posted
I don't know much about it, but if I remember the section on it in school it is actually very expensive, so therefore is not seen as a viable replacement for burning fossil fuels. There is also the huge problem of what to do with the waste. We can either shut the plants down and bury them beneath concrete or bury the waste in the desert somewhere. Obviously neither one is a great idea.
space opera
PS - still workin' on your story
Posts: 2578 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
There was an interesting DOE study I came across once on the warning signs needed to protect a future civilization that doesn't know English or any other current language from opening a radioactive waste dump. They wanted to put impressive statutes and dire pictorial warnings around the entrance.
My first thought was, "yeah, like that would stop Indiana Jones."
Um, I think we need to develop fusion. The fuel's easy to come by, there's some radiation danger but no radioactive waste, and it's pretty clean fuel.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
Don't hold your breath: a commercial fusion reactor was "about a decade away" for over 40years. Nowadays the researchers talk about one being online in a couple of decades. Looked at optimisticly, a fusion reactor would produce about half as much waste as a fission reactor.
quote:[with minor rearrangement and paraphrasing for clarity...] The nuclear waste produced by US coal plants exceeds the amount of nuclear fuel consumed by US nuclear reactors. Each ton of coal contains 1.3 parts per million (ppm) of uranium and 3.2 ppm of thorium. The combustion of 616 million tons of coal in 1982 released 1,971 tons of thorium and 801 tons of uranium into the air. Global coal consumption in 1982 (2.8 billion tons) poured 8,950 tons of thorium and 3,640 tons of uranium into the environment.
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Nuclear fission is cleaner, cheaper, and more efficient then burning fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, start up costs for power plants are expensive, and too many people who don't know anything about nuclear power think its worse for the environment then fossil fuels, and don't want the government touching nuclear power.
Posts: 4112 | Registered: May 2001
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I think the expense is mostly because they are so politically unpopular. People are afraid of anything with the word "nuclear" in the name. They changed NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) to MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) because they had to get that pesky word out of the name.
There are some valid reasons to fear nuclear power, yet I am afraid we've done ourselves a great disservice by neglecting this energy source. It's free of greenhouse gases, so makes far less global environmental impact than fossil fuels. Yes, fusion will be far better if we can get that working. Not only because it generates less waste, but because the waste it does generate decays much more quickly into safe forms. However, in the meantime we need something to tide us over the end of the fossil fuel era. We will run out of fossil fuels. Will fusion be cheap and available by then? Who knows! Fission, though, is available now. Europe (France in particular) uses a far higher percentage of fission reactors for their electricity generation than do we, and they (with the notable exception of Chernobyl) have done so very safely.
Chernobyl is a horrific example of what can happen when nuclear power is not done right. I suppose if 10 times that number died of exposure or heat stroke during blackouts, or because they can't afford the energy to heat or cool their homes, it would still be more acceptable to society than another Chernobyl, because 1) only the poor or old people would die, and 2) fewer would die at any one location or in any given day.
But when you factor in the cost to New York City of sea level rising 18 feet from global warming, then it begins to look more attractive.
I don't understand really why people don't want us to have nuclear power plants. To my mind, the answer to safety concerns is better safety technology and stricter safety standards. More redundancy, more frequent testing and designing in a higher margin of safety. But I am a technophile, and the workings of the minds of technophobes are forever inaccessible to me.
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It's called a fast breeder reactor. Feed it nuclear waste, and the breeder reactor converts it to much less nasty nuclear waste with a shorter half-life.
Posts: 2655 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
Nuclear is still a non-renewable energy source. If we replaced all our current power plants with nuclear plants, we'd by ourselves a couple of centuries, but we'd just be putting our great-(*)-grandchildren into the same bind we are heading towards today.
We should go fission, but not stop alternate fuel source research.
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Actually, don't breeder reactors create MORE nasty nuclear waste, albeit with much shorter half-lifes? Breeders are used to create weapons-grade nuclear material, right?
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A breeder reactor produces large quantities of pretty much harmless (when properly taken care of) substances, and a small quantity of weapons grade substances, from an input of a large quantity of very harmful material.
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Bok, it's non renewable, the same as fossil fuels, which have done good service for a century now. Fusion is also non-renewable, when once we turn all the hydrogen of all the world's oceans into helium. All energy sources are ultimately non-renewable. All are useful for a time only, or at a certain level, and then we must find new and different ones. Can we afford to skip over fission seeing how there is not yet a single fusion power plant in operation? When will there be one? Will it be in time? We really don't know. I think we need to take another look at fission power plants. The new generation is safer than ever before. When people flip the switch and there is no electricity there, their priorities may change. Witness the complete change of attitudes of Californians after a few rotating blackouts.
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posted
A carefully constructed fission plant can last for over 25 years. I'm not sure about commercial plants. Radiation.....the shielding placed around American designed reactors keeps levels down to almost nothing. The old Soviet design however......... Not going there.
Nukes are Mucho Expenso. They are about half the cost of a nuke powered carrier, if not more than half. The government designs the shielding for a specific max allowable. However, because the government overdoes so much, there is almost no radiation leakage.
Posts: 2208 | Registered: Feb 2004
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I knew that Yank, and it was funny. I was replying to the other's. I operate a nuke plant so it is a small personal thing for me. It is a fun job. I own machinery larger than conversion vans (does hulk impression of bulging muscles. Doesn't have bulging muscles). An it gets exciting at times.
Just the other day we had a pump (one that was not an important part of our plant) eat itself. It had just decided to give up. OOOOH yeah, it was great watching my supervisor running up the stairs screaming "get the hell away! It's gonna kill us all!"
It didn't. It just had a temper tantrum. So we shut her down. And she now lays in pieces all over the deck. We'll get to work on it later when the parts come in.
Anyway, I like the idea of going into fusion power as a new source. It just isn't feasable right now to contain it. And ya probably do get more radiation from a computer screen than ya do a nuke plant. I know I get more from the sun. Don't forget that we ourselves naturally give off a very very very vewy small doseage of radiation.
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An MRI specialist doctor once told me that the highest occupational radiation exposure in the U.S. was airline pilots and flight attendants. They spend so much time above the thickest part of the atmosphere that they get more cosmic ray exposure from space. I thought that was interesting.
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posted
Except what do you do when it's time to close down the nuclear plant? Where do you put the pieces? What do you do with the spent fuel rods? So far, the best we can think of is to hide them in the ground in the Nevada desert. For over 10,000 years.
My favorite nuclear plant story: Shoreham, Long Island. After LILCO decided to cancel the project (putting a nuclear power plant in one of the most densely poplated counties in the country, with a severe transportation bottleneck in the case of an emergency, and build it on sand, no less), they wanted to "just try it out."
I repeat: the project was CANCELLED. The powerplant had never seen a single radioactive element. It was pefectly "clean" (from a radiation point of view). They could dismantle it, and dispose of it using traditional methods.
So, what do you do? You fire it up! You dirty it up! You make it so that there is no proper way to decommision the plant, except for ENCASING IT IN CONCRETE FOR 10,000 YEARS! All for what? To prove that your design would have worked if only the %^#^% NIMBY jerks in Suffolk county would have let you?
Mankind is currently way too stupid to be allowed to use nuclear power as a long-term solution. Think of that the next time you see some schmuck in a Hummer or some suburb-rated 4WD SUV. He's eating your future.
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We should put the waste on rockets and shoot it into the sun. Or try to get into the mantle of the earth. I think the Sun is the better way to go.
But yes that is the big problem. There actually are plutonium breeder reactors that can use the waste from other reactors after it has been processed. But we aren't allowed to recycle spent nuclear fuel right now because of a stupid act of congress. It all has to go in the ground. And the real problem is all of the unscrupulous people who would like to get their hands on that waste to make it into weapons.
But overall I'm pro nuclear power and think we should be building more plants instead of gradually decommisioning the ones we've got. Electric cars don't do any net good on the environment if they are consuming electricity coming from coal burning power plants, no mater how clean they can make the coal emisions, you are still contributing to the green house effect.
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If our leaders can't agree on how to pronounce Nuclear Energy, do we really want them in charge of creating it?
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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Banna, it's precisely those breeder reactors we're not allowed to use that would need to be used to make weapons (other than dirty bombs and primitive bombs like the Little Boy). Which is why we're not allowed to use them. Now, maybe that's an adequate reason and maybe it's not, but it's not a completely nonsensical policy.
Posts: 1114 | Registered: Mar 2004
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According to my dad, very little of the nuclear waste is dangerous. Most of it is the little paper suits they wore in the reactor to keep radioactive dust from settling on their skin and burning them. Since the plant switched to cloth suits, there's only a fraction of the waste there used to be.
Also, 10,000 is the time for uranium to decay. Most of what's left in the rods isn't uranium. The point of fission is to break it in half. So mostly you have cobalt. That'll decay down into iron or something silly, but it releases a huge gamma ray doing it. It's the gamma rays from the cobalt that are actually dangerous and need to be put away safely. I forget the half life, but it's more like 60 years.
So since we've already blown up nuclear bombs in the Nevada desert and contaminated the site, why not bury some cobalt bits under Yucca Mountain? What difference does it make now? The place has already been irradiated.
Boy was I off! The half life of cobalt is only 5 something years. It must have been 60 to not be dangerous anymore. Half Life of Cobalt
The "spent" uranium-loaded fuel rods remain radioactive for ten-thousand years or more after they have done their job providing a fission source. They have to be stored in giant steel and concrete casks, or in huge pools of water, in order to control the radiation they give off. You can't store too many of them together, or too closely, because they start to cascade, and you get a dangerous increase in energies.
(It's neither a government-sponsored "All is well" report, nor a chicken-little "We're all going to die!" diatribe)
Plus, I've done some research into this very issue, so I'd say the report is pretty factual. And I can say, without a moment's hesitation, that they are not just storing little paper suits in those things.
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ssywak is right about the water. I have talked to a few civilian plants about this (they were trying to hire me).
no it does not increase the likelihood of a reaction necessarilly (sp?). However, my memory of reactor physics is escaping me after that much, as I am just a lowly mechanic. I don't operate the reactor at all.
Posts: 2208 | Registered: Feb 2004
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Moderators (not website moderators, silly) slow the reactions down, causing an apparent reduction in critical mass (or, looking at it another way, increasing the critical mass needed to actually hit, well, critical mass). Boron, Graphite and heavy water are used for this. The water in the storage pools is, to my knowledge, not deuterium (heavy water).
But we're just splitting atoms here, the bigger question remains unanswered.
Posts: 1862 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Ya know ssywak, I just looked up yer profile. ME Huh? I'm shootin fer the same thing as soon as I get the time to start working on it. Oh and tutoring. I need to find a math tutor.
Posts: 2208 | Registered: Feb 2004
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Yep. Mechanical Engineer. You should definitely give it a go.
Trig & Algebra! I took math courses in college dealing with triple integrals, curl functions, and God-knows-what else. 98% of what I use on a daily basis is trigonometry & algebra. I force myself to do an integration once a year just to keep those particular neurons in condition.
Posts: 1862 | Registered: Mar 2000
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When I get to NY for instructor duty I plan on attending RPI. The navy has a hook up with them for nuke trained personnel.
Posts: 2208 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
I'd actually feel a lot better about nuclear power if they could manage to not build the plants practically on top of earthquake faults (Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo) or right next to the freeway (San Onofre, between Los Angeles and San Diego). I mean, if you've got a good arm, you could stand on the shoulder of the southbound lanes and hit the containment buildings at San Onofre with a rock. I think that makes it pretty vulnerable.
This is why I am a bit nervous about nuclear power plants:
quote:The Santa Susana Sodium Reactor Experimental (SRE) was a small sodium-cooled experimental reactor built by Southern California Edison and Atomics International at Santa Susana, near Moorpark in Ventura County. It came on line in April 1957, began feeding electricity to the grid on July 12, 1957, and closed February 1964. This reactor used sodium rather than water as a coolant and produced a maximum of about 7.5 megawatts (electric). It was considered as the country's first civilian nuclear plant. On July 26, 1959, the SRE suffered a partial core meltdown. Ten of 43 fuel assemblies were damaged due to lack of heat transfer and radioactive contamination was released. For more info about the plant, go to: http://www.nuclearwitness.org/03_calif_nukes/03_santa/01_santa_timeline.htm The plant has subsequently been dismantled.
(From: "Nuclear Energy in California", at this site )
I lived within sight of the installation where this reactor was all during the time it was in operation. When the partial meltdown and its release of contamination occurred, nobody bothered to tell anyone who might be affected by it. Gee, thanks, guys. I didn't know anything about it until a few years ago - and my family was good friends with a man who worked up there and lived up the street from us.
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I don't know anything about the sodium based coolant system, but assuming it used the same containment building as everyone else in the US, they did tell everyone who was effected: the plant workers.
A meltdown means the operators have screwed up. They have a big gooey mess, the NRC breathing down their necks, and a financial disaster. That's it. It doesn't do anything better or worse reaction wise than it did before. However, it is really hot and really radioactive. It needs to be stored for a while and being liquid makes that difficult. Not impossible, just difficult.
I don't know if I could find a schematic of the containment building for you online and I'm half afraid to try. Basically, there's a giant concrete shell sitting around the reactor on all sides. As I said in the 9/11 accountability thread, my dad mentioned long before 9/11 that a plane could fly into the reactor and not do more than cosmetic damage.
The other thing to remember is there's two different chain reaction designations. Critical mass means you have enough uranium to sustain a chain reaction. Point super critical means you have enough to blow up. A power plant has critical mass. Trying to rig it for point super critical would take some serious doing. You'd either have to bring in your own uranium to add, in which case why would you bother, or try to salvage enough uranium from the pool. As I said before, fission splits the atom in half. You don't have a lot of uranium left when you're done.
Basically, power plants have been designed so that anyone with enough firepower to destroy it has better things to do with their time. It's much easier to hit the transfer stations to disrupt power. Not to mention cheaper.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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The link works now. Excuse me for being human. As far as the link within the quote - I'm not responsible for that, it was part of the quote and that's all.
And as far as only the workers being affected by the partial meltdown - I beg to differ. Radioactive contaminants were released into the environment. That means everyone in the surrounding area could have potentially been affected, and should have been notified. It isn't like the facility was secret or anything - it was reported in the Britannica Book of the Year the year it was constructed, so the existence of the facility was not classified. This secrecy crap just pisses me off no end. Especially since I was a very small child at the time, and vulnerable to the effects of radiation. I have a thyroid malfunction that can probably be traced to that accident, and I don't appreciate the attitude that it's just a cost of doing business.
posted
I just wanted to mention that I will do online math tutoring. Asking me to work math problems is like asking a dog to go for a walk.
I think the only reason so many people don't care for math is that those who do almost never go into education anymore, so that the first encounter people have nowadays with someone who loves math is in college when it might be too late. I happened to have 2 excellent math teachers (women leftover from an era when women couldn't be engineers or scientists but they could be teachers) in elementary school, and then my dad went back to school and got his math degree when I was about 10, so I would help him study (memorizing the things he needed to memorize) and then I would ask him what the heck it was all about when we were done, and we'd talk about it. That and I read Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column in Scientific American for years. Math is extremely beautiful and cool. Like God's paint set, or something.
Anyway, to make an A in any math course 1) go to every class, 2) do all the homework, and 3) don't be afraid to stop the teacher during lectures and ask for more explanation of anything you don't understand. Doing 1) and 2) above gives you the authority to do that. Most of the time, the whole class will be grateful to you because they were confused too. The atmosphere of the class will change, too, if you will do this, to one in which the students participate, and it will become a much more fruitful and interesting class for everyone, including the teacher. Oh and there's also a 4). 4) The night before the test, work a few problems of each type, (particularly problems off old tests by that same teacher, if you can get them) and make a single sheet with the relevant formulas and things you need to memorize for the test. Read over this sheet several times before the test, and be sure you have it memorized. Save these sheets from each test for help studying for the midterm and/or final. Again before the final, work two or three problems of each type and make yourself a single master sheet, if you like, combining the information from all the previous sheets.
Keep that sheet with your textbook forever. (Never ever sell your books. They are worth much more to you than you could get for them. Make notes in them and put tabs on important pages, write crucial equations on the flyleaves, and so on. They will be a very valuable resource if you do that.)
There you go. ak's four simple rules for making As in Engineering. This also works for physics, chemistry, circuits, thermo, and all those problem solving type classes.
[ May 15, 2004, 01:11 PM: Message edited by: ak ]
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posted
Nice site, informative. Your human-ness may continue now. I didn't mean anything bad, I was just tryin to inform ya that the one at least didn't work. The rest it says are PWR (Pressurized Water Reactors). In my opinion these are safer, more so than a sodium rx. Of course it all depends on the operators, maintenance, QA, and durability of parts.
Hi ak. thanx. I have bought a few books to help me out until I go for the school. I wasn't tooooo bad at physics when I was in the training pipeline (as long as it dealt with splitting atoms I was fine). If they have me memorizing drawings/schematics/whatever I should have no problem. I have to do that now on a lot of different stuff in the plant.
[ May 15, 2004, 01:24 PM: Message edited by: Stan the man ]
Posts: 2208 | Registered: Feb 2004
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I actually laughed like a blooming idiot on your account of the bad pump and the supervisor going wonky. Thank you!
I remember as a child asking my mommy if she would buy me a "I survived 3 Mile Island" T-shirt and she said, "No.".
Otherwise, I think nuclear power is a viable option. The US Navy has the most successful nuclear reactor program in the world, mainly because of the purposely-cautious, redundant safety checks that prevent disaster. Their protocols are the benchmark of the field, IMO.
I also had this wrinkled, old Chemistry Professor in college who preferred nuclear power as a means of energy, and he was polite enough to not mention how politics and rival energy sources (oil) have intentionally given nuclear power a bad name.
Posts: 1870 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Yeah, it wasn't funny at the time (I thought it was the gears on my engine). However, it wasn't longer than ten minutes afterwords and we were getting a few smiles and laughs about the whole thing. It was just a fire pump. I got plenty more.
Posts: 2208 | Registered: Feb 2004
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lma, I was unaware that any reactors had ever released into the environment. Frankly, a news story about a lawyer suing Boeing on behalf of the families is a bit suspect to me. It could be true, but it could just be good press for his case, too.
quote: Barry Capello, Attorney: "The whole story to the public was you have nothing to worry about, nothing got off site. And that was complete bunk. Our experts have shown the accident in 1959 released more radiation, 15 to 200 times more to the environment, than three miles island. Yet our government covered it up."
Unfortunetly, that means none got out. No radiation escaped at TMI. Zero times anything is still zero.
If SRE was not a military reactor, then it was overseen by the NRC and all the anti-nuclear watch dog groups. Somehow I doubt a partial meltdown escaped their notice. I'm waiting to see more evidence before I believe this story.
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Hi ak. thanx. I have bought a few books to help me out until I go for the school. I wasn't tooooo bad at physics when I was in the training pipeline (as long as it dealt with splitting atoms I was fine). If they have me memorizing drawings/schematics/whatever I should have no problem. I have to do that now on a lot of different stuff in the plant.
