Japanese N-Plant Explosion
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Sellafield was NOT a Commercial Power Plant, it was a plutonium production plant, with the initial fuel loading into the Windscale Piles way back in 1950.
It also contained 2,000 tons of Graphite and no containment building (it wasn't much different then Chernobyl in design or purpose.
Comparing that primitive device created for the MILITARY to Commercial Power Plants currently being built is dishonest.
Arthur
It also contained 2,000 tons of Graphite and no containment building (it wasn't much different then Chernobyl in design or purpose.
Comparing that primitive device created for the MILITARY to Commercial Power Plants currently being built is dishonest.
Arthur
Wasn't it also air cooled?
Question:
Have subcrit reactors been built yet? Successful prototypes?
Ones that stayed running for long and uneventful periods of time? no fun surprises?
I was under the impression they were just designs so far.
I kind of like this company's design for using a hitherto-untapped source: high altitude wind:
http://www.magenn.com/index.php
Generating blimps!
Woot!
BUT...other than a regrettable tendency for a power-dirigible to go Hindenburg...it seems like you'd rather have a generating blimp either pump water up to itself or condense it...and electrolyze hydrogen out to keep itself afloat Because Helium's hardly a renewable resource, is it?
Have subcrit reactors been built yet? Successful prototypes?
Ones that stayed running for long and uneventful periods of time? no fun surprises?
I was under the impression they were just designs so far.
I kind of like this company's design for using a hitherto-untapped source: high altitude wind:
http://www.magenn.com/index.php
Generating blimps!
Woot!
BUT...other than a regrettable tendency for a power-dirigible to go Hindenburg...it seems like you'd rather have a generating blimp either pump water up to itself or condense it...and electrolyze hydrogen out to keep itself afloat Because Helium's hardly a renewable resource, is it?
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They may be part of the same site, but the fires were at the windscale piles, not calder hall.
Calder hall was designed to deliver power, the windscale piles were for reprocessing fuel.
Addnedum:
And at the time of the Windscale fires they were still two seperate facillities.
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It handled spent rods from all our civillian reactors, or the ones not sent to France anyway. Anyway, it was a feat-breeder and it was unsafe. A commercial fast breeder of the era would have operated exactly the same, so as usual, that's total rubbish. In fact military law is tighter than civillian law. It has to conform to civillian and Army law, so should have been even safer. But no. It was a mess.
What are implying, that there is some kind of new nuclear physics we don't know of? Hey maybe computers will become sentient too and kill us all, who knows.
Are you also under the impression that we will need to store nuclear waste for thousands of years because we won't come up with a way to depose of them safely?
Yeah that as crazy as sub-critical reactors.
Sounds like it...
We, of course, have Hanford...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
I used to listen to the kooks on the radio...except sometimes Coast to Coast AM doesn't put on kooks...one of the things this guy who didn't sound nuts talked about is Area 51...What he said is that it's not so much that they had aliens there...as they had all sorts of classified, experimental, novel materials.. Yanno, heat tiles, radar-resistant stuff, probably stuff like Kevlar....and they used burning as a method of disposal.
They burned enough stuff, according to Radio Guy to cause a noxious smoggy cloud every afternoon.
So contractors who were working at the site all got cancer 20 years later, couldn't afford treatment, and couldn't get the government to pay for it, because their presence on the projects they were at...classified.
The docs didn't even know what they'd been exposed to and couldn't find out.
EDITED!:
Radio Guy is Jonathan Turley...here's a transcript of an old 60 minutes segment:
http://www.ufomind.com/area51/articles/1996/60min_960317.html
They used open pit burning to dispose of anything and everything, including barrels of toxic chemicals.
Anyway, the point of the ramble above is...secrecy is BAD I've not heard of Sellafield, but it sounds like it was a secret facility at the time, until it started pissing rads...
So Military law, Civilian law...doesn't matter. If something is secret the laws will be ignored because there's usually no way to hold someone accountable for what they do in a really-highly classified program.
(Did the persons responsible for the Sellafield trainwreck receive any punishment at all? I really am asking...)
That's what the Area 51 research guy said, and it seems a sensible statement, pretty obvious.
It's why Governments keeping secrets are almost always not in our best interest.
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Yes.
In fact I have repeatedly said that's my main objection to nuclear...although maybe not enough in this thread.
To reiterate :not the safety record. It's the waste.
You wanna disprove it to me? Give me the links that suggest we can do better, that we can make the waste inert.
And you haven't got a way to render that waste inert now, just as I haven't got a way to make renewable energy provide 100% of demand.
From what I've read so far, there's a few FBR's, one working Pebble Bed Reactor in South Africa...and I haven't seen any pages so far talking about a working subcrit reactor.
I'd like to see a good working prototype before I bet the farm on it. Before I accept it as doable, I would like to see a prototype in stable, reliable, proven operation-because you iron out design wrinkles that way.
Got linkies?
Are you really under the impression that it is physically impossible to harvest all our energy needs from renewable sources?
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http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf35.html
http://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstrea...DD109343AE436644F960DA4DE84.smart1?sequence=1
Certainly these could be developed in just a few decades, and certainly under a millennium! In the mean time we can continue to build 3rd generation reactors as the waste being produce is still very small in physical amount.
Its not for betting any farm on, it merely an example that nuclear waste is not a problem that can't be solved. Certainly reprocessing can get rid of 90-95% of nuclear waste and has been in operation in countries like Japan, France, Russia, for decades, by the way all of which also had or have FBR in service.
Not at all, only that it would be really hard, and require many decades of work building a whole new energy economy, on in which we can storage vast amounts of energy from intermittent sources and deliver it over far further distances then we can with our existing grid. In the mean time we can keep building nuclear reactors, hell we are building more and more coal and natural gas power plants, fuck china building a new coal power plant ever week, and again the numbers show those are killing vast numbers of people, far more than nuclear power could unless your assuming an apocalyptic and impossible rate of nuclear disasters!
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I think some politicians got in trouble for Sellafield. It used to be called Windscale, but they changed the name of the plant, hoping it would deflect some of the criticism and to get away from its' old names' bad connotations.
Q) If your plant contaminates a sea and pisses off the neiboughs what do you do?
A) Change the name and hope people think it's a different plant.
Only nuclear scientists could be that dumb! Genius is an inverse square of common sense!
Q) If your plant contaminates a sea and pisses off the neiboughs what do you do?
A) Change the name and hope people think it's a different plant.
Only nuclear scientists could be that dumb! Genius is an inverse square of common sense!
Yes, they do appear to be working on reducing the amount of long-decay waste...
What happens if the accelerator beam breaks containment? Not rhetorical question, but technical-it was mentioned as a danger, why is it a danger?
As far as renewables go...with renewables, I maintain that we need to both find new applications and improve efficiency of the older ones such that we are effectively no longer site dependent. In other words, we need to keep designing until we come to a point where, given any site's particulars, we can make at least partial power demand onsite, ideally all of it.
Along with that we create an interlocking grid of lines and storage devices, to make up for any shortfalls. Basically, instead of the current "big honking powerplant" model, it would be more like the "neighborhood windmill/battery bank". And all the houses would probably have their own PV array and battery bank as well.
You get more efficiency if you are able to produce right at the point of consumption, or very close...plus less need to build huge high-voltage lines.
MIT has found a way to use viruses to make batteries:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/virus-battery-0402.html
I do worry about hydrogen's explosivity and tendency to leak, but we could use it, via electrolysis, as a power storage medium.
What happens if the accelerator beam breaks containment? Not rhetorical question, but technical-it was mentioned as a danger, why is it a danger?
As far as renewables go...with renewables, I maintain that we need to both find new applications and improve efficiency of the older ones such that we are effectively no longer site dependent. In other words, we need to keep designing until we come to a point where, given any site's particulars, we can make at least partial power demand onsite, ideally all of it.
Along with that we create an interlocking grid of lines and storage devices, to make up for any shortfalls. Basically, instead of the current "big honking powerplant" model, it would be more like the "neighborhood windmill/battery bank". And all the houses would probably have their own PV array and battery bank as well.
You get more efficiency if you are able to produce right at the point of consumption, or very close...plus less need to build huge high-voltage lines.
MIT has found a way to use viruses to make batteries:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/virus-battery-0402.html
I do worry about hydrogen's explosivity and tendency to leak, but we could use it, via electrolysis, as a power storage medium.
BS, there were NO civilian reactors at the time it was built, so there were no spent rods.
It was built purely to create Nuclear Weapons.
The first commercial nuclear power plant wasn't built until 6 years after the construction of Windscale and only much later were facilities on the same site was used for their spent fuel storage and reprocessing, but all of that came later and had nothing to do with the Graphite fire that you were referring to.
That was NOT a Commercial Nuclear Power Plant.
And NO, there were no Civilian laws at all at the time (same situation existed in the US) and the Military, during this cold war period, was cutting corners to make weapons as fast as they could.
So NO, you can't compare these 1950s era MILITAYE NUCLEAR WEAPON PRODUCTION SYSTEMS to the inherently safe Commercial systems what we would deploy as an Electrical Power Plant in the 21st century.
Arthur
Depends on the time frame.
But I know of no serious study that suggests we could do so in the next 40 years and since in the next 40 years the population of the globe is going to go up by about 2 Billion people, so the demand for electricity is going to go way up and the only way to provide Base Load capacity for that kind of growth is via Coal or Nuclear.
Which is why even though our new Wind power is going up by about 30% per year, still in the US, 6,682 MW (11 new Coal fired plants) became operational during 2010, and this was the highest level of new coal-fired plants Commissioned in 25 years. Now to put THAT in perspective, China built nearly 3 times as much Coal fired capacity in 2010 as we did and plans on doing about the same this year.
Arthur
How so? We got accelerators like those all over the world, they don't kill people, or open portals to another dimension from which creatures rush in and take over the earth, ruling over the human race, sterilizing us and from which one scientist in a orange HAV suit saves us all.
The advantage with the accelerator or fusion driven sub-critical reactor is than fission reactions can be turn on and off. We must put in huge amounts of power to achieves just some fission reactions, therefor if something goes wrong, power is cut off and fission stops, there is no criticality and thus no chance of run away fission reactions. More so they are usually lead cooled designs which makes the issue of decay heat meltdown, pressure explosions and hydrogen fires non-existent.
Yeah sure love it, all for it, in the meantime we can keep building nuclear power plants
Yeah cute, I read greencarcongress.com by the way, but again in the meantime...
I really don't like hydrogen, its a pipedream pushed by oil companies specifically because the technological challenges it presents makes it very difficult to implement at any reasonable scale for many decades. Hydrogen is very difficult to store at high energy densities, its total efficiency from electrolysis (50-75%), energy loses in transporting and compressing or chemically storing it which can be up to 10% of the hydrogen energy content, and fuel cell efficiency which for PEM is around 50%, makes hydrogen a grossly inefficient way to store power! Many batteries like Lithium ion get beyond 90% efficiency in charging and discharging. I think electric batteries are the way to go, with smart girding electric cars can also double as grid storage.
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http://inhabitat.com/study-reveals-renewable-energy-could-support-all-of-civilization-by-2030/
It's up to you as to whether you consider it serious or not.
I wanted to link to the study, but it's behind a damn paywall.
(AAH! NOO! A PAYWALL! CURSE YOU ELSEVIER!)
I'm inclined to agree...BTW, I was thinking more of the home hydrogen generator run off of your windmil/PV array-so I actually wasn't figuring it to be transported at all.
More used as an onsite battery alternative if nothing better could be found...but I think the efficiency of deep-cycle lead acid batts is better than that, no?
I seem to remember NiCd's being particularly noxious to produce, and Li-ions possibly suffering from supply shortages.
Lead/acid we have tons of.
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Well I'm certainly not going to pay to see it, bur first of all you are wrong, they say that they would handle NEW energy by 2030 and all energy by 2050.
But they also say they need to install:
3,800,000 5 MW wind turbines
49,000 300 MW concentrated solar plants
40,000 300 MW solar PV power plants
1.7 billion 3 kW rooftop PV systems
5,350 100 MW geothermal power plants
270 new 1300 MW hydroelectric power plants
720,000 0.75 MW wave devices
490,000 1 MW tidal turbines
JUST to get to 2030.
For some reason they also claim that this would somehow reduce world power demand by 30%.
Not likely.
But let's assume for some reason that's true
Then
So just look at Wind for instance, we are currently building them at a great rate and all the major industrial nations are installing them and yet we installed just under 40 GWs of new turbines last year, and expect to do the a bit more this year and maybe 50 GW in 2012.
BUT this assumes we will install 950 GWs per year or over twenty times as much as we are doing now. Well sure we could ramp up, but it would take many years to get anywhere near 500 GWs per year, let alone 950.
So you say we could do it if we wanted to, but wait, at the SAME time, we need to build about 4,500 300 MW solar plants each year, again FAR more than we are installing today.
So you say we could also do that if we wanted to, but wait, at the SAME time we need to install 85 million 3 KW solar arrays on homes each year, or 340,000 new systems every work day for the next 20 years..... YIKES
So you say we could also do that if we were willing to devote maybe 6 million people to the task, but wait, at the same time we need to install 1.2 million Wave or Tidal devices (for which we are still at the begining stages), or 60,000 each year
Not to mention 14 or so new large dams each year or 270 new Geothermal plants.
What they also left out is provision for BASE LOAD. Not everyone is near tidal or Geothermal power and the others are intermittant, so no mention of power storage is made, but the cost of that would be HUGE.
Finally, what this plan leaves out is that virtually none of these large MW plants and Wind Farms are near population centers and so the amount of new long distance High Voltage lines (and associated losses) to get this power to the people is not mentioned.
The fact is, NO, this is not a realistic plan that anyone is attempting to follow.
Arthur
I'm going to quote something I said in an earlier thread:
So I think that's what we need to work for... interlocked energy self-production and municipal production, really, with on-site storage media included.
Less emphasis on distribution, more on network...with everyone ideally able to pretty-much self-power for short periods.
If nuclear is to be used at all, I still am going to look at it as probably the least-bad of alternatives that are undesirable, and something to be worked away from, enabling a longer-term transition to a renewable economy.
We can make a lot of gains by building buildings better than we do now, and retrofitting older ones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design
So there's still a lot of what's called "low-hanging fruit" in terms of energy gain to be had in building design. That's a notoriously stodgy industry there...and it bugs me no end when I see houses going up in the same old, lightly-insulated style as ever (this week, it was a 3000 sq ft McMansion, it will probably cost $500 a month to cool from the get-go, west-facing picture windows
)
As far as nukes...the waste issue-I will not consider it solved until it IS solved. 95% is reasonably good...it still makes nukes less than desirable.
To make them desirable in my book you'd need to be able to get that waste down to a totally inert state-pretend I'm from Missouri and show me it can be done.
Breeder reactors and subcrit reactors are good...although subcrit reactors have the issue of not being terribly good for power production-I skimmed, but apparently they require being powered up and powered down.
There's the proliferation issue...not a worry in a nation with nukes...but in any country with political instability and no nuclear bombs?
Do you really want them to have a plutonium-making machine?
And then of course there's the whole "dirty bomb" issue...the hotter the stuff you get your hands on, the better that works...
So I think that renewables top out nuclear in terms of pollutants (because there are pollutants involved in making some of the harvesting technology...another thing to work on), and it therefore makes sense to give priority to maturing renewables. Because there's a lot more potential there.
Around here, people seem to be highly enamored of nuclear, so the reason I'm getting so evangelical about it is because it seems that
(a) my concerns about radioactive waste are getting cavalierly dismissed
(b) people here seem to be willing to count renewable resources out before we've poured a lot of money and engineering expertise into trying to make them work.
Nuclear and fossil fuels get TONS of funding...renewables mostly have not.
So I think that's what we need to work for... interlocked energy self-production and municipal production, really, with on-site storage media included.
Less emphasis on distribution, more on network...with everyone ideally able to pretty-much self-power for short periods.
If nuclear is to be used at all, I still am going to look at it as probably the least-bad of alternatives that are undesirable, and something to be worked away from, enabling a longer-term transition to a renewable economy.
We can make a lot of gains by building buildings better than we do now, and retrofitting older ones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design
So there's still a lot of what's called "low-hanging fruit" in terms of energy gain to be had in building design. That's a notoriously stodgy industry there...and it bugs me no end when I see houses going up in the same old, lightly-insulated style as ever (this week, it was a 3000 sq ft McMansion, it will probably cost $500 a month to cool from the get-go, west-facing picture windows
)As far as nukes...the waste issue-I will not consider it solved until it IS solved. 95% is reasonably good...it still makes nukes less than desirable.
To make them desirable in my book you'd need to be able to get that waste down to a totally inert state-pretend I'm from Missouri and show me it can be done.
Breeder reactors and subcrit reactors are good...although subcrit reactors have the issue of not being terribly good for power production-I skimmed, but apparently they require being powered up and powered down.
There's the proliferation issue...not a worry in a nation with nukes...but in any country with political instability and no nuclear bombs?
Do you really want them to have a plutonium-making machine?
And then of course there's the whole "dirty bomb" issue...the hotter the stuff you get your hands on, the better that works...
So I think that renewables top out nuclear in terms of pollutants (because there are pollutants involved in making some of the harvesting technology...another thing to work on), and it therefore makes sense to give priority to maturing renewables. Because there's a lot more potential there.
Around here, people seem to be highly enamored of nuclear, so the reason I'm getting so evangelical about it is because it seems that
(a) my concerns about radioactive waste are getting cavalierly dismissed
(b) people here seem to be willing to count renewable resources out before we've poured a lot of money and engineering expertise into trying to make them work.
Nuclear and fossil fuels get TONS of funding...renewables mostly have not.
I'm going to quote something I said in an earlier thread:
So I think that's what we need to work for... interlocked energy self-production and municipal production, really, with on-site storage media included.
Less emphasis on distribution, more on network...with everyone ideally able to pretty-much self-power for short periods.
If nuclear is to be used at all, I still am going to look at it as probably the least-bad of alternatives that are undesirable, and something to be worked away from, enabling a longer-term transition to a renewable economy.
We can make a lot of gains by building buildings better than we do now, and retrofitting older ones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design
So there's still a lot of what's called "low-hanging fruit" in terms of energy gain to be had in building design. That's a notoriously stodgy industry there...and it bugs me no end when I see houses going up in the same old, lightly-insulated style as ever (this week, it was a 3000 sq ft McMansion, it will probably cost $500 a month to cool from the get-go, west-facing picture windows
...
Around here, people seem to be highly enamored of nuclear, so the reason I'm getting so evangelical about it is because it seems that
(a) my concerns about radioactive waste are getting cavalierly dismissed
(b) people here seem to be willing to count renewable resources out before we've poured a lot of money and engineering expertise into trying to make them work.
Nuclear and fossil fuels get TONS of funding...renewables mostly have not.
But you are totally unrealistic.
Indeed you frame our energy needs based on BS like our houses, but Residential use is maybe 20% of our energy needs, and since the average age of our houses is only 32 years old it's not like there are huge savings in upgrades to our existing homes. And yes we can build even more efficient homes but even if we do that won't reduce our country's energy needs, not with the fact that by 2050 when we need to provide for 110 million MORE people in the US (or roughly 40 million more houses/apartments), as well as the cars, food and buildings where they can work.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/usinterimproj/
You seem to forget that we are the world's largest MANUFACTURER and the energy needs for running our industry and commercial needs is HUGE and that our population continues to grow at a substantial rate.
The storage problem has been solved, from a Technical viewpoint, just need to do it from a political viewpoint.
The fact that the biggest issue at the plants in Japan have really been the Spent Fuel Ponds is likely to help with the political side of this.
And the problem with renewables has nothing to do with funding, we are spending (as is the rest of the world) enormous amounts of money on every form of energy research and providing huge direct subsidies for renewables.
Arthur
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