Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom

[illflem]

Explosive growth has made the People's Republic of China the most power-hungry nation on earth. Get ready for the mass-produced, meltdown-proof future of nuclear energy.

Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen.

A soft-spoken scientist named Qian Jihui has no doubt about what the smaller, safer, hydrogen-friendly design means for the future of nuclear power, in China and elsewhere. Qian is a former deputy director general with the International Atomic Energy Agency and an honorary president of the Nuclear Power Institute of China. He's a 67-year-old survivor of more than one revolution, which means he doesn't take the notion of upheaval lightly.

"Nobody in the mainstream likes novel ideas," Qian says. "But in the international nuclear community, a lot of people believe this is the future. Eventually, these new reactors will compete strategically, and in the end they will win. When that happens, it will leave traditional nuclear power in ruins."

Now we're talking revolution, comrade.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html?pg=1&topic=china&topic_set=

[BlueEyedSon]

1. Nukes use non-renewable fuel too. And don't forget the waste!

[jpak]

17. World demand for uranium will out strip supply by 2013

http://npc.sarov.ru/english/digest/142004/section4p1.html

(scroll down to the Bloomberg report).

This is not good news as the US currently imports ~96% of its annual uranium requirements.

And every other country with an extensive nuclear power program (Japan, France, other EU countries, South Korea and China) is an major importer of uranium.

Peak Oil will soon be followed by "Peak U"....

[megatherium]

22. two solutions to this problem.

One is waste reprocessing (and more ambitiously, fuel breeding). Another solution is to extract the fuel from sea water. Instead of $40/kg it would cost $400/kg but would still be worth while (the main costs from nuclear aren't fuel, as I understand it, but the capital costs of building the power station).

[jpak]

33. Reprocessing is expensive and produces large quantities of high-level

waste.

The defunct West Valley NY commercial reprocessing plant produced $10 million worth of plutonium over its operational life. It also produced 600,000 gallons of high-level liquid waste that will cost taxpayers (and not the former plant operators) $4-8 billion to clean up.

Here's some insight into MOX economics...

http://webhampton.com/grace/nuclearweapons/citizensguidemox.html

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=so03reparaz

http://nuclearno.com/text.asp?8491

Japan's reprocessing plant will cost $20+ billion to build and billions more to operate.

If the US had built reprocessing plants on that scale it would cost $100 billion or more - who is going to pony up that much money???

and what would we get for all that???

Electricity few could afford and a costly nuclear waste legacy that will impact the lives of Americans thousands of years into the future.

...and let's not forget spent fuel reprocessing gave North Korea and India The Bomb.

Extracting uranium from seawater would consume more energy than it would yield.

The concentration of uranium in seawater is 3 micro grams per liter.

US uranium consumption is currently ~27,000 metric tonnes per year.

We would have to process hundreds of cubic kilometers of seawater each year to supply current US demand - many times more water than the annual discharge of the Mississippi (580 cubic kilometers per year).

It would be an environmental disaster - it ain't gonna happen either.

[Massacure]

35. You don't need to reprocess. Use breeder reactors.

Canada has the right idea.

[jpak]

37. Not true

Every nuclear power plant in world produces plutonium.

You don't need a breeder to do that.

On edit: Canada doesn't have a breeder reactor program, but India used Canadian CANDU reactors to produce plutonium for its weapons program...

[Massacure]

38. Yes, but if you don't have a breeder, then you need to reprocess.

Breeders are the solution to the high level waste created by reprocessing.

They may cost more upfront, but they cost less in the long haul.

[jpak]

40. Every commercial-scale breeder ever built cost 2-3 times

more than a "conventional" nuclear power plant.

The last light-water nuclear power plants built in the US cost ~$5000 per kW.

France's 1250 MW SuperPhenix fast breeder cost $10 billion. ($8000 per kW)

The canceled (US) 350 MW Clinch River breeder reactor would have cost $4 billion ($11000 per kW).

The high cost of new nuclear power plants is the sole reason why none have been ordered in the US since 1973.

If utilities can't afford light-water reactors, how are they going to afford breeders????

Furthermore, every commercial-scale breeder reactor ever built experienced serious sodium fires - every single one!!! Most of these accidents resulted plant closings and decommissioning.

These things don't just work - who is going to buy them????

Placing tons of plutonium in the middle of tons of highly reactive liquid sodium is just a catastrophe waiting to happen.

It was a bad idea from the get-go.

[Massacure]

49. 10 billion, oh wow.

1250 megawatts x 1000 kilowatts per megawat = 1,250,000 killowatts.

1,250,000 kw x 5 cents = $62,500 per hour.

x 24 hours = $1,500,000 per day.
x 365 days = $547,500,000 per year.
x 50 years = 27 billion, 375 million dollars over its life.

Electricity costs more than 5 cents too.

[NickB79]

39. So $100 billion is too much to pay for reprocessing

But we spent twice that much already in a failed attempt to capture Iraqi oil? Is oil too expensive for most American's to afford?

HALF of what we've spent so far in Iraq would pay for the reprocessing. At least with reprocessed nuclear fuel we actually get some benefits out of it.

[Massacure]

34. They may be non-renewable, but it will last longer than the sun.

The oceans have enough uranium that can be absorbed from them to last 7 million years, and erosion is constantly replenishing the oceans with enough of it to generate 20 times the energy we currently use every year. The crust has enough uranium for four billion years, provided erosion lasts that long, and I have no doubt it will. I highly doubt all the water will be mysteriously vaporized.

[NEOBuckeye]

45. we have just 1 to 2 billion years before the Sun boils off the oceans

And in another 3 to 5 billion years, the Sun is expected to go Red Giant and literally fry and devour the Earth.

Needless to say, I think the Sun still has us beat. But if mankind can somehow survive this century with a high-tech nuclear/anti-matter/free-energy society, then maybe "Peak Sun" in some far off future epoch might be the least of our worries.

[jdj]

2. how comforting.

are we in some kind of weird race to poison the earth in 50 years or less?

edit: to post above, and China's environmental record is so stellar as it is, we know they'll be ever so stringent about spent fuel disposal.

[hnsez]

3. thanks to scientists, the US used to lead the world, now we follow

thanks to our horrible education system

[eternalburn]

4. Meanwhile,.....America drops back into the dark ages......

Budget reality clouds Fermilab's day in sun
As major project debuts, federal cuts put future in doubt

By Jeremy Manier and William Grady
Tribune staff reporters
Published March 5, 2005


The excitement many Fermilab researchers felt on Friday at the debut of a $180 million instrument to study the fundamental properties of matter was dampened for some by fears that it could be the storied facility's last major project.

The physics research outpost has no solid plans or funding for new ventures aside from the new experiment, called MINOS, which will investigate little-understood subatomic particles called neutrinos. Although many theoretical physicists say their field is poised for its greatest leaps in knowledge since Einstein, some experts say budget woes in the United States mean the greatest discoveries of the future may happen at new labs in Europe or Japan.

Morale among the 2,500 physicists and engineers at Fermilab took a blow last month when the Bush administration canceled the facility's only other planned big-ticket experiment--a $200 million project to study a key mystery of the origin of the universe. The administration cut the project unexpectedly, citing a tight budget, even though the plans had passed several scientific reviews.

~To read more click below~

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0503050222mar05,1,413850.story

[tom_paine]

23. Yes, Imperial Amerika, Home of the Kinder and Gentler Witch Burners

Take away their televisions, though, and I suspect the fires would light again.

Perhaps it would be the more generic "liberals" and the violence wouldn't be burning, but it would amount to the same nonetheless.

I wouldn't give a bucket of warm spit for those poor bastards alive in Imperial Amerika in 2050 or 2100...

Poor souls, many not even born yet. My pity for you is as unbounded as the hatred you shall look upon your pathetic, apathetic, and cowardly ancestors who bequeathed the monstrously fucked up nation and planet to you.

Good luck. You are going to need it. (along with all the guns and ammunition you can scrape together to fight for your Basic Liberties)

[mopinko]

5. and, will it be

too cheap to meter?

[Coventina]

6. or is it "Let a Thousand Reactors BOOM!"

Sorry, couldn't resist.

[megatherium]

24. There's a real nuclear reactor in suburban Portland, Oregon

(at Reed College) that is of an inherently safe design: even if all the control rods were removed and the primary coolant removed, it cannot melt down. (Thermal expansion lowers the density of the core below critical.)

Good to know it can't melt down. It's operated by college kids. (Licensed by the NRC, actually. I started the training program myself, when I was a freshman there, but didn't have time to complete it.)

[Earth_First]

7. We had a good run...

:puke:

[Occulus]

8. Oh crap. It's happening. This doesn't have a thing to do with weapons,

but it does have to do with the Chinese economy.
China is poised to be the world's next superpower. Within ten to fifteen years, if things continue for the US the way they have, we will no longer be on top; China will. It is home, after all, to more than 2.3 billion people (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ch.html).

From this link:

Area - comparative:
Definition Field Listing
slightly smaller than the US

Also from this same site:

People United States
Population:
Definition Field Listing Rank Order
293,027,571 (July 2004 est.)

So China is slightly smaller in area than the US, but has more than a billion more people living in it.

In other words, among many other things, China needs energy and it recognizes oil is simply not going to be able to solve the problem. Any nation in China's position would be working on developing a safe and clean form of energy production, and if a form of nuclear power can be made safe via the physics involved, they quite simply should be allowed to pursue that technology.

Who knows? Maybe China will develop a form of nuclear power so safe it's no longer an alarming thing to have around.

[Zynx]

9. That's 1.3 billion, not 2.3 billion.

Still is a boatload of people though.

*waits for screaming anti-nuclear chickens to enter thread*

[ozone_man]

12. Another indicator of the new world leader

I have never been a nuclear advocate, except perhaps fusion, but this is interesting. It seems to solve many of the problems of the present water cooled reactor design, but still has the nuclear waste problem.

A see it as another interim solution to what is ultimately needed, renewable energy sources that don't have waste problems. One thing is sure, that fossil fuel is on the wane and replacements are needed.

In May, British eminence green James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis that Earth is a single self-regulating organism, published an impassioned plea to phase out fossil fuels in London's The Independent. Nuclear power, he argued, is the last, best hope for averting climatic catastrophe:

"Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies, and the media. … Even if they were right about its dangers - and they are not - its worldwide use as our main source of energy would pose an insignificant threat compared with the dangers of intolerable and lethal heat waves and sea levels rising to drown every coastal city of the world. We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilization is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear, the one safe, available energy source, now, or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet."

[Bob3]

13. Chernobyl was not a Hollywood creation.

It's a level or risk I don't think people are quite willing to take - even if the global warming stories are used to scare people. sheesh what happened to trying to convince people? Everybody is trying to stampede them these days. fear fear Terror global warming! don't think react!

[iconoclastNYC]

26. Chernobyl was a bad design

No reactor in the west was built that way and the Soviet's shortchanged maintenance and inspections.

[AndyTiedye]

30. Hanford Is Very Similar (and has even fewer safeguards)

If a similar incident had happened at Hanford, it would have
severely irradiated much of Washington state, and to a lesser
extent much of the northern US and Canada.

[iconoclastNYC]

46. Very similar?

From what I've read the Chernobyle design was radical different then anything build outside of the USSR.

Could you provide me a link ?

[jpak]

18. South Africa has the world's most advanced pellet reactor program

http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/1999/kemm.htm

and most of China's current (and future) reactors will western designs.

http://www.nuclear.com/nation-by-nation/China_news.html

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/t71411.html

China is not an innovator in nuclear reactor design...

[Chicago Democrat]

10. Chinese innovation SAVES THE WORLD! wow

we sure suck, don't we?

[Igel]

11. This is a good thing, really.

China is among the nations with the fasting rising greenhouse gas output; they're exempted under Kyoto, and like hell they're going to agree to anything that infringes on their sovereignty and economic growth without getting something at least as beneficial to them in return.

They have coal, but probably not enough for the long-run--and do we want that much coal burned for energy? I think not.

There's not that much oil left on the world market.

And if not for the almost religious anti-nuclear zeal on the part of environmentalists, we'd probably have really nifty nuclear power plants coming on line now. But there was no reason to research it: insurance and EPA analyses made new plants prohibitive, and public opinion made it a none-starter.

Hence our incredible reliance on carbon-burning for energy.

[Bob3]

15. The combination of Three Mile island and Chernobyl killed

the nuclear power plant industry in the U.S. Not the environmentalists - they've been ignored about everything else why would anyone listen to them this time?

Simply put people are not willing to take the risk - no matter how small it is, of waking up one morning and being told that they have to leave their homes and they can never come back ever. Even a F5 Tornado doesn't poison the land for 100's of years.

Not to mention we still don't know what to do with the spent fuel.

[Igel]

19. I think I see it from the other side: 3MI really did in nuclear

power--it made most of the American public agree with the anti-nuclear-power environmentalists. (Chernobyl finished nailing down the lid on nuclear power.)

The environmentalist agenda hasn't been completely ignored: many, but not all, of their arguments have been ignored. The won on this one.

[iconoclastNYC]

27. Hysteria spreading cause the public to turn against Nuclear

Coal and Oil kills 10000x more people yearly then Chernobyl.

People link nuclear power with nuclear bombs.

Nuclear is the only thing we can do today to start reducing carbon emmisions. Wind generation helps but it cannot scale like nuclear, it requires too much land.

[AndyTiedye]

16. Nuke Waste, Operator Error, and Terrorism

There is nothing nifty about nuclear power. It's expensive and
dangerous in operation, and produces waste that is deadly forever.
Radiation is invisible, so when there are accidents and radiation
is released, people don't find out until after they have been exposed.
Nuclear plants and nuclear waste are natural targets for terrorists.
A larger number of nukes would be harder to protect.
Smaller plants would be less dangerous to operate, but the amount
of waste per kwh would probably be even higher.

[Igel]

20. It's more expensive than it needs to be,

and I suspect that plants designed state-of-the-art 2005 would be safer than the current ones, 1975 state of the art. If for no other reason than we have 30 years of data on how nuclear plants work and age.

It's possible to vastly reduce the amount of nuclear waste; there was never any incentive for it before, all that was required was storing it; the technology, being relatively new, was sucky. Hanford was a nightmare. Scientists in the West new about the Soviet disaster in the Urals for a while before they figured out what caused that waste dump to go nuclear; they checked and found that the conditions were similar at Hanford.

The terrorist angle is a real concern. But it's necessary to weigh new nuclear power plants not against nothing, because that's unacceptable to people; we need to weigh it against what's currently being used (30-year-old nuclear power plants, coal-, oil-, and gas-burning plants) and what circumstances will be like in a decade or so. I know France likes their plants, and I think Finland's building for, among other things, Kyoto compliance.

[AndyTiedye]

21. Finland Has Little Problem With Terrorism

and France hasn't much of one either.
Sadly, our government has painted a bulls-eye on us all.
This must be taken into account in any consideration of
expanded use of nuclear power in the USA.

How do new nukes produce less waste?
I haven't heard that claim before.

One thing we know after building nukes for this long is
that the reactor vessel becomes brittle from being bombarded
with radiation, which means that they become more likely to
fail catastrophically as they age. No solution to the
embrittlement problem is in sight.

[megatherium]

25. nukes would solve this problem too.

If we achieve energy independence using nuclear, we wouldn't have to invade middle eastern countries and so forth. We could be like a big Canada, if we ever grow up as a people and a nation.

[AndyTiedye]

29. All These Plants WILL Have to be Protected from Terrorists & Thieves

We would have had the problem of middle eastern fundie terrorists anyway.
They were a creation of our own CIA, created to bedevil the former Soviet Union.

In any case, we HAVE that problem, which means that any current or
near-future nuclear power plant will need protection from it. So
do all nuclear fuel and nuclear waste facilities.

To this we should add the nuclear proliferation issue. Some of those
who might be motivated to break into nuclear facilities are agents of
non-nuclear nations who want to join the nuclear club. This becomes
even more of a problem if you "recycle" nuclear waste into plutonium.
Every country that wants nuclear weapons will be trying to steal some
plutonium.

Large numbers of small plants makes the security problem almost insurmountable.

[NickB79]

31. Lets see, we have ~120,000 troops in Iraq right now?

And what, about 120 reactors in the United States, supplying 20% of our nation's electrical power? Lets say we built 380 more, to give us a total of 500 plants. That should supply almost all the electrical power we need. Conservation programs, solar, wind, and a few modernized coal plants could fill in the gaps. We could put 100 fully armed troops around EACH nuclear power plant for a year, then rotate in the other 100 troops to relieve them. We could put a dozen armored Humvees with .50-cal machine guns, 40mm automatic grenade launchers, and anti-aircraft missiles at each plant. Hell, we could spare an M1 Abrams tank per plant! This still leaves 20,000 troops to patrol and secure reprocessing plants where you can prepare the spent fuel rods for re-use for more power generation. I don't think you could get much more secure than that.

All of this would be much, much cheaper than sending our troops over to the Middle East to fight for oil supplies and create even more terrorists than there were before.

BTW, do you really think anyone could steal any workable quantity of plutonium without lethally poisoning themselves in the process? It would be much more difficult that getting a lead-lined suitcase, that's for sure.

[jpak]

42. 222,000 US homes have roof mounted PV arrays.

and there is currently 6700 MW of installed wind generation capacity in the lower 48 states.

How many troops will be needed to guard them????

None.

Can anyone guess why???

[iconoclastNYC]

28. Read the article. N/T

[NickB79]

32. "New nukes producing less waste"

Breeder reactors? They literally eat their own waste, producing even more power from it.

[jpak]

43. Not true

Breeders produce 20% more plutonium than they consume (that's why they're called breeders).

They also produce more fission products than conventional reactors.

They do not "eat their own waste".

That's just wrong.

[anarchy1999]

14. one word, CHINA!

Look out world, they've been operating on a 1,000 year plan for ages. Here it comes. And guess what, the Bush family, the Rothschilds, the Rockfellers, the Gates, not the least Mr. Buffett and Berkshire and Wally World, they are all holding hands, singing together. We are Family.

[VegasWolf]

36. How long before it becomes mandatory to learn some dialect of Chineese in

order to get a high paying job?

[Merlin]

41. Amazing! This may be one of the most important developments in history!

If this country doesn't get its head out of bush's ass, we'll wind up being just a brief chapter.

[reprobate]

44. Sorry, but that chapter ended January 12, 2001.

[Barrett808]

47. Why Nuclear Power is not the answer to Global Warming

Just read this in the latest ASPO newsletter (http://www.peakoil.net):

A typical 1200 MW nuclear power plant produces 32 PJ per annum, so to provide for 700 EJ around 20,000 nuclear power stations would have to be built. To fuel this number of stations, around 4,600,000 tonnes/annum of uranium would be required.

Current world annual mine production totals only 36,000 tonnes of which Canada produces 10,000 tonnes and Australia around 8,000 tonnes. The balance of 30,000 tonnes required to meet the generators’ demand for 66,000 tonnes/annum comes from inventories, ex-weapons material, MOX and re-worked mine tailings. So primary production would have to be increased 140-fold to match present global energy needs exclusively from nuclear power.

However the emerging economies of China and India are setting the pace for growth and rising energy demand, so to meet their aspirations the initial requirement for the building of 20,000 nuclear power stations is likely to be insufficient. In reality there is little chance of fuelling the current modest building programme of new stations as secondary sources of uranium are expected to be exhausted by 2012, creating a shortfall in supply unable to be filled by additional mining, so the first desired characteristic of sustainability is unattainable.

Then the claim for the carbon-free status of nuclear power proves to be false. Carbon dioxide is released in every component of the nuclear fuel cycle except the actual fission in the reactor. Fossil fuels are involved in the mining, milling and enrichment of the ore, in the fuel can preparation, in the construction of the station and in its decommissioning and demolition, in the handling of the spent waste and its re-processing and in digging the hole in the rock for its deposition.


The lower the ore grade, the more energy is consumed in the fuel processing, so that the amount of the carbon dioxide released in the fuel cycle depends on the ore grade. Only Canada and Australia have ores of a sufficiently high grade to avoid excessive carbon releases and to provide an adequate energy gain. At ore grades below 0.01% for ‘soft’ ores and 0.02% for ‘hard’ ores more CO2 than an equivalent gas-fired station is released and more energy is absorbed in the cycle that is gained in it. Ores of a grade approaching the “crossover” point such as those in India of 0.03%, if used, risk going into negative energy gain if there are a few “hiccups” in the cycle.

The industry points to the presence of uranium in phosphates and seawater, but the concentrations are so low that the energy required to extract it would exceed many times the energy obtained from any nuclear power resulting.

...

It is claimed that nuclear power meets the two characteristics of sustainability and zero or low carbon dioxide emissions and so might be able to substitute for fossil fuels once they are exhausted and in the meantime to avoid release of some greenhouse gases. The claims are baseless.

(more)

http://www.peakoil.net/Newsletter/NL51/newsletter51.doc

[megatherium]

48. I'm skeptical that mining low-grade uranium ore consumes more energy

than is contained in the uranium.

But I believe the main fallacy here is the argument that there is at most 50 years of uranium available. This is merely the proven reserves: it's clear that there is substantially more uranium waiting to be found.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/factsheets/uranium.htm