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NPR Story on the Future of Nuclear Power
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Mar 06, 2006 08:33 AM
from the whither-goes-the-world dept.
from the whither-goes-the-world dept.
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'."
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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.
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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:
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Re:Excess heat & Cold Fusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Weren't Pons and Fleishman from Utah? Humidity there is typically under 4%. I once watched
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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.
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"Cold Fusion" isn't really an accurate name (Score:5, Funny)
Crystal or Sonic? (Score:4, Informative)
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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What a wasted opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
If my name was Ion, I'd surely name my daughters Anne and Katya (Kat for short).
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Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Re:Pebble Bed reactors (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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: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.
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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: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.
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Someday we shall evolve beyond urban myths (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Of Astronauts and rods (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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Re:Of Astronauts and rods (Score:4, Funny)
-Eric
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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.
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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.
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Re:Converting to fusion later? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes.
KFG
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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).
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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
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