as it were, be it through insurance or emissions taxes.
Okay, but if you’re going to make nuclear pay for all its externalities, I want you to factor that into the pricing of other alternative forms of energy. For example, I’ve never heard the cost of old battery disposal and caustic waste cleanup after electric car accidents being factored into their overall costs.
And how do you begin to calculate the external costs of fossil fuel? How can you put a dollar value on CO2 emissions when we don’t really know what effect they have? How about SO2 emissions, ozone pollution in cities, etc?
Remember, a nuclear/hydrogen power cycle removes an awful lot of externalities that we tolerate from existing forms of energy.
*How can you put a dollar value on CO2 emissions when we don’t really know what effect they have? *
You make an estimate, based upon expert opinion. The lowest price I’ve seen is about $5 per ton, US$1990. The highest tops $100.
You say that’s a wide span? Tough. The exercise forces you to deal with the tradeoffs rather than sweeping them under the carpet.
(You also need to calculate some sort of distribution of probable effects, which is paired with the estimated damages associated with each scenario. The result is a loss function.)
Caustic Battery Acid, etc.: Some externalities are too small to regulate directly (and car owners certainly have an incentive to avoid auto accidents). Also, if car owners are sued for these spills, then the insurance market should handle the problem. I’m not convinced that eliminating some $590 billion dollars of liability per accident is a small subsidy.
Finally: I’m giving an absolutist position here. Industry doesn’t like emission taxes, since it forces them to pay for emissions control equipment AND the damage resulting from the pollution that they spew out anyway. In practice, I am sympathetic to other market-friendly regulations such as tradeable emission permits.
Also: If nuclear power is as safe as its proponents claim, then liability insurance shouldn’t be that expensive, should it?
Remember, a nuclear/hydrogen power cycle removes an awful lot of externalities that we tolerate from existing forms of energy.
Yeah. But for the time being, the hydrogen economy is a dream. I’m inclined to lean towards natural gas / conservation for the time being. I am cautiously sympathetic to Nuke pilot projects, however.