Norwescon panel: Nuclear Renaissance.
Apr. 16th, 2009 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plutherusThis is the first panel I found my notes for.
It may have been the first one I went to, I'm not sure anymore. One of the panelists was a nuclear engineer in the Navy. The other one was involved somehow in civilian nuclear energy I think. Or something like that. Didn't actually get that part down in my notes.
Anyway, miscellaneous notes from the panel, mixed in with a few other random thoughts:
Obama's new secretary of energy, Dr. Chu, seems to be well-liked by the scientist types - an actual nobel laureate in physics and, according to his Wikipedia article, a professor of molecular biology as well as physics and the former directory of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (Compare to his two predecessors, a career politician and right wing nutjob followed by a venture capitalist. But I digress.)
Chu's only previous experience in politics, by the way, has been in advocating for alternative energy research.
Anyway, he recently reversed his position on so-called "clean coal", saying we should be investing in it. Part of the reason for doing so was because, even if we don't manage to abandon coal altogether soon, China and India won't.
Which is interesting because the panel spent a good amount of time talking about China's and India's attempts to abandon coal.
China, apparently, is doing this by attempting to bring 100+ new reactors online over the next 10-20 years. Hopefully, these will be similar to the nice, safe, French models, rather than the occasionally-exploding Russian versions.
The French it turns out, have a great safety record, due in part to the intense training required to work in a nuclear power plant there, but also because of standardization of designs. They have 50-something nuclear power plants, built around 3 different designs. Contrast that to the U.S., which has 100-something power plants and 60-some-odd designs for them.
India's power plants, instead of being water-cooled, use liquid thorium salt. Or maybe that's the fuel. Either way, it flows. Then it heats up. And, it reacts with water to make hydroflouric acid. So, they've got these pipelines full of boiling hot, radioactive, acid. According to the main panelist, dealing with it requires that the engineers be "very, very good" at working with it.
It is likely that the training requirements ensure they are. Hopefully. Of course, in a country with over a billion people you can likely find a few who are, or can become, extremely good at such a thing.
At least it's not high-pressure, apparently. Just barely above 14.7psi, so a leak doesn't mean high-pressure spraying boiling radioactive acid, cuz that would probably suck.
Back on the home front, he pointed to new technology being promoted by a company called Hyperion. This one's pretty cool: basically, it's a self-contained nuclear power plant about the size of a large hot tub. Meant to be buried for five years, then dug up for refeuling. What makes it cool is the technology used makes it impossible to melt down. The hotter it gets, the less it works. This is the opposite of, say, Three Mile Island. If it starts to heat up, long before it can go critical, it will shut down altogether. As it cools, it begins to work again. I don't know if these things are actually used anywhere yet, but it's worth watching.
What about spent fuel/nuclear waste. That's the one thing that always gets brought up when nuclear power is discussed. The guy next to me brought it up before I had a chance. Well, it turns out, that's not nearly as much of a problem as some would think. It turns out that you can use most of the waste still to generate more power, in smaller, safer, cheaper plants. France is doing this today, as is Japan. We aren't, but it's not really much of a problem. The waste itself is pretty dangerous if not stored correctly, but it turns out that the best thing to do with it if you plan on re-using it is to store it somewhere out of the way for for a decade or two. Which is exactly what we've been doing. So, if we do start investing more heavily in nuclear power, we've got storage facilities to put the waste into already, and lots of "waste" that's been sitting there for a while, ready to be used.
I was unclear as to whether the re-processing the fuel was the same as a breeder reactor. Maybe I'll look that up later, but we're not currently doing either one.
I also have a note on that page that says "L-1 satellite". I have no idea what I wrote that for. Are we planning on putting a nuclear power plant at the L-1 point? Because if they were very dangerous, that'd be a great place for one. Or maybe that had to do with collecting solar power in space and beaming it to Earth. Which is another technology that has a lot of promise, but that people also have a lot of fear of - mostly through misunderstanding how it would actually work.
It may have been the first one I went to, I'm not sure anymore. One of the panelists was a nuclear engineer in the Navy. The other one was involved somehow in civilian nuclear energy I think. Or something like that. Didn't actually get that part down in my notes.
Anyway, miscellaneous notes from the panel, mixed in with a few other random thoughts:
Obama's new secretary of energy, Dr. Chu, seems to be well-liked by the scientist types - an actual nobel laureate in physics and, according to his Wikipedia article, a professor of molecular biology as well as physics and the former directory of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (Compare to his two predecessors, a career politician and right wing nutjob followed by a venture capitalist. But I digress.)
Chu's only previous experience in politics, by the way, has been in advocating for alternative energy research.
Anyway, he recently reversed his position on so-called "clean coal", saying we should be investing in it. Part of the reason for doing so was because, even if we don't manage to abandon coal altogether soon, China and India won't.
Which is interesting because the panel spent a good amount of time talking about China's and India's attempts to abandon coal.
China, apparently, is doing this by attempting to bring 100+ new reactors online over the next 10-20 years. Hopefully, these will be similar to the nice, safe, French models, rather than the occasionally-exploding Russian versions.
The French it turns out, have a great safety record, due in part to the intense training required to work in a nuclear power plant there, but also because of standardization of designs. They have 50-something nuclear power plants, built around 3 different designs. Contrast that to the U.S., which has 100-something power plants and 60-some-odd designs for them.
India's power plants, instead of being water-cooled, use liquid thorium salt. Or maybe that's the fuel. Either way, it flows. Then it heats up. And, it reacts with water to make hydroflouric acid. So, they've got these pipelines full of boiling hot, radioactive, acid. According to the main panelist, dealing with it requires that the engineers be "very, very good" at working with it.
It is likely that the training requirements ensure they are. Hopefully. Of course, in a country with over a billion people you can likely find a few who are, or can become, extremely good at such a thing.
At least it's not high-pressure, apparently. Just barely above 14.7psi, so a leak doesn't mean high-pressure spraying boiling radioactive acid, cuz that would probably suck.
Back on the home front, he pointed to new technology being promoted by a company called Hyperion. This one's pretty cool: basically, it's a self-contained nuclear power plant about the size of a large hot tub. Meant to be buried for five years, then dug up for refeuling. What makes it cool is the technology used makes it impossible to melt down. The hotter it gets, the less it works. This is the opposite of, say, Three Mile Island. If it starts to heat up, long before it can go critical, it will shut down altogether. As it cools, it begins to work again. I don't know if these things are actually used anywhere yet, but it's worth watching.
What about spent fuel/nuclear waste. That's the one thing that always gets brought up when nuclear power is discussed. The guy next to me brought it up before I had a chance. Well, it turns out, that's not nearly as much of a problem as some would think. It turns out that you can use most of the waste still to generate more power, in smaller, safer, cheaper plants. France is doing this today, as is Japan. We aren't, but it's not really much of a problem. The waste itself is pretty dangerous if not stored correctly, but it turns out that the best thing to do with it if you plan on re-using it is to store it somewhere out of the way for for a decade or two. Which is exactly what we've been doing. So, if we do start investing more heavily in nuclear power, we've got storage facilities to put the waste into already, and lots of "waste" that's been sitting there for a while, ready to be used.
I was unclear as to whether the re-processing the fuel was the same as a breeder reactor. Maybe I'll look that up later, but we're not currently doing either one.
I also have a note on that page that says "L-1 satellite". I have no idea what I wrote that for. Are we planning on putting a nuclear power plant at the L-1 point? Because if they were very dangerous, that'd be a great place for one. Or maybe that had to do with collecting solar power in space and beaming it to Earth. Which is another technology that has a lot of promise, but that people also have a lot of fear of - mostly through misunderstanding how it would actually work.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-04-17 04:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-17 06:11 am (UTC)The power density of the beam wouldn't really be enough to cause any actual damage, even if all the fail-safes failed and it somehow got stuck both off-target and turned on.
Ben Bova's been pushing for the idea for years, along with others. And, interestingly, there's a company already building them! PG&E just signed a deal this week to start buying power from them in 2016: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30198977/