Pebble bed reactors can produce hydrogen also
But what if they accidently make a hydrogen bomb? 
No, really. Hydrogen does have an image problem. A company was using part of our research facility to test and prove a safe portable (car) storage system. They’re gone now, but the claim is that hydrogen is much safer as a vehicle fuel than gasoline.
I’m fuzzy on the technology, but I think that when it’s in the tank, it’s not hydrogen. When needed as fuel, it’s “cracked” back into hydrogen and burned. Someone here surely knows more about that than I do.
[url=]Here is a Brookings Institution report about nuclear power. It concludes:
This is also in line with a talk I once saw in which the person showed some data comparing the U.S., France, and Japan, from which it was concluded that the costs of nuclear are not higher here than in France and Japan. Rather, nuclear power is less competitive because the costs of fossil fuel plants (coal and natural gas) are lower.
In practice, it seems that what advocates for nuclear power seem to want is more subsidies or even government involvement in pushing nuclear power. Given the downsides of nuclear relative to some other alternatives (and the fact that it is a mature technology that has already received loads of subsidy in the past), I don’t really see how this can be justified. I am in favor, however, of some sort of carbon tax on nuclear power’s fossil fuel competitors, which is the best way to correct the externalities in the market. This may give nuclear power the push that it wants…or it may give a push to other things like wind, solar, and conservation / efficiency.
I can speak to part of this. As I said in my earlier post my Dad ran a nuclear reactor safety division at one of the national labs for like 20 years. They did test these things. This test:
http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/1266/Jet_Vs_Concrete_wall.html
which I linked to in my earlier post was run because someone asked 'What would happen if a jet hit a containment dome?". My Dad was the guy they asked so he bought an F4 Phantom and ran it into a wall at about 540 MPH to test the wall. It turns out that you would the people in the jet would be really dead and the containment dome would be slightly dented. In that test the F4 Phantom was moving at about 540 MPH and the deepest dent in the wall was, IIRC, about 3 inches. That wall was 12 feet thick and made out of nothing more than cement and rebar. It would be rather hard for a terrorist to breach a containment dome without something like a cruise missle or possible a big plane packed wih explosives. Could it be done? Yes. Would i be easy? No.
The big issue with terrorist is a) plant security and b) waste security. If you compare the effort required to a) get into the plant or waste dump and b) get the harmful material and c) do something harmful with it it would seem that there are easier ways to cause serious damage to the country. I would imagine that something like simultanious gas attacks (like the sarin attack in Japan) would be more of a concern because it would be easier to pull off.
One of the reasons for going ahead with Yucca mountain is that it would be much easier to secure the waste if it was all in one place. Right now it is stored all over the place. Something needs to be done about it but the fight against Yucca was pretty ugly and I don’t know what ever happened with that. The containers that they use to ship the waste are pretty indestructable. I know a guy who worked on the design and they tested the heck out of those things.
I would think the biggest security issue would be the plant itself. If terrorist got in and caused a delibrate meltdown that could be ugly. I’ll have to ask my Dad how hard it would be to make a plant melt down. So the plants would need really good security. I imagine that they have it already but I seem to remember some people getting into a nuc plant as a protest. I did find an article about people getting access to nuc plants but they were in the 1970s through the early 1990s. I also found an article that the NRC has increased security requirements for nuc plants. I really don’t know about the physical security issues.
Slee
I quite agree, and have thought so for a very long time. I agree with regret the second statement as well.
My memory of TMI was that we’d dodged a bullet. It wasn’t a disaster or a tragedy, but it was a monumental fuck-up that could have turned into something much worse than it was. I don’t recall the mainstream media protraying it as anything other than a near-miss caused by arrogance, ignorance and laziness, especially in the management ranks of the company that owned the power station. The over-reaction that resulted was caused largely by the nearly simultaneous release of “China Syndrome.” In fact, TMI would have taken its proper place among very close calls, people would have been disciplined and the safety procedure books rewritten, except that “China Syndrome” came along and scared the hell out of everybody. As moviemaking, it did a great job of emotionally manipulating the audience, but the American public is just dumb enough to equate Hollywood with reality, and the two became forever entwined in the American consciousness. I sometimes think that if a fire had broken out in the World Trade Center the same week “Towering Inferno” was released, no more skyscrapers would ever have been built.
As for concerns about wind energy, I live just a few miles from a huge wind farm, perched on what we call the Peetz Table near the Colorado-Nebraska state line. The land it’s built on isn’t good for anything else except maybe growing wheat, and that’s such a gamble any more that it just doesn’t make economic sense. Farmers living nearby say there’s little or no noise, since the turbines turn only when a steady wind is blowing, and the only thing you can hear is the sound of the wind in your ears. I don’t think anyone out here is concerned about a few birds, since the major migratory flyway hereabouts is along the South Platte, a good 15 miles from the wind farm. Of course, red-state attitudes being what they are, even if the things killed hundreds of starlings and wrens every day, nobody would much care.
Actually, I think the fossil fuel plants receive plenty of subsidies of their own. If governments stopped giving coal plans a free pass on environmental protection rules (i.e. grandfathering old plants so it’s cheaper to keep a rusty old monster running than build a new one) and started charging the full cost of externalities (such as so2 and co2 emissions), then that would be pretty much all that’s needed. Of course, that would make power noticeably more expensive, so it probably won’t happen.
Just to make clear the impact of big fossil fuel plants, take a look at this article on the top greenhouse emitters in the UK. On the numbers they present, the Drax station alone is putting out co2 equal to over two million households.
Incidentally, when it comes to long-term storage of hazardous waste, I’ve often wondered why they don’t just periodically gather together all the stuff sitting in temporary facilities, stuff it all into a plant they are decomissioning, and wall it up inside a big pyramid made of reinforced concrete. The one Cheops had built with bronze age technology has lasted four and a half thousand years, and surely it can’t cost much more than hollowing out mountains or whatever. Plus we’d have some new pyramids!
Yes, but all the interesting stuff was looted thousands of years ago. King Tut isn’t notable for anything he accomplished in his lifetime, but that his cache of stuff was surprisingly intact when discovered in 1922.
I suppose you could built a pyramid or a dome or something out of poured concrete, so any intrusions would be immediately obvious.
I was thinking more along the lines of ‘durable impervious structure suitable for embedding stuff in you didn’t want rattling about the countryside for a few hundred years’ rather than ‘super-high-security’, but it’s all good.
silenus’s post (#30) really got me to thinking. At first I thought :smack: , but the idea keeps sneaking into my frontal lobe.
So why not just send it all to White Sands and China Lake, a couple of huge places already lost to us, and just leave it there. Abandon all hope so to speak. Getting the stuff there is still problematic, but that always will be.
We would, of course, need to take precautions against hurricanes and such.
Am I missing something?
Peace,
mangeorge
Yeah…I am in total agreement with you. Hence, the carbon tax, although I agree that other things like strengthening the new source review laws…or phasing out the grandfathering altogether as you suggest…is also needed. There is no doubt that coal power plants have killed a hell of a lot more people so far than nuclear power plants.
Well, considering that you can visit the spot where the tower that held the first atomic bomb sat, I don’t think that White Sands is ‘off-limits’ nor a good place to store the waste. There is radioactivity but unless you decide to stay there for a long time it isn’t going to hurt you.
Second, you want the waste in a place that you believe isn’t a) going to change much for the forseeable future and b) has little or no underground water activity. I am not sure if White Sands or China La
Well, considering that you can visit the spot where the tower that held the first atomic bomb sat, I don’t think that White Sands is ‘off-limits’ nor a good place to store the waste. There is radioactivity but unless you decide to stay there for a long time it isn’t going to hurt you. You get about .5 to 1 milliroentgen for an hour at ground zero. The average adult recieves ~ 90 per milliroentgen per year.
Second, you want the waste in a place that you believe isn’t a) going to change much for the forseeable future and b) has little or no underground water or geological activity. I am not sure if White Sands or China Lake would fit.
Slee
And now guess what? George Bush is on your side, Der Trihs! From today’s NY Times: "“Let’s quit the debate about whether greenhouse gases are caused by mankind or by natural causes; let’s just focus on technologies that deal with the issue,” Mr. Bush told workers at the Limerick Generating Station, a nuclear power plant here in Montgomery County. “Nuclear power will help us deal with the issue of greenhouse gases.”
See the article here (registration may be required).
And you know what happens when you’re on the same side of an issue as George Bush? Mental China Syndrome!
Oh well, back to the tunnels.
So Mr. Bush is willing, although reluctant, to accept nuclear power as a lesser of evils compared to global warming. I knew he was a closeted environmentalist all along.
I certainly concede this is a major, major problem, and it gives me great pause even though I’m strongly pro-nuke. But given the OP (or at least the OP’s link), the question is: Is poor long-term storage of nuclear waste a greater risk to the world than global warming? It seems quite unlikely that this would be true. I think we must opt for the lesser evil.
You sound like a LaRouchian (although I doubt you are). If there’s one thing that can make a dedicated pro-nuker like myself hate nuclear power, it’s LaRouchians and those who think and talk like them.
I’ve read a book carefully analyzing the Three Mile Island accident twenty years later written by a former NRC expert who is as clearly pro-nuke as I am. True, there was only a trivial amount of radioactivity released and zero uptick in cancers and such. In that sense – and in that sense only – TMI was indeed grossly overhyped (but again, that’s just the norm for news coverage). Yet the truth is that the accident was far, FAR worse than anyone believed or even imagined at the time. The reactor did indeed melt down and the safety systems were dangerously inadequate. It was purely a matter of mere luck that there wasn’t a lethal release of radioactivity.
So please don’t downplay TMI to such an excessive degree. It merely makes us pro-nukers seem like industry con-men or dupes.
See my reply to Sam Stone, above. While I’m strongly pro-nuke, I must insist that the only reason TMI had zero casualties was pure luck. We simply must not downplay TMI or the risks of nuclear power too much. We can only rationally argue that the relative risks are lower than other forms of energy generation when all things are considered. And society must agree to accept those risks.
No, it means he’ll screw up my side like he screws up everything else. It’s what he does.
Bush is not the sort of person I want on my side; he’s the sort I want on the other guy’s side.