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In addition to what GulMadred posted, there definitely wasn't all that much NIMBYism going on for this project. Far from that, there were some 20 communities that volunteered and actually contested to have it built nearby, since having a multi-billion dollar project near your town tends to be fairly good for the local economy and such.
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Oct 15, 2013 17:15
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I'd like to improve my knowledge on fracking, especially with the advent of recent protests in my own province about the subject and more extreme views on the subject such as gasland and fracknation have been thrown around a lot. Could anyone point me to some reading material or references on the subject? I found this study published last year to be very good when it comes to the local concerns and dilemmas with Fracking in New Brunswick, Canada (http://www.unb.ca/initiatives/shalegas/shalegas.pdf) but I'd love to have more information on the subject since it's becoming a bit of a phenomenon in many other places around the globe.
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Oct 22, 2013 21:08
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Deleuzionist posted:Check out Propublica's reporting on the matter. http://www.propublica.org/series/fracking Thanks for this! There's a tonne of useful information in here and it was pretty much what I was looking for. GulMadred posted:This doesn't mean that pool/research reactors are useless; they can serve as a neutron source for the creation of medical radioisotopes. And they can help to train new generations of scientists. And they generate Cherenkov glow, which everyone agrees is pretty TRIGA reactors could also produce Plutonium 238 "cheaply" (http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2012/02/01/11193/). Plutonium 238 is basically a requirement for sending probes beyond the asteroid belt and for powering bigger mission packages like the massive Curiosity rover: http://www.npr.org/2011/11/08/141931325/the-plutonium-problem-who-pays-for-space-fuel
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Oct 29, 2013 17:53
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Correct. To handle peak you either just build more nukes or have gas plants on hand. Unlike coal fired plants nuclear fuel costs are very low. Having them generating when they aren't needed isn't such a huge waste, and you can always use the extra to do something like desalinate water. The Enhanced CANDU 6 can go from 100% down to 60% full power fast enough to follow daily load times, which is kind of ridiculous. Other heavy water reactor designs are planned to be able to get similarly deep load-following capabilities: http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionA.htm#load-follow Otherwise, we'll wait for the same things that are limiting renewables right now, specifically better intermittent storage. I still think molten cell and flow-cell batteries will win the day here since they're potentially cheap, very modular, and ridiculously efficient. CommieGIR posted:
They don't really have a choice but to go with coal/gas. They need to replace significant chunks of capacity in very short periods of time, and you simply cannot do that with something that is too expensive. Because if it's too expensive, you don't have the money/resources to do it quickly, so it takes a much longer time.
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Dec 11, 2013 22:51
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Its one of the things that pisses me off, because Japan basically wants to do the same damned thing, switching to wind supplemented by coal and natural gas.
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Trabisnikof posted:Sorry NEI was using decimal cents per kwh instead of dollars per kwh. Except we're dealing with two energy sources that, historically and practically, are known to vary greatly in cost. Nuclear in particular gains dramatic reductions in cost with standardization and with any subsequent plants built after the initial plant bears the brunt of the licensing/design costs. Solar increases drastically in cost with subsequent installed capacity due to its variable output which requires a series of increasingly expensive measures to stabilize as the installed capacity increases. In reality, you compare the most expensive nuclear plant in the world to the most subsidized solar project in the world and the cost is closer to 4 times higher for solar. Compared to standardized Chinese nuclear plants, it's closer to 12 times higher for solar. http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/michael-shellenberger-and-ted-nordhaus/no-solar-way-around-it/
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Dec 13, 2013 20:08
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The cost of renewables isn't that high on paper. The problem is that renewable output isn't controllable and fluctuates. This is a very big deal in so far as load balancing on the grid goes, and results in exponential increase in cost impact with increase in renewable penetration: http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/michael-shellenberger-and-ted-nordhaus/no-solar-way-around-it/quote:analysis by the Clean Air Task Force suggest that integration costs for solar and wind are likely to surge dramatically should renewables rise much above 20 or 30 percent of total electrical generation (see graph below). Yes, you can predict the weather and plan ahead, but planning ahead still means you will need all the extra grid facilities in order to control the load from renewables. Smart, efficient, load-balancing systems aren't cheap by any means; The intermittent storage tech is limited to expensive batteries that require their own set of controls or to big inefficient heat storage systems, and those systems require secondary and even tertiary load-levelling buffers like fast-response supercapacitors or lead-acid batteries. You need to have systems capable of dealing with excess electricity, and systems in place that will ensure the grid doesn't suffer a brownout if there is not enough electricity. All of this stuff becomes increasingly complex as renewables penetrate into the grid, and just like in the case of nuclear regulations, the more complex it gets, the more time and money is required to build it.
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Jan 21, 2014 20:21
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Speaking of weapons, there's a lot of effort in the form of political initiative to destroy weapons-grade material in commercial nuclear power plants. This is another window people can peak through to better understand what the political landscape looks like when it comes to nuclear energy in the foreseeable future. To start, the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) being built in the US by Shaw Areva has effectively been mothballed. The entire purpose of the facility was to fabricate uranium-MOX fuels composed of weapons-usable plutonium as the fuel isotope, in hopes of destroying the plutonium in commercial nuclear power plants. The UK tried to do this as well but it proved to be too expensive for both the fabrication of the fuel and its use in conventional power plants. A slight shift in priorities was enough to freeze plans for trying the same thing in the US: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-US-MOX-plant-left-cold-by-budget-0503147.html The MFFF was part of a bilateral agreement with Russia to help destroy stockpiles of weapons-grade and weapons-usable plutonium. The Russians are apparently several hundred steps ahead of the US since not only do they already have MOX-producing capability, they also finished construction of another commercial 789 MWe sodium-cooled fast-reactor to go along with their other 600 MWe unit on-site. The new reactor is currently being loaded with fuel and should go critical some time in May. This is another one of those "Yeah maybe in the next 30 years" pipeline reactors so I'm kind of excited to see how it's going to work: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Fuel-loading-begins-at-fast-reactor-0302147.html While the on-site BN-600 uses 17-25% enriched uranium as fuel, the Russians plan to use this new BN-800 unit to burn uranium-plutonium MOX fuels instead. More importantly, they hope to gain some much-needed information on how a closed-loop plutonium fuel-cycle would work. The reactor is supposedly capable of plutonium breeding where the only fuel required, after an internal stockpile of reactor-grade plutonium is bred, will be natural uranium. And unlike a CANDU system, it could go even further than that by taking in pure U-238 completely devoid of U-235 from uranium enrichment for fuel, and also burn any long-lived actinides added into it. All this stuff is theoretically possible with the design, but the real question is what the effects on performance will be for these types of operations, and what other things could be learned for future commercial designs. Wikipedia has a bit of a blurb about the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beloyarsk_Nuclear_Power_Station Of course, it wouldn't be a nuclear power plant without numerous incidents and protests and such, even in Russia.
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Mar 5, 2014 20:48
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Illuminti posted:I think this is the thread to post this into. I read a paper on their work recently. The system they're developing is technically a chemical pseudocapacitor, albeit an unusually strong one. The actual chemical reaction involves lithium (Li) and hexafluorophosphate (PF6), with the graphite electrodes playing mostly a current-collecting/intercalating material role for those two species. When you charge the battery, lithium and PF6 ions are stored in neutral form in the anode and cathode graphite, respectively, and when you discharge it those two are released as ions and join in the electrolyte to stabilize each other. LiPF6 is typically used as an electrolyte salt in lithium ion batteries due to the very high potential required to dissociate it, which is exactly what they're taking advantage of here to produce their batteries with high cell voltage. Add to that the cheapness of LiPF6 and graphite, along with the respectably high charge capacity of the system, and you have a pretty good energy system for vehicles. I think they still have problems with energy efficiency at high cycling rates, however, and I imagine the actual production of the graphite electrodes is very involved (they were talking about perfecting the morphology of their electrodes, which is something of an art form in battery chemistry). But unless there's some catastrophically bad defect with the system that they haven't talked about, it looks like a good contender for LiFePO4 and LiCoO2 batteries in cars. Evil_Greven posted:I saw this video on Thorium (it's... not the most visually appealing video) and it has some crazy information in it. I don't like the title of that video. The thorium car is a complete hoax and it's a good idea to stay far away from it. The military isn't all that concerned about efficiency, unless it leads to higher practicality. They only care about size, weight, power, and practicality when it comes to energy systems. Pressurized water reactors, fueled with highly-enriched uranium, fulfill all those requirements and then some, so there's little reason to develop anything else at the moment unless they'll get major improvements out of it. For commercial applications where weight and size are less restricted and power is much less of an issue, PWRs quickly lose what makes them great for Navy use. Nixon actually did kill off thorium research for the most part by axing the molten salt reactor experiment, starting with shutdown in 1969. Before then, the MSRE accumulated 9000 hours at full power on U-235, followed by 4100 hours at full power on U-233 (the fuel isotope derived from thorium-232). Nixon killed it because he wanted to funnel attention towards his pet project liquid metal fast breeder reactor, which was subsequently axed by Carter in the 80s. China is developing thorium molten salt reactors with a small army of researchers and engineers (700+ people), and it's still going to take a couple more decades before they reach commercial status on their design. India is also looking into thorium in solid-fuel reactors. And then you have some other companies here and there in western states that are taking "baby steps" towards thorium in molten salt systems by trying to use it in existing reactors with some modifications, trying to develop molten salt coolant loops, etc.. Political apathy towards nuclear R&D is pretty much the reason that thorium, and uranium-238 for that matter, aren't getting any development in the west these days. Illuminti posted:from what I have reasearched on these guys since I saw this, the scientists and companies involved seem to be legit, and without a history of making overblown claims they can't back up. But of course at the end of the day it is a marketing video and they are probably looking for investment. My main concern is I've seen claims that these things will usurp baseload generators like coal plants, which isn't going to happen without the successful development of really good load-leveling systems. My secondary concern is that the cost of solar panels in roads instead of asphalt is probably ridiculous, both from an installation and maintenance standpoint. Office Thug fucked around with this message at 18:18 on May 26, 2014 |
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May 26, 2014 18:15
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JustNorse posted:I thought development of Thorium was supposed to be rather easy to fast-track as it builds mainly on the same principles as other reactors? I know it was suggested that my university try to get a test facility built some years back, but a new reactor of any kind in Norway isn’t very likely to happen. Thorium is just about as similar to conventinonal LEU as fusion is similar to solar power, unfortunately. The biggest thing about thorium-232 is that it is not a fuel isotope itself, but a precursor to a fuel isotope, U-233. In order to get to U-233, you first need to irradiate thorium-232 with neutrons to produce protactinium-233, and then you need to let that decay into U-233. The protactinium-233 intermediate also needs to be isolated from additional neutron absorptions in order to avoid overbreeding it into uranium-235, the next fuel isotope in the lineup, at the cost of 2 additional neutrons which would kill your neutron economy. That isolation step is very important but difficult to achieve in conventional pressurized water reactors, which are designed to operate on the same fuel assembly for months at a time. You would need to change the fuel assembly practically on a bi-weekly basis in order to mitigate significant Pr-233 losses to overbreeding, which is just not feasible. India's response to this is to use heavy-water designs based on the CANDU, which can switch fuel assemblies in and out while remaining online. The main gripe of doing this is that heavy water is very expensive. China is going for a radically different design, the molten-salt reactor, which will boast limited online reprocessing capability to proactively separate and isolate Pr-233 with minimal effort. And numerous other places are going for something that's kind of in-between heavy water and molten salt; the pebble bed reactor. Keep in mind that in most of these cases the research initiative isn't purely for thorium fuel. It will hover between thorium and conventional U-235, because no one has enough U-233 bred up to kick start a fleet of commercial reactors purely on Th-232 and U-233 yet. U-235 is somewhat similar to U-233, but it comes with U-238 which is a huge pain in the rear end. Preliminary thorium breeder reactors will actually be HEU burners to start off, which will eventually switch to thorium breeding once they've accumulated enough U-233. At that point the reactors need to be able to simultaneously fission U-233 and use the excess neutrons to keep breeding more U-233 from thorium. When it comes to breeder reactors you're basically designing 2 very different reactors in 1 and that's really loving hard.
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Jun 17, 2014 21:35
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silence_kit posted:No no no you're not getting it. One of the mantras of this thread is that we should ignore the fact that nuclear power plants are incredibly complicated feats of engineering and require extreme care in order to be operated safely. Instead we should blame the government for why nuclear power plants take forever to build and why they cost bajillions of dollars. Except the cost of new first-of-a-kind nuclear plants is competitive and in many cases lower than other fossil fuel baseload options, and building additional standard systems reduces the cost and construction time dramatically: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Economic-Aspects/Economics-of-Nuclear-Power/ However, as previously stated, cost overruns will arise with delays incited by politics and politically-sanctioned changes in regulation during construction.
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Jun 17, 2014 23:21
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The Insect Court posted:Mindless group-think combined with lolbertarian narcissism and techno-utopianism. Leads to a lot of "nuclear power is the future, I should know because I just got promoted to assistant manager down at the Geek Squad, plus look at my reddit karma from /r/thoriummakesyourdickbigger"-style Dunning-Kruger. Not to mention the usual conspiracy theory/echo chamber nuttiness about how those who hold different opinions are not just wrong but evil. See, for example, the ranting about those STUPID NAZIS at the UCS who want to KILL YOUR CHILDREN RIGHT NOW because their position is "focus nuclear development on improving existing reactor technologies". I think you're the only person thinking along those lines. Everyone else seems to just want cheaper electricity that isn't loving up the environment.
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Jun 18, 2014 08:01
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Tasmantor posted:Unless it's not nuclear power because then it just has all these issues, oh god to many to even consider it just go nuclear. I don't think I have to explain this in detail but the usage of coal and natural gas (even in combined-cycle gas turbine configuration) is not good for the environment and not sustainable. Those things need to be replaced. Our options are nuclear (U-235 fuel in the short run, Th-232 and U-238 precursor fuels in the long run), solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and so on. Not saying you're pro-fossil fuel or pro-renewable or whatever, I'm just trying to explain what's going on here. Nuclear has numerous issues that have all been highlighted already because it's important to pin down why things are the way they are when debating about them. To reiterate, the biggest issues with nuclear right now are the various uncertainties caused by shifting politics and other things leading to delays and cost overruns, especially in construction (http://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/aecl-cost-overruns-for-nuclear-plant-repairs-not-unusual-n-b-minister-1.1369135 and http://www.startribune.com/business/231932641.html and http://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2014-04-paper-construction-cost-overruns-olkiluoto-reactor-rival-skyscrapers-pyramids-taj-mahal and http://www.businessinsider.com/americas-new-nuclear-plants-are-costing-billions-more-than-expected-2012-7 and etc.). It's no surprise that cost overruns tend to drive future investors away when it can cause increases of 70% in the original estimated cost on a good day (the estimated cost itself being some 2-3 times the overnight cost, before cost overruns): http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionC.htm#darlington. Evidence of politics causing these issues is substantial, with many increases in time and cost in construction, waste management, and decommissioning as a result of political motions in the form of things like excessive regulations already being part of normal cost projections: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html and more recently http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es0725089. Current models are also evolving to incorporate future "poo poo happens" projections in order to help mitigate cost overruns from random political motions. We've seen what three separate accidents (TMI, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima) can do to ongoing plant construction projects and operational nuclear plants in various political regions of the world, and it ranged from reasonable to basically illegal closures (http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/C-German-nuclear-shutdown-unlawful-1401131.html). Based on that information, you get a pretty good idea of why nuclear plants are built in some places and not at all in others, despite those other places already having plants in operation and lots of expertise. Politics are currently treated as such a serious physical issue with nuclear's implementation (http://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:11500528) that a majority of new R&D approaches are specifically aimed at making licensing and construction as quick and simple as possible in order to reduce that dangerous time window in which anything can happen. Small modular reactors, standardization, and political initiatives akin to France' Messmer Plan are just a few examples of this new type of political, rather than technological, nuclear R&D approach we're seeing more of in the west. Development of advanced reactor designs that address safety, waste, and proliferation in a definite manner are taking a backseat in all of this. And that's no good for anyone in this debate. Elotana posted:Is there a side-by-side flowchart of the regulatory approval process for, let's say a 9H CC gas turbine plant versus an ABWR nuclear plant? Sort of like the insane "legal immigration" flowcharts for when idiots start talking about "getting in line." I figure it would be very similar to License renewal: http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/licensing/renewal/introduction/orientation.html Except you aren't trying to build a reactor while it's going on, so there's about 5 times less inspection stages and such. Office Thug fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jun 18, 2014 |
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Jun 18, 2014 23:52
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NUCLEAR
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In nuclear news, Russia is still on track with its BN series Fast Reactors. Their latest one is the BN-800, a ~800 MWe reactor that is currently undergoing testing since it reached criticality back in June. The goal of the reactor is primarily the destruction of weapons-grade plutonium, and it's going to be very good at it:quote:The first BN-800 from OKBM Afrikantov and SPbAEP, is a new more powerful (2100 MWt, 864 MWe gross, 789 MWe net) FBR, which is actually the same overall size and configuration as BN-600. The first is Beloyarsk 4, which started up in mid-2014. It has improved features including fuel flexibility – U+Pu nitride, MOX, or metal, and with breeding ratio up to 1.3. The MOX is quoted as having 20-30% fissile isotopes. However, during the plutonium disposition campaign it will be operated with a breeding ratio of less than one. It has much enhanced safety and improved economy – operating cost is expected to be only 15% more than VVER. It is capable of burning 1.7 tonnes of plutonium per year from dismantled weapons and will test the recycling of minor actinides in the fuel. From http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Fast-Neutron-Reactors/ The reactor is also designed with iso-breeding capability, meaning that after an initial fissile fuel loading phase (which could be reactor-grade plutonium from other such reactors) it can then be fueled with fertile materials that will be slowly converted into fissile fuel inside the reactor. Its transuranic profile is also self-regulating; transuranics are fissioned more rapidly if there's too much of them in the core, until equilibrium is reached. So this reactor could also act as a transuranic waste garbage disposal system. The design is robust enough that all of these things will be possible. However, the real question remains as to how efficient the reactor will be at doing all this stuff. Fast reactors are also a bit more expensive to build and operate compared to pressurized water reactors, before accounting for regulations. It's still pretty exciting to see this thing become reality, and technically this isn't even a Gen IV design.
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Aug 16, 2014 20:11
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