New cracks in Hunterston reactor
bbc.com
bbc.com
Perhaps the reason that these kind of schemes are so problamatic is beacuse they are so massive and complicated. A basic understanding of human nature explains why a large nuclear station is a more risky project from almost any angle (cost, risk of incompetence/accidents, health and safety). I want power stations that are small enough to fail safely in any scenario, not just the ones that an engineer has imagined. I doubt that is possible with something this monolithic.
My stance is: don't build new nuclear infrastructure if it's not sure how to cope with its waste. Better: don't build new nuclear infrastructure at all.
No current efficient power generation is either waste or accident free, although natural gas is probably the best if you have access to it. Coal mining kills many more people than nuclear ever has, and leaves holes all over the place. On a per-megawatt basis, nuclear is the safest generation type.
However, these are factual arguments which normal people can discuss and argue, which is fine.
What I am talking about is non-factual hysteria, of which many groups have produced volumes of, to the point where the average uninformed person will react badly to the mere mention of nuclear power. Popular culture is full of references to nuclear accidents or bombs leaving areas uninhabitable for 10,000 years or more, and most people are irrationally frightened of radiation in tiny quantities.
Nuclear power is an excellent power source for reliable, emissions free base load power. Instead of trying to shut down any research or funding, those that are concerned should be pressing for phasing out of old plants and replacement with newer, safer designs. And coming up with the best waste storage plans.
Yet this non factual hysteria has essentially zero bearing on important power infrastructure.
But every time nuclear technology falls short in some way, its proponents come rushing online to blame the shortcomings on some anti nuclear cabal that has somehow infiltrated both society and media.
Personally I think the worst problems of nuclear power are those proponents. Without the constant straw men of this or that technology is much more bad perhaps there could be some constructive public debate, but we haven't seen that in my lifetime.
Nuclear (fission) power is very expensive 60s technology. Centralized big plants with lots of high pressure steam and exotic compounds. Billions have been spent on research for over 40 years, and the technology that is promising today is pretty much the same same as in the 80s. Breeder technology for example has time and time again been shown to be expensive and prone to failure.
The whole energy sector is full of these complicated problems. Fusion power seems just as far away as 30 years ago. Solar and wind has obvious scaling problems. Only hydro power and geothermal power is reliable and cheap enough but doesn't work everywhere.
A decade back I remember every office in a building I worked in (in the UK), leaving their machines on pretty much 24hrs. The building manager suggested the idea of cutting electric between certain hours, and people protested.
Phone chargers, desktops, monitors were all on. Probably for 16 hours of each day when no one was there. Even when people were there the machines were barely busy.
Computers could have been suspended to ram or turned off. I still see this even in offices with modern PCs that can boot quickly and suspsend to ram with ease (used to be touch and go).
Could spare CPU cycles be farmed out?
I'm glad to see better power saving settings in newer CPUS, and operating systems. But this needs to be better. Some mobiles can hold a charge for a week even with voice calls. Other smartphones are getting charged daily, some with negligable use. Charging batteries takes more power than you get back out.
Lots of small energy efficiencies could really help. Stuff like giving screen savers the boot, having sensible power defaults in OSs etc.
It was fashionable a few years back to turn off your devices 'at the wall' so stop so-called 'vampire use' - which was TVs and other equipment on stand by. It sounded plausible - but in reality is just noise in the overall consumption picture, and is just window dressing to make people feel like they are doing something.
I'll agree that idling PCs and monitors should go into sleep mode like laptops do, but that stuff is not going to make the slightest dent in consumption anyway. Compare the power consumption of an electronic device with something like an iron or a stove or a clothes dryer and you'll see why. And that's before you start looking at heavy industry and large-scale building temperature control.
Even with our paltry electric use we are still getting high bills (UK)! Expense is the biggest incentive for us to get our electric use down.
If server farms have become a bigger polluter than the aviation industry, I see that as a challenge. Use the hardware as efficiently as possible. Caching layers could hugely reduce CPU use. Perhaps we could measure an app's power consumption aswell as bandwidth use?
Check the report from Fraunhofer, i.e. slide 85. http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/downloads-englisch/pdf-files...
Produced in August 2014:
Renewable: 12.8 TWh
Rest: 25.8 TWh
Total: 38.6 TWh
% produced renewable: 33% I left the pumped storage in "Rest" as I have no idea what engery was used to pump.
We'll produce just as much energy, we'll be efficient about it, and we'll have a ton of wildlife and preserved habitat.
Because to actually power the country with renewable resources will require a TON of space.
In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...
Page 168 mentions the fact that coal ash contains uranium, and that people living near coal power stations are exposed to more radiation than those living near nuclear power stations.
Advocates of new nuclear cannot just dismiss concerns of catastrophic accidents as scaremongering, because the worst cases of accidents are extremely bad, even compared to chemical plants and coal related disasters. They also need to address the cost argument.
Nuclear disasters are much more furious in short periods of time, but I'm not sure that compressed in to a single number, that nuclear has been more harmful per-power-produced as fossil fuels. Maybe someone can properly refute or corroborate that statement.
But it feels like an airliner going down. The size of the tragedy is great which puts irrational fear of flying in to people's heads, when it's about the safest mode of travel that exists.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/12/china-coa...
>Emissions from coal plants in China were responsible for a quarter of a million premature deaths in 2011 and are damaging the health of hundreds of thousands of Chinese children, according to a new study.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/12/european-...
>Air pollution from Europe's 300 largest coal power stations causes 22,300 premature deaths a year and costs companies and governments billions of pounds in disease treatment and lost working days, says a major study of the health impacts of burning coal to generate electricity.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/ipdf/10.1021/es3051197
He shows that since the invention of nuclear power, it has saved 1.8 million lives relative to the obvious alternatives. Since its invention, nuclear power has killed about 5000 people. That makes it about 360x safer than deployed alternatives and yet, somehow nuclear is the technology that must justify itself on safety grounds.
After Fukushima happened, I heard or read several times (without being able to quote, probably radio/TV) predictions that big nuclear accidents like Tshernobyl and Fukushima will get more frequent in the future, because (a) the reactors get older and (b) more reactors have been built in the mean time.
I hope that future will prove these predictions wrong, but somehow I feel that hoping is not enough. And incidents like these where security limits are relaxed [0], don't really reassure.
[0]: Quote from the article:
"EDF was granted permission by the regulator in the summer to relax its graphite weight-loss limit at the Dungeness reactor in Kent from 6.2% to 8% after it came close to breaching the original safety margin."
I mean, has a nuclear power plant ever been built on budget? In my state the only nuclear plant was finished years late and 2 billion over the original 1 billion budget.
Now they are trying to build another with a 6 billion budget. How much over will that one go? The prediction is that it will be producing power in 15-20 years. That's so long from now and meanwhile power users will be charged interest on the loans to build this thing.
They are predicting a 30% increase in power demand in the next 20 years, so maybe it is the best option...
If that is true this means that the cost estimation of all the reactors that we have until now are false and until now we do not even know what it will cost us in the future to "clean up the mess".
If you are going to get into the externalities of nuclear power, then you have to do the same for other technologies.
You can thank the Carter administration for this blunder.
I hope that I am just hysterical and there is some solution planned since long time, and maybe there is totally no danger at all and we can continue for long time enjoying sea products from the channel.
The people who try to sell nuclear energy as cheap often forget to factor in that cost.
> The tubular graphite bricks, each about a metre high, moderate nuclear reactions and are essential to safe operation. However, they cannot be replaced.
Can anyone comment on why they can't be replaced?
> EDF was granted permission by the regulator in the summer to relax its graphite weight-loss limit at the Dungeness reactor in Kent from 6.2% to 8% after it came close to breaching the original safety margin.
> Hinkley-B and Hunterston-B are also getting close to their higher 15% limits, too.
More information: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/MultimediaFiles/Live/FullReport...
This does demonstrate an interesting aspect of large nuclear stations. Technical issues can remove large amounts of capacity from a grid. And as stations age the long term wear and tear make outages less predictable.
What's puzzling is that the manufacturer in the Netherlands supplied pressure vessels of the same model to other countries (including 10 to the U.S.), and that the different testing procedures in those countries haven't turned up any problems.