201–210 of 269 posts
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passive fail-safe already existed 20 years ago. CANDU Reactor is exactly that. Doesn't even need enriched uranium.
So what happened? Why aren't we in a world of abundant energy?
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Pumped hydro has been viable for energy storage for decades and decades, running 70-80% efficiency. It's more efficient than most alternatives, to include compressed air, but it can't be dispatched quite as quickly. The real problem is the fact that environmentalists tend to hate dams, especially large hydro projects, so there's a major political battle on top of finding funding for these kinds of capital-intensive p…
Even if we could build dams with no worry about the environment, it wouldn't help. There are not many places left to build them, and a lot more would be needed. Sure use them where we have them, but they are not a something we can grow.
I bet the Fukushima backup power system would have fit this explanation perfectly: > in addition to the grid connection, there are four twelve megawatt diesel generator stations spaced around each corner of the plant -- each with two generators, any one of which is able to provide operating power to keep the reactor's safety systems working. Unfortunately for Fukushima, all generators were flooded by a single Tsunami…
While these are real risks, it's worth pointing out two things: - This wasn't just "a single Tsunami", it was the Tsunami resulting from the 4th largest earthquake ever recorded happening just a few hundred km away. - The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that. The effects of the disaster are absolutely terrible, and we…
That's the point, though, isn't it? One of the richest and most developed nations failed to decommission the plant in a timely manner, even under excellent conditions, in order to save costs. It's not the technology that's the problem.
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France begs to differ. We basically replace fossil fuel with nuclear here (we only have small peaker gas plants, our baseload is all nuclear and some of our variable load is hydro) and there is no particular scale problem, no accidents (incidents yes, but they don't become accidents, the system works), a few pools of waste but whatever, no trouble to procure the fuel...
The fuel is an interesting point - I gather it comes from former French colonies, mostly. Do you know if this is true? And if so, what are the conditions of the workers and the impact on the economies of countries where the extraction happens?
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My old man was a Navy nuke turned instrument tech at Three Mile Island... he can go on and on about steam tables. I worked there one refueling outage while lazing about after college. Highlights include: sweeping river muck out of the empty cooling towers, scrubbing pipes for x-ray analysis, standing "fire watch" since doors were propped open, taking a smoke break on top of the Unit 2 control room building ( that Uni…
I'm getting flashbacks of the engineering problems I had to solve at school with all this talk of steam look up tables. Not sure if its enjoyable or suppression nostalgia :)
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Well, any plan for green energy has major holes in it. If it was easy someone would have already done it. The EU is taking this very seriously however as part of their climate plans. The big problem with the hydrogen economy is not the conversion of the gas plants, it is having enough wind to generate the hydrogen in the first place. You need excess wind capacity to make hydrogen, and no private venture will invest i…
Texas of all places are building tremendous numbers of wind turbines primarily driven by market forces.
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It’s funny when I read the Foundation novels, it seemed silly to me that people could lose track of technology and fall backwards. Then you read something like this and realize Asimov had a point!
The key insight is that data is not knowledge. We probably still have all the papers and journals and schematics and whatnot. What we don't have, however, is people with the appropriate training to make sense of those things. Without those people - without actual working knowledge of the technology - all that data is useless.
You can figure out what it does rather easily. Figuring out why it was done that way requires a lesson from the school of hard knocks in a lot of cases.
In the case of the nuclear industry those knocks can be rather significant.
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I agree with your risk assessment, but I have to say that given the choice between a climate apocalypse and a nuclear power buildout, I would choose the latter.
If only it was a conscious choice... I fear significant climate has happened already, and even if we stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow will continue for a long time to come. Putting up a few km2 of solar in e.g. the Sahara now is surely less effort than decommissioning dozens of nuclear plants in 50 years.