Nuclear reactors

[JimC]

This is why I think the correct answer is not any method of generating more power, but instead conservation and efficiency improvements in how that power is used.

I mentioned that already earlier in this thread as an important part of future renewables based energy supply. In Japan, houses are pourly insulated and people are encourage to use energy to keep the dollars rolling in for TEPCO. The sad thing is, they probably wouldn't have had to build Fukushima if they'd focused on efficient energy consumption.

The reality is that we will need multiple methods to move in a healthier direction for the planet. Energy conservation is certainly one of those methods, but so is making use of a variety of renewable resources. In somewhere like Australia, a combination of solar and geothermal may well be effective. The big question is how to combine private enterprise and government incentives to get the process rolling...

[egbert]

There are indeed many factors to consider, but one, straightforward and quite brutal economic reality is the cost per megawatt. My main, and I thought reasonably optimistic point, is that if solar cells (for example) start to be manufactured on a very large scale, the cost per panel will greatly decrease. And given that Oz has a lot of degraded, cheap agricultural land with high solar flux available, one can have some hope for a renewable future, given a decent kick-start to the process...

Not really. Conversion of light energy into electricity is by no means simple, and a needed breakthrough has yet to be found.
In an attempt to promote the generation of solar energy, the Ontario government has reluctantly committed to purchased electricity from those who install a bank of solar panels at the rate of eighty cents per kilowatt hour, for a contract term of twenty years, in an attempt to make solar financially viable. This is ten times the rate consumers are paying for electricity.
You can imagine how the economic absurdity of selling electricity at 10 percent of what it costs! How long is that economic model going to survive?
Ontario has long attracted industry by selling electricity below the real cost. But, such deficit finance can't go on for long, before reality sets in. So, we currently have on our electricity bills a charge for "debt retirement". They even have the gall to charge us sales tax on it! Sorta like being charged sales tax on your mortgage interest. Ah, politicians, gotta love them. And, we're being forewarned of HUGE increases in our electricity rates.
Just watch what little industry is left flee to cheap coal in China.

Your suggestion of fields of solar panels in places like the Ossie outback, or the Sahara, sounds good. Trouble is, solar panels are expensive. And, they produce direct current, which can't be transmitted very far. So, in order to get this power to the populated areas where it is needed, it is necessary to convert it to AC. Which, of course, isn't 100% efficient, so now the price goes up, never mind the complexities of building multi megawatt converters.
It all sounds so simple at first glance, but the Grand Designer has really fucked us. Every alternative has its downside.
And here we are, sitting on this ball of molten lava, wondering how to get energy...

[JimC]

There are indeed many factors to consider, but one, straightforward and quite brutal economic reality is the cost per megawatt. My main, and I thought reasonably optimistic point, is that if solar cells (for example) start to be manufactured on a very large scale, the cost per panel will greatly decrease. And given that Oz has a lot of degraded, cheap agricultural land with high solar flux available, one can have some hope for a renewable future, given a decent kick-start to the process...

Not really. Conversion of light energy into electricity is by no means simple, and a needed breakthrough has yet to be found.
In an attempt to promote the generation of solar energy, the Ontario government has reluctantly committed to purchased electricity from those who install a bank of solar panels at the rate of eighty cents per kilowatt hour, for a contract term of twenty years, in an attempt to make solar financially viable. This is ten times the rate consumers are paying for electricity.
You can imagine how the economic absurdity of selling electricity at 10 percent of what it costs! How long is that economic model going to survive?
Ontario has long attracted industry by selling electricity below the real cost. But, such deficit finance can't go on for long, before reality sets in. So, we currently have on our electricity bills a charge for "debt retirement". They even have the gall to charge us sales tax on it! Sorta like being charged sales tax on your mortgage interest. Ah, politicians, gotta love them. And, we're being forewarned of HUGE increases in our electricity rates.
Just watch what little industry is left flee to cheap coal in China.

Your suggestion of fields of solar panels in places like the Ossie outback, or the Sahara, sounds good. Trouble is, solar panels are expensive. And, they produce direct current, which can't be transmitted very far. So, in order to get this power to the populated areas where it is needed, it is necessary to convert it to AC. Which, of course, isn't 100% efficient, so now the price goes up, never mind the complexities of building multi megawatt converters.
It all sounds so simple at first glance, but the Grand Designer has really fucked us. Every alternative has its downside.
And here we are, sitting on this ball of molten lava, wondering how to get energy...

Firstly, no power source is without faults, but that shouldn't paralyse us. Also, the cost per panel of solar photovoltaics will come down with large scale manufacturing. Inland Australia has large, flat open spaces, with high insolation, not that far from grid connection. The DC to Ac conversion cost a little energy, but you accept that as part of the deal.

It is happening here, although slower than I would wish. There is also a geothermal project in the wings...

[Aos Si]

Anti matter is where its at. Well if you are looking for world domination/1 trillion dollars.

I'm not sure about fusion but it is the way to go, very long term supplies of sea water and lithium and the radioactivity is confined to the reactor not its waste products per se.

1% efficiency even seems out of reach atm but who knows?

[JimC]

Heard a news report this morning, which said that radioactive iodine levels in sea water samples near the Fukushima reactor were several million times the legal limit, which is a bit of a worry...

Given its half life of 8 days, either there is still some fission occurring, or the earlier releases produced much higher levels than that, which have since decreased by the usual negative exponential curve.

Also, they are detecting radioactive Caesium (half life 30 years) in fish samples along the cost. The bio-accumulation begins...

Overall, it is clear that the issues are more serious than either the company or the Japanese government has yet admitted to.

[roter-kaiser]

There are indeed many factors to consider, but one, straightforward and quite brutal economic reality is the cost per megawatt. My main, and I thought reasonably optimistic point, is that if solar cells (for example) start to be manufactured on a very large scale, the cost per panel will greatly decrease. And given that Oz has a lot of degraded, cheap agricultural land with high solar flux available, one can have some hope for a renewable future, given a decent kick-start to the process...

Not really. Conversion of light energy into electricity is by no means simple, and a needed breakthrough has yet to be found.
In an attempt to promote the generation of solar energy, the Ontario government has reluctantly committed to purchased electricity from those who install a bank of solar panels at the rate of eighty cents per kilowatt hour, for a contract term of twenty years, in an attempt to make solar financially viable. This is ten times the rate consumers are paying for electricity.

Again, you're comparing the subsidised costs for nuclear/fossil electricity with the real cost of renewable energy. I'm not sure how Ontario gets its energy, but I know that coal mining is subsidised by way of tax cuts and even direct subsidies to certain mining companies to keep people employed, which is what politicians want to make them look good. We already talked about the public money that is spent on nuclear energy for research, safety, disaster recovery, disposal. Have the consumer pay of all of this and the energy price will go up tenfold easily,leveling the playing field with renewables.

You can imagine how the economic absurdity of selling electricity at 10 percent of what it costs! How long is that economic model going to survive?
Ontario has long attracted industry by selling electricity below the real cost. But, such deficit finance can't go on for long, before reality sets in. So, we currently have on our electricity bills a charge for "debt retirement". They even have the gall to charge us sales tax on it! Sorta like being charged sales tax on your mortgage interest. Ah, politicians, gotta love them. And, we're being forewarned of HUGE increases in our electricity rates.
Just watch what little industry is left flee to cheap coal in China.

you're lucky that energy prices are so low in your part of the world. Here in Australia we pay 36c during peak and about 10c at night. Thanks to government incentive programs however, we have solar panels on the roof and the electricity company now owes us $330.

Your suggestion of fields of solar panels in places like the Ossie outback, or the Sahara, sounds good. Trouble is, solar panels are expensive. And, they produce direct current, which can't be transmitted very far. So, in order to get this power to the populated areas where it is needed, it is necessary to convert it to AC. Which, of course, isn't 100% efficient, so now the price goes up, never mind the complexities of building multi megawatt converters.
It all sounds so simple at first glance, but the Grand Designer has really fucked us. Every alternative has its downside.
And here we are, sitting on this ball of molten lava, wondering how to get energy...

Solar energy is not limited to photovoltaic. There are technologies out there that concentrate sunlight by means of mirrors and thus heat water which powers turbines, just like a coal fires or nuclear power plant. This eliminates the need for precious metals to be mined for solar panels. The distribution of energy remains the same problem, however these plants can be a lot smaller and therefore a lot closer to where the energy is consumed which is another advantage.

You can look at it in many ways, renewables are the way forward and not nuclear energy.

[roter-kaiser]

Anti matter is where its at. Well if you are looking for world domination/1 trillion dollars.

I'm not sure about fusion but it is the way to go, very long term supplies of sea water and lithium and the radioactivity is confined to the reactor not its waste products per se.

1% efficiency even seems out of reach atm but who knows?

Fusion's been 70 years in the making and I think the longest chain reaction so far was sustained for 0.00000054 seconds.

I'm not too confident that this will ever kick of. I think this is a project long dead but some high profile physicist still hang on to it because they're too proud to admit their life-long error.

[Aos Si]

Anti matter is where its at. Well if you are looking for world domination/1 trillion dollars.

I'm not sure about fusion but it is the way to go, very long term supplies of sea water and lithium and the radioactivity is confined to the reactor not its waste products per se.

1% efficiency even seems out of reach atm but who knows?

Fusion's been 70 years in the making and I think the longest chain reaction so far was sustained for 0.00000054 seconds.

I'm not too confident that this will ever kick of. I think this is a project long dead but some high profile physicist still hang on to it because they're too proud to admit their life-long error.

Yeah well perhaps failing dramatically will teach us something anyway.

Hard to say, some smart ass might suddenly go I know lets try firing the phasers into the dilithium crystals, that might give us just enough power to warp the plasma inductors to factor wang. And it might work, I never second guess ingenuity, and necessity is the mother of all fuck ups, but sometimes it just might work Jim!.

Still I'm banking on antimatter myself. When I have about a kilo of it I can shut down my factory and hold the world to ransom. *Sigh.

[Warren Dew]

Do you really believe nuclear power is safe and risk free, as it would appear from your posts?

If you're reading that into my posts, you're reading a lot more into them than is actually written in the words.

No form of energy production is safe and risk free. That's why I advocate energy efficiency over new energy production, especially in developed countries. However, I don't think touchy feely approaches like "education" will work to substantally improve energy efficiency; what's needed is substantially higher energy prices. That's why I'd like to see the process accelerated through substantial energy taxes.

In developing countries, I think the reality is that some new plants will be built. I support nuclear as part of that mix because I think that by far the most damaging plants to both humans and the environment are coal plants, which I'd like to see retired rather than constructed. I'd like to see them build anything but coal and other fossil fuel plants.

[nellikin]

Well I wouldn't. I don't want any fossil fuelled power plants to be built, but at the same time, I can't see that nuclear power is an alternative. It is risky and dangerous and downplaying the ramifications of accidents is to my mind twisting the situation to fit your belief that anything is preferable to fossil fuels.

You say I should not participate in a debate of which I know nothing, but your apparent ignorance of for example soil processes and the effects of contamination on soils and ecosystems merely exposes your lack of understanding of these. You do not consider plutonium contamination to be a danger, as it is relatively immobile in soils, but that merely means that it isn't easily leached out into receiving waters. It does not equate to lack of plant and micro-organism availability. Phosphate is considered highly immobile in soils yet is a vital plant nutrient and plants have evolved ways of extracting phosphate from soil (root exudates do the job). The problem is that other substances chemically similar to plant nutrients are taken up by plants by mistake - the mechanisms to extract nutrients aren't specific to one element or compound. A classic example of this is enhanced uptake of arsenates in soils with high levels or arsenic (contaminated or naturally occuring). Arsenate is chemically very similar to phosphate, so plants extract it by mistake, leading to bioaccumulation through the foodchain. Now plutonium is chemically similar to calcium - CaCl2, CaO, CaCO3 are classic forms of calcium compounds, just as PuO, PuCl2 and PuCO3 are "common" in Pu chemistry. Then there is the remarkably similar atomic radius of Ca and Pu (175 to 180 pm). Given my understanding of soil chemistry, it is extremely concerning because I consider it highly likely that plants - which need to extract Ca from soils as part of their macronutrients - will "mistake" Pu for Ca, due to their similar chemistry. As Pu is not naturally abundant, there are only a few studies looking at plant uptake of Pu (for example in boreal forests near Chernobyl) - but they actually suggested phytoremediation of Pu contaminated soils as plant uptake of Pu is evident. This means that we can assume that if Pu contaminates soils, it will enter the biosphere and be ingested by higher organisms in the food-chain. The effects of this are not known and can only be guessed at. I do not wish to risk contaminating our world even more with toxic chemicals when we cannot assess or control the risks.

Get rid of fossil fuels - yes. Replace it with nuclear, not in my mind.

[Aos Si]

I read an interesting article about thorium reactors which produce much less waste and are far easier to monitor being used in future.

Basically they use uranium to cause thorium to become U233 and very unstable and the reaction burns up the uranium leaving relatively less waste product. Seemed promising although its still mostly on the drawing board atm and at the prototype stage, it works in theory though. In theory with the right monitoring technology these could be used in even geologically unstable areas, because environmental damage is fairly unlikely.

Its also worth noting that had Fuki not screwed up with its safety tests and monitoring and had it not been a 40 year old reactor it would probably of been safe, because modern reactors have far tighter more bomb proof chambers to house the reaction and their safety protocols are much better. You'd have to hit it with a large bomb to penetrate the shielding they use now, probably some sort of bunker buster. Modern reactors are more able to douse errant reactions as well due to the ability to dump water on them being built into the safety protocols.

[Warren Dew]

Heard a news report this morning, which said that radioactive iodine levels in sea water samples near the Fukushima reactor were several million times the legal limit, which is a bit of a worry...

Given its half life of 8 days, either there is still some fission occurring, or the earlier releases produced much higher levels than that, which have since decreased by the usual negative exponential curve.

Or the containment barriers are continuing to deteriorate, allowing previously contained fission products to escape. For example, the salt water added earlier could have caused rapid corrosion that is now causing leaks that weren't there before. Something like this seems to me the most likely thing that's happening.

[egbert]

Heard a news report this morning, which said that radioactive iodine levels in sea water samples near the Fukushima reactor were several million times the legal limit, which is a bit of a worry...

Given its half life of 8 days, either there is still some fission occurring, or the earlier releases produced much higher levels than that, which have since decreased by the usual negative exponential curve.

Or the containment barriers are continuing to deteriorate, allowing previously contained fission products to escape. For example, the salt water added earlier could have caused rapid corrosion that is now causing leaks that weren't there before. Something like this seems to me the most likely thing that's happening.

Salt Water Zirconium has excellent resistance to seawater, brackish water, and polluted water.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=KXwgAZJ ... on&f=false

[Warren Dew]

The containment barrier in question here are the steel vessel, not the zirconium cladding. That could be due to seawater corrosion or it could be due to a variety of other mechanisms, such as melt through of the primary containment due to decay heat. Much of the zirconium cladding was clearly breached early in the accident, or we wouldn't be seeing radiation levels nearly this high.

Of course, the seawater could have caused problems in other ways, such as by leaving salt residue in hot spots where it boiled away.

[JimC]

Heard a news report this morning, which said that radioactive iodine levels in sea water samples near the Fukushima reactor were several million times the legal limit, which is a bit of a worry...

Given its half life of 8 days, either there is still some fission occurring, or the earlier releases produced much higher levels than that, which have since decreased by the usual negative exponential curve.

Or the containment barriers are continuing to deteriorate, allowing previously contained fission products to escape. For example, the salt water added earlier could have caused rapid corrosion that is now causing leaks that weren't there before. Something like this seems to me the most likely thing that's happening.

Sure, but with Iodine's half life of 8 days, and the fact that fission alledgedly stopped soon after the shut down, I would have thought there would not be too much left...