I don’t know. Do you think it’s less or more likely than a 9.0 earthquake?
I’ve never associated clean coal with carbon capture, but you’re the coal person. I know little about CCS technology but I have a nodding acquaintance with the scrubbing of CO2 from natural gas by amine contact. Don’t want to hijack too much but I’d love to hear your thoughts on CCS.
My point about “clean coal” was in response to DSeid’s post mentioning natural gas and “less dirty coal” as “lower impact fossil fuels.” Gas I agree with but as far as CO2 is concerned, coal really has issues.
I’d enjoy learning the Straight Dope on it as well. Although from Una’s comment it doesn’t sound too hopeful a story.
Less.
We have evidence, post 9/11, that passengers will take matters into their own hands and rush the bad guys (indeed they did it on 9/11 when the passengers in the last plane learned what was going on). Passengers will no longer sit idly by and wait to be crashed. They’ll take their chances, however slim. Terrorists will not stop a plane load of passengers converging on them. The plane may crash as a result but unless there is a colossal stroke of bad luck it probably won’t land on a reactor.
Further, pilots have new rules about keeping the cabin door closed and those doors have been reinforced. Pilots will likewise not sit idly and allow bad guys in the cockpit to take control of the plane.
If by some means terrorists do take control of the plane countries are wise to this trick. They will have fighter jets on their ass in short order and will never be allowed near a nuclear plant or major city.
This was a one-time trick for the bad guys. They won’t get another chance to do it again.
From a previous post of hers I gathered that CO2 capture techniques can work in a lab just fine but have real problems working on an industrial scale coal plant to the point of being completely impractical.
(grain of salt…I may be remembering wrong)
Okay, but I wasn’t actually thinking about large commercial aircraft.
I’m not sure a private plane would be anywhere near sufficient.
The secondary containment building is nowhere near as strong as primary containment but it is still a steel structure and not exactly weak. I think a private plane would be shredded on the way in.
Remember, just blowing some water out of the pool is not enough. You need to disable the pumps else they will just pour more water on the rods.
With the steel structure of the building and all the miscellaneous junk inside (cranes and walkways and so on) I think a small plane wouldn’t come close to causing major problems. Make a mess sure.
Here is a pic of a small plane that hit a tall building. Didn’t do a whole lot of damage.
I knew I’d read some things about nuclear plant terrorism. Here’s one article:
In-ground pools would be safer, but as we’ve seen, elevated spent fuel pools are common, and they don’t have any special containment other than the concrete of the pool walls.
This is another ding on nuclear power. If we use our military to protect nuclear power plants, shouldn’t the cost of that count as an additional subsidy?
Or, since nuclear power plants are a strategic, military target, would it be so bad to turn over the operation of these plants to the military? We trust them with our ICBMs and nuclear submarines, after all.
We were talking about “design life.” Your comment is irrelevant.
Utterly ridiculous argument. If you expand your power usage, whether it’s fossil, nuke, wind or whatever, you have to expand your grid capacity as well. Wind needs dedicated power lines and a bunch of peak and baseload generators, and ideally pumped storage too, to deal with all the fluctuations. Just wonderful for a developing country on the rise.
If Somalia want to keep to its paltry 80 MW over the next fifty years it can keep on using diesel and the emissions will be too small to worry about. Of course they’ll stay incredibly poor and continue to live as subsistance-farming peasants with short brutish lives, but at least the climate will be safe. But if they manage to increase to, say, 1000 MW over the next half-century (and I hope for their sake it’s a LOT more) then they’ll need to upgrade their distribution whether they have one nuke plant or 1200 wind turbines. Or a coal plant, adding its little bit to the IPCC carbon trajectory.
The IPCC assumes the world is going to DEVELOP over the next century. Subsistance-farming peasants the world over are going to want a bit of electric lighting at night and maybe piped clean water and hell, they might even aspire to more! China is building power plants of all types like crazy at the moment and I suspect it just may be upgrading its grids to go along with that.
What exactly do you expect the 2.5-billion odd people in China and India to do over the coming decades? You think everything’s going to stay the same and the West just has to cut back on its fossil use a little, put up a few thousand wind turbines? The rest of the world is developing and building: houses, roads, factories, power grids. It’s happening. What’s your solution: stop them? Maybe we should bomb them before they get too far along, cull the herd a little?
They are going to need power and if we want it to be carbon-free it’ll be wind, solar or nuclear. As coal gets more expensive, the carbon-free alternatives become more attractive and then countries will have to decide between 1000 MW nuke plants that they can put where they like and last 60 years, vs 500 km2 wind farms that have to be stuck up on hills, need a whole bunch of other hardware for demand-matching, and last 20 years. If those are the choices I’ll absolutely bet the nukes win, and I DON’T like the idea of hundreds of chinese-built Westinghouse copies all over the world in countries with hastily-drawn-up regulations, but that is what we are facing.
This isn’t going away. Our choices are limited. Either we come with better renewables, or we facilitate, supervise and educate the nuclearisation of the world, or we say “screw global warming” and let the fossil carbon burn. Concentrated solar has at least six times and possibly twelve times the area power density of windfarms, which is a big plus. But it doesn’t supply at night so you absolutely need energy storage, and the practical installed costs, lifetimes and maintenance of hundreds of square miles of tracking heliostats are unknowns at the moment. As Magiver said, rich countries with desert need to be building these things yesterday. Not for their power but so we can get the mistakes out the way and work out how to build the next ones and sell them to China and India. Or it might turn out that they simply can’t compete with nuclear - I don’t know.
That was a lucid and thoughtful post, levdrakon. (Just thought that should be recognized.)
The better solution to the spent fuel pools might be to prohibit long term storage outside of special containment. And it’s clear we need better considered short term storage & transportation protocols.
except for the engine a small plane is nothing but glorified aluminum foil.
Also, a small plane like that loaded with explosives could do a lot of damage.
First off these are strong structures. Nuclear plants are designed to withstand earthquakes and hurricanes and tornadoes and so on. The Fukushima plant rode out a 9.0 earthquake fine. It’s tsunami protection was half a meter to short. It took one of the most powerful earthquakes on record to do this and they were close as it was riding it out with no lasting effects.
Yes, it did get slammed. My main point here though is these are not weak structures. They are quite robust.
Second, not all cooling pools are above ground. My (limited) reading suggests BWRs have the pools next to the reactor and are raised. Other designs have the pools in entirely different buildings and in those case they are in the ground.
Third, as noted, these are strong structures. The cooling pool is 40 feet deep. If we assume a 40x20x50 foot dimension that pool is holding 40,000 cubic feet of water. That is 2,497,150 pounds of water being held aloft in a structure designed to not let it fail even in a strong earthquake.
In addition I think the pools are steel lined. They may be open but a cracked bottom where all the water pours out is not something they want. They engineer against such an occurrence.
In short, it will take something substantial to hit one and break it open. I seriously doubt a small plane will suffice (a commercial jet at full speed probably could). Just breaching the secondary containment wall will shred a small plane.
Fourth, when we talk about building new reactors I feel reasonably certain they would think about this and willing to bet all cooling pools at a new reactor would be sufficiently protected. The reactors we are talking about were built many decades ago and they were not thinking about this.
Fifth, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is way ahead of you. They mandated that all US plants implement protection from an air attack which includes the spent fuel pools. They are not saying what those protections entail (understandably) but nuclear power plants have taken steps to beef up the protection in this area.
Never say never I know but if you think it is as simple as one whacko in a Cessna flying into a power plant I think you are hugely mistaken.
An attack sufficient to get a nuclear plant to go critical and cause massive damage would have to be a very substantial attack.
Those hydrogen explosions at Fukushima seemed pretty substantial.
The explosions weren’t the real problem though (not that they helped). It was lack of ability to pump water which was unrelated to the explosions (well, the explosion was the result of not pumping water but pumping water was not stopped because of the explosion).
I doubt a Cessna with explosives could make a bigger boom. They can’t carry that much.
If the Japanese government and the nuclear spokesmen are being open and honest, it will be the first time in history that happened. We will find out after some time how dangerous this whole thing was. But it will not be soon.
The history of disasters shows how often they underplay and lie. The Gulf disaster is a perfect example. BP still is lying about how much oil flowed. The government went along with most of BPs lies.
I’m always talking about what nukes can do now, not what they can do in 50 years maybe. Now is when we’re supposed to be slashing CO2 emissions, not 50 years from now. In 50 years we may well have space elevators that make solar power satellites a trivial expense. We’d get there faster if we would only pump a few more billion into the technology per year. One can dream.
Wow. Um, no. Have you read about what those countries are doing about their energy needs? They aren’t going all nuke, not by a long shot. You’d think they would if they could and it was that easy, wouldn’t you? Why aren’t they? Seriously, we keep our hippies in California, where they belong. China and India don’t have hippies. Why aren’t China and India already powered by 100% nuclear? There’s nothing stopping them, right?
I’m completely with you about concentrated solar. I’ve never said wind is supposed to be the final answer to 100% of our energy needs. I’m concerned about what we can do now. I’m willing to let the world figure out what else to do 50 years from now. There isn’t much I can do about the future except back the clean energy sources I think can eliminate the most CO2 from our diet, starting yesterday.
In the not distant future we will be reserving petroleum derived fuel for much less than we currently use it for. Alternatives will be more cost-effective both because they will be going down in price (in the case of battery electric vehicles due to several factors such as technologic innovation, economies of scale, and commoditization) and because as oil gets farther past peak its cost will increase further. In any case the cost of the electricity to fuel cars with electricity at night in a trough filling fashion, or for that matter to produce hydrogen, would be minimal in, for example, an era of ample nuclear plants providing base power - the reason being exactly that both could accomplish that in a trough filling manner. Running a nuclear plant at full capacity round the clock costs hardly more than running it at full capacity only during peak demand periods; a nuclear plant able to provide close to peak demand will of necessity be underutilized during most of the rest of the day and more so night, and the marginal cost of optimizing that utilization by filling batteries then, or producing hydrogen, would be minimal.
As to the cost - those figures have been provided and it is cheaper than nuclear. The where? Well almost everywhere the wind potential is superior. Wind farms can co-exist with other uses, be they agriculture, or solar farms, or industry, or even, in smaller modified scales, with urban planning. So can solar, just by utilizing factory rooftops. Tied together in a grid intermittency is a much smaller problem as the resources have little co-variance from location to location and solar often varies inversely with wind.
I said “less dirty” and in the context thought it was clear that I was mainly intending lower CO2 coal. Some of that is accomplished just by getting rid of the oldest plants. Some is by doing basic improvements on current ones that Una has frequently bemoaned are not done because the cost incentive is not yet sufficient to motivate it. Capture and sequestration may not work cost-effectively, and Una’s previously informed me that co-firing with biomass is not so easily widely achieved, but there are or perhaps will be other approaches attempted. There is too much coal resource here that the industry will not at least try to develop ways to utilize it.
I don’t think so.
One, you are setting up the straw man of doing it all itself, which clearly is not what I am discussing.
Two, given that wind farms can dual use, as noted above, the objection of “not enough space” is moot.
There are a few issues at work here.
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China is experiencing booming growth. They need power and they need it fast. The US is not in the same boat. Our power needs are relatively stable. We can take a longer view. As gas becomes prohibitively expensive to run our cars (in 30 years give or take a decade) and we, perforce, switch to electric or hydrogen our energy needs will spike dramatically. We’ve got time to plan for it though.
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It is China. Do you think they give a moment’s thought to hippies wanting clean air? Their pollution problems are dramatic. I have seen pictures of rivers that are literally (no hyperbole) black…or red in one case.
Have you seen Chinese air pollution? (lots more like that)
Nothing but nothing will stop China from pursuing economic development. Expensive cleaning on smoke stacks? Forget it.
- As noted earlier China IS building nuclear power plants including trying out a Thorium reactor (cited earlier).
Given their lack of concern over pollution do you think they give a rat’s ass about radiation dangers? The Chinese government has always viewed the lives of its people cheaply (consider the plight of Chinese coal miners…a lethal profession over there).