Toshiba Pushes Safe, Small Nuclear Reactor Design 965
core plexus writes "This article describes a proposal from a Japanese corporation that wants to thrust the Interior Alaska community of Galena into international limelight by donating a new, unconventional electricity-generating plant that would light and heat the Yukon River village pollution-free for 30 years. There's a catch, of course. It's a nuclear reactor. Not a huge, Three Mile Island-type power plant but a new generation of small nuclear reactor about the size of a big spruce tree. Designers say the technology is safe, simple and cheap enough to replace diesel-fired generators as the primary energy source for villages across rural Alaska."
Villages? (Score:2)
Re:Villages? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Villages? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Villages? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Villages? (Score:5, Informative)
A million plus dollars buys a security force more than able to gaurd the perimeter around a complex not larger than a school building. Security is then essentially free for these people, and in fact they are still saving a lot of money per year in energy costs. Plus they are paying for a service in their community to people that will be living in their community. And those security people will spend money somewhere.
This solution may not be fesible when there are cheaper fuel alternatives, but out there it seems to make a lot of sense.
Nuking Nukes (Score:3, Insightful)
Listen to grenade go *BOOM*. Realize that one needs to read up on nuclear reactors.
You really don't know the first thing about how these things work, do you? What would you possibly hope to accomplish by dropping a grenade into the secondary coolant loop, other than stopping power output, which would be accomplished by the truck hitting the pipes?
Virg
Toshiba Pushes Safe, Small Nuclear Reactor Design (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Toshiba Pushes Safe, Small Nuclear Reactor Desi (Score:3, Funny)
New term (Score:4, Funny)
waste? (Score:2)
I already have issues just trying to dispose of radioactive cat litter ( what you get when treating a cat for cancer )
Re:waste? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:waste? (Score:5, Funny)
A major Japaneese corporation donates a high tech, ultraclean nuclear reactor to remote Alaskan village. The plant goes online, and everyone is happy until....
One day, all contact with the village is lost. A crack team of physicist/commandos are sent in, headed by Jean-Claude Van Damme or Vin Dielel (the Governator's too busy). What they find will SHOCK and HORRIFY the world, horribly disfigured villagers, mutant killer walruses (they came inland, they're mutants!) and a conspiracy going further than they could have imagined.
I can tell already tell (Score:2)
Re:waste? (Score:2)
sucks to be him
Pollution Free? (Score:2)
I wonder why they some small "village" in Alaska - perhaps this technology isn't as safe as they might like us to think?
People in Alasks don't HEART Nature. (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pollution Free? (Score:3, Insightful)
And never forget about incidental pollution not related to burning... like the occasional oil spill.
Well, this is a good place to start (Score:5, Interesting)
And if something goes badly wrong, is anyone really going to trek through the snow and ice to check things out? Just kidding.
While the Japanese nuclear "industry" is one of the worst in the world in terms of safety, it's impressive that reactors are this small, and maybe this will eventually come to be the standard for electricity generation in places where the other fossil-friendly alternative - namely hydroelectric power - is not an option.
Re:Well, this is a good place to start (Score:5, Funny)
Sony today announced it's latest line of personal entertainment products that, miraculously, don't need batteries, ever. Say hello to the new Sony NukeMan.
WARNING: RADIOLOGICAL HAZARD. DO NOT OPEN; NO USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE. IF DEVICE BECOMES OVERLY WARM, IMMERSE IMMEDIATELY IN HEAVY WATER AND CALL THE U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY'S RADIOLOGICAL EMERGENCY RESPONSE TEAM. DO NOT USE WHILE PREGNANT OR NURSING AN INFANT. DOES NOT CONFER SUPER-POWERS UPON USER. KEEP AWAY FROM EASILY-MUTATED ARACHNIDS.
Available in red, purple, pink, sky blue, and glow-in-the-dark green.
Schwab
Re:Well, this is a good place to start (Score:3, Funny)
That would be sweet! As Dying-of-Cancer Man, you could fight crime using the awesome power of your inspiring tale of courage!
DoCM: "Stop, villain! *pant* Your nefarious schemes are over! *hack cough* Oh, there goes the last of my hair..."
Villain: "Your body wracked with cancer and the effects of chemotherapy, I'm surprised you can stand, much less threaten me."
DoCM: "I just want
Small portable reactors are nothing new (Score:3, Interesting)
Accoring to the headline, the reactors are about the size of a big spruce tree.
Why is this impressive? US subs and aircraft carriers are powered by nuke plants which are in the same rough size, if not smaller as a spruce (which, according to this [jaredsgarden.com] pages stats are roughly in the range of 30-60 ft tall and 20-30 ft wide). And the boat and ship nuke plants have been around for many years, too.
What would be impressive, though, is if they CAN indeed run trouble free fo
Re:Small portable reactors are nothing new (Score:4, Informative)
Binkleyz, ET2(SS), USN, Ret.
Re:Well, this is a good place to start (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well, this is a good place to start (Score:3, Informative)
Nope. The Chernobyl reactor caught fire. It used a graphite moderator (a design not used in the US) which caught fire when the coolant water boiled down low enough to expose it to air. The Chernobyl design was basically an accident waiting to happen -- it was actually worse than a meltdown. (In a meltdown you're left with a pool of radioactive metal that's no longer critical all over the floor of the containment
Re:Well, this is a good place to start (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well, this is a good place to start (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well, this is a good place to start (Score:4, Informative)
Sign me up! (Score:2)
decentralization of the power grid (Score:2, Interesting)
Whaaaa.....? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Whaaaa.....? (Score:2, Funny)
Ignorance (Score:5, Insightful)
There is soooo much less polution from nuclear reactors given the probability of worst case scenarios versus the diesel they are currently using. Why are we still burning fossel fuels!@!#@#!@!#
They arent in a location very suitable for wind/solar either, so nuclear seems like the best non-renewable solution.
Such a backwards society we live in, when technology is available and safe, and we delay in implementation.
Re:Ignorance (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly a name change is needed. Just like MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) used to be called NRIs (nuclear ...). Maybe something like "elemental decay engines" would be less scary for the illiterate masses?
I can hear them now: "It has the word 'decay' in it. Is it like composting?"
Austin Powers' nemesis? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ignorance (Score:4, Interesting)
Nuclear energy is barely cost competitive now, and the only reason they are even close to competive is because of the heavy government subsidies that the industry gets. Without subsidies, nuclear energy wouldn't be cost effective at all, and the industry in every country is heavily subsidized. One of the biggest subsidies is governments acting as an insurer of last resort since regular insurance companies are not willing to offer policies against nuclear accidents.
I would rather see companies be penalized (via taxation) for the pollution they generate, which they can pass on to me in the form of higher prices, or they can switch to cleaner energy sources and offer me cheaper prices. At the same time, governments can stop subsidizing other forms of energy, which can be passed on to me in the form of lower taxes. As the markets rationalize, I suspect that I will see a net gain, while government tax income will be revenue neutral.
Sadly, this won't happen in America, since Republicans are mostly beholden to big oil, and Democrats are mostly beholden to the greens, neither of whom have my interests at heart.
Re:Ignorance (Score:4, Interesting)
Those expenses are hard to enumerate. I'd go ahead and try to estimate them and apply a tax to gas accordingly, but there is another cost which is easy to enumerate. How about the cost of interventions in the Middle East? The only reason we launch cruise missles like they were practice rounds on the target range is because of the oil under the ground. If the cost of Middle East wars were tacked onto gas, you can bet that alternative energy would look more attractive.
It's a win-win too. Anti-war protesters can't complain about the wars over there if they buy gas for their car. If they want to set an example and use other sources of power, then they can rest assured they aren't spending their tax dollars on bullets. If the true cost of oil is high enough people will stop buying it, and we won't end up invading the middle east every 5-10 years. Without the huge flow of cash and the US state department pushing the status quo you can bet that democracy is a lot more likely to fluorish over there as well.
Plus, this would all be sustainable in the long run.
Let people buy oil, nuclear, or whatever. Leave it up to each individual to decide what makes the most sense. Just make sure each option is priced with all its associated costs factored in. If it costs less to clean up after one source of power, then make sure it is taxed correspondingly less.
The old dilemma (Score:2, Insightful)
- Safe.
- Small.
- Nuclear Reactor.
Pick two.Re:The old dilemma (Score:3, Insightful)
Pick two.
'Nuclear' doesn't actually enter into it; it's just one locus of possibilities within the 'Safe/Cheap/Small' domain.
Already been done (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Already been done (Score:3, Interesting)
It took a large team of men, working in short shifts most of a day to get it in a container. It did not look like something I would want to do, even if the pay was good, though I doubt it was.
They say the Russians built quite a few of these little self-powered navigation towers.
Randy Virgin? (Score:2, Funny)
go nukes (Score:2)
Nuclear material in remote, unsecured locations? (Score:2)
Seems that our rogue, zealot enemies (no, not linux zealots) could try to do some damage/steal stuff in a remote
Re:Nuclear material in remote, unsecured locations (Score:5, Insightful)
Nantucket's solution to windmills (Score:2)
they are only 70 feet tall!!
they could be installed on-island and generate all the electricity they need.
What about the Waste? (Score:2)
Reactors evolution (Score:5, Informative)
-Big hunk of uranium in a pool of water*. Water heats but is under pressure so it can't boil. The water (contaminated and radioactive) is then piped through fresh water (in sealed pipes) from a lake or river transferring heat so the fresh water will boil and turn turbines. Neutron absorbing control rods are raised or lowered into the big hunk of uranium to control the reaction. Problems can occour with pipes corroding and releasing contaminated water*, control rods can jam, leaks in the coolant water* can cause a loss of coolant leading to an overheated reactor.
-Little pellets of uranium in a pool of water*. Same principle as above, only there are no control rods. As the pellets heat up, the expand, increasing the distance between the pelets. This is much safer because there are no control rods to jam. Loss of coolant can still be a problem, but easily solved by simply moving the pellets further apart.
-And now, this reactor.. a Big Rod of Uranium is immersed in a pool of water*. The rod of uranium is sub-critical so it can't sustain a (large) heat producing reaction on its own. A sleve made of neutron reflecting material (google for nuclear bomb neutron reflector) slowly makes its way along the BRoU over the reactors 30-year lifespan. Only the uranium surrounded by the sleve can react. If the sleve moves too fast, then the reactors lifespan is simply shorted - it will never produce more heat than can be made via the reflector. If it moves too slow, the reactor simply produces less heat. Overall a very good design. If I were to have a reactor in my backyard, I definately would choose this style.
I've gotta hand it to the toshiba people.. I wouldn't have thought of this... pretty cool.
*Note: Water may not be water. Water is often used because of its high specific heat, but many other liquids have been used as coolant. In the toshiba reactor, liquid sodium is spec'd because its non-corrosive. A big plus in a maintenance-free environment.
Um... (Score:5, Funny)
Reflector PR doesn't make sense... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a bit skeptical about the reflector mechanism: certainly, it makes sense to use a neutron reflector to modulate reactor output. But the business about "if the sleeve moves too fast, then the reactor's lifespan is simply shorted" doesn't make any sense to me.
The lifetime of most reactors is determined by the buildup of "poisons" (neutron-absorbing waste products) in the fuel, which is why reprocessing plants work so well: unlike a coal plant, a nuclear plant generally doesn't get more than a small fraction of the available energy out of its fuel, so you can chemically repair the fuel and use it again.
But the buildup of poisons in the fuel is dependent on the total amount of energy released so far. So moving the reflector too fast should either (A) produce more heat or (B) not affect the lifetime of the core very much. Toshiba seems to be claiming (not-A) and (not-B), which doesn't jive (prima facie) with reactor physics.
Re:Another benefit of sub-critical fuel (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Reactors evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
Scaled down for the home (Score:2)
A Pity Asimov is Dead (Score:5, Interesting)
Toshiba announces new laptop power supply (Score:2)
radioactive (Score:4, Funny)
So is this one of those situations where limelight = green glow?
Affordable safe spacelift ends waste issue (Score:2)
Once in orbit, you simply sypersync it toward the sun... or even better, use space elevators to directly fling the stuff to the sun. It doesn't travel thruought the cosmos to wreck someone else's problems, and there is no need to bury it in anyone's backyard. You can even use nuclear powered spacecraft to do it if you dont h
Funny thing about the French (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, what to do with the spent fuel is a problem, but is the cost of storing the degrading material higher than what we pump into the air each year? Let's face it Solar and wind are not there yet. (Although if your looking to make a worth while investment in your home, consider adding solar cells if you live anywhere outside of the pacific northwest, my father did and uses it to heat water and some applices and its paid for itself in 3 years. Me I still rent, so someday)
I wish people would get over their nuclear phobias and NIMBY additudes because something needs to be done, and adding more gas turbines and coal plants are not the best solution.
Re:Funny thing about the French (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual proportion in France is 75% of electric power generation from nuclear. Another 15% is other "clean" power, such as hydro. The remaining 10% is evil dirty "burning stuff" electricity. I live pretty close to about five reactors here, and I feel pretty safe. It's preferable to having a bunch of coal plants dumping crap (including a fair amount of uranium!) into the air.
Nuclear really is the way to go. The only major accident, Chernobyl, was only possible due to the collusion of a horribly unsafe plant design, and moronic operators who decided to run an experiment (i.e. try something out that was way beyond the design specs) and turn off all of the safety systems while they were doing it. So, surprise surprise, the thing made a big KABOOM.
If coal plants had to live under the same radiation emission guidelines as nuclear power, they would never be able to operate. So I agree completely, get rid of nuclear phobias (in other countries, there doesn't seem to be a lot of it here!) and get rid of heavy pollution in electrical generation.
What's wrong with TMI? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
The only problem I can see with it (aside from public perception) is that it involves a shaft dug into permafrost. I'd be somewhat worried that a wet fall followed by a sudden cold spell could lead to the shaft getting crushed.
Of course, it will be hard to sell people on, despite the fact that this is probably a much safer thing to have in your back yard than a gas main. I'd like one in my back yard, except for the fact that it's not cost-effective to run, unless you're in the middle of nowhere in a place without sunlight.
I want one in MY backyard (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I want one in MY backyard (Score:5, Insightful)
What comes out of these reactors is much less radioactive, for a much shorter period of time. You can safely put it back in the ground, in a non-water soluble, non-concentrated form.
Yes, you can put that in my backyard too. I strongly suggest that people that consider this a problem not live near me. It will dramatically improve the intelligence in the area.
You know..... (Score:3, Funny)
Oh wait, wait........imagine a beowulf cluster....oh fuck it.
About Time (Score:5, Interesting)
Because it had to be "certified" and documented, the cost was outrageous. Each section of pipe had to come from a certified company built by a certified company and using materials (ore, etc) from a certified place, all documented of course. Makes you feel better about the construction, but costs a lot and requires lots of maintenance.
At the time I saw some specs for a new, simple design to be used in Asia and submitted to the NRC. It used less people, more gravity fed pumps and flows, and should have lowered the cost of plants from billions to hundreds or even tens of millions.
Nothing came of it and it was a larger scale than this, but it was a good idea. Nuclear has a place when built well and conservatively, which it seems this design is.
why we fear nuclear power (Score:4, Informative)
how long really? (Score:3, Insightful)
It looks like we may be able to break down the seriously radioactive stuff from nuclear fuel and turn it into the stuff that is only slightly radioactive (think dangerous for about 100 years.)
So we reprocess the spent fuel, which we aren't doing now. That's 90% of your mass right there that you extract and put back into the reaction.
Now take that 10% and extract the 2% plutonium that is in it and use that in one of the nuclear plant designs that can run on plutonium/uranium mix.
Now with the 8% that is left, process it in an actinide burner and you have a small amount of material that needs only to be kept for 100 years before it isn't really very radiactive. In practice, the closer you get to the 100 year mark the less dangerous it becomes.
Pebble Bed & 3 Mile Mythology (Score:3, Informative)
http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/ [mit.edu]
Also, whenever people invoke Three MIle Island, I'm always obliged to point out that ZERO nuclear waste was released during the accident. It was all completely contained. Most people think it was like Chernobyl, but the fact is: the safety standards worked for 3-mile.
Quick primer on nuclear physics (Score:3, Informative)
For each element, there is a small list of stable isotopes. If a nucleus becomes unstable for whatever reason, it attempts to return to a stable configuration. There are several ways this can happen, including radioactive decay and fission.
The nucleus of any atom is held together by binding energy, and tries to fly apart due to electric repulsion between the protons. The binding energy per nucleon has a broad maximum around 8 MeV and nuclear mass between 50 - 75. Unstable, heavier nuclei may undergo fission into smaller nuclei with higher binding energy. The difference is released as heat, which we use to generate power.
The electric repulsion increases as the square of the number of protons in a nucleus, so more neutrons per proton are needed for heavier elements to maintain stability; however, there is a limit, and elements beyond Bismuth (83) are naturally unstable. These nuclei undergo radioactive decay, which occurs in two types: alpha and beta.
Unstable, heavy nuclei emit alpha particles, which are identical to Helium nuclei -- two protons, two neutrons. This radiation reduces the atomic mass by roughly four, eventually bringing the element to a stable nucleon count. Unstable nuclei also can undergo beta decay, converting a neutron into a proton and a high-energy electron, which is emitted. The amount of time needed for half of a sample of material to radioactively decay is called the half-life.
For fission, there are only three isotopes with a long-enough radioactive half-life to be stored and transported, and which are fissionable by neutrons of all energies: Uranium-233, Uranium-235, and Plutonium-239. U-233 isn't natural, and is created by inducing Thorium-232 to undergo beta decay by adding a neutron. U-235 occurs in small but extractable quantities in natural Uranium ore. Pu-239 is created by U-238 neutron capture and beta decay.
Alpha- and beta decay cause ionization in matter with which they come in contact by knocking off outer-shell electrons. Alpha radiation for Pu-239, the most energetic alpha decayer in a reactor at 5.1 MeV, has a range of only 3.6 cm in air, after which it is low-enough energy to absorb two electrons from the air and become a Helium atom which can't ionize. Uranium reactors, like the Toshiba model, have even smaller alpha ranges. Nuclear reactors are not at risk for leaking alpha radiation.
Beta radiation consists of electrons, which are much more likely to scatter when they ionize, so there isn't a specific ionization range for beta radiation. On the other hand, the highest energy beta radiation from fission reactions is on the order of 3 MeV, and can be stopped by half a centimeter of concrete. There is no possibility of beta radiation escaping nuclear reactors.
Gamma radiation, produced by neutron capture reactions, drops off exponentially as it is absorbed, so it can be reduced to background levels by a manageable thickness of iron or lead shielding. Normally, this occurs immediately surrounding the reactor vessel itself. If the vessel develops a leak or the shielding fails, nuclear plants have additional concrete shielding and containment procedures. In the unlikely event that everything fails, exposure to reactor gamma radiation is comparable to going to a doctor for X-rays -- not something you'd want for prolonged periods, but not going to injure you before you evacuate. In the case of the Toshiba reactor, which is 60 feet underground, there is no possibility of gamma leakage because the ground acts as shielding.
Things people are forgetting about the whole thing (Score:4, Informative)
A) the "dirty bomb" (a current favorite among hte fear mongering media) made out of radioactive materials is generally NOTHING like the multiple-megaton weapons that make the big fancy mushroom clouda. These are bombs that expode conventionally, and through said explosion, scatter radioactive materials around an area, creating a hot zone that will possibly kill, probably sicken, some people right near the area, but mainly just go to scare the millions of people into knee-jerk reactions though non-understanding.
B) Making a cheap and nasty little dirty bomb can be easily done by stealing the Cesium 137 out of a few hospitals (canisters of it are used in x-ray machines - i think its an xray machine). The added benefit of this is that the material is a very fine powder that can get spread widely by the wind.
One of these canisters got loose in Brazil once. [pbs.org] Resulted in killing four and made a few people sick. THe cleanup was a tad nasty. People heard about it, and thousands of them showed up at hospitals to get checked out for possible contamination. This was after local officials told them "Look, you were in the immediate area, youre going to be fine." People still stood on line at hospitals, choking hospital resources and generally fucking up their ability to take care of those that were really hurt.
[If you get a chance, find that Dirty Bomb special NOVA did a while back. [pbs.org] This is the ref for that cesium info above]
Stealing a fat hunk of reactor core would involve about a million times work, and unless they wannt rub the thing against a cheese grater for a while, they're left with one solid hunk of radioactive material, which is fairly easy to handle, contain, and bury somewhere.
[again, go read that NOVA site.]
C) Your average goober (read: 98% of the population) is completely unaware of that fact that we're constantly being bombarded with "background radiation" every second of every day. They're also unaware that our skin does a pretty good job of fending that low-level shit off.
D) Imagine if mass media existed at today's level in Edison's time. Getting people to accept the fact that electricity was not going to jump out of an unused outlet (or a wire) and kill you [in everyday non-dubmass use] would be next to impossible, and
E) People Die. Its something we all do, and ya can't avoid it, so stop fucking scaring yourselves into non-action. You can only hope its not going to be horrible. Generally, not being a stupidass - and keeping yourself aware of (AWARE, not SCARED) the other stupidasses around you - will go a long way in accomplishing this.
I dont like how the press message is written (Score:3, Informative)
Because of its design and small size, the Toshiba reactor can't overheat or melt down, he said, unlike what happened in the 1986 accident at Chernobyl that killed 30 people and spewed radiation across northern Europe.
While the new type of reactor might be perfectly safe, why do they spread "disinformation" then? Of course, the "blow up" of Chernobyl only costed about 30 lives. The cleaning up recruits of the USSR army had about 1000 falacities later. Seems they don't count.
Anyway, besides the credibility of the press release the question of how to take care about burned out units remains.
angel'o'sphere
Permafrost? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll have to ask my uncle. He helped Bechtel build an oil refinery in northern Alberta...
Prediction: The politics will be vicious. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a must win for the antinuclear movement.
They'll view with alarm the small size, and especially the very low installation cost which makes it hard for long delays to bankrupt by increasing the cost of working capital.
That no plant has been ordered in the US for decades is a huge political point for them, and they'd see this as the camel getting a nose into the tent. I expect a bitter fight by them.
Impossible! (Score:3, Funny)
Except, of course, for the public to rationally consider anything at all with "nuclear" in its name. That is really impossible.
What is it with people and "nuclear"? This reactor is suggested by the Japanese of all people. They were nuked. Twice. If anyone should automatically shut down his brain and cringe at the sound "nuclear", it should be them. Yet they seem to be thinking rationally about it. In the meanwhile, it is the Americans who nuked them who black out when hearing the word. What is this, some sort of guilt trip?
Wait, I got it. These Japanese are also scared of nuclear power. But they hell-bent on revenge! They'll install these miniature nuclear plants all over the USA, and at a predetermined time will cause them all to explode, killing everyone in the continent! Notice they don't suggest it be used in Japan? Launch a pre-emptive strike now!
Re:Technology good. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:2, Insightful)
In addition, if you bury the waste in the desert, in containers that don't corrode, where's the harm?
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:3, Funny)
Like guns, the uranium will leap out and attack people. Don't give me that "safety" crap. I don't want to be disturbed by facts...
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dangerous nuclear waste hangs around for a couple of weeks. The 50,000 year stuff is all low-level stuff. People living in Colorado will get more radiation mowing their yards.
We're constantly bombarded with radiation NOW. Everywhere. In the food we eat, in the water we drink, in the air we breathe.
A major nuclear disaster would be, well, like Chernobyl. Really bad in the surrounding area, Nothing at all a hundred miles away.
But Chernobyl does bring out the biggest danger with nuclear power. idiot bureaucrats running the reactors.
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of what messed up Western Europe was the hysteria whipped up by the media. Please show me the mass cases of sterility, mutation, birth defects, etc. rampaging across that continent right now.
The fact is, the radioactivity in the atmosphere of Western Europe matched tha
Who's calling who an idiot? (Score:5, Informative)
What will cause more fear is idiots like you under selling the risks.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
First, by cores, you mean control rods. But you're still somewhat off track.
Second, Chernobyl was an unstable, bad design, without a containment building. It's design, RMBK 1000, was such that if things went bad, the nuclear reaction would continue, instead of shutting down.
In addition to the uranium, a nuclear reactor needs two things- a moderator (which actually promotes the fission chain reaction) and a thermal transfer mechanism, to take heat away and make electricity with it. This is beyond the control rods, which are used to shut down the plant.
In every plant in the US, water acts as both the moderator, and the heat transfer mechanism. Lose the water, and the chain reaction is unsustainable. You can't take away heat anymore, but the fission chain reaction slows down dramatically. This is what happened at Three Mile Island (TMI)- they lost the water. They melted parts of their core, but that was the extent of the meltdown. The reactor vessel did it's job and physically contained the uranium. The containment building did it's job, along with all the auxillary systems, and no appreciable radiation was released to the public. TMI proved that we can handle a disaster without endangering the public.
Back to chernobyl. The RMBK 1000 reactor used water as a heat transfer mechanism, and graphite as a moderator. So when they lost water cooling, the reaction actually increased in power, and this raised power output lead to a rapid spike in temperature and pressure, blowing the lid off the reactor core and destroying the building.
Moreover, if they attempt to sustain low power levels (20% of capacity), the system is unstable. Because the core was huge, it was possible to have pockets of reactivity that couldn't be well controlled. When the power level is low, the cooling water/heat transport flow is reduced, to keep proper operating temperatures. But because they had pockets of reactivity that could be greater than average, there could be local areas where the flow was inadequate, boiling off the water prematurely, and getting us back the increasing reactivity with water loss that I mentioned earlier. Hence, they where supposed to operate below 20% power.
As for the people, despite earlier problems at different plants, they were not aware of the aforementioned technical problems. The Soviet bueacracy prevented any useful exchanges on such subjects. This is not to excuse them from not knowing more about their plant, just to paint a picture.
The cause of this was ironically a safety experiment. When a nuke plant is shut down, it still produces a significant amount of heat that must be removed. Normally the power required to run the pumps to remove this heat comes off the grid from other power plants, but if the plant is disconnected from the grid, a diesel generator is used instead. It took them three minutes to start the diesels (as opposed to a ten second standard in the US), so the engineers thought that they could bridge this three minute gap by extracting power from the turbine while it was in the process of coasting to a stop.
In order to test this theory, they deactivated every single safety system the plant had, and brought the power levels down to 6%. I've already talked about why this was bad.
At the end of their 'safety test', they inserted the control rods successfully, and in a hurry, because they could tell they were losing control of the plant. Because of the horrible design, though, these control rods where insufficient to kill the chain reaction, and instead only displaced water, which brought the power levels up to 100 times normal. Kaboom. The 'successful' insertion of the control rods was the final event in an idiotic string of actions.
They had no understanding of the safety i
Re:Who's calling who an idiot? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Do read about Hiroshima some time. Se how precisely the timing had to be constructed. Check the purity and mass and density specifications. Then try to construct a scenario in which a nuclear plant could even vaguly resemgle that.
Chernobyl is pretty much the worst that could happen, and there are plenty of safety precautions that could have prevented it.
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing like that. Heck, people still live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were subjected to far worse than what a nuclear powerplant would do. (Although it's possible that cancer incidence is still slightly higher there -- lots less than the equivalent risk from, say, smoking tobacco.)
Chernobyl was just about the worst case scenario for a nuclear plant -- and that was a really stupid design with a positive void coefficient and a graphite moderator -- which caught fire when the cooling water boiled away. Chernobyl still isn't the best place to hang out for very long, but there are other places that can be naturally more dangerous (such as downhill from a lake that occasionally bubbles toxic gases, such as the one that wiped out a village in Africa some years ago, or the valleys in geologically active regions that can collect lethal levels of sulfide gases and kill the occasional unwary hiker, and so on.)
Oh, and as for "Nuklear Power plant has a jet that flies into it.", in the US and Canada at least (and probably most other places), the result is a flattened jet and maybe a few scratches and scorch marks on the (many feet thick, reinforced, densified) concrete of the containment building.
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:4, Informative)
It's been thought of. Google for "nuclear waste subduction". The problem is that subduction is a long, slow process, punctuated by violent activities like earthquakes and volcanoes.
You could accumulate a lot of waste in a given area that was slowly being pulled under, and then an volcano blows it all back up again. Or an earthquake cracks the seals and you've got contaminated groundwater or whatever.
The problems seem solvable with careful choice of site(s). There are places where the odds of such things are quite small. Pick someplace offshore, for one thing.
In reality, you'd have a greater risk of an accident in transporting the waste there than in any major incident happening.
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Big article on this in Scientific American many years ago, in opposition to the Nevada waste site. Again the greatest danger is in transportation, but once entombed there is really no way for the material to harm anyone. You put a core dirlling ship in the ocean and dril a hole 2-3 kilometers into the ocean floor. You then drop barrels of waste into the hole separated by a few meters of the sediment. Even if the conatiners were to breach the material would at most disperse a few meters into the surrounding sediment over thousands of years. There is no worry of ground water contamination or even human contaimination once entombed, and eventually the material ends up melted into the mantle.
But, there is the threat of an accident during transportation, which is a worry for any nuclear waste disposal method.
Re:Thsi is what nevada is for... (Score:3, Informative)
In water the blue glow is caused by radioactive particles exceeding the speed of light. No, not the 3e8 m/ss speed of light in the universe. The slower speed of light in water.
The glow that one sometimes sees around radium or other elements is actually particles interacting with chemical impurities around it. You get much the same effect with a black light.
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:5, Interesting)
But my hometown lies 15 miles from Waste Control Services, and the plant sits right on top of the Ogalalla Aquifer from which the entire region pumps its water. The "corrosion proof containers" are metal barrels buried in a cement-lined pit. Along with the radioactive material are "non-corrosive" substances like old batteries and various forms of chemical, petroleum and medical waste. To top all this off, some "stabilized" napalm has been added to the mix as garnish.
Taken separately, these things are not harmful. Properly encased by well-trained robots in impervious material, these things are not harmful. But... packaged by overworked, underpaid, undereducated laborers in the cheapest material available with security checks run by firms hired out by the company to be yes-men, dumped together en masse in a cement pit, I'd say these things have the possibility for a big ka-boom.
So... to answer your question -- avoid West Texas at all costs.
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:5, Interesting)
And yes, coal is normally not considered radioactive. But it does contain traces of radioactive material, both in the coal itself and as waste rock from the mining process that isn't entirely separated. Not very much, of course -- but it takes thousands and thousands of tons of coal to produce the same power as a few pounds of uranium.
Of course, all radioactive waste eventually decays. We haven't even touched on the other stuff in coal ash that's highly toxic (like arsenic) that never decays.
I'll happily store the waste from the nuclear generated power I use in my backyard if you'll store the ash from the coal generated power you use in yours.
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:4, Interesting)
As far as the heavy metal runoff from uranium mining, it is no worse than that at any other heavy metal mine. Or a gold mine for that matter.
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:2)
the core is small enough that it can be recycled easily. (It's about the size of a garbage can)
Who will guard these potential hundreds or thousands of can-sized reactor cores from theft by miscreants?
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:nuclear power is cleaner.... (Score:3, Interesting)
At about 95 pounds per cubic foot, this power cell alone would weigh just shy of 3/4 ton.
Then add in the fact that the cell is welded to the end of a 70 foot long steel tube filled with liquid sodium - with no way to access the core except for:
a) Lifting the 76 foot rod out of the ground via crane (required disconnecting everything first of course - probably some noticable downtime)
or b) digging a tunnel down about 70-80 fe
Re:Energy = Profit (Score:2)
Step 2 is the cost of not cleaning up all the pollution from the current system.
which is 10000-fold higher than the economic/environmental costs of the new system
not really (Score:3, Informative)
Back feeding lines is an issue, but not as big as you might think. In nearly all cases your house is not the only one isolated, thus when you start backfeeding lines, all your neighbors think they have full grid power and start to use it, but since you don't have an unlimited supply of power, the breakers (and fuses) on your generators trip. Thus you are forced to correct the problem before you can use your own backup. That said, back feeding does happen, and it is dangerious. Dangerious enough that lin
Re:SL-1 Reactor, Idaho Falls (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:SL-1 Reactor, Idaho Falls (Score:4, Informative)
Re:SL-1 Reactor, Idaho Falls (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.radiationworks.com/sl1reactor.htm
"A small, 3MW experimental BWR called SL-1 (Stationary Low-Power Plant No. 1) in Idaho was destroyed on January 3, 1961, when a control rod was removed manually."
snip
"A careful examination of the remains of the core and the vessel concluded that the control rod was manually withdrawn by about 50cm (40cm would have been enough to make the reactor critical), largely increasing the reactivity. The resulting power surge caused the reactor power to reach 20,000MW in about
1) 3MW not 200kW - Makes a difference
2) It did "melt down" - effectivly anyway
3) It did contain water (presurized or not I dunno)
4) It was caused by human error
5) It was probably a lot larger fuel block
Silly FUD's, google will always win!