A $200-Million Floating Nuclear Plant? 453
Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'A Floating Chernobyl?,' Popular Science reports that two Russian companies plan to build the world's first floating nuclear power plant to deliver cheap electricity to northern territories. The construction should start next year for a deployment in 2010. The huge barge will be home for two 60-megawatt nuclear reactors which will work until 2050... if everything works fine. It looks like a frightening idea, don't you think? But read more for additional details and pictures of this floating nuclear power plant."
I would like to point out... (Score:2, Insightful)
I can think of something more frightening (Score:2, Insightful)
Not nearly as freightening as the reactors and fuel they provide for Iran.
No, I didn't appreciate the Chernobyl reference. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nothing new (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Scary? (Score:5, Insightful)
With all the liberal imperialist environmental communists out there screaming because
1. Coal is a non-renewable energy source.
2. Oil is a non-renewable energy source.
3. Natural gas is a non-renewable energy souce.
4. Wave power is too ugly to be built (too lazy to Google for it but Kennedy / Kerry vetoed the idea because it was too close to THEIR vacataion home).
5. Water flow (river) is too unpredictable (and causes environmental damage when you flood blah blah blah).
6. Wind power is too noisy and it kills birdies.
What the hell else do we have?
Solar? Right. Who wants a backyard full of panels? Some people like to BAR-B-QUE in their back yards
I say
Re:Nuclear isn't necessarily scary (Score:5, Insightful)
yes. they produce different sorts of waste products.
Nuclear power doesn't produce much waste, for the amount of energy you get out of it. But the little bit of waste it does produce is really really nasty. The waste is about 90% recyclable into more fissile material, but you need some sophisticated processing plants to do this. And transporting radioactive waste to an from a processing facility is extremely risky, which is why it is preferable to have an expensive power plant with all the processing facilities on site.
I prefer nuclear power over coal and oil. And the environmental impact of nuclear energy is smaller than that of a hydroelectric dam, discounting nuclear accidents, which you should never have. Hydrodams displace many animals and dramatically change the ecosystem for thousands of acres. Old nuclear reactors had pretty significant impact on the local environment too, such as warming of the river/lake/coast they sit on. this is bad, it can have all sorts of impacts on the reproductive cycles of many animals, as well as result in poisonous algae blooms. It is indeed possible to build reactors that are safe and have low environmental impact, they actually do exist.
There is no power source that you will make everyone happy. Crazy environmentalists don't like wind power (kills birds and rare bats), hydroelectric (disrupts the local ecology), coal and oil (nobody likes these), or nuclear (every power plant is a potential Chernobyl)
If oh-so-wonderful France can run 70% of its energy off nuclear power, then why can't the US? In the US we have a lot of lunatics who would rather have coal plants than nuclear plants. I'm assuming Russia, which has always been much more creative in nuclear technology than the US, that the only obstacle to nuclear power is coming up with the money to fund it.
Re:It looks like a frightening idea, don't you thi (Score:3, Insightful)
Naval reactors have a different design than civilian power reactors. They are smaller and require less frequent refueling events because they burn enriched Uranium and produce less average power. The safety record of US naval reactors is good primarily due to a high degree of training and discipline, and design uniformity over long periods. The Soviet navy experienced a number of serious failures.
A floating civilian reactor will probably not burn enriched Uranium, resulting is a much larger core that must be refueled frequently. That it's mounted on a barge will probably mean it has less containment than a traditional civilian power reactor. It will probably not enjoy the same level of discipline of operation.
I don't think one can extrapolate naval reactor safety to these large floating civilian reactors. Apples and oranges.
Re:Safety (Score:2, Insightful)
Umm... this is a slightly different scale of power generation. Those ships and submarines which are nuclear powered have really small reactors. The power (and more importantly pressure) generated in a small Navy sub reactor is "small" compared to this beast. We're talking about TWO full scale reactors on a barge.
While the reactor on a aircraft carrier might provide power for the 1000 crewmen and motors, etc, this scale vessel could power a city. Think about it... what if the government could keep one on reserve in the event of an extended blackout. Or better, what if we could anchor a nuclear barge 50 miles off a foreign shore to power troop deployments? Or to power parts of our enemies country after we take out all their power plants.
Re:Nuclear isn't necessarily scary (Score:3, Insightful)
Nuclear power has problems - but they are all solvable within our technological reach. The problems of irreplacable fossil fuels combined with the bad consequences of dumping CO2 into the atmosphere are not in any way solvable with technologies we currently have - or even expect to have. Windmills, wave power, solar power , biofuels and others aren't likely to produce the quantity of power we expect to need over the coming years. Fusion looks cool - but we can't do it yet.
So whilst nuclear power is *HARD* - it has the huge benefit of not being *IMPOSSIBLE* like all of the other power sources we have.
Re:Safety (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, never to be seen again except for the massive Radioactive Steam explosion [ingentaconnect.com].
Re:No accidents?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Safety (Score:3, Insightful)
powered Tacoma in 1929 for about a month.
here [historylink.org]
She had a turbo electric drive, so she could generate a lot of power.
Re:Nuclear isn't necessarily scary (Score:3, Insightful)
I've often wondered, given the massive amounts of research going into power distribution systems these days, why this energy can't be used in some way. Nuclear reactors, after all, work by heating water. If you could preheat the water using the recently-produced waste, you wouldn't need to drive the main reactor quite so high.
Is it that nobody could be bothered retro-fitting existing reactors with extra pipes and pumps, or is it a matter of diminishing returns?
Re:Nuclear isn't necessarily scary (Score:3, Insightful)
And your evidence for this statement is?
Come on, you must have evidence of at least some risk to suggest it's "extremely" risky.
Re:Hanford was not a power plant (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, like it is better to have a government agency supervising private industry and keeping them in line than it is to have a government operation under 300 layers of secrecy that nobody is allowed to even look at.
The Hanford mess is a result of nobody bothering to care for decades about management of waste on the site. I heard a talk by somebody who had some involvement with the cleanup efforts. Apparently over the many years of operation all kinds of stuff was pumped into tanks, and records of what that stuff was were not kept accurately. When sludge from the tanks was sent out for analysis it was done in a careless manner - without even rudimentary precautions like sending the same samples to independant labs for duplicate testing.
Basically it was run like a government operation where nobody could get in trouble for making a mess, and unsurprisingly a huge mess resulted. Additionally during the cold war there was the genuine concern that if we had fewer bombs than the Russians it might result in an enemy first strike - so in some sense they might have been right to make safety priority #2 (but there is no excuse for not doing a lot better than they did). After all, an actual nuclear war would have made the leaking tanks at Hanford look like a VERY minor problem.
Bottom line - large-scale nuclear power generation facilities require heavy oversight - by folks who are more interested in exposing problems than covering them up. There is no reason to ban them entirely - any industry has the potential to create disaster (just look at Bhopal) - like anything you just need to make sure that it is cheaper to be safe than to be unsafe.
5 points for the emotive article title (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Environmental Scaremongering (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting viewpoint. What do you have other than national pride to make you think that an inactive US nuclear industry that spends more money on advertising than R&D is less worrying? Recent work from South Africa, India and China is most likely better than both.
However it is not "clean" - it is an industrial process involving mining, extremely toxic chemicals in processing and the end product produces waste that is both toxic and radioactive so cannot just be ignored. Also it takes years to build any sort of thermal plant, paticularly a brand new design, so it is not available now. Using an old design is pointless since capital costs are going to be very high and you want to be able to get the best results you can - plus things like accelerated thorium reactors could solve the fuel shortage problem (and be cheaper to build and run as a consequece) and produce a lot less waste. Pebble beds don't scale up so are expensive but solve a lot of safety issues - perhaps they can have longer lives so may end up cheap enough to use in the long run. Someone will bring up fast breeders so I'll point them to look at the Superphoenix project first - reprocessing sounds like a good idea but was very difficult to implement with highly radioactive material so even photovoltaics (which do not scale up - twice the scale and you get no more than twice the output) ended up cheaper per MW no matter how big you build your Superphoenix style fast breeder. In the end you need a new design instead of hoping for corporate welfare - President Carter (who has a masters degree in nuclear engineering) effectively killed the US nuclear industry by making it clear there wouldn't be more corporate welfare for new plants - the focus has been on trying to get the welfare back for more dinosaur plants instead of building things that can stand on their own merits (and blaming hippies, coal ash as radioactive waste too, everything but their own inaction).
Re:Nuclear Is Quite Scary (Score:2, Insightful)
Second, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl is actually flourishing; the radioactivity there is actually about a third of what it is in Denver. Besides, the type of reactor used in Chernobyl was designed by a fool. No sane person would use a graphite moderated reactor today. The danger is far too great.
My main point is that risk is an essential part of civilization. In order to continue our way of life, which I believe is better than any that has existed previously, we must take some risks. Nuclear power generation is one of the lesser risks that we face in that ordeal. So safe are nuclear power plants today that I would volunteer to live next to one.
How many steam boilers exploded in coal plants in the 19th century? How many people died in train accidents during the early days of railroads? Safety improves with time, and it's really not fair to condemn the entire concept of nuclear power generation based on a few mistakes made in its very early years.
Of course the administration wants to encourage support for nuclear power. Any person who rationally looks at the alternatives (not to say this administration is rational) will do the same. It's the best way to wean us off of fossil fuels in general, and from dependence on unstable middle eastern countries in particular.
Re:Umm.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Crash Testing (Score:5, Insightful)
No. As you can see in these crash test videos [blogspot.com], the containers used to transport nuclear waste can be broadsided by a 120-ton locomotive traveling at 80 miles per hour and come out of it with only cosmetic damage. Unfortumately, all the fud about accidents & terrorism on trucks or trains carrying nuclear waste tends to appeal more to peoples fearful hearts than the facts do to peoples rational minds. That makes me a sad pro-nuclear panda.
Um, no it's not (Score:3, Insightful)
It may well be possible to safely contain the wastes from coal-fired power, but to claim that it will necessarily be easier than nuclear is more than slightly presumptuous.
Re:Nuclear Is Quite Scary (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: "every power plant is a potential Chernobyl" (Score:2, Insightful)
"every power plant is a potential Chernobyl"
That is false. Chernobyl was a graphite core reactor, and that is what made it dangerous and caused that failure mode. Nuclear reactors that have an inherent tendency to explode and burn in a manner that cannot be controlled have only been deployed on a large scale in formerly Soviet states. Other forms of liquid cooled reactor found in other countries such as in North America and Europe could potentially exhibit the China Syndrome, but experience has proven that harder than commonly believed to actually bring about. Modern reactors being proposed have been engineered to avoid all of the known major failure modes. It is important to keep in mind that nuclear power is science, not magic, and as such has at least the potential to be fully understood and tamed.