Uranium Pebbles May Light the Way 629
kristy_christie writes "According to Wired News, South Africa's state-run utility giant Eskom and its international partners want to build the world's first commercial 'pebble bed' reactor, which, instead of using fuel rods, 'is packed with tennis ball-size graphite "pebbles," each containing thousands of tiny uranium dioxide particles'. To developers, the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor promises a rebirth of nuclear energy. Proponents insist that the reactor's design features make it 'meltdown-proof' and 'walk-away safe'."
Sweet (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear Power, despite the cries of environmentalists, is possibly the cleanest mass power source. On a scale of power generated per ton of input material it is incredibly efficient (bested only by those power sources which require no nonrenewable input, like wind/tidal/etc.), generates no effluent or air pollution, and needs only a competent staff (and, unfortunately, security), to stay running properly.
Nuclear plants may be prohibitively expensive to build these days, but if "pebble bed" reactors cost significantly less, then they may lead the way back towards what I view as our ideal energy source.
It's time to give nuclear a second chance.
Re:Sweet (Score:2, Insightful)
Meltdown isn't the (whole) problem (Score:4, Insightful)
That said, I'm not against nuclear power (from fusion) per se. Of the options we have, it's one of the best at the moment. "Alternative" power sources need a lot more work, and fusion, whilst extrememly promising, just isn't practicable yet (unless I've missed a major breakthrough in the last couple of years). I'm just pointing out that there are still other problems that need to be addressed.
I'm a proponent of nuclear energy (Score:3, Insightful)
Many of the world's problems exist because of the small patch of oil-soaked land out in the Middle East and the lack of trustworthy stewards of those fields. With Gulf War II over and those oil fields finally in the hands of Western democracies we may see some improvement in global stability vis a vis the opening of OPEC to its main customers. However, because we continue to rely on oil as our primary power source we will likely continue to have problems as the oil fields run drier and drier.
It is good to see Africa (of all nations!) take the lead in this new system of nuclear power generation. Older systems like the ones in Canada and France are fine, however it would be a stretch to say that they are perfect. There is plenty of room for improvement in those power plants. This usage of uranium pebbles is one such improvement, but there are more.
It is a problem that people would be willing to block the development of Africa because they object to the usage of these newer power systems. Especially so because for the most part the same protesters unwittingly reap the benefits of their own country's nuclear power generation systems.
Waste disposal (Score:4, Insightful)
They claim the graphite and silicon carbide around the pebbles will keep it sealed for ~ 1 million years, which is impressive. It'll be interesting to see if humanity is around in ~1 million years
It also produces about 19 tons of radioactive waste (in the form of these coated pebbles) every year. That's going to be some landfill site, if the technology takes off...
Simon.
-1 Flamebait (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Meltdown isn't the (whole) problem (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you are. While stable on human lifetimes, concrete is not, I believe, stable on the necessary time perios. It is also water permeable on a long enough timescale. In the past, people were researching "glassification" - incorporating the wast into a kind of glass which is much more stable than concrete. Even then, I believe they found that the heat generates by radioactive decay increased the mobility of the waste through the glass so that it might be expected to start leaking out of the block in 250,000 years worst case.
Decomissioning and waste management? (Score:1, Insightful)
And before you mention the lack of effluent, bathing in the irish sea or eating fish caught there is now considered a "risky activity".
Re:Meltdown isn't the (whole) problem (Score:5, Insightful)
That way you dont get a lot of waste, and you get many many times more use out of the fuel you have.
Nuclear waste is a problem that already has a solution, and a solution that is ecologically sound and very much in line with recycling and reuse.
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Insightful)
'most people' don't know even the basics of how the energy is generated, all they know is that the place can explode and then there's going to be 3eyed fishes. the problem is that even if it's a 'failsafe'(won't explode) plant there's going to be hell explaining it to the people who are against nuclear power for mainly emonational reasons(and assume that people defend nuclear power for similar reasons because they hate the environment or something silly like that, or just for pure greed).
it's like that old joke... "what we need nuclear power for? i only need electricity"(dunno how the variation goes in english actually, but you get the idea).
around here there's a need for another reactor(industry needs the juice) but there's quite many people who are against it, yet they don't complain when we need to buy the same amount of electricity from russia(that is generated by nuclear reactor there, just over the border, at lower safety standards than what would be in place if the reactor were on our side of the border).
Re:Clean nuclear power (Score:2, Insightful)
The difference, of course, is that you're breathing in the radioactive depleted uranium dust. Radioactivitiy is much more dangerous inside your body. Human skin pretty much blocks weak alpha radiation, but such an emitter in lungs is highly dangerous.
Re:I'm a proponent of nuclear energy (Score:3, Insightful)
Global instability over the past, oh... how about all of recorded history, has been about power struggles (that usually have very little to do with oil). Imperialism, world wars, revolutions, slave revolts, coups, violent protests, terrorism - all these examples of instability are caused by struggles for power (freedom being a power). Oil may seem like the cause of recent problems, but really it's just a weapon in the war. We fight for oil because without it we couldn't fight for power.
And what western democracies are the oil fields in the hands of? Iraq certainly doesn't constitute "those oil fields", and after we're out of there we may very well see Iraq run by a government unfriendly to the US. What other western democracy is over there? Not Kuwait. Calling them a democracy is a joke.
OPEC is probably doing the world a favor by controlling the oil production. If we pumped the oil out as fast as possible to reduce prices we'd only exagerate the problems of polution and a limited supply of oil.
It is good to see Africa (of all nations!) investigate cheap and clean power since they need it so very badly, but I worry about how the waste will be handled. The environmental and saftey issues of nuclear energy has caused us to spend millions and possibly billions on researching and implementing advanced waste disposal. Will cash strapped nations in Africa be as diligent?
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Insightful)
Two words: Lung Cancer.
That is the alternative, and pollution from traditional power generation plants is killing people every day, and sickening many more.
There is not a single permanent disposal site world-wide. no one can guarantee the safety. the U.S. government even has a website on _just this problem_. Ready-made dirty bombs are driven in trucks all over the country. GREAT IDEA.
If someone wants to kill a lot of civilians, all they need is a garage lab to produce chemical or bio agents. Much more effective, much easier to deal with, even more scary (1 gram of the right bio agent could kill millions). See the recent research on mouse pox [i-sis.org.uk] for some really scary stuff (did that story make /.?). How 'bout a bio agent that'll only wipe out one ethnic group? The research is just about there. It is always hard to evaluate relative risk, but to me nuke power is way down the list.
BTW, as far as nuke disposal, there's a good reason for a lunar colony... =) Name another major energy source where the pollution could realistically be taken entirely off-planet.
Also BTW, I hope some of the recent solar energy developments lead (finally) to competitive photovoltaic power generation on a distributed basis (that'll tick off the power companies!). One of the more exciting developments is solar fabric [si.edu], which can be used in curved building designs.
Re:Sweet (Score:2, Insightful)
Is it? Last time I checked, they still used the cyrillic alphabet in Ukraine. Yes, "Ch" is the dominant convention in the English speaking world, but that doesnt mean its the only one.
Re:Decomissioning and waste management? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, disposal is a problem.. but it's not like it wasn't just lying around to begin with.
Oh please.. that old, tired argument again. YES, uranium occurs in most rocks in concentrations of 2 to 4 parts per million and is as common in the earth's crust as tin, tungsten and molybdenum. HOWEVER, uranium in the natural state is a mix of two isotopes; 99.3% U-238 and 0.7% U-235. And guess what? U-238 is barely radioactive, with a halflife of about 4500 million years. U-235 on the other hand is way more radioactive, and thus the part they are interested in using for reactorcores.
Guess what? The enriched uranium they use in reactors contains in the region of 3% to 4% U-235 - making it litterary too hot to handle. Even 'spendt' reacorfuel contains more U-235 than ordinary oranium-ore, as well as more than a bit of Pu-239 and Pu-240 (the longer the fuel stays in the reacor, the more Pu-240). And Pu-239 and Pu-240 is two isotopes of an element better known as plutonium... granted, it's not weapongrade plutonium, but it's still something I wouldn't have scattered about.
Fact: There is little or no pollution from an operative reacor.
Fact: Spent fuelrods from reactors are a major enviromental problem.
You might find this [uic.com.au] and this [antenna.nl] webpage interesting.
Re:Ever heard of Hamm-Uentrop? No? Read this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Decomissioning and waste management? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, we "enrich" the uranium-- largely by sorting isotopes. There's no reason why you couldn't choose to de-enrich/deplete the uranium back down for storage, if you thought this was beneficial. This is why it's entombed in glass in many storage proposals, and why it's often reprocessed-- so you can sort the "useful fuel to reuse" and "spent fuel/waste".
There are intermediate-term (80-500 year) storage problems involved with the high level wastes produced in fission reactors. The thing is, these wastes inherently have short half lives and decay to more harmless stuff very quickly.
Chernobyl was stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
The reactor increased in efficiency as temperature increased. This is a nice little feedback loop. Most reactors lose efficiency as temperature increases, meaning that it is difficult to try and overload the reactor, even on purpose.
The reactor was designed to be cheap, and it did not have a dome. Domes contain radioactive material very well. Tests have shown that an aircraft hitting a dome would hardly scratch it.
As another cost-cutting measure, the reactor didn't have any good backup power. It may seem silly to have a power plant that needs power, but nuclear power plants do need power to start up and in case of emergencies. Western plants have batteries and generators.
As if these technological blunders weren't enough, some bonehead transfered control of the power plants from the ministry that designed and built them, where all the trained personnel are employed, to the ministry of energy. There are reports of operators sitting on the control board and people showing up to work drunk.
Basically, in 1986, the Chernobyl reactor demonstrated a bunch of "don'ts" to a world that should have already known.
There will always be technology out there that can be misused. The amount of that technology will only increase. Do we ban knives because people get stabbed? Do we ban nuclear power because a couple of Russians cut costs?
The 'ball' nuclear reactors are basically foolproof. You put a bunch of balls next to each other and you get heat. This is not weapons grade Uranium.
I only see one problem with nuclear -- the small amount of waste that is generated needs to be handled properly. It can be done, but it just has to be done right.
Re:Environment/North Korea (Score:3, Insightful)
Landfill or that Mountain Place? What if it seeps? Breaks/chips/breaksdown and leeches into the soil substrate? Three eye fish, as cool as they are, will not be the worst of our concerns.
Re:I hate ignorance! (Score:3, Insightful)
South Africa, the country where Eskom resides, is a country in Africa (easily confused with South America by Americans. South America is a continent south of North America, the continent with three different countries on it, including the USA).
Er, so it isn't ignorant to confuse a Slashdot story poster with "Americans"?
I've never confused South America with South Africa, nor has anybody I know.
Re:Sweet (Score:2, Insightful)
I live next to 3 very large natural gas holding tanks that are a much more vulnerable terrorist target than any nuclear reactor.
Re:Decomissioning and waste management? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fact: Spent fuelrods from reactors are a major enviromental problem.
Fact: The byproducts of all other currently viable forms of energy production are major environmental problems.
I can't think of anyone who would say that nuclear waste is not bad. But I for one, and many others who have researched the topic, believe it is less bad than the alternatives.
I would rather have a small amount of really bad stuff being controled, than a huge amount of pretty bad stuff being spewed into the air I breath every day.
Is this new form of nuclear power renewable? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Insightful)
What metric are you using to say that nuclear power has historically been unsafe? The number of deaths caused per MWh produced? Deaths or injuries per reactor-hour of operation? Average deaths per year at a given plant?
Really, compare these metrics to that of any other power distribution plant and you will see historically, even with the huge publicized disasters like Chernobyl and TMI, that no other large scale power producer even compares in safety to nuclear power.
But since we're on the topic of nuclear power safety history, the website The History of Nuclear Power Safety [owt.com] is an excellent resource.
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Insightful)
That is a myth spread by the anti-nuclear lobby, who are really anti-industry, as a side-effect of being anti-capitalist. Think about it logically for a minute. Why is spent fuel dangerous? Because it emits radiation. What is radiation? It is energy. What is the point of any fuel? That you can extract energy from it.
The problem of what to do with nuclear waste has already been solved: just loaded it into another type of reactor (called a "fast breeder reactor") and continue to use it. Nuclear waste simply is not a significant reason not to use nuclear power. The only problem is what to do with old, worn-out reactors.
Re:Rational thinking. (Score:2, Insightful)
So what not a modern design like IFR/ALMR/AFR? (Score:2, Insightful)
- burns it's own waste as fuel.
- is safe (The reactor core will cease to function when it gets to hot).
- could be use current 'nuclear waste' as fuel.
- could use current weapons grade plutonium (think decomissioned warheads).
- the final by products 'nuclear waste' will be as radio-active as normal uranium ore.
I really with the nuclear energy phobic would learn a little bit about modern reactor technology.
IFR - http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA378.html
AFR - http://www.rae.anl.gov/research/ardt/afr/
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Insightful)
Truth is that Wind power is a hard paying proposition - cheap energy, doable today, without all the headaches that comewith nuclear.. In what sense is that "anti-capitalist"?
Partly true... (Score:3, Insightful)
True, if you only consider what is legally released into the environment while the nuclear plant is operating. If you consider the fission byproducts and their "disposal" (e.g. long term storage) then this isn't true. Yucca Mountain nonwithstanding, the problems associated with nuclear waste may not be worth the benefit (and I'm a nuclear-trained engineer).
There are other safe designs (Score:2, Insightful)
Canada is justly proud of its very safe CANDU design, some good links at:
http://www.nucleartourist.com/type/candu.htm
They've got a new design out that's, yes, even safer, and (they hope) cheaper to run. They've got a good business going overseas, but you can't sell the things in North America at all.
So far.
One can only hope the interest in reducing carbon emissions will bring people to their senses. I'm all for green renewable technologies, too, but hydro, wind, and solar are just not yet up to being more than 20% or so of the generation mix. The other 80% has to be fossil or nuclear. Nukes are way cleaner.
Salon magazine recently has some hair-raising stories about environmental devastation from coal; and that's what "greens" are guaranteeing to continue by opposing nuclear.
Re:Chernobyl was stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I mean who really needs to travel by plane anyway? While we're at it, lets do away with recreational cruise ships, all military aircraft, naval vessels, missle silos, etc.
P.S. - if you want to debate the need for military equipment please start a new thread, they were just examples of things "that might kill thousands of people while handled by a drunk."
Re:Partly true... (Score:5, Insightful)
However, use of plutonium is rather taboo for some reason -- witness the furor over Cassini's radioisotope generator, which some environmentalists claimed could kill thousands in the event of an accident on launch in 1997 or during the flyby of Earth in 1999, with one site suggesting a 10-micron particle could result in the exposure of a person inhaling it to thousands of REMs. Their argument was that the release of the 72 pounds of plutonium would be catastrophic over centuries.
An article in a 1993 Oak Ridge National Laboratories Review states, "according to NCRP Reports No. 92 and No. 95, population exposure from operation of 1000-MWe nuclear and coal-fired power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants.
Even factoring in mining -- where radioactive dust presumably goes into the air -- and disposal -- where various bits of radioactive dust and water are released -- nuclear plants produced only about a quarter of the average radiation dosage that coal plants do over their lives. I've seen the strip mines that are used to get at uranium, and while it's not pretty, it's not nearly as bad as the destruction of entire mountains in the Appalachians. There is also research going into extracting uranium from seawater for about $120 per pound, which, although about 10 times the current rate, could be more environmentally safe and could provide thousands of years of power, presuming we operated on nuclear power for that length of time.
I'm all for nuclear energy. While I am also a proponent of renewable sources, I don't like the environmental damage caused by hydroelectric. Solar has issues of night-time electricity use, and it is reportedly a messy thing to make, with some pretty dangerous chemicals involved, not including any batteries that would be needed for cloudy days and night use. Wind has issues of reliability, and tidal generators have a range issue, not to mention that I wonder how it would affect the beaches to have thousands of them operating.
I recognize the dangers of nuclear energy. I know that it's hard to clean up, and that there are significant security risks; I'd much rather be in a room with an exposed piece of coal than an exposed piece of reactor-grade uranium. But that piece of uranium will be useful long after the ash from the coal has been carted off and buried. It will have given off no CO2 or nitrogen or sulfur oxides during its use (save whatever transportation is used for it), and less radioactivity.
In balance, I believe that nuclear reactors are a far better source of energy than anything else we have at the moment.
Ahh, so I must be against Capitalism (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I hate ignorance! (but not enough to avoid it) (Score:3, Insightful)
When you're done correcting the original poster's grotesque ignorance of geography, you might spend a little time correcting your own. There are ten nations on the North American continent. The seven you forgot are: Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.
DU and nuclear waste Disposal (Score:1, Insightful)
DU Education project. [iacenter.org]
Re:Sweet (Score:2, Insightful)
The chain of fallacies here is fascinating.
Re:So what not a modern design like IFR/ALMR/AFR? (Score:4, Insightful)
Safe designs for nuclear reactors actually kind of excite me, because we clearly need to get away from fossil fuel energy.
Although, ultimately, I'm most excited about bio-mass energy (if it can ever be made to be practical at a large scale), because while burning bio-mass derivative fuels produces CO2 - at least the next generation of fuel will re-fixate that CO2 as it grows. . . it's a stable system where we are at least not increasing the amount of CO2.