While the fact that location of nuclear power plants must be in proximity of large sources of water leaves it wide open to natural disasters such as Japan’s recent triple meltdown and Nebraska’s ongoing “island” nuke plants that are surrounded by the Missouri River and just an accident waiting to happen, there are better ways to go about it.
There are two areas that cause nukes problems, both of which concern cooling – hence the proximity to water. The core itself which in most U.S. reactors are boiling water nukes and the requirement of circulating water in the core plus cooling spent fuel rods that have outlived their life as core rods but hold sufficient reactive material that if they are not continuously cooled, will heat up, boil the water in the cooling ponds, eventually boil off the water, expose to air and start throwing radioactive junk into the air and melt down to puddles in the bottom of the concrete cooling ponds.
I cannot speak as to the vulnerability of the primary boiling water loop, where water circulates through the active nuclear core, runs through a heat exchanger to heat a secondary loop which, in turn, drives turbines in the generation of electricity. I don’t know enough about the primary loop and backups to comment on it.
But I can comment on the cooling ponds used to store used fuel rods that can also melt down and cause major radiational releases to the atmosphere.
This failure mode is one that should never happen. Because the Federal Government, the NRC and states cannot seem to work out what the fuck to do with used fuel rods, they are currently being stored – in mass – at each nuclear plant where they are used up. This, as illustrated above, adds a second layer of risk to the nuclear generation of power in that we have two points of failure instead of one. See Fukushima articles ad nauseam.
Simply put, instead of storing depleted uranium filled rods coated with zirconium that is guaranteed to generate hydrogen when heated sufficiently in highly vulnerable concrete lined tanks at each nuke plant, if we recycled the waste and processed what’s left into casks (an already proven technology that glassifies the waste into an almost impervious form of ceramic bound waste) and then bury them (as in the Yucca mountain facility or better yet, dump them in the Mariana Trench where they will be recycled into the earth’s mantle long before the casks degenerate) the problem of depleted fuel rods would vanish..
This will not solve all the problems of nuclear power but it will reduce the accident potential by 30-40%. Using new designs (Thorium, pebble bed, submerged reactor) rather than Hyman Rickovers boiling water submarine nuclear plant will further reduce any risk of radiational leaks.
Why don’t be do this? P O L I T I C S. Not science, I assure you. The NIMBY syndrome is running at full force as far as Yucca Mountain is concerned and the environmental paper work needed to dump glass nuke waste into the Mariana Trench would probably fill up the trench.
So we stumble along from one disaster to another, trashing the only good and reasonably rapid way we have of cutting down on coal and oil produced electricity because we are too stupid to grasp and utilize solutions that are right in front of our noses.
One more giant step on the way to “we are doomed”..
ecliptix543 says:
Once 90% of the global population is summarily executed by Bennie’s food price inflation and the ongoing American Imperial wars spiraling out of control, we won’t need as much power. See, silver lining
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21st June 2011 at 9:11 pm
llpoh says:
What the hell, let’s abandon nukes and rig up a bunch of these instead:
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21st June 2011 at 9:38 pm
llpoh says:
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21st June 2011 at 9:38 pm
llpoh says:
Fuck wordpress.
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21st June 2011 at 9:39 pm
Axel says:
I live in Vegas and fully support Yucca Mountain. It would have been alot smarter for Nevadans to say, OK, y’all can dump yer nuclear shit here but you have to pay us. And the Feds were willing to do it! But, no, emotions always seem to carry the day, so NIMBY syndrome won over.
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21st June 2011 at 10:00 pm
Thinker says:
GAO: leaks at aging nuke sites difficult to detect
U.S. nuclear power plant operators haven’t figured out how to quickly detect leaks of radioactive water from aging pipes that snake underneath the sites — and the leaks, often undetected for years, are not going to stop, according to a new report by congressional investigators.
The report by the Government Accountability Office was released by two congressmen Tuesday in response to an Associated Press investigation that shows three-quarters of America’s 65 nuclear plant sites have leaked radioactive tritium, sometimes into groundwater.
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21st June 2011 at 10:47 pm
ecliptix543 says:
You live in Vegas, Axel? My condolences… never fear though – Florida will be catching up to you guys soon enough in unemployment and foreclosures.
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21st June 2011 at 11:11 pm
bigargon says:
hey the answer .. more wars…use all that spent uranium to make tank rounds blow some crap up.
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21st June 2011 at 11:11 pm
ecliptix543 says:
Reactor sites leaking tritium? Can we collect it and make free night sights?
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21st June 2011 at 11:11 pm
SSS says:
ecliptix543
I responded to your comment on the Simon Black article.
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21st June 2011 at 11:21 pm
ecliptix543 says:
Noted and replied to.
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21st June 2011 at 11:52 pm
Scott says:
I had been a supporter of nuclear power and still am if we are only to concern ourselves with the immediate economic situation. The problem is we can’t design any system to ‘control’ nuclear power because it outlasts us by far. It occured to me, as a result of the Fukushima disaster, that, what if the ancient Egyptians had, instead of pyramids, built nuclear reactors or, if instead of Stonehenge those prehistoric inhabitants of England had made a nuclear repository for their radioactive waste? Though their civilizations are long gone their legacy could have left the Nile delta or much of England uninhabitable for eons with all the impact that would have had on subsequent human history. No Cleoptra or even no United States!
Aside from the conceit that we, as a people and civilization will continue into the future with the necessary skills and technology to operate our nuclear systems, though history is replete with examples to the contrary, there is the other factor that wrecked Fukushima- nature. While the tsunami that swept over that power plant was large it is not the worst nature can throw at mankind.
The entire march of recorded history has really been a brief period of relative quiet on the natural front. Much bigger tsunamis can be generated by events other than earthquakes as geologists are
not aware. They speak of waves hundreds of feet high sweeping ashore generated by volcanic islands sliding into the sea. It would also not take an extinction event sized asteroid plunging into the sea to do the same. A meteoroid a couple of hundred feet in diameter would do the trick and we just do not have the engineering technology much less the money to build a seawall capable of resisting the ocean rising a hundred or more feet along a coastline. But tsunamis are not the only trick nature can throw at us. Supervolcanoes, earthquakes of a size we have not had the pleasure of knowing and who’s to say just how powerful a tornado or hurricane can be? We have records only going back a few hundred years and even our ‘legends’ are, at best, less than 10,000 years old. We need to remember that the greatest freshwater lakes on earth today are less than 10,000 years old and North Africa wasn’t an arid desert as recently as the glory days of Rome! What certainty do we have
that Yucca mountain or any place else we select as a nuclear repository won’t itself experience similiar climatic change in a similiar time frame? What right do we have to create a radiological hell for our descendants a hundred or thousand generations hence?
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21st June 2011 at 12:00 am
SSS says:
Mike Endres
Your article got off to a bad start with “While the fact that location of nuclear power plants must be in proximity of large sources of water.”
The Palo Verde triple-reactor nuke plant, opened in 1986, is 60 miles west of Phoenix AZ and sits in the middle of the desert. It is the largest single power source in the country (bigger than the the Grand Coulee Dam) and cranks out 3,900 megawatts of power. Enough to service 4,000,000 customers from California to Texas. If the recent eastern Arizona fires get to the power lines from Palo Verde, El Paso is toast. Lights out.
Now, then. Palo Verde sits hundreds of miles from ANY major water source. Its cooling comes from municipal waste water. The water is further pumper to a huge natural gas plant to cool its steam turbines. Pretty cool, huh?
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21st June 2011 at 12:43 am
ron says:
It seems like the problem is we have old style reactors that need to be replaced.I was told the newest kind can be shut down or started up very quickly.I have new popular science and it has some good stuff about energy.Mabe that darn energy dept is the problem,get rid of it and we might get something happening.
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21st June 2011 at 12:53 am
Opinionated Bloviator says:
Boiling water reactors are a 1950′s technology that become the ONLY nuclear power solution due to early govenment funding, early success with the first generation of nuclear powered submarines and the fact that the enriched uranuim and plutonium they produced was needed to make all those nukes. The first mover advantage on steroids…
As with all things in this, our glorious age of Hopey Change/Panem et Circenses, it will take a crisis or several to force the issue of getting serious about bringing nuclear power into the 21 st century. By money is on meltdown’s, rolling blackouts and the endless bleating of the NIMBY sheeple masses as they huddle in the dark…
An willfully ignorant people who refuse to accept responsibility do not deserve self rule instead tyrrany and selfdom will be their lot as it is all they deserve.
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21st June 2011 at 1:25 am
flash says:
SSS says: Now, then. Palo Verde sits hundreds of miles from ANY major water source. Its cooling comes from municipal waste water. The water is further pumper to a huge natural gas plant to cool its steam turbines. Pretty cool, huh?
But what happens in the event of an emergency at the waster water pumping facility.If humans engineered it it will break eventually leaving US or someone in the future up the creek without a solution.
.
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21st June 2011 at 6:29 am
Novista says:
SSS
Were you trained by a Jesuit? Or … maybe you’re Opus Dei ……
Of the 69 pressurized water reactors and 35 boiling water reactors (65 nuclear power plants) you cite one exception to the post. Please explicate all the rest. One in 69 is not a bad start.
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21st June 2011 at 7:21 am
Muck About says:
@SSS: I was speaking generally and left out Palo Verde.. Sorry. I do maintain, however, that one reason nuke plant design is stuck in the 50′s-60′s is because of money and vested interests by GE and Westinghouse and those they bribe in CONgress.
Regardless, the issue of disposal of waste should have been solved and operational before the first nuke plant was commissioned. When an engineering problem (and that’s what nuke waste is) is clear before you finish the design of the project, that problem should be solved right along with the others that crop up as design stages are finalized and before anything is built.
Humans are so damn good at kicking the can down the road and sticking their head up their ass so they don’t even hear it “clink, clink” as it goes that I hold little faith that we will not self-destruct through ignoring problems until it’s too late to fix sans disaster.
After a lot of research, there are a number of permanent solutions to nuke waste, if we’d just use one. The first and best being reprocessing the waste into new fuel (no new technology required), glassification of the remaining waste and permanent disposal at the bottom of the deepest trench in the world where plate tectonics will insure the eventual safe burial of the glassified waste will take place. Burial of the waste in a place like Yucca or beneath any number of huge salt domes that are extremely geologically stable where contamination of subsurface water tables would never be a problem is another – somewhat less desirable solution.
The last solution is the least desirable because of the 35,000 year half life of some of the material that can’t be (currently) easily recycled. Since we have no clue if we’ll survive another 100 years, the hubris involved in trying to insure wastes are safely out of the way for 35,000 years is immense. Processing the waste to minimize it, glassification of what’s left and burial in a tectonically active area ( in the part of the plate that’s diving under a neighbor) is a little (but not much) more expensive than a salt dome or Yucca but no one could argue that being eventually buried under a continental plate is not a secure and permanent way of making the shit go away.
Or we just hang out, slowly loosing ground, until God has mercy on us and hands down the secret of a 95% efficient solar cell to some pious engineer. //sarcasm off//
MA
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21st June 2011 at 11:18 am
Steve says:
“The NIMBY syndrome is running at full force as far as Yucca Mountain is concerned…”
Don’t be misled by Harry Reid’s claim that “all” the citizens of Nevada object to Yucca Mountain. In fact, the people in Nye County (where Yucca Mountain is physically located) and the six surrounding counties are all in support of continuing the license application for Yucca Mountain.
You are correct that this issue is all politics, not science. Reid has used Yucca Mountain as his primary campaign plank ever since he was first elected, scare-mongering the voters in highly-populated Clark County to be terrified of anything nuclear.
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21st June 2011 at 1:15 pm
SSS says:
@ Muck and Novista
I wanted to make two points with my Palo Verde comments.
1. You don’t NEED to build a nuclear plant near a large body of water. In fact, you can build it in the desert. Palo Verde proves it can be done.
2. Perhaps of few readers of my comments learned something. The vast majority of people don’t even know Palo Verde even exists, let alone sits in the middle of the desert.
@ Flash
Your comments on the water situation at Palo Verde sent me over to Google, where I learned something. So thanks.
The Palo Verde site has an 80 acre water reservoir. If there’s an interruption in the water supply from the waste treatment facilities, there’s enough water in the reservoir to last for a year.
Here’s a photo of that engineering marvel.
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21st June 2011 at 3:35 pm
Goldorack says:
what is the problem with nuclear energy?
well, there is already a good chunk of Ukraine where no human will be able to settle in the next 100,000 years, and probably the north-east quarter of Japan. up to 9 mS/h mesured in public places in Tokyo. one person on two dying from desease in Europe has a cancer.
where do you see a problem?
move along, nothing to see.
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21st June 2011 at 4:04 pm
SSS says:
Goldie
Chernobyl was built by the Russians, for pete’s sake. On the cheap with little regard for safety, starting with the lack of a shield around the reactor. Good reactor shields, the ones with no welding seams, are difficult and expensive to manufacture. Ergo, they skipped that step. So what else is new with regard to ANYTHING built during the days of the Soviet Union? Nothing but cheap shit that worked poorly, if it worked at all.
And putting a six reactor site (Fukushima) on the coast of one of the world’s most active and severe earthquake zones wasn’t a bright idea to begin with. Putting an 18-foot wall around the complex to stop a tsunami that turned out to be 30 feet was even less a bright idea. Jeez, what more could it have cost to double the size of the wall and avoid all the tragedy, not to mention the billions it will cost to clean up that crap? Penny wise, pound foolish.
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21st June 2011 at 7:22 pm
Mikey says:
All of these analysis assume that the Uranium/Plutonium reactors are the only type of nuclear reactors that exist. To be blunt – this is BS. I’m not talking about fusion reactors where very small atoms like hydrogen are slammed together to make bigger atoms like Helium either. Those are still not yet commercially viable.
In the 1950s and 1960s there were two competing technology bases for nuclear fission reactors. The first is the now well known Uranium 235/238 reaction, and its collarary, the Plutonium reactor. These reactors use solid fuel rods that are lowered into a high pressure reactor vessel that are cooled by a liquid flowing through the reactor vessel. This liquid is either very salty water (in older reactors) or molten sodium metal (in newer reactors), that then becomes highly radioactive. Leaks of this cooling fliud is the greatest risk of the release of radiactive material. Uranium reactors consume somewhere between 5-10% of the reactable fuel in the fuel rods. Shutting down a Uranium reactor is very complex and mostly relies on dropping something between the fuel rods to ‘absorb’ the subatomic particles that bounce between the fuel rods to create the reaction. The best material to do this is graphite – otherwise known as Carbon. Or Coal. This burns really well if there is a fire and then stops absorbing all the high-energy particles in the reactor vessel. The byproducts of this reaction take between centuries and millenia to ‘break down’ to a ‘normal’ level of radioactivity.
The competing technlogy is a Thorium reactor. This uses a different material and is a liquid reaction in that the Thorium is converted to Thorium Flouride – a liquid. This liquid is then pumped into the reaction chamber. It consumes almost 100% of the possible fuel, and the byproducts decay much more rapidly than those used in the Uranium cycle – decades rather than millennia. To shut down the reaction is trivial – you just turn the tap going into the reactor chamber off and the reaction stops when the fuel burns out. This is also a low pressure reaction in that it doesn’t need elaborate, heavy pressure containment vessels that are prone to crack and require extremely careful maintenance.
So why has no one heard of the Thorium reactor? One reason, uranium reactors produce plutonium as a byproduct that can be made into nukes. Thorium and the byproducts of its combustion (if I can use that term) can’t be turned into a nuclear weapon. Over the past 30 years, nuclear weapons and nuclear power have been inextricably linked. This means that zero work has been done on Thorium reactors since the US Government designed and ‘Open Sourced’ the design of a Thorium reactor to any friendly government that wanted it.
You’re hard pressed these days to even find any academics that are familiar with the Thorium reactors these days. Which is a pity really, as technically it is a much better option.
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21st June 2011 at 12:02 am
SSS says:
Mikey
It was only a matter of time before someone showed up beating the “Thorium Reactor Drum,” and you’re it.
Thorium reactors have been studied and researched since the 1950s. This technology ain’t new, and it’s STILL NOT COMMERCIALLY VIABLE. Otherwise, they’d be all over the planet.
You’re living in a “Eureka!!” dream world. Wake up.
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21st June 2011 at 12:58 pm
Mikey says:
@SSS – it’s been commercially viable since the 1960s. They’re not being built now as the technology is not being taught – that’s all.
In the VHS vs BETA wars VHS won, not because it was better, but because it was more popular due to deals with movie producers. In the Uranium vs Thorium wars Uranium won due to deals with the military.
As for the “all over the planet” comment – India is building 1 right now, with Chinese technical support. India after all has the largest known Thorium reserves on the planet and China wants energy in the same way that the US wanted oil in the 60s. The difference is that China knows that it’s not going to be able to supply its internal demand in another decade or two and is planning for it. Hence why China is aggressively wooing India.
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21st June 2011 at 6:12 pm
SSS says:
Mikey
India has been making grandiose noises about thorium reactors for quite some time. Last time I looked, it had plans for a 60 megawatt thorium reactor. That’s fucking peanuts in the world of producing power and virtually useless for India’s explosive need for energy. To put 60 megawatts in perspective, a third-generation plus reactor manufactured by Westinghouse produces 1,154 megawatts. That’s 19 times as much as the thorium reactor.
Convince me with what’s doable TODAY with thorium. Some facts and figures, please, starting with the megawatts an operable thorium reactor can produce.
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21st June 2011 at 6:41 pm
Mikey says:
@SSS
Sorry mate – I can’t do that. I don’t know enough about the field. I’m not a nuclear engineer.
What I can say is that of course there’s no COTS system as sweet FA R&D has been done on the system in the past 30 years or so.
Just like moon rockets. As of right now it is impossible for us to get to the moon for the exact same reason that it’s not feasable to build a Thorium reactor using off the shelf parts.
A metric bucket-load of R&D must be done before we can built the machines, to build the machines, to build the parts, to build the thing to build the reactor/moon rocket.
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21st June 2011 at 7:38 pm
Mikey says:
@SSS
correction – links found.
This are from the ‘World Nuclear Organisation’ – a research and promotional organisation funded by all the major Nuclear Power development and construction corporations. You know, the people that have the most money to make from nuke tech.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html
Here’s another one – a link to a US company called ‘Lightbridge’ that is currently trying to make a commercial Thorium reactor by doing the R&D first. Current operating profit is clost to US$2mm /quarter
http://www.ltbridge.com/
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21st June 2011 at 7:58 pm
SSS says:
Mikey
Thanks for the links. I read them and gained exactly zero confidence that thorium is a practical answer to energy production in the next generation. Zero.
India, China, the U.S. and other major consummers of energy don’t have TIME to fiddle with thorium. That’s my point, and you proved it. Thorium is not ready for prime time.
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21st June 2011 at 8:59 pm
Mikey says:
@SSS
maybe I’m missing something but i’m not seeing the pressing need that you’re describing. *All* technology requires R&D. Especially large items such as power plants of any sort. Each power plant is a unique structure – regardless of whether or not it follows a standardised design. There are always tweaks and improvements – modifications to suit local laws or improved technologies. Redesigned components and systems to provide greater reliability or efficiencies.
It’s not like you can duck down to SuperCheap Auto and pick up a thermonuclear generator and slap it on the deck of your ute like an el-cheapo petrol generator.
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21st June 2011 at 9:34 pm
Hope@ZeroKelvin says:
On a completely different note, my We are Doomed mugs came today and they are beeeuuteeful. Can’t wait to put one in each office, heh, heh.
Also made several orders through Amazon through this site and told my daughter, The Queen of Amazon Ordering, to do the same.
So, you lazy wretches, get with the program and let’s go nukular and help out the Admin!
(Hat tip GWBush for the pronunciation)
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21st June 2011 at 10:02 pm
SSS says:
Mikey
Look for my reply entitled “Dear Mikey.”
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21st June 2011 at 12:25 am
Mikey says:
@SSS – maybe I’m just having a ‘Man Look’ but I can’t find it, even if I use the power of the Google.
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21st June 2011 at 12:41 am
SSS says:
Mikey
It’s a short article I posted. Admin has to approve and post it. Stay tuned. Tomorrow, probably.
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21st June 2011 at 12:53 am
Mikey says:
@SSS
ahh – fair enough. I’ll wait till then
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21st June 2011 at 1:05 am