New Nuclear Power Plants in the next 5 years 850
Guinnessy writes "As oil, coal, and gas become increasingly expensive, energy utilities take another look at nuclear power. The nuclear reactor builders are jostling for business as more than 26 plants may be ordered or constructed over the next five years in Canada, China, several European Union countries, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and South Africa. Companies in the US and UK may order an additional 15 new reactors. Physics Today magazine has a global roundup of the new plants on construction, and how the builders are getting around some of the potential road blocks in their path. I'm sure many slashdot readers would be surprised to know that some new plants will be coming online so soon."
Move towards wind or hydro. (Score:1, Interesting)
While economics may dictate that we head towards nuclear power before wind, solar or hydro power, for instance, we should really be skipping ahead. Putting more research towards power generation from renewable resources may in the end prove to be a far better investment.
It is likely that we will see nations like Denmark and Canada, which have put significant resources towards wind, hydro, solar, tidal, and other renewable energy sources, surge ahead in the long run. Nations that have put their efforts behind nuclear power will find themselves in the same boat as we are in today with coal, oil and natural gas power plants.
New Nuclear Reactors (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm all for new fast reaction nuc plants for now.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Ideally, I'd like to see home or neighborhood sized power generation. This would DRASTICALLY reduce the total amount needed due to loss in transmission lines. I read somewhere that this nears 50% of what's generated.
Since the "waste" of a fuel cell running on hydrogen is heat and water, wouldn't it be great to water the garden with that waste product, and perhaps cool the fuel cell using a heat transfer coil that used that heated water to warm the pool, or pre-warm that hot water for the house? Obviously its not perfect and you'd probably generate less heat than you need overall -- but every bit counts, right?
I've wanted to do this with a home air conditioner for a long time. Why not cool the condenser with water using a heat exchanger and dump that heat to the pool?
Go ahead... put it in my back yard (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Move towards wind or hydro. (Score:1, Interesting)
Except that the worst estimates say that if we switched over to 100% nuclear today, we'd have about 100 years of fuel for the most basic power plants. With all the nuclear technology we've developed, we could easily breed many times that amount of material. So we're pretty much set for the next few hundred years.
If we run out, it *is* possible to mine nuclear materials from elsewhere in the solar system. This is a much more difficult thing to do with coal and oil. Thus given the options at our disposal, nuclear is the best option with the longest possible life.
Re:Nuclear Waste? (Score:2, Interesting)
Good, we need nuclear power (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Move towards wind or hydro. (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, the other power sources you mention have a long way to go before they have a chance of being a viable replacement. Wind and solar power especially are extremely expensive and inefficient. In fact I seem to recall that solar power actually costs more to produce than the electricity is worth. Hydro power is an established enough technology, of course, but you kinda need a giant dam and a big river for it to work.
Re:When do materials for nuclear plants run out? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When do materials for nuclear plants run out? (Score:4, Interesting)
Thing is, we aren't really prospecting for radioactives very hard. Oil's very profitable, so we're looking for it pretty hard.
Like any mineral resource, to include oil and such, there's several points for when you talk about how much is available. The two factors are the cost of extracting, and the difficulty of prospecting.
I'll use oil as an example. When you see figures for 'oil reserves' and remaining oil, it's generally the amount available at a certain price point. This is because it costs money and resources to extract. Certain fields almost spit it out, and then you have things like oil shale, where you have to really work at it. So it might cost $2 a barrel to extract from a Saudi Oil field, while it costs $60 a barrel to extract from Canada's oil shale fields. Thus, when they talk about the world's oil reserves, they generally don't include the shale fields.
Then you have prospecting. Nobody really looks very hard when Oil's at $10 a barrel, but when it's at $60 people tend to look very hard for additional sources.
As a third point, as the resource increases in value, technology for extracting the resource is developed. The very shale methods were developed around WWII due to the need for resources because fighting made many areas unsuitable. More recent innovations is being able to bend while drilling wells, thus being able to reach more fields economically.
As far as uranium and plutonium goes, we've discovered enough of it that we don't have to worry about it for the short term, due to a relativly intense search after WWII.
As price increases, more mines become economical, and prospecting increases. Uranium is relativly difficult to find compared to coal and oil.
Per This site [americanen...ndence.com] using known sources they figure that we could last for almost a thousand years using conventional reactors. If we go to more fuel efficient reactors such as breeders, this can be extended into the tens and hundreds of thousands of years.
It's just that you might have to accept $500/kg uranium rather than $40/kg as it was as of the survey. This would translat to a few more cents per kw/hour of electricity. Fuel for a nuclear plant is actually one of the smallest expenses. Labor is the largest. Going with breeder reactors would, of course reduce the fuel cost.
For that matter, we're looking into reprocessing the waste from our current reactors again. The older stuff has had enough time to cool down to make this alot easier.
Re:I'm all for new fast reaction nuc plants for no (Score:2, Interesting)
Problem of H2 generation: solved.
Re:I remember the 1950s. (Score:3, Interesting)
In france, 80% of electricity come from nuclear power, they also have one of the most extensive and electisied railway (railroads if your American) networks in the world. Therefor most of their many trains are effectivly nuclear trains. Sure, the reactor isn't actually onboard the train but what difference has it made? A bit more infastructure maybe, still far less overall cost per passanger mile than a modern highway.
More to the point, how well technology has progressed compared to predictions, depends entirely on what predictions you use. There have been countless predictions made in teh past, its incorrect to lump them together as societies 'prediction of the time'. Taking your example of computers, some people may have said they would do more by now, but a lot of people said they would be able to do far less.
I mean the end of Moore's law has been forcast by many since the early 80s, even now the field is well and truly split as to whether Moore's law will still apply in 10 years time. It would therefor be incorrect in 10 or 20 years to look back with hindsight and say "everyone thought Moores law would hold" or "everyone thought Moores law would fail", which is what is being said about predictions made in the 50s.
Re:coal (Score:3, Interesting)
Truth is, we are not particularly rational about such things as a culture. The anti-tech, anti-nuclear movment of the 1960's didn't help matters one bit, by training an entire generation of people to baseless fear of anything "nuclear".
Re:When do materials for nuclear plants run out? (Score:5, Interesting)
For use in the most common reactors you need to have a 5:95 mix of uranium-235:uranium-238 , but uranium ore is only 1% U-235, and the rest is U-238. So out of a batch of 100kg of ore you'll get ~1kg of U-235, so only ~10kg of reactor fuel.
The rest of the uranium-238 is depleted uranium waste; it's not pleasant stuff and we've got a whole bunch of it (the US alone has hundreds of thousands of tonnes) lying around. Going at the rate we're mining uranium ore we have, apparently, around 50 years of enrichable uranium ore left.
But uranium-238 isn't waste, at least not to a breeder reactor; when it accepts a neutron it becomes plutonium-239, which is a fissile fuel. In fact 1/3 of the power generated, even in conventional nuclear reacors, is from fission of plutonium-239 produced from uranium-238.
Basically put lots of uranium-238 into a reactor with a radioactive fuel which gives off a load of neutrons, and you're turning nuclear 'waste' back into nuclear fuel!
Fast breeder reactors use plutonium as the initial charge to get non-enriched uranium going (remember plutonium is produced in the reaction, so no worries about plutonium running out), and thermal breeder reactors use thorium, which is about as abundant as lead, to keep it going.
Using breeder reactors we've got all the nuclear fuel we'll possibly need; apparently in the range of 10,000 to five billion years worth. Also because actinide waste products are reprocessed and reused the spent fuel is less harmful, either being stable, or very unstable and having a short half-life (thus decaying and becoming stable).
This isn't science fiction either; Russia is using a breeder reactor at the moment, and India and China are planning to build their own (India is where most of the world's Thorium is so it's a natural choice for them). The reason it's not widely used is because it's slightly more expensive than using 5% uranium-235, and why use an expensive process when you can use a cheaper one.
So basically although electricity may get slightly more expensive we'll always have it available from breeder reactors. For me the real mystery is why environmentalists aren't crazy about this, taking nuclear waste and generating energy and non-radioactive waste? Sounds like an environmentalist's dream, but I guess they just can't see past the N-word.
Re:When do materials for nuclear plants run out? (Score:3, Interesting)
The world supply of recoverable uranium is enough to last for around a thousand years, and that's with the current crop of horribly inefficient fission plants we're running now. If we reprocess the fuel using breeder reactors, multiply that by about a hundred-- and the waste storage problem is essentially eliminated as an added bonus.
Re:Nuclear waste is scary but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there any reason why nuclear waste cannot be recycled?
Just encase it in leaded glass, and insert that into a subduction zone, where it will safely be heating the planet's magma along with lots of naturally occurring radioactive material. In a few hundred thousand years it will reappear, diffused to the weaker levels that we see in volcanic lava, or as part of a plate edge upwelling from the planetary interior.
In any event, it will be well away from contact with the biosphere for a length of time suitable for it to become reasonably neutral. No problems with constructing a repository that must securely contain it for the hundred thousand years needed for it to radiate itself down to tolerable levels.
Of course, it's no small feat to plant nuclear waste in a subduction zone -- but neither is it impossible, either. Look at the depths we drill of oil at. Surely a platform above a subduction zone trench that guides the packages downward and plants them (via a teleoperated digging machine) deep enough into the ocean floor to launch them on their way without posing a severe threat to the environment can be devised.
And once "planted", the radioactive waste should be pretty much unreachable by terrorists. Seems like a winning plan to me. Anybody see anything wrong with it?
Re:Mr Burns Aside (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll dispute that.
Nuclear Power Safer Than Peanut Butter [mikelietz.org]
Even including chernobyl, nuclear power is safer per kilowatt/hour than any other source(except maybe hydro).
I mean, you have to be a total idiot in not following procedures to get yourself killed even in reprocessing operations.
Re:I remember the 1950s. (Score:3, Interesting)
Was they guy who mass produced the infamous 'i survived three mile island' t-shirts an operative for the 'fossil fuel' industry? nope! just a capitialist looking to cash in on a fad!
and you know what, the fact that not a single person was injured in three mile island mattered to anyone. just the fact that a nuclear core could overheat and potentially go critical, that part of the early warning system failed, but that the fail safes managed to create a dicey, but controlled situation, where they were left no choice but to vent radioactive gasses into the atmosphhere after an ordered evacuation. well, the whole situtaion was controleld and handled remarkablly well, nothing like the slipshod handling of chernoble that the russians had to deal with.
That was all it took to 'doom' atomic energy in the united states. everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and not a single person died.
So because we had an awesome system that could prevent an atomic catastrophy like chernoble from occuring, even when the equipment failed, it was deemed unsafe by the public because we 'evacuated' people just 'to be on the safe side.' hey, atomic energy proved that if you put in the right people to do the job it Is safe. and Even with the right people, it's cheap! even if you consider the cost of building a 'long term' storage site the cost per killowatt hour is still far below 6 cents per killowatt hour.
and then there is the fact that apparently spent fuel rods can be 'recycled' into new fuel rods, and take up signifigantly less 'storage' space thanks to advances in robotics, etc. fission power is also the only source of energy that the longer we wait to tap it, the 'less' there is to tap (due to atomic decay) if recycling programs retrieved even 50% of spent fuel rods that would double the world supply of uranium (and there is PLENTY of uranium to be mined and refined yet)
I love eco friendly power, and frankly I can't imagine anything More ecologically friendly than atomic power. sure it takes some care and some precuation, but the science is good, it's proven, the technology is mature, we know how to build reactors and how to certify them. we know what level of staffing efforts it takes to train people to keep atomic energy facilities safe. Many many sites are projected to reach end of life, if we don't rebuild our atomic infrastructure and expand it, we're in serious trouble.
and we can even locate the plants many many miles away from 'major population centers' just to keep the 'scared public' from worrying. in smaller less populated areas the safety and benefits of atomic power can be more easily 'sold' to the residents... even if the 'power' is being sold to 'large communities' hundreds of miles away through high efficiency transmission lines. if the state of 'texas' can supply electricity to california, then it should be no problem to find plenty of suitable locations to place as many reactors as we need to provide lots and lots of cheap, atomic energy. and if we're looking for a 'cheap' fix for the 'oil and coal' addiction, well, converting more of the grid to atomic power would be the 'easy' answer.
Re:coal (Score:3, Interesting)
In other words, ignoring the 97% recyclability of the uranium, the fly ash would only need a 120 parts/million density to 'generate' the same volume of radioactivity as a nuclear power plant. Even if you further presume that this radioactivity is pure uranium, and take into account that it takes 200tones of 'natural' uranium to produce the 24 tones of enriched uranium You've still got something only half as 'rich' as the lowest quality uranium ore that is normally mined -- and the Uranium ore is likely to have rich 'veins' where most of the uranium will be found, as opposed to the fly ash which will be very uniform.
In other words, even though it may have 'a lot' of uranium in it, the volume of fly ash is too huge to make it worth refining.
This is also an exercise in how much garbage the average coal plant produces.
Re:Thorium (Score:4, Interesting)
The nuclear industry uses too much science fiction - put a fraction of the advertising budget into that project in India and you may see more science instead.
Re:coal (Score:5, Interesting)
They're talking totals. They're counting the fuel rods still sitting on site in the plant's pool. Plants don't actually get decommisioned that often. They can store between 20-40 years production on site. Generally they can store 10-20 years waste in their pool alone. After that solutions vary. Some use above ground containers.
Apparently the nuke waste, since fly ash is used in concrete construction.
Concrete locks the stuff up and people aren't eating it. You could turn my sand into glass and nobody'd be able to tell a thing. Without some extreme scientific equipment.
We already get 15% of our grid power from nukes. Why do you need more plants for this comparison?
Because all our plants are of different, unique designs. This drives costs up. I'm talking about building a few dozen of the same type, so they can share those engineering expenses.
Tell you what, how about we remove Price-Anderson protection from nuke plants and require them to pay for their own waste storage (and insurance of same), and then do a comparison?
Hmm.. Price-Anderson's [wikipedia.org] 'protection' is simply a government mandated insurance co-op with a cap of 10 billion. Each plant provides 300 million of individual insurance. Only if the 10bil cap is exceeded does the fed.gov step in, and they tend to do so regardless for any disaster in the billions. Enacted in 1957, the individual insurances have only had to pay out $151 million, of which $70 million was TMI. The DOE has paid out $65 million, for reasons not listed. It could have been earlier, before the act was modified to establish the collective, and when the private insurance was only $50 million or so. Personally, I'd simply keep upping the collective amount. This would be easier with even more plants to pay into it.
As for the waste storage, I'm sure the power companies would love to take care of it themselves, they're being charged $.001 per kilowatt/hour [esmeraldanvnuke.com] for yucca mountain.
Given that wind power is growing at 25-35% per year, however, it looks like we'll get a good impression of how practical it is in the not-too-distant future anyway.
Survival of the fittest! Great idea. Love it if it works out, but I'm not holding my breath. Wind is so small even now that 25% growth isn't difficult. Kinda like when you only have 1 tower up. When you put the second up you've just doubled capacity. Doubling it's market share would be a better accomplishment.
Perhaps one of the new cheap solar techs we hear mentioned now and again will become practical, also. Since sunshine and AC load correlate pretty highly, powering one's AC from such a system takes care of the intermittent power production issue.
If it wasn't for the fact that I live so far north that my annual AC needs are like 1 week a year, I'd consider it too.
don't downplay nuclear waste (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Nuclear waste is scary but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Where it is effectively diluted throughout the entire airspace, and that most likely means it presents less of a risk of radiation poisoning than the concentrated stores of spent nuclear fuel that are associated with traditional nuclear power plants.
There's plenty of other nasty things in coal smoke, like carcinogens, which I would imagine present a much more real danger than trace amounts of radioactive material.
Re:Here we go again (Score:3, Interesting)
A large majority of pollution controls are never tested for efficiency. Large sources like power plants, however, are regularly tested (usually at least once every 5 years).
Aside from that, controls to remove NOx/SOx may not be appropriate for removing metals. NOx is usually removed using SNCR/SCR (selective [non] catalytic reduction). You push a bunch of ammonia into the exhaust stream, heat it up (>2000 degF typically), maybe pass it over a vanadium or platinum catalyst, and you get N2/H20. This process will do little to remove metals from the exhaust stream, as no materials are actually removed from the exhaust.
SOx is generally controlled via flue gas desulfurization, which involves throwing a lime (typically) solution into the exhaust stream, which will absorb the SO2. This process will also capture particulates, including metals, but in general an ESP or other wet scrubber will have removed most of the particulate prior to this treatment. Mercury is generally emitted in the gas phase from coal firing, and I'm not as familiar with mercury emission controls. EPA studies indicate that elemental mercury in the vapor phase is difficult to control. Use of SCR will oxidize the mercury, which allows for some removal in a wet scrubber system.
Mans inability to manage/protect it (Score:2, Interesting)
What concerns me even more is security. One of the planes for 9/11 flew right over Indian Point which was a target if they could not make it to WTC. Yet little has been done to secure Indian Point or the spent fuel pools should any form of attack from land or air occur.
This is one area I agree with the French who are smart enough to put the military and anti-aircraft batteries at the nuclear plants due to threats of terrorism. Despite the public outcry the administration is unwillingly to do what is necessary to secure our nuclear power plants and our borders.