NPR Story on the Future of Nuclear Power 353
deeptrace writes "The Living on Earth show on NPR recently had a segment on the future of Nuclear Energy. The nearly hour long show is available as an mp3 and in transcript form. It talks about hot fusion, cold fusion, and Pebble Bed Reactors. It provides a well balanced and informative overview of progress towards their use for future nuclear power generation. Most interestingly, they talk with Dr. Pamela Boss and Dr. Stanislaw Szpak at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego. Dr. Szpak says of their cold fusion experiments: 'We have 100 percent reproducible results'."
100%? (Score:5, Insightful)
100% success or 100% failure?
Re:100%? (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words: they are getting fusion, but their means of getting it is (currently) worthless for energy production.
Excess heat & Cold Fusion (Score:5, Interesting)
The amount of excess heat is usually about a few Watts per square centimeter of palladium electrode.
During some experiments this excess heat is believed to achieve much higher value:
One event described here which is not described in the technical literature is an extraordinary 10-day long heat-after-death incident that occurred in 1991. News of this appeared in the popular press, but a formal description was never published in a scientific paper.
Mizuno says this is because he does not have carefully established calorimetric data to prove the event occurred, but I think he does not need it. The cell went out of control. Mizuno cooled it over 10 days by placing it in a large bucket of water. During this period, more than 37 liters of water evaporated from the bucket, which means the cell produced more than 84 megajoules of energy during this period alone, and 114 megajoules during the entire experiment. The only active material in the cell was 100 grams of palladium. It produced 27 times more energy than an equivalent mass of the best chemical fuel, gasoline, can produce. I think the 36 liters of evaporated water constitute better scientific evidence than the most carefully calibrated high precision instrument could produce. This is first-principle proof of heat.
A bucket left by itself for 10 days in a university laboratory will not lose any measurable level of water to evaporation. First principle experiments are not fashionable. Many scientists nowadays will not look at a simple experiment in which 36 liters of water evaporate, but high tech instruments and computers are not used. They will dismiss this as "anecdotal evidence."
It is a terrible shame that Mizuno did not call in a dozen other scientists to see and feel the hot cell. I would have set up a 24-hour vigil with graduate students and video cameras to observe the cell and measure the evaporated water carefully. This is one of history's heartbreaking lost opportunities. News of this event, properly documented and attested to by many people, might have convinced thousands of scientists worldwide that cold fusion is real. This might have been one of the most effective scientific demonstrations in history. Unfortunately, it occurred during an extended national holiday, and Mizuno decided to disconnect the cell from the recording equipment and hide it in his laboratory. He placed it behind a steel sheet because he was afraid it might explode. He told me he was not anxious to have the cell certified by many other people because he thought that he would soon replicate the effect in another experiment. Alas, in the seven years since, neither he nor any other scientist has ever seen such dramatic, inarguable proof of massive excess energy.
Here is a chronology of the heat-after-death event:
Total evaporation equals:
Re:Excess heat & Cold Fusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Weren't Pons and Fleishman from Utah? Humidity there is typically under 4%. I once watched
Re:Excess heat & Cold Fusion (Score:4, Funny)
100% BS - maybe? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I had a portable fusion generator, the first thing I would do is hook one up to my house and disconnect myself from the electric company so I wouldn't need to pay electric or heating bills anymore. The next thing I would so is start selling "long life" battery systems, or "super duper efficient" heating systems to fund my research. Considering that this is the last thing they are doing, even after having 8 years to study it - my BS alarm is ringing like wild. They wouldn't happen to be seeking big government funding would they? Hmmmm.
"Cold Fusion" isn't really an accurate name (Score:5, Funny)
Hold the exception for solar (Score:3, Funny)
Stars may look easy, but have you ever tried making one? Just figuring out where to put all the hydrogen you'll need is a major logistics headache. And don't even get me started on the nightmare Environmental Impact Statement you have to fill out. Face it, if the sun hadn't just been there by chance, we never would have gotten the funding / permits needed to buil
Crystal or Sonic? (Score:4, Informative)
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
1) "Hot" fusion works, but a practical solution is always 20 years away. (However, they then go on to say that the current target date for a workable solution is 2050 -- 44 years from now.)
2) "Cold" fusion is not quite dead yet. A small group of researchers claims fusion is taking place with a mechanism requiring "new physics",
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
NPR is still a long way from advocating nuclear power.
Seems to me, this is NPR doing its job of presenting an issue in a balanced manner. No, they're not advocating anything here. They're just informing.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the trouble with balanced journalism, a great many people find listening to an opposing point of view unbearable.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
NPR is not an advocacy group (Score:5, Insightful)
NPR is a media organization. Their focus is on public discussion, information dissemination, and issue analysis. As such, NPR is much more useful, and threatening to the status quo, than they would be if they were a politicized organization such as MoveOn.org or the American Heritage Foundation. (And yes, I did mean the American Heritage Foundation.)
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is where it's been since we started thinking about it: 40-50 years from now. Fusion, real controlled commercially viable fusion power, as opposed to just an interesting source of neutrons, is fantasically difficult. Hell, forget the difficulty of actually sustaining the reaction; we don't even have a good idea of what materials to build the reactor out of; over the life of the reactor vessel, every single atom in it will be struck and displaced by neutrons up to 500 times, and that does very bad things to all known materials; austinitic steels start to swell and degrade after only 30 dpa, and the best candidates we know of can only handle 150 dpa. And ITER doesn't even come close to generating the number of neutrons necessary to test these things in a reasonable time frame; there's another facility due to be built to explore this single issue, but there's not even a completed design yet, let alone an ECD.
So we don't even know what to *build* a real fusion reactor, as opposed to a test vessel, out of, and we haven't even spoke of how difficult the actual fusion process is to get useful energy out of. Brehmstrallung losses mean that, really, D-T fusion is the only real candidate, so all those fancy aneutronic schemes that enable you to extract energy directly from charged particles, and all the non-equilibrium schemes, will result in a net energy loss.
Fusion isn't just hard, it's *really really really* hard. By comparison, the Manhattan Project was just a trivial engineering problem. There are aspects of fusion power, like that materials issue I mentioned, for which a solution just might not exist.
but the economics are vastly overstated and there's no disposal solution.
There are plenty of disposal solutions. The amount of nuclear waste generated per unit of electricity is absolutely piddling. You could take the stuff and dump it into a subduction zone, or even just into some random abyssal trench, and you'd end up doing far less environmental damage than we're doing right now with fossil fuels, for which the "disposal solution" is "vent the waste directly into the atmosphere." Just because a cost is widely distributed, doesn't make it any less of a cost. Just because you kill people all over the planet, instead of just around the power plants, doesn't mean they're any less dead.
Re:Great! (Score:4, Funny)
Just use unobtainium like they did in the movie "The Core"... It actually gets STRONGER with heat and pressure.
If more scientists went to the movies I think we would be much farther along.
Probably not subduction zone disposal . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, many countries have banned dumping radioactive waste into the sea under the London Convention [londonconvention.org]. The United States signed it in 1998, but it hasn't been ratified yet.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But the uranium! (Score:5, Insightful)
1) As energy prices rise, "economically recoverable" changes.
2) This ignores seawater uranium recovery, which contains thousands of years worth at current consumption rates.
3) Non-breeder reactors burn 0.7% of uranium down to about 0.35%, so they're using about 0.35% of the mass. A good breeder will burn 95% of the mass of the uranium.
4) There's also thorium breeders.
Realistically, we're looking at thousands of years even as energy consumption grows.
Re:But the uranium! (Score:3, Interesting)
We don't want to use breeder reactors today (bacuase of the risks associated with enriched ur
Re:But the uranium! (Score:3, Interesting)
High estimate, but even with this what happens when you increase your nuclear power generating capacity by more than an order of magnitude? The answer is that the high quality fuels which currently result in carbon production of only one third of that of gas turbines (yes, it's rock that has to be mined and processed) runs out and the lower quality stuff that requires more resources to turn into fuel is used.
As for breeders - find out ab
Re:But the uranium! (Score:3, Interesting)
If you have ample high-temperature nuclear power, you can make hydrogen at 70% efficiency, and thus
Re:But the uranium! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great! (Score:2)
Nucular. It's pronounced Nucular. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nucular. It's pronounced Nucular. (Score:5, Funny)
Once again, demonstrating the brilliant reasoning behind my "A Proposal for the Construction of the 'New Orleans Nuclear Power Facility'"
-Eric
Re:Nucular. It's pronounced Nucular. (Score:2)
Pebble Bed reactors (Score:5, Insightful)
I was especially interested to read the following (apart from the funny connotations of the scientists name!)
Sue Ion is the technology director for British Nuclear Fuels. She thinks nuclear energy is becoming more attractive because of the growing concern over greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. Ms. Ion also says pebble beds have an added benefit that can move them beyond the electricity business. The reactors will operate at extremely high temperatures -- not hot enough to melt the fuel, but hot enough to efficiently desalinate ocean water for drinking. And actually so hot they could crack open molecules of water. That would make it possible to manufacture hydrogen.
It would seem that this could kill several birds with one stone - "cleaner" electricity production, a source of hydrogen for motor vehicles and the possibility to make sea water domestically usable. Those seem like massive upsides, what are the downsides?
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on how good operational control and maintainance is. Make the operations manager criminally liable for any negligent activities. Considering that I live near a nuclear power plant and a nuclear bomb plant, I am pretty froggy on the concept. The big part would be making sure that the plants are run effectively, efficently (not the same thing as effective, btw), and safely.
Three Mile Island [TMI] happened due to poor operations control layout and bad UI. There was poor disaster planning and insuffecent communications ability in and out of the plant. Better planning and an effective use study could of taking care of that. I do use studies on how people read reports on supply usuage in their departments. They can do that with how people operate a nuclear reactor. In addition, mandated training on disaster scenarios in a functional trainer mock-up mandated every year would also be advisable.
On the Chernobal accident, it came down to a bureaucracy forging ahead because an incompedent manager made a decision to go ahead with a test because he didn't want to tell his bosses he couldn't due to worry excessively over what could happened. He should of worried more.
Errrr... (Score:2)
Re:Errrr... (Score:5, Informative)
In a nuclear reactor, heat is cheap.
What you're doing with these things is using the heat from the nuclear reaction to boil water, then using the steam to spin turbines and thus turn dynamos to generate electricity. It's a giant steam engine.
Now, if you want to desalinate salt water, one way to do it is to boil the stuff. The salt is left behind, and once the steam condenses you have fresh water. So. Use your nuclear furnace to boil off some salt water from the sea. Direct the hot steam through your turbines. Generate electricity. Then condense the steam in your cooling towers and output fresh water.
There'll be some tricky engineering to be done to make sure you don't get salt deposits clogging up your plumbing, but in principle the idea is pretty sound.
Re:Errrr... (Score:3, Informative)
Instead of water, it uses pyrolytic graphite as the neutron moderator, and an inert or semi-inert gas such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide as the coolant, at very high temperature, to drive a turbine directly.
From this Wikipedia Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor/ [wikipedia.org]
can't use drinking water as primary coolant (Score:3, Informative)
You could still heat exchange from an inert gas to water, however, and m
Re:Errrr... (Score:4, Informative)
What's generally done in nuclear reactors is that the core cooling is done through a sealed loop; the material which flows through the core never actually goes near the steam turbines. It goes out of the core, into a heat exchanger, and then back into the core. That's it. Barring some sort of disaster, it never leaves this closed loop.
This gives you a lot of additional flexibility in terms of what kind of coolant you want to use, too. It doesn't have to be water -- it can be liquid metal (IIRC the French use or used liquid NaK in their breeder reactors) or even some sort of pressurized gas or something more exotic.
Having an open-loop core cooling system just doesn't strike me as a particularly good idea; I do like the concept of using the waste heat from power generation for some actual purpose though, be it desalination or H2 production or whatever, but I think there are lots of ways to do this without opening up the core to the environment.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:4, Insightful)
Use a nuclear reactor to make drinking water - what could possibly go wrong?
Given that the pressurized water heated by the reaction is kept in separate pipes from the water that turns to steam, not much. Any leaks or other issues would cause big enough problems that the last thing you'd worry about is clean drinking water.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:4, Interesting)
What a wasted opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
If my name was Ion, I'd surely name my daughters Anne and Katya (Kat for short).
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:2)
Now the public has Pebble-Bed reactors being sold as a "failsafe, foolproof and risk free" reactor. Do you think Joe average is really going to lo
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:4, Informative)
"We" never made that claim about Soviet reactors. Cherbobyl didn't "blow sky high" anyways. It simply burned.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it did blow "sky high". The boiler overpressurized and exploded. That's why old-style pressurized-boiler systems aren't liked. They have a tendency to explode suddenly. Those same boilers were responsible for quite a few industrial accidents in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The nuclear fuel, however, never exploded. It was merely scattered by the boiler explosion. Had the Chernobyl reactor bunker been properly designed to withstand such an explosion, the mess could have been completely contained. Instead it spread across several miles of nearby area and found its way into the water table. Some of it was carried by winds, but this really wasn't anything different than the hundreds of nuclear bomb tests that had been done in decades past.
One way or another, Chernobyl was a stupid, stupid design. The reactor had insufficient safeguards, the personnel were not fully trained, they performed a fail-safe test by actively overriding the fail-safes themselves (!?), and the fail-safe test was done with no qualified overseerers present. Put it all together, and it spells a recipe for disaster.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, people living in Bavaria (West Germany) and Czech Republic are supposed to have any mushrooms they pick in the forest tested for radioactivity. There are offices in most small towns that will do this service for free (or a small cost).
Here is my supporting research:
http://www.racerocks.com/fungi/fungrad.htm [racerocks.com]
http://www.chernobyl.info/index.php?userhash=1155
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly. Containment structures have saved our collective arses, so to speak, so many times in the US that the concept of building without one seems outright foolish. They work amazingly well. Three Mile Island wouldn't have been a Chernobyl without its containment structure, but it could have been a Chazhma Bay or Windscale sized disaster.
That's why I don't support pebble beds. Their idea is to work economic voodoo thanks to the lack of a containment structure, insisting that their reactor is safe simply because it has a negative void coefficient (produces less power as it gets hotter). Pardon me to all of the people who bring this fact up in every discussion of PBMRs, but whoop-di-doo.
Plus, PBMRs use *graphite* as a moderator. Even if you believe that nuclear grade graphite only erodes instead of burning (even though the Soviets were insistant that it was burning graphite that spread the radioactive plume from Chernobyl), the erosion of a few percent would be bad enough. But it gets worse. Not only is air (with oxygen) the "backup coolant" in the event of a helium leak, but in most designs I've seen, there's water/steam near the main loop, either as a secondary coolant or for hydrogen generation. Steam + graphite = hot h2 = explosion.
I instead would like to see more money being put on reactors that aren't the current buzz - liquid metal breeders, esp. lead and lead-bismuth breeders. As breeders, you recover a hundred times as much energy and leave a small fraction of the waste from a given amount of fuel. Your fuel is automatically entombed in case something goes wrong. Often, the reactor is underground, so the ground acts as extra neutron shielding. The metal typically can circulate through natural convection if necessary. In general, while they have high capital costs, their operation is quite simple. And without needing much fuel or waste disposal, quite cheap to run in general. While China is really pushing for new PBMRs, Russia is pushing for liquid metal breeders.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:3, Informative)
Wait a minute. There are several different issues here.
1: It was impossible for them to explode like a nuclear bomb. Several anti-nuclear gro
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:3, Informative)
I guess you haven't been to Chernobyl lately. The down sides to any nuclear power is its nuclear. It could blow and take a whole lot with it.
When was the last nuclear power plant accident that happened while its operators were following all prescribed safety procedures? Nuclear power is extremely safe, even more so than traditional coal plants. As long as the operators are trained properly, they perform maintenance as required, etc. there isn't much of a problem.
Name me one nuclear power plant accident
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:2)
That's not to say pebble bed reactors aren't a lot safer than current nuclear plants, but that's also because a traditional PWR reactor is a scaled-up s
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:2, Informative)
As far as a danger to the public, we are closer to death every time we get in a car--especially if some idiot is using a cell-phone. Your chances of dying quadruple every time you use that cell phone. You'd be better off driving drunk (.08).
TMI was a public relations disaster, and not much else.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree completely.
Now, prove to me that every nuclear reactor will always be well-designed and that the operators will never make a mistake.
The real problem with nuclear is not health-r
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:2)
To make a modern nuclear planet melt-down you have to know what you're doing and realy want to - and it still wouldn't be anything like as bad as Chernobyl. Fusion plants are
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:2)
Probably not even that. As soon as you began to lose containment the fusion reaction would shut down completely. The temperature would drop like a stone as the gas expanded (PV = nRT and all that) and by the time it actually touched the walls I doubt it would be capable of doing any damage.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:4, Informative)
What do you mean by "explode"? Are you thinking "turn into a nuclear bomb" explode? If so, yah, I agree, but that's mainly because reactors aren't built to be a bomb. Chernobyl did blow up - the boiler definitely exploded. Blew the roof off of the building. Several other things blew up, too. Heck, there was a seismic event recorded near Chernobyl at the same time, so I think it's safe to say there was an explosion.
Three Mile Island was an explosion, too. The core became exposed, boiled away a ton of water (and split it into hydrogen and oxygen), and detonated the resulting hydrogen as well.
If you're trying to say that nuclear reactors don't turn into a nuclear bomb, I'd agree with you. But all reactors that burn things and boil liquid into gas under lots of pressure for electricity can explode.
Now, it's perfectly possible to contain that explosion (using a containment building) but saying "oh, nuclear reactors are safe, they can't explode" is a little false. They can explode, and they would spew a lot of radioactivity. It's just that there are a lot of safeguards built in. Forgetting this means you could end up with a situation like Chernobyl, where the system was built with only partial containment. With a coal reactor, you might be able to get away with that, although it would still make a giant mess. With a nuclear reactor, you absolutely cannot.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd love to see PBRs being built here in the UK. Using them to desalinate sea water would also be an amazing boon; large parts of the UK are already facing drought-like conditions this summer. We're surrounded by water, we should take advantage of that
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:2)
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:4, Insightful)
What? There are plenty of ideas. Encase it in ceramic and concrete and embed it deep in the Earth's crust. Plant it in a subduction zone. Eject it from the planet. Deposit it in an extremely deep oceanic trench. Just because you may not like these ideas doesn't mean they don't exist.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I think these are all bloody awful ideas. In fifty-odd years we'll be running short of the uranium fuel that our current reactors use - and which pebble-bed reactors will also burn. Unless nuclear fusion has really come on by then, at that point we'll begin building breeder reactors - which will burn the waste from the previous generation of plants.
That nuclear waste will suddenly represent an enormous fuel resource. You could probably run the UK for centuries just off the amount of fissile junk stacked up at Sellafield already. And we'll really be kicking ourselves if we've thrown it all into a subduction zone.
Bury it deep, sure - but bury it somewhere it can be dug up if we realise we actually want the stuff someday.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's just kick this "clean" nuclear energy out the window. Nuclear plants produce some of the most toxic substances known to man. (Plutonium comes to mind).
Nuclear power plants keep their waste in shielded rooms deep inside the plant, which are then sealed up and stored so the waste doesn't get released. Coal plants, however, release more radioactive waste into the atmosphere. Coal contains traces of uranium, and as it burns, we get uranium dust in the air. Nuclear power doesn't have this problem. So, let's just kick this "clean" fossil fuel energy out the window. And unless you have a way to use hydro, solar, or wind power to produce as much energy as either fossil fuel or nuclear, we're left with this choice: store our radioactive waste deep underground, release clean steam; or burn massive quantities of coal, release tons of dirty smoke and radioactive particles in the air.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:5, Informative)
Simple sanity check: How's a coal powerplant smokestack filter going to catch thorium oxide if it's not stopping carbon dioxide? The size of the molecules is not significantly different. Additionally, if it is catching those many tons of thorium and uranium, where are all the nuclear waste disposal people dealing with the spent smokestack filters that by onw are surely clogged with tons of radioactive metal compounds?
Don't kid yourself. Nuclear is clean and safe.
Hydrogen power, on the other hand, is idiotic. Releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is fine as long as it comes from a carbon neutral source. If you were producing methanol from plants and burning that in cars (not farfetched, seeing as several racing leagues use it), it would not matter that CO2 was released, because each molecule of CO2 would be one that was taken out of the atmosphere a few months prior to grow the plant feedstock in the first place. The lack of a carbon in H2 is not an advantage. The very real disadvantages of H2, such as difficult of containment and poor energy/volume, still stand.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:5, Informative)
You have no idea what you are talking about. None. What carries radiation in pure H2O? What is it's half life? (Admiral Nimitz [wikipedia.org] once drank reactor water to prove it safe - and still these myths.) The water in most modern reactors never turns to steam - it's used as a heat source to turn a secondary water system to steam to drive turbines and other useful equipment - through heat exchangers - look it up. The reactor water, safe as it is, is never dumped anywhere. It lasts the life of the system.
Here is a nice picture to explain the heat exchange cycle of a presurized water reactor [tva.gov] for you.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:4, Informative)
I cannot describe in words how assine this statement is. Plutonium might not be the worlds most lethal substance, but it's a danm sight more dangerous than everyday toilet bleach. Just ask Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. Well, you could have asked them if they hadn't been killed in plutonium accidents.
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's see... This web page [arizona.edu] lists the LD50 for Clostridium botulinum for mice as 30 picograms per kilogram of body weight, and C. botulinum neurotoxin at 200 picograms/kg. We're so nonchalant about botox that people have parties where they inject themselves with it to get rid of wrinkles. See also this portion of the Wikipedia entry on plutonium. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:3, Informative)
Not much plutonium is mined. About 0% in fact.
Any that was created in stars has long ago decayed. All the plutonium we have now was made in fission reactors. (The first generation of reactors was built specificaly for plutonium manufacture - any electricty was a side product.)
Small Scale (Score:5, Interesting)
Each plant being so big and so custom made to the area, also makes them hard to inspect; each one is different to some degree.
The French have been building small scale N-Plants w/ passive cooling; meaning if something goes wrong it shuts itself down without any need (or room for) equipment failure. (an example being using the pressure from the reaction to hold back water. If there is less pressure or more pressure the water enters an shuts down the plant.
It seems to be passive cooling and uniform construction is key to safety. Building them smaller means there are more of them and they are closer to "you." So not sure how I feel about size. Also there is security risks, more plants to watch equate to more risk.
Re:Small Scale (Score:3, Interesting)
All light water reactors have this system. It is called Safety Injection.
Furthermore, most French reactors are basically identical to most US reactors, they are the same Westin
The major problem is still people. (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that nuclear energy is probably one of the best choices for the future as coal, natural gas and oil run out, but it's got a lot of obstacles to overcome.
Re:The major problem is still people. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The major problem is still people. (Score:4, Insightful)
I guarantee that turning over contol of nuclear facilities to the private sector will immediately trigger the hiring of low-wage bare minimum staffs to save money.
From what I understand, nuclear power plants are owned and operated by the private sector, but are highly regulated. Regulated to the point that they effectively are co-owned by private and public interests. Normally I am all for the free market, but anything involving splitting an atom should have the Energy department heavily involved. Incompetant bureaucracy, money-grubbing business... so far the two seem to cancel each other out.
Re:The major problem is still people. (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you not aware that turning off the powerplants in the US is not an option? Where would you get the energy from? Hurriedly building 1000 water dams or 1000000 windmills? Coalplants? Burning the rapidly dwindling oil? Either way, Electricity prices would multiply by 20 and you'd have an instant major recession.
-Filik
Something needs to do better than conservation (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea of re-using the heat appeals, but worries (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like you're re-using the same heat from that coolant quite a few times. You can't use the coolant directly without the exchanger, I assume, since it would be contaminated -- and what good would desalinated but otherwise radioactive water be to anyone?
Re:The idea of re-using the heat appeals, but worr (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The idea of re-using the heat appeals, but worr (Score:5, Interesting)
For the desalination or hydrogen cracking, I believe they are talking about that being the *primary application* of the reactor. In a place where you need power, you use the heat to make electricity. In a place where you need water, you use it to desalinate. In a place where you need hydrogen, you use it to crack water.
Electricity is great for running stationary objects like buildings, but not so good at vehicles. A storable fuel is better for that.
Consider some seaside urban area that is outgrowing its supply of fresh water. Since these reactors are modular, you could install one reactor to make electricity, one to make water and one to make hydrogen for the cars. The power, water and hydrogen distribution grids are all in place and benefit from economies of scael, and you can share the administrative/training/regulatory overhead of running the reactors.
Need even more power/water/H2? Install another module.
Someday we shall evolve beyond urban myths (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Of Astronauts and rods (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Of Astronauts and rods (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, right now we are sitting in a car with the engine running and the garage door closed. I think we are better off with the revolver.
Re:Of Astronauts and rods (Score:4, Funny)
-Eric
Re:Of Astronauts and rods (Score:3, Interesting)
3 mile island was an econimic desaster but killed no one. Chernobyl caused a notable loss of life, but nothing nearly as bad as recent coal desasters. Given that Chernobyl's design was about as safe as playing hot potato with nitro glycerine, I think nuclear power has a pretty good safety record.
Re:Of Astronauts and rods (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Of Astronauts and rods (Score:5, Insightful)
We should consider it as a learning example, instead of just proof that nuclear energy is unsafe.
The nuclear technicians should learn that.
A) When you run procedures that states minimum of 30 rods down do not run it with only 6.
B) Do not turn off the reactors cooling system.
C) When running tests with powerplant please inform the people that are actually running it that there is a test going on.
The Nuclear Power Plant builders should learn to build the plant according to designes specifications instead of making it like it looks almost reasonably like that.
And people should learn that people at nuclear plants need training.
The finally, the reactor type should be decommissioned as soon as possible since there is inherent design flaw that made it impossible for humans to fix the problem they made during that test.
I think after Chernobyl people are atleast little more carefull here in west than the people responsible for Chernobyl.
56 people have died because of chernobyl and chernobyl related radiation diseases.
4000 people is estimated overall toll. There was over 400 000 people on the effected area.
Oh. And one thing, most people on the toll where within 20 mile radius of the reactor.
Thats from one accidents in many decades. The coal industry is more deadly but the difference is that coal industry has thousands of small incidents that kills, and those doesn't raise the headlines like a single nuclear accident does.
Re:Of Astronauts and rods (Score:3, Interesting)
If that's a "live round", then I'm going to have to say that I'm not very worried.
TMI had a flawed reactor design. The control rods were designed as a single unit. Therefore, when one rod was unable to be reinserted into the reactor, none of them were. Oops. Now we have an unregulated reaction going out of control -- pre
Re:Converting to fusion later? (Score:5, Informative)
Very impractical. The principles are totally different; all they have in common is the word 'nuclear'.
Think about what it would take to refit a coal-fired power plant into a gas-fired power plant. You'd have to rip out and replace the entire furnace. Same with fission to fusion; you might be able to keep the boiler and turbines and so forth, but the heat source - the actual power core - would have to be totally replaced.
Re:Converting to fusion later? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes.
KFG
Re:Converting to fusion later? (Score:2)
It would be a bit like (Score:2)
Re:Check the Source (Score:5, Insightful)
As it turns out, you guessed right that the article was not very balanced, but not he way you thing. The imbalance here stemmed from the way informed criticism of the technology (not of local economic issues) were awarded about one sentence in an great big sales-brochure-like presentation of the proponents' view.
Yes, valid criticisms do exist, and from solid sources too. Google it. Not necessarlily saying they're wnough to tip the scales in the "no-go" direction, but pretending there are none, or that this article was anything close to balanced, is just ridiculous.
And what's "left" about believing in pshychic phenomena, anyway?
Re:Check the Source (Score:2)
Re:NPR (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:NPR (Score:2)
At least it's only 10% of their budget.
Re:NPR (Score:5, Informative)
And as the sibling said, if you think NPR is leftist, your 'left-right' spectrum is way out of whack.
While I personally don't get cable anymore, anyone who does pays for Fox News, whether they like it or not. The only way to not pay for Fox News is to not have cable or satellite, which is a minority of the US.
Re:NPR (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, conservatives believe that *all* media is liberal, with the possible exceptions of Fox News and certain talk radio programs. This fact adds nothing to our understanding of NPR. Note that most people who have actually listened to NPR approve of it. Hence, it is doing its job.
The notion that government should promote conservative values and stifle everything else is arrogant, ignorant, and in the end i
Re:NPR (Score:3, Insightful)
The funny thing is that there are many liberals who feel that NPR is too conservative. Or rather, too corporatist, due to the fact that they've generally given up government money and are now reliant on corporate grants (aka sponsors).
When both sides call a source biased, that's a good indication that they're about as middle-of-the-road as you can get.
Re:NPR (Score:3, Informative)
Indeed. Listen to a my hometown radio station KPFA [kpfa.org] in Berkeley, Ca. for a few hours then you will know what real leftist radio sounds like.
Re:NPR (Score:5, Informative)
Couldn't find any info on an NPR hiring scandal (unless you mean the recent Bush CPB scandal?) Care to provide a link? Or is this a 20-year old canard that you are still holding onto like Chappaquiddick? Also couldn't find anything on a funding scandal so a source there would be helpful as well.
I don't believe Fox is publicly owned.. or did you mean Fox as the 'government-controlled' media source?
Re:NPR (Score:5, Insightful)
NPR managers were deciding on who to hire based on whether or not they were Republicans. Great way to get balanced news, huh?
Well, the Republicans in charge thought that Republican views weren't getting enough airtime apparently, so they wanted to hire more Republicans to call the shots. I've listened to several talk-radio stations, both lefty (which there are very few of) and righty (which are everywhere), and NPR is nothing at all like either type. You'll not find anything like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly from the right, or Thom Hartmann or Jerry Springer from the left. Compared to the righty and lefty stations out there, NPR is the model of balance and journalistic integrity. They regularly have both democratic and republican guests on several of the shows. They have shows like Justice Talking where you actually get two sides of an argument presented in a manner that doesn't devolve into a Crossfire-esque shouting match like you find on many "news" shows these days. The host puts forth questions and the guests both get some time to answer them. Simple. Fair. Comprehensible. So go ahead and take a shot at them for their funding, but don't even try to compare the level of bias with Fox or any other news organization that hardly even tries to appear balanced.
Of all the people who bash NPR, I wonder how many have actually listened to it for any length of time. It's one of the least biased news sources out there right now. Hell, I know quite a few Republicans that support it. I'm an independent who pretty much fits the bill of the social liberal / fiscal conservative. Needless to say I'm very much frustrated with the current state of both major parties. At least I have a decent radio station to listen to on the way to and from work though. Sure beats Rush or Springer (I can't believe they gave him a political show).
Re:NPR (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm asking this next question in the utmost sincerity:
Are you saying this because of specific misinformation in the piece, or is this a knee-jerk reaction you had without even hearing it?
Re:Prove it (Score:5, Interesting)
Humans can't help but be bias, this is due to them being human.
NPR's news is written and recited by humans.
Therefore NPR is bias.
Bias isn't always obvious and is rarely on purpose. The UCLA study [ucla.edu] on bias found that journalists often will use the WORDING of a story to slant it one way or another. For instance, they'll say that Newt Gengrich "gained notoriety for his time as house leader" instead of saying "he was the house leader." Of course, this is not word for word from the study, please read it before deciding how much you believe it.
Getting back to your request, the study states that NPR does indeed have bias but not much more-so than the average publication such as Time magazine, for instance.
I equate being a partisan to having a mental disorder, due to a study I read [stanford.edu] on how the rational thinking center of the brain of a partisan literally shuts down when exposed to a differing viewpoint. The reason partisan journalists are bias is because they think all facts point towards their viewpoint as "truth."
The brain will cut off information input at some point because if we really knew how many variables we DIDN'T know, we'd never make any decisions. That's why I don't vote
Re:Candu (Score:3, Informative)