Fission in a Box 345
Jim Howard writes: "The The World and I magazine has an article suggesting the following interesting possibility: 'Advances in South Africa and the Netherlands suggest that small-scale fission machines could become safe, reliable, and inexpensive sources of electricity and heat for ships, factories, and perhaps single-family homes.' Well worth a look, if only for the review of nuclear power basics." Don't hold your breath, because technical obstacles aren't the main ones. But it's a nice overview of the science behind small reactors.
Re:How we got here (Score:2)
Great! I would like you, then, to estimate the cost of everything you buy using that methodology and pay the difference between that price and the price it's been marked at to one or more organizations that are doing said cleanup work. Accordingly, when you buy a gallon of gasoline for $2, I expect you to send the Sierra Club or some similar organization $5. When you pay your $50 electric bill, I expect you to send $80 to repair damaged river systems. And so on. If you are doing this already, I applaud your honesty and integrity (though I question your intelligence). If you are not, then begone with you, for you are nothing but a hypocrite. Do not expect others to pay when you are not yourself willing.
I'm living in California...the reason for the so-called electricity crisis is none other than hypocrisy. Those who oppose the construction of generation facilities should have their power turned off first. When that law is passed, I expect very little opposition to such construction. In a democracy, it's easy to protest this and that without it having much effect on you personally, because you know that if your viewpoint makes it into law, the vast majority of the cost will be borne by others (who may or may not agree with you) simply because there are more people who are not you (millions) than who are (1). When the minority of complainers suddenly has to foot the entire bill for its ideals the game changes - suddenly a "social conscience" isn't so popular a thing to have.
This is a fundamental problem with the type of government most advanced nations have. I don't have a real solution (well, I do, but it involves replacing this form of government with a much different one). In the meantime, it might be of interest to consider that the externalities usually thought to be the reason environmental damage occurs in the first place are just as much an issue in the fight against it. After all, how much does it cost you to protest the construction of an electricity generation facility? How much does it cost others when your protest succeeds? That scenario is the definition of an externality.
Re:Talk economic sense, please. (Score:2)
ess people out of work = less crime less people out of work = a larger consumer market
You're forgetting, cheap energy = lower production cost. Lower production cost = lower consumer cost (in a healthy market), lower consumer cost = higher demand. Higher demand = expanded production. Expanded production = more jobs.
In what way?
Imagine we were all still riding around in horsedrawn buggies because we didn't want to seriously reduce the demand for: buggy whip makers, street cleaners, horse breaders, blacksmiths, veterinarians, etc, etc.
Also, considering that the most likely deployment of these reactors will be in the elefctrical generation industry, I fail to see how the workers will be displaced. They will just get some additional safety training (I hope!) and go from working on gas turbines powered by natural gas to gas turbines powered by fission.
Re:"Too cheap to meter" (Score:2)
The Beauty of the design in question is that it won't explode in the sense most people think of.
There could be explosive decompression of the working gas, but since it's helium, it won't be particularly harmful. (Nor will it be terribly radioactive). The fuel itself would remain confined to the 'pebbles'.
While it would suck to be the person that managed to get one open w/o protective gear, the neighbors would most likely suffer no ill effects.
Progress (Score:2)
I have two major objections to the use of nuclear power. The liklihood of a core accident and waste handling.
This system appears to answer my first concern. Unlike most reactors in use in the U.S. this one seems to be intrinsically stable under failure conditions. (I would certainly classify total loss of coolant a failure state!).
The real question is waste handling. It seems that the fuel design will keep the waste contained over the operational life of the fuel. The question is processing after use. Are the pebbles to be somehow disassembled and reprocessed (possably after a cooldown period) or will they be disposed of as is? How long will the pebbles contain the fission products after use? Any possability of using their intrinsic heat generation for a smaller scane energy production (perhaps using sterling engines to extract useful power)?
I suspect that in the real world, their careful handling will extend exactly as far as their useful life + public oversite. After that, they will be disposed of in the cheapest possable way w/o reguard to long term safety. It's the american way.
If the pebbles are intrinsically sound enough containment for long term storage and preferably useful for secondary energy production, this could be feasible and at least no more destructive to the environment than current fossil fuel use.
Re:Spent fuel MUST BE stored on site. No appeals. (Score:2)
You don't get nearly enough from the Hoover Dam. IIRC, Nevada only gets 25% of the power from Hoover Dam, which only covers 13% of Las Vegas's power needs. Even if you somehow got the California and Arizona to relinguish their share of the power from Hoover Dam, that still wouldn't cover Las Vegas's power needs. The lion's share of Nevada's power comes from fossil fuels.
Re:Light and Heat Your Pool for Free! (Score:2)
Just don't go in the deep end!
Actually, looking into an operating nuclear reactor is an eye-opening experience. If you live near a university with a reactor, chances are they have a tour of it every now and then. It becomes far less scary when you can see it.
Two choices... (Score:2)
Re:How we got here (Score:2)
That's a *very* intriguing idea, metis. Please, expand upon it!
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Re:From South Africa? Ha! ha! ha! (Score:2)
I wonder if we're all nuclear babies...
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Fussion/Fission confusion. (Score:2)
Traditional nuclear power comes from fission, the breaking apart of atoms. It isn't anything new. Nobody is talking about fusion, the combining of atoms.
Fission power is what fuels the hydrogen bomb, and we are proposing that we put fission reactors in everyone's home?
Well, except you nobody is talking about fusion. The hydrogen bomb is fussion based, NOT FISSION. It combines hydrogen atoms together - it fuses them. The older atomic bombs America dropped in World War I were fission.
I suppose to be technical there is fission in a hydrogen bomb used to set off the fusion reaction, but it isn't the main source of the explosive power. That is the fusion.
So the artical is talking about the same reaction used in current power plants, just scaled down.
Ben
We'll run out of uranium (Score:2)
The only way to sustainably use fission is to make plutonium in breeder reactors and then use that, isn't it? Additionally, isn't plutonium about the nastiest stuff you can ever deal with?
Go you big red fire engine!
Home reactors ain't gunna happen (Score:2)
Go you big red fire engine!
reprocessing plutonium (Score:2)
I think the biggest issue with small scale nuclear reactor operations is security--the potential for sabotage or theft is a big concern. There are probably groups out there that would sabotage an early pioneering installation, with no regard to loss of human life, to poison the waters for future development.
Re:Most ignorant comment in the history of mankind (Score:2)
Re:Riiiiiight. (Score:2)
I agree whole-heartedly :)
I think a better idea would be to take the suggestion that others have made on this thread, and use a liquid-metal reactor that just keeps burning the waste until it's down to practically nothing. It's more energy efficient and cleaner to boot.
Still, as long as people are afraid of a possible china syndrome or chernobyl, this isn't likely to be a very popular solution.
ObJectBridge [sourceforge.net] (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Re:Riiiiiight. (Score:2)
Actually, it's fusion, the uniting of two or more atoms of hydrogen isotope into helium, that powers the hydrogen bomb. Fission, the splitting of the atom into smaller atoms, is what powers all those nuclear bombs that are sitting in Russian, Chinese, American, etc. silos, waiting to destroy us all.
Just a minor point, but I thought it might help to clarify just what we should all be skeptical of here.
Why not? The biggest problem with the modern electrical system, imo, is transmission and distribution. Fuck it; if we can produce our own power, let the power companies wither on the vine. In many cases, they richly deserve it.
I agree, for different reasons (such as: what do we do with the nuclear waste???). Although I adamantly believe that nuclear power is nowhere nearly as evil as the present practise of burning fossil fuels to produce electricity.
ObJectBridge [sourceforge.net] (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
From South Africa? Ha! ha! ha! (Score:2)
It's funny that the proposal comes from South Africa, because there were quite a few natural nuclear ractors nearby, such as in Oklo [uiuc.edu] , in Gabon. (here is a more technical article [isu.edu], and a cross-section diagram [gns.ne.jp], neatly labelled in Japanese). And, of course, you can expect it to be threatened by mining [academicpress.com]...
(Here is my google search [google.com] for the stuff).
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Re:Killing two birds with one stone (Score:2)
That's as long there's no bunch of monkeys running around and undoing by hand what the automatic control system does, like at Three-Mile-Island...
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Re:You down with Entropy? (Score:2)
This is total bunk. That carbon dioxide would be STILL released in the atmosphere if the plants did rot on the ground, were burned (duh?) or eaten (where do you think the carbon dioxyde we exhale comes from?).
It's just fingerpointing by people who don't like dams.
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Re:How we got here (Score:2)
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Re:Killing two birds with one stone (Score:2)
Noted; thanks for the tip. I'm working under the (perhaps foolish) assumption that current designs and fuel replacement policies are set up to prevent this from being a hazard.
It sounds like you are describing a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity ("negative void coefficient" if you are a civilian). In a water-moderated reactor, an increase in temperature will reduce moderator density therefore cause a tendency for power to decrease. This provides for negative feedback and causes reactor power to change to match the heat removed from the system without operator intervention. This does not prevent an over power condition - it just means that the reactor is inherently stable.
Again, this depends on the design of the reactor. One of the big selling points of the slowpoke was that there was no configuration that would lead to an overpower condition (pull all of the control rods out, and it's still in a stable regime).
Academic in this case, though, because the article wasn't talking about slowpoke reactors (I'd misunderstood initially).
Re:Hydroelectric as a non-renewable resource. (Score:2)
Trivial as it may seem, energy gained by tidal power is, erg for erg, slowing down the rotation of the Earth. True right now the results are inconsequential, but if massive projects were undertaken to supply 30% of the Earth's onging power needs with tidal forces, over the long run it could have an impact, and it's not exactly like we have a way to repair the damage by speeding up the Earth's rotation...
There's on the order of 1.0e30-1.0e31 joules of energy stored in the Earth's rotation. That gives us around 30 billion terawatt-years.
I don't think we're in danger of draining it soon.
At least clean fission only eats up matter which, though not a renewable resource either, is constantly being replenished on the order of tons a day from micrometeorites.
...which are made of rock, and thus don't contain much hydrogen. Allegations of a continuing hail of ice micro-comets are as yet unsubstantiated.
Not to worry, though. Even if we just extract deuterium (which is 0.015% of all hydrogen) for fusion, we have about 1.0e13 tonnes of the stuff in the oceans. Assuming around a million times the energy yield of chemical reactions, this gives us about 5 million terawatt-years.
Switch to ordinary hydrogen, and by the time the sun burns out, we'd have used around 15% of the ocean. Assuming we don't ship in a few ice asteroids in the interim.
Re:Only removes actinides. (Score:2)
I've already been assuming that the barrels are filled with glass pellets. I still wouldn't want the barrels to break. Shatter the beads, and currents will take the resulting dust all over. Disperse a pollutant in the water, and it *won't* just stay in one place - you'll eventually have to worry about it (especially if we're dumping all of a continent's waste, and not just one plant's worth).
If you have a really deep hole, and plug it really well - maybe. But I'd still feel safer with the barrels deep in the continental shield.
Re:Not a slowpoke; my mistake. (Score:2)
No, they won't. They are designed to keep the bits of fuel far enough apart that no reaction hot enough to start burning either the fuel itself or its carbon shell could start or sustain itself.
This has actually been tested by running a pebble-bed reactor without coolant for an extended period.
I meant, a pile larger than would fit in the reactor. A large enough pile should indeed melt down. The reaction will increase exponentially if the probability of interaction (vs. escape or absorption) is greater than one divided by the number of child neutrons produced by a reaction.
The probability of absorption (by the graphite or by a nucleus) depends on how far a neutron would have to travel to escape the pile. Use a bigger pile, and there's less chance of the neutron escaping.
If fissile material was sparse enough inside the fuel balls, then you could set it up so that an arbitrarily large pile still wouldn't enter meltdown, but this would make it a lot less useful for generating power as well (a small pile would be very, very subcritical).
"As long as everyone does their part safely". (Score:2)
And therein lies the biggest problem: you're relying on *everyone* to do their part safely, *all* of the time, for all of the reactors that are ever installed.
One screwup (accidental or delibarate), and you've just astronomically jacked up the cancer rate for everyone in the area for the next 50,000 years or so.
Good luck getting these insured.
The current scheme - using a few big, well-monitored plants - is much safer.
Also, FYI, lead will corrode relatively quickly (and I'm ignoring earthquakes and other disasters).
Slowpoke (Score:2)
I'll have to look that up; thanks for the pointer.
My understanding was that at least some versions used fuel rods, but I haven't checked in quite a while.
Not a slowpoke; my mistake. (Score:2)
My mistake, the article refers to a different type of reactor.
The graphite-laced "pebbles" in their reactor could melt down if enough were piled in one place, as graphite will stay put under meltdown temperatures (the fuel, steel, and graphite will alloy with each other and whatever's underneath them as they heat up). The PBMR is thus open to abuse.
A meltdown still won't cause a nuclear explosion. It just makes a hot molten mess that's very radioactive.
Only removes actinides. (Score:2)
According to two different descriptions of ALMRs, you only end up burning the heavy waste products (actinides) with this scheme.
Radioactive lighter elements may be bred to something more stable, but stable ligher elements are just as easily bred into medium-lifetime radioactive isotopes.
Re:Only removes actinides. (Score:2)
The problem with this is that the subduction zone, by nature, is earthquake-prone. With your containers that close to the surface, contamination of local water will also be a problem (your containers won't last more than a couple hundred years, which puts them at a couple hundred feet...)
I suppose you could drill a deep hole in the subducting crust, seal it with clay, and then let it go down, but I wouldn't trust a filled shaft to stay impermeable to water in an earthquake zone.
Re:Dealing with spent fuel. (Score:2)
That depends on where you bury them.
The proposals I've most recently heard about involve either burying them a few miles deep in the Canadian Shield - bedrock that water doesn't flow through - or burying them a few miles deep under the ocean floor, with the holes plugged with clay (which water doesn't flow through readily).
Both should work long enough for most of the products to decay, even if the containers don't last anywhere close to that long. The containers are mainly to protect it during transport and during temporary storage (accidents could have nasty consequences without these precautions).
Re:How we got here (Score:2)
I would not at all be suprised if Bush accomplishes more that Clinton and Gore on global warming and other fundamental environmental issues. The problem is that the press is willing and able to exploit the slightest bit of hestitation on Bush's because he is a Republican and was previously involved in oil.
Re:How we got here (Score:2)
Where is it written that the President must do dog and pony shows for the press, especially when they've exhibited such willingness to play up every little slipup. Anyways, I happen to have liked Reagan.
The man lied under oath and had sex with an intern in the White House. If he were the chief executive of any company or even lesser government official he would be gone in a second. Don't even act like Clinton didn't bring it on himself. They couldn't find a thing on the man? Feh. They found out that he perjured himself. As for "finding" stuff, we have this thing called a court of law...it sorta makes things difficult. Clinton is dirty, you can deny it all you want, but he's dirty.
No, Bush clearly knows how to relate to people. That matters in politics. He may not have the rhetorical skills that Clinton has, but those are two entirely different things.
No, other people are running this government, unlike another certain president that thought he was some kind of genius, he didn't try to micromanage. He has very good people and he's using them properly as far as I am concerned.
Education reforms. Military reforms. Taxes. Etc. You may dislike his policy, but he's focused on them. Clinton on the other hand tried to be all things to all people and I frankly thing he didn't accomplish much as a result. If he had focused his energies on a few really important issues, he would have been far more effective.
Yes his policy is largely alligned with mine, though not entirely. Although I couldn't care a rats ass about the Christian right, so to speak, I'd rather have them merely kept in a corner then have someone that is unwilling to, say, make any real changes in education for fear of pissing off the teachers' unions.
Totally unsubstantiated by ANY respectable media source. In fact, such drugs were not even in vogue when he was in school, it's nothing more than a rumor.
Heh what dirty tricks would those be exactly? The one where he gets an endorsement?
Which, by all accounts, can hardly be blamed on him, but rather on the market and lack of oil.
Uh, you do know that the media actually did inspect the ballots and found that even if they used Gore's proposed method, that Bush would have actually PICKED up votes overall? But that's besides the point? What dirty tricks specifically? Prove them.
His people for one. You don't keep staff like that by being an asshole.
Anyways, this is pointless. You may be well to the left, but it is NOT a given that Bush is an idiot, stupid, unethical, or whatever. If you've been paying any attention to the "people", you'll find that a solid majority of the country STILL approves of him. So by the Democrat's meter during the impeachment, everything is peachy, right? Or are you going to say that some things matter more now? That's what I thought.
Re:Efficiency GOOD, protectionism BAD. (Score:2)
So name a significant country that actually contradicts this trend. Then compare that to all the countries and times that confirm it.
You can argue anything if you so desire, but that doesn't mean that the facts bear it out. All sorts of countries work for less than the United States (not to mention most of the Western world), yet we continue to have low unemployment and overall rising standards of living. The same goes for many other enlightened countries.
You're even assuming that consumer purchase power is reduced. That's simply not the case and it's been demonstrated time and time again. What generally happens is that consumer's purchasing power rises on the aggregate, because goods and services get produced for less.
This is completely incoherant. Where are you getting this stuff from, off the back of a cereal box? How does a market failure result from continual innovation and increased efficiency? And wtf is slump supposed to mean in this context? How do you get from point A to point B? It does not follow.
Yes, you do get more leisure time. When you extropolate this pattern of increasing efficiency out across all people, it means that people on the whole can work much much less and recieve far more. In other words, before the days of tractors, fertilizers, combines, and such, mere existence demanded that the vast majority of society work on a farm. Now with all these advances in technology, that have necessarily obseleted those previous jobs, people are free to pursue other tasks, knowing that if they work a couple hours a day they will at least have basic sustenance. Although it may be true that people _raise_ their standards of living, and thus keep on working just as hard (if not harder), this is a matter of personal choice. Because people are basically rational, we can reasonably assume that they are happier working hard.
Some people stop making stuff and start making other stuff? Complete jibberish. Anyways, I am under the impression that you have a romantic view of previous centuries. If so you have little appreciation for history or economics.
The only shred of legitimacy that your argument has is that if innovation happens TOO rapidly and people get displaced TOO fast, then we could potentially have problems. But we are in no danger of that today. In fact, on the aggregate, the gains in efficiency that we have made in the past decade pale in comparison to others. What little oil workers there are would be READILY absorbed into today's economy. The vast majority of the people unemployed in this country (very low percentage by historical standards) today are unemployable and/or simply don't wish to work; it's not the jobs don't exist for the taking. In other words, if you're willing and able (as these most of these oil workers would be), you can find a decent job.
Efficiency GOOD, protectionism BAD. (Score:2)
Take this example (ignoring the environmental concerns and such). We reduce our energy costs by 20% using this fission method. Sure, some workers lose their jobs in the short run, but the job markets are tight and they would be absorbed. Consumers get cheaper energy, meaning that you have to work less to get the same amount of energy. Furthermore, industry is then allowed to produce cheaper goods and services because they no longer have to pay for this waste, which transfers back into consumers pockets. When people have more money to spend on other things, guess what? They spend more. Meaning that there is more demand for OTHER goods and services that people would RATHER have.
Fission energy comes from fast fission products (Score:2)
For example,
n + U235 --> Heavy1 + Heavy2 + 2.4n + 215MeV
where n are neutrons, Heavy1 and Heavy2 are two
split parts of the U235 (Uranium 235) atom,
and 215MeV is the energy released.
Something like 90% of that is in the motion of
Heavy1 Heavy2 and the neutrons (i.e., 180MeV of
kinetic energy.) The kinetic energy of
Heavy1 and Heavy2 is deposited very quickly
in the surrounding fuel as heat. The neutrons take a little longer to slow down, but no one
knows a way to directly convert the energy in
fast neutrons into electricity.
As someone else has pointed out, if you're
doing nuclear fusion in a plasma,
as in
Deuterium + Helium 3 --> Helium 4 + proton
you can convert the energy directly into
electricity, because the fusion products are charged.
Re:Hydroelectric as a non-renewable resource. (Score:2)
"I don't think we're in danger of draining it soon."
Check this shit out:
The planet used an estimated 415.6 Billion BTUs [google.com] in 2000. This translates to 121.8 trillion kilowatt-hours, whick boils down to 121800 terawatt-hours, or 13.9 terawatt-years.
Now, mind you, global energy-consumption is increasing at around 2.2% per year (ibid [google.com]). So, the first year we'd only lose 0.015 seconds. No big deal.
To see how this would all work out in the longer run, I wrote a little script [fury.com].
After 100 years we'd only have to adjust our clocks 5 seconds slower every year. In the year 2360 the Earth's rotation would exactly match that of Mars, with a 24 hour, 36 minute day. By 2540 the calendar would only have 364.25 days in it, and just 30 years later another day is lost.
In 2693 we've lost December entirely, and days are 26.2 hours long. By 2773 things have kicked into serious gear and we're down to a year of 182 days that are each 48 hours long.
Assuming that in the interveining 800 years we find a way to overcome the logarithmic problem of sucking the energy at a constant rate from a slowing source, we can take out the last of the rotational power in the Earth by the year 2812.
Pretty early on people would have to rewrite timing code that was based on the assumption of a constant number of days in a year and seconds in a day. And geosynchronous satellites would have to have ion drives constantly pushing them gently away from the earth into higher and higher orbits to match the slowing rotation.
Of course, the biggest problem here is clearly that we can't use DirectTV after 2812 because the geosynchronous satellites can't stay in non-orbit.
Kevin Fox
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Re:"Too cheap to meter" (Score:2)
They don't have to be buried. Extract the plutonium and use it up in a reactor designed for it. Put the other stuff in the business end of a nuclear accelerator, or park it on the edge of a fission reactor, and make it break down sooner than by waiting for natural decay.
Or just bury the waste outside the U.S. Capitol building, where it's already more radioactive than outside a nuclear plant [junkscience.com].
"Son, do you know why the lights went out? Oh, good, you found more billiard balls."
Industrial Mass Spectrometer (Score:2)
So what do you think of the idea of dropping trash into a plasma jet and running the whole mess through an industrial-sized mass spectrometer? Every so often you empty out the barrel of Carbon, the barrel of Iron, the little bucket of Plutonium...along with the one hundred other bins and pipes for all the other elements.
Possibly not a troll [OffTopic] (Score:2)
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South Africa and nuclear, not quite (Score:2)
"The situation is SA appears to me to be precisely the situation that lead to the first generation of Nuclear Power being a failure. It will be a political statement signalling the rise of a regional superpower"
I don't think the developments on PBMR in South Africa are politically motivated but economically motivated (Eskom is a large now privatised company).
South Africa has also already had a successful nuclear power plant for decades now (Koeberg, in the Cape), so I can't understand that we have much of a statement to make. Very few people also seem to remember that South Africa also had a nuclear program and successfully built and detonated a nuclear bomb (way back in the 70's already IIRC; the nuclear program was eventually dismantled). So I highly doubt that this is an attempt to make any sort of political statement, I don't think South Africa has anything much "to prove" in terms of nuclear technologies (unlike for example countries like India which are experimenting now with nuclear weapons, their political situation is entirely different).
Our president might not be the sharpest around at science (his degree is economics) so quite frankly I (and most everyone else) wishes he would refrain from attempting to make strong scientific statements, its embarrassing. But the President has absolutely nothing to do with the PBMR program, and believe it or not we do have some very good scientists and engineers here.
I think you should consider doing a little more research into the political and social climate and history of South Africa before making your conclusions, as it seems to me that by and large you've just mentally mapped the US political situation onto South Africa, assumed it is more or less the same, and made your deductions from that.
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More background info (Score:2)
Re:From South Africa? Ha! ha! ha! (Score:2)
When it was pointed out to her that Toronto was as far away from Mexico as South Africa is from Gabon, she said "Oh."
Re:From South Africa? Ha! ha! ha! (Score:2)
Nearby is relative. Oklo is as far away from South Africa as Denver is from New York City. Plus there's the inconvenience of two conflicts in the way if you want to go by land - the DRC and Angola.
Re:"As long as everyone does their part safely". (Score:2)
Re:Most ignorant comment in the history of mankind (Score:2)
Perhaps I overstated my case. Perhaps you overstated your subject line?
-russ
What's new is the safety (Score:2)
However, these new plants are much smaller (smaller danger from meltdown) and much obviously safer (e.g. no possibility of run-away), so they will produce a new level of trust in people.
Don't worry about disposal. The nuclear material exists in nature now and we manage to live with it. There's no reason why we can't put it back with a level of safety equal to background radiation.
-russ
Talk economic sense, please. (Score:2)
Yes, we do.
The millions of people who work in electricity plants, where nuclear reactors are used responsibly by the government, will beg to differ on that one.
A society that protects its workers at the expense of its consumers will forever be a poor society.
-russ
Re:What's new is the safety (Score:2)
Yes, why don't they?
-russ
Re:What's new is the safety (Score:2)
-russ
Re:What's new is the safety (Score:2)
Thats because radioactive elements tend to change into different elements. The problem with fission products is that they contain isotopes which have a long half life, either of the initial elements or their decay chain.
In geological time scales this is a fairly short time, however.
Re:You do not have the slightest clue (Score:2)
Wrong. Check out the Federation of American Scientists, who have a remarkably accurate FAQ on the matter. Check out this link [fas.org] for details.
Or, for those who are goatse.cx averse [disney.com], I'll just reprint a snippet of the FAQ here: The 5 Mt Redwing Tewa test (20 July 1956 GMT, Bikini Atoll) had a fission fraction of 85%.
The next claim of yours--namely, "It is naive of anyone to believe that nuclear weapons design is common knowledge"--is just as absurd. The principles behind nuclear-weapons design are straightforward and are taught in college classrooms to undergraduates. In the height of the cold war, nuclear-weapons design was published in the open literature. One physicist might write a paper detailing the particular physical properties of compounds exposed to extremely high radiation flux and whatnot, comparable to those found in the heart of a star--a perfectly acceptable scientific article, but when you say "heart of a star" I hear "in a nuclear weapon undergoing supercriticality".
The Manhattan Project was chaired by General Leslie Groves of the Army Air Corps/USAF, but all the principals involved were scientists. Have you ever tried to get a scientist to keep something a secret? They can't. They're genetically incapable of secrecy. It's right there in their DNA sequence, somewhere in that giant double-helix, that says, "if it's cool and it furthers our understanding of the cosmos, I've GOT to tell people about it!"
As far back as the early 1980s, the magazine The Progressive was sued by the United States Government to prevent them from publishing extremely detailed specifications and schematics of nuclear weapons. The DOE only withdrew the lawsuit after it became clear that to get an injunction against The Progressive, they'd have to declassify even more documents and put even more weapons-design material into the public record.
In the Manhattan Project days, it was VERY difficult to obtain large amount (mere pounds) of weapons grade U-235 and plutonium.
No it wasn't. Uranium is a very common element. You can refine it out of granite, for crying out loud. The difficulty has never been in getting fast-fissile material; the difficulty has been in separating it out. Yes, centrifuging it all out is tremendously power-intensive, but if you want the bang, you gotta pay the buck.
The main reason most nations cannot produce nuclear weapons (specifically hydrogen-based nuclear weapons) is because they don't know how to arrange the materials
Nope. The engineering behind it is well-known. The difficulty comes in getting refined fissile material--world governments keep an excruciatingly close eye on stockpiles of refined fissile material (save in the former USSR, which is why it's a source of such concern to arms-proliferation wonks), and building facilities to refine raw material into enriched fissile material is considered extremely destabilizing to regional peace, and as such, is strongly discouraged.
Re:FAS is AGAINST nuclear weapons (Score:2)
Like Bungie says, "Sorry don't make it so". Neither does "wrong".
Yes, U-238 is quite common, but U-235 is NOT
Sure it is. It's about 0.1%, or thereabouts, as a percentage of the total mass fraction. If you've got a kilo of uranium, you've got a gram of U235 in there. Where's your problem? The difficulty is in refining, not procuring.
And what are you calling "fast-fissile material"?
Material which can undergo explosive fission easily.
If the US did not want someone to release scientific material, do you really think that they would sue them?
The Magic 8-Ball of History says... "Clearly, Yes". Ever heard of The Pentagon Papers? Ever heard of the New York Times? Ever heard of a couple of journalists named Woodward and Bernstein? All of these people and agencies came under withering governmental pressure to not publish information deemed harmful to the national security. The courts have historically been extremely hard to convince that national security overrides the First Amendment.
In matters of national security, the people would be arrested or worse...
Paranoid ranting from someone who's losing the arguments on merits, so he's turning this into an "if YOU only knew what I knew, YOU'D agree with me, too!". Sorry. I outgrew that mode of debate when I was in fifth grade.
When you are citing "proof" of your arguments, you should not use biased sources, or if you do, you should include a source from each side of the argument. The American Federation of American (Atomic) Scientists is a non-profit organization devoted to ENDING the arms race and is AGAINST nuclear weapons.
Just because they have a mission in life doesn't mean they're lying. I know a senior officer in the USAF who's in command of a missile silo. Let me tell you, nobody on Earth hates nukes as much as he does. If you think that ending the arms race makes FAS partial, then all I can imagine is that you don't want the arms race ended.
Buddy, everybody who's involved with nukes wants the arms race to end. Even Pat Buchanan wants the arms race to end. The only difference of opinion is how the arms race ought to end--by one side making a moral stand and unilaterally disarming, or both sides negotiating a mutual disarmament.
FAS wants the arms race stopped. So does SAC and NORAD and Dubya and Clinton and all of Congress. If you want me to find a source from a party that wants the arms race to go on, I'm sorry, there aren't any reliable sources out there.
All the people who want the arms race to go on are absofuckinglutely nuts, and the entire world knows it.
Re:Killing two birds with one stone (Score:2)
I used to believe this too. Of course, like many things, the truth is a little more complicated. When I tried this line on a physicist friend of mine (who used to work for the AECL), she sat me down and smacked me around. :)
While the heavy water moderator is required to initiate the reaction (the rods are initially less than critical mass), once started, the rods end up enriching themselves, and may be able to sustain a reaction on their own.
Also, even if the reaction stops, the rods may generate enough heat to melt anyways. This is because a good fraction of the heat generated in the plant is by the decay of fission products. You can't stop the decay no matter what you do.
Of course, this is probably incredibly unlikely. But that just means you have to roll the dice more often. :)
Cool eh?
Jason PollockRe:Not a slowpoke; my mistake. (Score:2)
No, they won't. They are designed to keep the bits of fuel far enough apart that no reaction hot enough to start burning either the fuel itself or its carbon shell could start or sustain itself.
This has actually been tested by running a pebble-bed reactor without coolant for an extended period. It got hot, but no hotter than designed for, and no incident occurred.
- - - - -
Re:Dealing with spent fuel. (Score:2)
great! so now the whole region is covered in radioactive rocks. This has helped the situation how?
Re:Dealing with spent fuel. (Score:2)
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Re:Dealing with spent fuel. (Score:2)
I'm obviously no physics guy (otherwise I most likely wouldn't be asking this question), but couldn't spend fuel be dumped in an active volcano where it would melt down in liquid-hot mag-ma (sorry, had to say it) and diffuse the radioactivity?
Astute Uranium Marketing (Score:2)
Re:Righter than you know (Score:2)
U-bombs were tested in the late 60s. Basically, the idea was to wrap a H-bomb with uranium. The A-bomb trigger would go off initiating an H-bomb explosion which in turn would induce fission in the outer uranium layer for an increased yield. It was a very messy weapon and didn't have a whole lot of strategic value as such. I think the one test killed a bunch of fisherman in a Japanese boat called the "Lucky Dragon" (I forget the original Japanese name) from fallout who were trolling a bit too close to the test site. However this might be more than a little bit mixed up.
It has been a while since I've thought about the history of above-grounds weapons testing and if you are relying on Slashdot for a nuclear physics education you are just plain silly. As a Ph.D. in plasma physics, it is distressing to see the number of scientific dubious assertions that get moderated up (it is as though science here is decided through committee and not experiment).
In any case, because there are many variants of atomic weapons means I don't have a great deal of faith in the previous poster. Depending on the details of the trigger and fusion fuel you can get all sorts of weapons (optimized for explosive yield, optimized for EMP, optimized for neutron yield, optimized for fallout or lack thereof,
A blanket statement that all fusion bombs are fission powered is a bit misleading.
Furthermore, if I recall correctly nuclear proliferation treaties were entered into which effectively arrested development of U-bomb type weapons. Your level of cynicism will dictate whether that means anything to you.
Kevin
Re:Riiiiiight. (Score:2)
The Hindenburg was not downed by the Hydrogen. The Hindenburg went down because the the fabric "skin" over the metal frame had been painted with a mixture containing powerdered aluminum. It was the first time a blimp had been painted with the substance, and before that the extreme flammability of the stuff was unknown. When the ship dropped its mooring lines, a sparc from the static it picked up from storm clouds arced somewhere on blimp, and the aluminum in the paint caught fire. It burned at several thousand degrees, and the entire skin of the blimp went with it. The heat collapsed the frame, and blew up the hydrogen tanks inside.
The whole thing was discovered by the Germans soon after the explosion, who covered it up fearing that shifting blame from helium to the aluminum paint would make Nazi scientists look bad. It was later discovered by a NASA hydrogen expert who saw that the giant flames and burning skin were inconsistent with hydrogen explosions. He found remnants of the blimp's skin and tests confirmed his theory.
Just a little eye opener...
Re:Only removes actinides. (Score:2)
Right, but during the time its being sucked into the molten part, its trapped under a large amount of rock, which makes a good radiation shield. Moving at a foot a year, itll be 20 feet underground in maybe 30-40 years, and thats plenty of shielding. Yes it takes a million years to be spread into the magma layer, but during that time its in a place where it cant harm humans. The trick would be to put the waste right where the crust is subducting, you dont want to wait 30 years for the waste to start moving underground if you accidentally place it 30 feet away.
Re:Riiiiiight. (Score:2)
Re:Joe can't find a job (in USA) (Score:2)
Re:The reactor casing is also a problem (Score:2)
Re:Only removes actinides. (Score:2)
Yes, Bogus man, you have no clue. (Score:2)
I agree. To speak with athority on power generation you should get a degree in Nuclear Engineering, work in a plant, and know what you are talking about.
The only reason Chernobyl went up and Three Mile Island did not is luck. Both reactors were designed using inadequate computing power. Chernobyl went critical because there was a region of positive feedback in the operation cycle that was not uncovered using the two dimensional simulation techniques used in both the USSR and the US at the time.
BzzzT! Wrong, this had nothing to do with inadequate computer simulations. US reactors, at least, were tested out with models, then prototypes and pilot stations. These are the kinds of things men have been using instead of computers for all of human history but the last 40 years or so.
Both accidents were caused by operators overcoming automated saftey features. At Chernobyl, the operators were testing safety features at low reactor power levels and outside electricity turned off. They were not supposed to do that. At TMI, operators failed to believe their insturments and turned off systems that would have shut the plant down safely. There the similarities end.
Chernobyl suffered a steam explosion and uncotrolled release because of poor design goals. It was a dual purpose reactor providing both electricity and plutonium. The core was water cooled and graphite moderated, the graphite serving to promote plutonium ingrowth. It was also an easy access reactor, with nothing between it and the world but heavy concrete blocks. When the operators got everything just wrong and core power jumped from 0 to 1000% in a thousanth of a second or so, they were doomed. The heat released immediatly precluded control rod insertion, leaving the core overpowered and uncontrollable. It then got hot enough to make a steam and hydrogen explosion that blew those concrete blocks off with such force that they destroyed the refueling crane above. Without further barriers to release, the contents of the core were free to kill operators and make a mess for miles around. Nasty, but it won't happen at a US plant because we don't have easy access reactors. We have contained reactors desinged only to make power.
backward (Score:2)
While the attempted environmental extortion is admirable, the world will not reward people like this. Reality is that Joe San-Diego did not want a powerplant in his back yard yesterday. Today, he has to pay an absorbident amount for an artificially limited commodity.
Poor Joe. He's going to suffer rolling blackouts and all that. Burgalars will rob him while his alarm is off. His food will rot when the fridge is turned off. His house will mold and mildew while his AC is off, his air indoors will be worse than that outside and his health will suffer. His children will get asthma and he'll have to pay for expensive medicine and hospital trips. His trafic lights will be unreliable and his car rides will take longer and be more dangerous. One day, after an automobile accident at a broken traffic light, his hospital might loose power and all the OR gadgets will sputter and fail.
Oh well, that's too bad for Joe.
Re:We'll run out of uranium (Score:2)
Ch. expl. was caused by well-known Xe-135 effect (Score:2)
Chernobyl was operated at high power levels (normal operation) and then shut down for about eight hours while engineers mucked with the console, then brought back up to critical condition. The basic problem is that nuclear reactors are not like cars. When you shut 'em off, they don't just lie dormant until you switch them back on again.
When you operate a reactor, one of the fission products decays (half-life eight hours) into Xe-135, which absorbs neutrons strongly. That has the same effect as inserting a bit of control rod into the reactor, and as the reactor comes up to equilibrium levels of Xe, you have to pull out bits of actual control rod in order to compensate. The equilibrium level of Xe 135 in the core is determined by the balance between production (which depends on your average power level over the last eight hours) and destruction (which depends on your power level now) of the Xe.
When you turn off the reactor, you stop destroying the Xenon. It builds up in the reactor core, effectively shutting down the reactor by greater and greater margin until, about eight hours later, it reaches a peak level and begins to decay again.
The operators on the day of the accident found that they had to pull large amounts of extra rod out of the reactor core (because of the Xe-135, though they didn't pause to think about it). When they brought the reactor critical, the Xe-135 was quickly destroyed by the neutrons in the core, removing the extra damping effect and making the reaction run away.
Even then, "SCRAM trips" (emergency shutoff safeguards) in the console would have saved the day except that they had almost all been disabled to test a single particular one.
The real problem with nuclear power isn't the "normal" waste disposal problem. It's the incredible, abject, deep stupidity of the bottom 1% of nuclear plant workers. You can engineer around physics, toxicity, and radiation -- but you can't engineer around foolish people. I was finally convinced of this truism by the insanely stupid people in Japan, who made their own critical assembly out of dissolved uranium (by doubling the uranium batch size for faster processing) -- other examples may be found in the nuclear plant lore here in the U.S.
Re:You down with Entropy? (Score:2)
Re:This is just what we need... (Score:2)
I'm thinking depleted-uranium SUVs -- how else are we going to make them heavy enough in the future?
Be the first on your block with a new Ford Excrescent!
Re:You down with Entropy? (Score:2)
From our lungs, not our stomachs. (You said exhale, not belch.)
OTOH, flatulent cows are actually a significant source of methane, another greenhouse gas...
--
Re:Riiiiiight. (Score:2)
Economics becomes paradoxically inefficient as markets mature, because the profit incentive becomes the entire driving force. So why do anything when you can get pure profit?
My stepdad had a toy and hobby store. It got wiped out by toys r us. Now the big box stores and chains are having big time problems - is it playco I just saw having a liquidation sale? How about etoys.com? The net result is much fewer hobby shops, with the loss of artisan advice giving. Remember when you were little and built things? Now everything is just manufactured and toys magically appear - even build-it toys are leaving less to the imagination - check out a lego set lately? So the inefficiency that economics doesn't address is that of good workmanship - there is a strong incentive away from it, in fact. Of course, in many circumstances, mass production is a good thing - even Ferrari has come into the 20th century for making engine parts. But there needs to be a balance of craftsmanship, and that is what is lost. In
And the other thing placing too much faith in market economics is, you wind up with a bifurcated economy - the rich get richer, the poor have children. Most of us
Concentration (Score:2)
Rate me [picture-rate.com] on picture-rate.com
Hah (Score:2)
Rate me [picture-rate.com] on picture-rate.com
Re:Most ignorant comment in the history of mankind (Score:2)
Dude, have you not got any of what these people have been saying?
In small douses, radiation doesn't hurt you. In large doses it does. The byproducts of nuclear reaction are far more radioactive (a million times as much so, according to one poster) then the normal uranium you'd find in the ground. Touching the two ends of a dead battery is in no way comparable to getting hit by lightning. It's the same with this
Rate me [picture-rate.com] on picture-rate.com
Did you even read the artical (Score:2)
Anyway, all that would happen if some guy tried to 'open it up' is that he would severely burn himself, and spill really hot beads all over the place, it wouldn't cause Hiroshima style explosion. And you would need to use dynamite in order to get the case open (or some similar explosive)
Rate me [picture-rate.com] on picture-rate.com
pic... (Score:2)
Rate me [picture-rate.com] on picture-rate.com
Re:"Too cheap to meter" (Score:2)
>basement fission plant works.
Troll.
As opposed to the fun when the 6 year old tries to take the microwave, the gas boiler and the television apart? 120 volts and/or gas is not going to teach more than a final lesson. The modern world is not noted for the child-benign nature when you take it apart.
Re:What's new is the safety (Score:2)
Untrue. They're mostly burned out now, but there are natural nuclear reactors. [academicpress.com] Truth is stranger than fiction.
Re:Speaking of small reactors... (Score:2)
As a matter of fact, they have been made pretty darn small. Check this link [fas.org].
Highlight:
"The W54 warhead used in the Davy Crockett had a minimum mass of about 23 kg, and had yields ranging from 10 tons up to 1 kt in various mods (probably achieved by varying the fissile content). The warhead was basically egg-shaped with the minor axis of 27.3 cm and a major axis of 40 cm. The W-54 probably represents a near minimum diameter for a spherical implosion device (the U.S. has conducted tests of a 25.4 cm implosion system however)."
10 tons of yield is pretty small for a nuke. And I can't find the link now, but I have read other reports that state the theoretical minimum diameter for a "linear compression" nuke is about 4". Those atomic rocket launchers in Starship Troopers? Not so crazy, apparently.
Re:Gas Turbine Modular Helium Reactors (Score:2)
"General Atomics?" It sounds like something out of an old Asimov or Niven story. I gotta have a T-shirt. Didn't see any for sale on the web site... is there a way to get GA swag?
Slashdotted... (Score:2)
--
Killing two birds with one stone (Score:2)
Not only will we be able to get power so cheap that we can kiss rolling blackouts produced by centralized power generation goodbye, but we can also worry about what happens when someone want's to "reverse engineer" the thing by opening up the box and "checking out" the hardware, in the name of information being free. Man, I sure wouldn't want to be living within 100 miles of someone who thinks it wise to tinker with a small nuclear reactor.
And think about the chain reaction that would be caused by one "going off." If anyone else in the area had one, the resulting EMP would probably fry the control electronics and cause other devices to go "critical," thereby setting them off too. What a blast that would be (no pun intended).
Re:Only removes actinides. (Score:2)
Really, though, I agree with the idea of burying the nastier stuff on the low side of a subduction fault. By the time any of that rock resurfaces, the radionuclides will be long decayed.
Re:You do not have the slightest clue (Score:2)
BEFORE USE:
1. Remove cranium from anal cavity
2. Take a physics course or two
U-238 is fissionable. It is not fissile, so it is not used for fuel in reactors, except to be bred into Pu-239. Neutrons at the energies produced by fission reactions cannot induce fission in U-238. At that energy, neutrons either don't interact at all, or are captured, leading to beta decay. Neutrons from fusion do have enough energy to induce fission, though. When you look at the reactions, you see that a few grams of deuterium-tritium mixture can produce enough high-energy neutrons to induce fission in several hundred grams of U-238. I can't comment on the exact numbers (not a nuclear engineer), but the given figures definitely fit in order-of-magnitude estimates.
This is why H-bomb schematics always show a cylinder of U-238, with a rod of U-238 down the middle, and the intervening space full of deuterium and tritium, with a complete fission bomb at one end. I think there's usually a beryllium casing outside the uranium cylinder, but I'm not positive.
It is possible to create a bomb which derives almost all its energy from fusion, but such weapons are heavy and large for their yield. They have almost the same design as described above, but the U-238 jacket is replaced with tungsten or lead. One mostly-fusion device, the Tsar Bomba, derived 97% of its yield from fusion. It was intended, however, to have a U-238 jacket, to produce an even higher yield.
Most of this info was taken from the Nuclear Weapons FAQ, section 1.5. Here's one link [cetin.net.cn], I'm sure Google can find more if you want.
Re:How we got here (Score:2)
I thought "green" meant getting power from crystals or butterflies or some shit.
green means different things to different people. To me it means first that the cost of every product should reflect not only how much money it took the producer to produce it, but also the cost of cleaning up the mess that third parties are left with as a result of both its consumption and its production. Second, green means that we should not party at the expense of our grandchildren. Taken together, what I want to say simply is that green means fair. But then again, I am a green-red colorblind.
Re:Only removes actinides. (Score:3)
The medium-lifetime elements are what I'd worry about, personally. Anything with a half-life of millions of years isn't going to be horribly dangerous (in low doses or for low exposure times), and so could if necessary just be spread around over a very large area as dust in the air or the ocean. Its contribution to the natural background radiation would be undetectably low.
But, if you have medium- and short-lived isotopes present, you'd triple everyone's cancer rate doing that. This is why I consider the shorter-lived elements to be the main problem.
Ultimately i think some sort of crustal sequestration method would be the best, send the radioactive particles into a fault where thell be sucked into the earth.
This was my favourite solution a while back too. Then someone pointed out that it would take millions of years for them to be sucked down (moving at maybe a foot per year, and you want it to sink several hundred miles). This unfortunately doesn't look practical.
My favourite long-term solution would be to either find a way to *safely* ship them into space (you don't want a rocket to explode), or else to feed them many times through a mass spectrometer/neutron source rig (filter out the safe elements, and send the unsafe ones back into the neutron source for transmutation). Neither approach is practical now (both could be done, but they'd either be horrifically expensive, or have unacceptable risks of contamination, or both).
Re:Killing two birds with one stone (Score:3)
Um, no nuclear plant ever built in the history of nuclear power has been able to cause a nuclear explosion. Building a nuclear bomb requires completely different conditions (for reasons that I won't go into here).
The worst that happens, with any reactor, is that the core gets hot enough to melt and/or cause coolant pipes to burst. This is ugly, because it contaminates everything nearby, but relatively minor on the "explosion" scale. There is no EMP.
I wouldn't worry about meltdowns, though. Firstly, all reactors built within the past two or three decades have doubly- or triply-redundant systems that shut them down when they overheat. Secondly, anything that uses water (heavy or light) as a moderator *can't* melt down. Without a moderator, the reactor stops dead (it needs the moderator to react). With water as a moderator, your moderator disappears as soon as it heats up enough to burst pipes. End of reaction.
Lastly, the "slowpoke" style of reactor described can't have runaway heating at all. As it heats up, the core expands, pushing the fuel rods away from each other and making the reactor less efficient. Do whatever you like to it; it doesn't run away.
Hydroelectric as a non-renewable resource. (Score:3)
At least clean fission only eats up matter which, though not a renewable resource either, is constantly being replenished on the order of tons a day from micrometeorites.
Kevin Fox
--
I am not a nuclear physicist... (Score:3)
Nuclear Fission releases incredibly large amounts of energy, even when it is a controlled fission such as that in a nuclear reactor. If I understand correctly, nuclear fusion is capable of releasing as much as if not more energy. But like the topic says, IANANP.
Now, perhaps I read too much science fiction, but surely there must be a better way of harnessing this energy than using it to boil water (in the case of current nuclear power stations) or heat up helium (in the case of this article) to turn a turbine to create electricity. It seems to me that a LOT of energy would be lost in the transfer from heat to mechanical to electrical energy.
The article mentions that "The early designers and builders minimized the risk of their projects by combining the new nuclear fission--based heaters with the well-proven closed-cycle steam engines." So, my Isaac-Asimov-reading-lets-build-a-reactor-the-siz
I dunno, but it seems like an awful lot of energy is being wasted in the current reactors, including these new PBMRs mentioned in the article
And I have to admit, I wouldn't mind having a personal sized one to power my home for a couple of years (decades? centuries??...depending on the amount of fuel). Oh well...perhaps I was just born a few hundred years too early.
Re:No more brownouts.. Woohoo (Score:3)
Re:Spent fuel MUST BE stored on site. No appeals. (Score:4)
Then the heavily-armoured barrels get their paint scuffed.
I don't trust nuclear waste barrels to last a hundred thousand years, but I do trust them to survive anything short of a point-blank strike from heavy artillery.
If you *do* fire heavy artillery at point-blank range into a nuclear waste barrel, you'll get a clould of glass shrapnel - the safest transportable form of nuclear waste puts waste oxides into glass, where they stay (glass is quite durable and resistant to chemical attack). Scrape up the first foot of soil for a quarter of a mile around, put that in barrels, and sent it to the waste dump along with everything else. No additional contamination.
In summary, I don't think that accidents during transport are a concern. I'd be more worried about deliberate theft, and the risk of that can be made no worse than it already is with waste stored at power plants.
Also, storing waste at the plants is not a viable long-term solution, as they aren't in earthquake-free regions isolated from the water table. One good disaster, and *all* of the plant's waste goes into the environment.
Dealing with spent fuel. (Score:4)
The problem with any scheme that involves chemical reprocessing - which used to be widespread - is that you get a lot of minor mishaps occuring, which exposes workers and the nearby environment to small amounts of Really Nasty Stuff (tm).
If I understand correctly, worker health liabilities were why plutonium reprocessing plants were abandoned, but in general, it's just plain safer to seal up the waste in very sturdy containers and drop them in the continental sheild.
As far as transmuting the waste is concerned, there are problems. If you stick waste next to a large neutron source (like a reactor), it will be transmuted. Continuously. This has the good effect of transmuting long-lived radioactive isotopes into shorter-lived ones, and the bad effect of transmuting non-radioactive decay products into radioactive isotopes. This won't magically make the waste non-radioactive (well, after a few centuries of this, it might all end up as the four stable lead isotopes, but don't hold your breath).
In summary, while burying the waste in mine shafts is an imperfect solution, it's one of the best ones that we currently have. We can always dig it up later if we find a really good way to dispose of it.
Re:"Too cheap to meter" (Score:4)
How we got here (Score:4)
The big problem for nuclear power is that the Nuclear power industry has lied and lied and lied. It is no wonder that the public don't trust nuclear power, they would be morons if they did.
The only reason Chernobyl went up and Three Mile Island did not is luck. Both reactors were designed using inadequate computing power. Chernobyl went critical because there was a region of positive feedback in the operation cycle that was not uncovered using the two dimensional simulation techniques used in both the USSR and the US at the time.
If the west was so smart in its nuclear power strategy Three Mile Island would never have been choosen as a site with Manhattan right next door.
The problem today is that having lied about the costs, the safety and the military use of byproducts the civil nuclear industry is going to have a hard time being trusted even if it is proposing an entirely different technology.
Pebble bed and Heavy Water designs are both intrinsically safe technologies that will 'fail safe' in case of failure. Unfortunately the nuclear industry claimed that the intrinsically unstable and dangerous AGR and light water designs were 'fail safe'.
The backers of pebble bed have a point. However having been lied to the public is entirely rational in not trusting the experts again. The idiot in the Whitehouse is certainly not someone I would trust to ensure that safety standards were enforced. The administration has reneged on pledges to not drill off the coast of Florida and to implement C02 emissions caps, arsenic in drinking water is OK. And that is the crew to be trusted to regulate nuclear power?
We may need to start using Nuclear Power in the future, however I think we can wait another four years for a President who is not in the pocket of the energy companies before we let that genie out of the bottle again.
Re:Riiiiiight. (Score:5)
Re:How we got here (Score:5)
because you know that if your viewpoint makes it into law, the vast majority of the cost will be borne by others (who may or may not agree with you)
Externality is defined as cost born by those who are not parties to the transaction. If you think having other people pay for your pleasure is bad, than you should want externalities to be internalized in the cost. Yet you seem to want that others pay for your pleasure and you're pissed because others pass laws that make you pay for your pleasure.
Simple imaginary scenario. Generating electricity causes soot which causes cancer. When you pay for the electricity at cost, someone else's health subsidizes your extra-large refrigerator. You think that is moral, but that passing a law that would force electricity companies to pay for that externality, and raise the price you pay, is an immoral forcing yourself on others. And to think you called me a hyp... no let us not go there.
So what is to be done? Let's find a hispanic neighborhood where the people are to lowdown to complain, they will get the cancer and you will get your extra refrigerator on the cheap. Right? And if they do complain they are communists, right?
Now, my definition of green is based on a simple notion of utility. If you want your extra refrigerator, you should pay someone to agree to a higher risk of cancer. That is the fair market price of electricity. At that price, when you buy electricity, the total utility increases and the market allocates resources efficiently. When you exclude externalities, the total utility of a transaction may be negative, which simply means that the market becomes extremely inefficient in allocating resources.
I'm living in California...the reason for the so-called electricity crisis is none other than hypocrisy.
If you read the papers you know that there are more reasons offered for the power crisis in California than Californian residents. So let's eschew simplifications. A complex event has many causes, think of a car accident. If you are the police, you will accuse the drunken driver. If you are in charge of road signs, you will point out the the stop sign was hidden by a tree. If you are Ralf Nader you will point out that the car manufacturer tried to save a few bucks on the brakes. Each view has a point, but each is governed by a perspective on what improvements are more salient.
Those who oppose the construction of generation facilities should have their power turned off first.
Your explanation, that the crisis results from strict regulation, has problems with the fact that municipalities that did not deregulate are in much better shape today, which suggests that deregulation had something to do with it.
Your solution is to punish hypocritical consumers that want power but resist power generating facilities. Lo and behold, I suggested something similar, but based on the market. I want those who create more demand to pay to those who resist the building of power plants until they agree to host them. It may be the same people, or it may be other people, what does it matter?
If Joe San-Diego doesn't want a powerplant in his backyard, I assume that is because it disturbs him to some degree. If you want a powerplant in his backyard, I suggest you offer Joe enough to get him to change his mind. As you raise your offer, Joe, or someone else, will eventually accept, because the utility of the payment will be greater for them then the disutility of having a powerplant in their backyard. Electricity prices will be higher, but they will reflect exactly the disutility of generating it. You may still have your extra-large refrigerator, or the price might convince you invest in a more efficient model. That is what markets are for.
You down with Entropy? (Score:5)
Do people seem to forget that there is entropy in this universe? All production of electricity causes some form of energy loss. Thus the obvious problem of efficiency.
Nuclear power is very efficient, and does not pollute much. Sure, the pollutants are highly toxic, but there is a smaller proportion of it, than to coal power (as an example). I'd rather have nuclear than coal. Coal pollutes the atmosphere and is far worse than nuclear power, as is oil, and other fossil-fuel based power sources.
Water power is clean but all of the prime locations have been used... thus further plants would be on less effective/efficient sites and end up being very expensive ways of ruining the surrounding ecosystem.
Solar and wind power are not constant enough yet to be relied upon as a sole source of electricity. In addition, these technologies cannot be used universally, some locations will see a benefit while most will not be economical.
Tidal power is effective, but cannot be implemented everywhere (and I mean every oceanside town here). The local topography needs to be just right for tidal power to be economical.
Fusion power is not economical yet either, although there are projects in the works.
So that leaves us with dams and nuclear power (fission) as our clean energy sources...
The problem with nuclear power is that the public is uneducated about the safeness of the power production process. In the US and Europe, nuclear power is extremely safe because it is highly regulated. Safety measures are considered, then will be increased beyond the engineers' original specifications. Chernobyl was as bad as it was because Russia couldn't afford to build a safe plant... they followed the motto "good enough for government work."
Righter than you know (Score:5)
This is for all the folks who told you fusion powers the hydrogen bomb:
The H-bomb uses a fission trigger which supplies about 10% of its energy output. The prompt gamma rays from this blast are used to compress and trigger the secondary stage; this must occur before the mechanical blast rips the secondary apart.
The secondary contains a stick of fission fuel surrounded by fusion fuel surrounded by a thick, depleted Uranium tamper. When the assembly is compressed the stick of fission fuel fissions, providing neutrons which...
Finally, the incredibly huge mass of neutrons generated by the fusion reaction induce fission in the depleted Uranium tamper, yielding about 80% of the bomb's energy. Now we have an explosion. And 90% of the energy comes from fission, not fusion.
The mantra about H-bombs being "clean" is just one of the many lies told by the nuclear industry to make itself look more useful than it really is. Richard Rhodes' books The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb have many more details about how the current situation came about.