Is Rocketing Nuclear Waste into the Sun a Viable Solution?

[vanesch]

I'm trying to remember a whole town like Chernobyl being irradiated and wiped out by a hydro dam. I suppose the technology has come quite a ways since then. But, its not the technology at fault here, its the people using it and their lack of attention to details like those found in environmental issues.

You really really cannot compare Chernobyl (and the entire Soviet industry policies) with western countries.
But even so, place Chernobyl in context:
- a few hundred direct dead
- an estimated 10 000 victims of pollution over the next 50 years (where do you have reports of the estimated number of victims of pollution over the next 50 years of other catastrophes, or even technologies, like coal power plants ?)
- an area of about 1000 km^2 contaminated and hence transformed into natural park for about 200 years.

That said, if accidents of the Soviet era are the point of comparison, then you should look at how many coal mine dead they had per year, and find out if coal mining is acceptable, how much pollution they had from any industry they had, and whether that is acceptable, how safe cars are etc...

So, really, Soviet technology and accidents are not a measure for the expected risk of a given technology - at most it can serve as a worst-case simulation!

 

[mheslep]

Simple: solar panels are expensive.

Exactly.

 

[mheslep]

You really really cannot compare Chernobyl (and the entire Soviet industry policies) with western countries.
But even so, place Chernobyl in context:
- a few hundred direct dead
- an estimated 10 000 victims of pollution over the next 50 years (where do you have reports of the estimated number of victims of pollution over the next 50 years of other catastrophes, or even technologies, like coal power plants ?)
- an area of about 1000 km^2 contaminated and hence transformed into natural park for about 200 years.

Yes there is a paper out, can't find it at the moment, about a couple of researchers/biologists who went over in 200x to study the effects of Chernobyl in the immediate area. They state that they were expecting to find a radiological disaster and were instead chagrined to discover that the effects were basically nil for the plant and animal life 20 yrs out. Edit: Here's a similar piece in Nature News: http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050808/full/news050808-4.html

 

[russ_watters]

Numbers like that actually aren't so daunting - I mean, that's not http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/10/iraq.costs.ap/index.html" , right?

Well, once you factor in all the other costs, it probably puts the numbers roughly equal to each other, probably $5 a watt, conservatively. That also doesn't include the fact that you get probably about a 30% utilization factor from it. So compared with a source that runs 24 hours a day, that's $15 a watt.

Costs will certainly come down, but here's a recently built plant that cost $7/W: http://www.metaefficient.com/news/north-americas-largest-solar-electric-plant-in-switched-on.html

Note the simple payback on the project is a hundred years if you don't include maintenance and assume the solar panels will last that long.

You could compare that with nuclear, currently estimated at an installed cost of $1.85 per watt. So you're 3-5 times the cost of nuclear, and that's including current regulations that make nuclear power more difficult than it needs to be.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/23/AR2005072300752.html

Does that really compare unfavorably to petroleum prospecting, extraction, and refining infrastructure? (Or plus the transport infrastructure, if you count the fact that we already have a national and international transport grid for electricity generated from other sources.)

The comparison is not easy because the operating cost for nuclear and solar are both low, but for fossil fuels, the construction costs are a good order of magnitude lower. And that's a big hurdle. Here's a recently built gas turbine plant that cost $0.5 / watt to construct: http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2001/07/16/story2.html

I don't know what they pay for natural gas, but if it's $8 per million btu (that number may be wholesale - it could be more like $15) and the plant has a 40% thermodynamic efficiency, that's $0.6 per watt per year.

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/ngw/ngupdate.asp

russ, do you think that solar could workably serve as a primary source of power as mheslep is suggesting? That seems like it would be pretty nice, actually, if it truly has that potential. But even as an omnipresent supplementary source of power, which I'm suspecting it might be relegated to practically, wouldn't be too bad.

⚛​

No, I really don't see how it could. It isn't just the money for the plant, land is valuable and people are not going to want to give it up. Environmentalists included.

 

[russ_watters]

Don't forget that there is a big factor between installed (maximum) power, and effective, average power. For wind energy in favorable places, this is a factor of about 6, and I think a similar factor for solar.

I used a factor of 3 in my calculation, but that is admittedly conservative. It may be doable in the desert, though.

 

[mheslep]

...So even if one decided to go "all solar" and "all wind", you'd have to have a need for (fossile?) backup capacity that is of the same order as the full installation, with high flexibility ; in fact, only gas turbines can cope...

Well if the average solar/wind power is sufficient, there are some good storage techniques available that can handle the lulls, pump-storage in particular.

 

[mheslep]

Costs will certainly come down, but here's a recently built plant that cost $7/kW: http://www.metaefficient.com/news/north-americas-largest-solar-electric-plant-in-switched-on.html...

Article says that Nellis AFB plant is 14MW on 140acres (0.57 sq km), or only 25W/sq M, ouch. Thats 4X worse than my worse case guess above (100W/sq M), so now we're up from 2% to 8% of NJ under glass, and that's sunny Nevada. Perhaps this lower than expected result is due to dead space over that 140acres.

Edit: With regards to the cost and payback time: Currently solar never pays back, though solar PV is not that far out of reach. Its currently 2-3X more expensive IF the land is free (already owned, as at Nellis). (The article is confusing - the AF didn't pay the $100M and thus the 2.2c/kw-hr is meaningless). Solar PV costs ~http://www.solarmarket.com/products.html" now and fossil is 9 to 10 (in say Nevada). Cost of solar is almost all amortization of investment, cost of fossil is currently 1/2 to 2/3 investment and the remainder fuel costs. So to make solar PV viable either one of two things needs to happen: PV doubles in efficiency per cost and that's looking plausible, or fossil fuel increases in cost by 2 to 3x also looking plausible. I imagine there's already tax advantages in place to help solar along, and there's likely environmental penalties increasing on fossil plants to raise its cost.

 

[baywax]

Ah. And you also instilled a moratorium on coal mines ?

I don't know anything about coal. In fact I haven't the foggiest about uranium. Perhaps that's one of the problems. Education.

My guess is that there is a big scare about nuclear power because the only thing (most) people know about "nuclear energy" is that it results in a very big mushroom cloud. Then people's skin falls off or there's nothing left of them but a shadow on the ruins of a building.

If there can be nationally funded education and town meetings about nuclear energy that are not just propaganda but show all sides of the issue, including the methods of waste disposal, effluent hot water, mining techniques that work and that don't work with the environment... then people might get a little cozier about the idea of reading by the light of the nuclear power plant.

Right now I believe there is a rather large mushroom cloud looming over the industry in most people's uninformed minds.

 

[vanesch]

Well if the average solar/wind power is sufficient, there are some good storage techniques available that can handle the lulls, pump-storage in particular.

You mean, reversible hydro ?
Point is, you need a big capacity to compensate for a windless week in winter when it is cloudy !

 

[mheslep]

You mean, reversible hydro ?
Point is, you need a big capacity to compensate for a windless week in winter when it is cloudy !

Yes exactly. This is a 2100MW facility:
http://www.dom.com/about/stations/hydro/bath.jsp
I walked the flow tunnels at that plant before they turned it on. Pumps the water up at night when there's excess power, and generates during the day when there's high demand.

Edit: I note that recently just by retooling the turbines to current technology the facility is jumping to 2700MW.

 

[vanesch]

Yes exactly. This is a 2100MW facility:
http://www.dom.com/about/stations/hydro/bath.jsp
I walked the flow tunnels at that plant before they turned it on. Pumps the water up at night when there's excess power, and generates during the day when there's high demand.

Yes, this is a known technique to compensate peak demands. But the problem we're facing here is that we're not sure about the BASE LOAD. So if mid-January, at night, there is no wind, and the next day it is windless and cloudy, then you have to compensate for hours, or even days, the base load with this, if, say, 80% of the provided power is solar/wind. This means that your hydro capacity has to be capable of generating 100% of the total load for an extended time, which is not available in most countries.

 

[mheslep]

Well pump storage can help, if not totally solve the problem. Also pump-storage doesn't require any existing rivers to dam, it can be man made anywhere, though practically it requires some natural elevation.

 

[RonL]

Thanks Azael. The migration factor was something I had no idea about. What springs to mind every time are these 3 mile Island and Chernobyl scenarios. Its particularly enlightening to know that a lot of nuclear material will not contaminate water.

This thread kinda jumped the track I know very little about nuclear, but I'm all for it.
If there might be a future value of the current waste, and if water is not contaminated, as implied above, then engineers should be able to design a storage system in the ocean, suspended in a quite zone midway between bottom and the surface, far from populations, and monitored and protected by NATO forces and cost to be shared by all users of nuclear power.
When safe methods of refinement and use have been developed, then very little expense of recovery would be involved.
With current detection systems, and a large area of water to cross, (evil-doers) would not be able to make use of it, in some improper manner.
Starting now, a very focused effort to teach everyone about nuclear use, and a long term plan of storage and recovery, a plan to reach far into the future.

Just a few simple thoughts

Ron

 

[baywax]

This thread kinda jumped the track I know very little about nuclear, but I'm all for it.
If there might be a future value of the current waste, and if water is not contaminated, as implied above, then engineers should be able to design a storage system in the ocean, suspended in a quite zone midway between bottom and the surface, far from populations, and monitored and protected by NATO forces and cost to be shared by all users of nuclear power.
When safe methods of refinement and use have been developed, then very little expense of recovery would be involved.
With current detection systems, and a large area of water to cross, (evil-doers) would not be able to make use of it, in some improper manner.
Starting now, a very focused effort to teach everyone about nuclear use, and a long term plan of storage and recovery, a plan to reach far into the future.

Just a few simple thoughts

Ron

Yes, like I said, there's the image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki firmly attached to all things nuclear. We need to educate and be educated about the advances since the distant days of Oppenheimer, the cuban missle crisis and the cold war.

Turning back for a second to solar power. What's the chance of establishing an array of panels in space and somehow wirelessly transfering the power from them to earth? (without frying birds, planes and stuff)

 

[russ_watters]

Yes exactly. This is a 2100MW facility:

vanesch isn't looking for megawatts, he is looking for megawatt-hours. Typically, those installations are built to smooth-out daily peaks, so that 2100 MW is only meant to last, perhaps 6 hours (representing about half a day's electricity usage). So if you have six days of the wrong kind of weather, you'll need 12x the capacity to ensure you have enough power.

And even worse than the day-to-day fluctuations are the seasonal ones. Seasonally, you may get variations of as much as 75% on average for a month or two at a time.

 

[vanesch]

vanesch isn't looking for megawatts, he is looking for megawatt-hours. Typically, those installations are built to smooth-out daily peaks, so that 2100 MW is only meant to last, perhaps 6 hours (representing about half a day's electricity usage). So if you have six days of the wrong kind of weather, you'll need 12x the capacity to ensure you have enough power.

And even worse than the day-to-day fluctuations are the seasonal ones. Seasonally, you may get variations of as much as 75% on average for a month or two at a time.

Yes, this is indeed the fundamental technological problem I see with wind/solar as baseload, and this is the reason why in the end, people will start constructing coal power plants, as in Germany.

Now, this may change one day. The day that we find a way to have a cheap storage system for HUGE amounts of electrical energy, I think the fundamental limit on wind/solar might be lifted. But as long as this isn't the case, they are condemned to remain a minority contribution. And the problem is, as long as they are a minority contribution, they don't show their REAL price, because they are using the flexibility of the complementary majority system (whether it is nuclear, coal, gas, hydro or whatever).

That said, I don't have anything against solar/wind in principle. If economically, they are viable, they are ecologically still much better than coal. So even a minority contribution can be a good thing, if it replaces coal. But the problem is that they are (by "ecologists") usually represented as a way to replace nuclear, and that's the error, because they cannot replace a base load. Well, of course if there's only about 10% nuclear in a grid, you can replace it by solar/wind. You will probably already have enough flexibility in the grid to compensate the variations. If not, you'll have to add some extra fossile capacity. But you didn't IMPROVE the ecological situation of your electrical production! You're still mainly fossile, and you've used your "joker" of your 10-20% wind/solar without storage.

If you are, like the Germans, at 36% nuclear, and you *phase out* nuclear to "replace it" with wind/solar, you will get stuck around 10-20 % with your wind/solar, and now you will have to replace ~ 20% nuclear by coal (that's what they ended up doing). You aggravated the ecological situation. If they would have ADDED wind/solar to their nuclear park, then they might have *improved* their ecological situation marginally, by shutting down, or reducing the use, some of their coal power plants.

And if you are, like the French, ~80% nuclear, you would be a hell of a dumbass to try to replace it by wind/solar!

But, all this can change if:
- the price of wind/solar goes down
- the efficiency goes up (size of the installations)
- one invents a cheap mass storage technique for huge amounts of electricity

But this has first to be demonstrated on industrial scale before one can build a policy on it! We're still far from such a demonstration.

 

[Andre]

You really really cannot compare Chernobyl (and the entire Soviet industry policies) with western countries.
But even so, place Chernobyl in context:
- a few hundred direct dead

No 56

- an estimated 10 000 victims of pollution over the next 50 years

Actually 4000.

But it nicely illustrates how we tend to hype disasters sky high.

 

[mheslep]

- one invents a cheap mass storage technique for huge amounts of electricity

Well I am not quite ready yet to declare pump storage is not just that, yet. Looks like it was built for $0.80/ Watt, and though I can't pull the exact run down time, I think this facility has the capacity to run 24 hours from a full lake (its > than 6hrs). Now, take the time frames suggested above, that wind/solar is out for 6 days in, say, Sweden. 2005 generation in Sweden was 18GW w/ some hydro in there, leaving a wild guess of 14GW of existing fossil and nuclear to be replaced w/ Solar/Wind.

So Sweden needs (14GW/(2.7GW/plant))*6 = ~30 pump storage plants to handle the slack while the Solar/Wind is down for a week, at a cost of 30*2.7GW * $0.80/W = $65B for all of Sweden. Point taken above though, that this storage cost should be considered part of the over cost of solar/wind.

Edit: wrong cost

 

[mheslep]

No 56



Actually 4000.

But it nicely illustrates how we tend to hype disasters sky high.

Especially so if compared to the actuaries due to the emissions from an equivalent Soviet style coal/oil plant there.

 

[mgb_phys]

Dinorwig was the first large scale pumped storage in the UK.
It cost £500M (1975-1985) for 1800MW, although the cost was probably high because it is built in a national park and has to leave no sign that it there.
It's about 80% efficent and amazingly it can go from hot-standby to full 1800MW in 16seconds or shutdown to full power in 75seconds!

 

[baywax]

Dinorwig was the first large scale pumped storage in the UK.
It cost £500M (1975-1985) for 1800MW, although the cost was probably high because it is built in a national park and has to leave no sign that it there.
It's about 80% efficent and amazingly it can go from hot-standby to full 1800MW in 16seconds or shutdown to full power in 75seconds!

That's sounding like a good way to reduce nuclear waste! Are there any environmental/health downsides to pump station generators?

 

[mgb_phys]

Well it took about 1M tonnes of concrete to build and they had to remove 12M tons of rock so there is an enviromental impact from that - but that's only the same as a large quarry.
The main problem is the same as that of hydroelectric power - there are a limited number of sites where you can build them and they tend to be a large distance from the generators / users of the power - people tend not to build cities or factories in isolated mountain valleys.
Having said that, anywhere that experienced the last ice age probably has a stock of ideal geography for these schemes.

Their main benefit would come from making wave/solar/wind practical since you could have a nuclear base load and use pumped storage to smooth out extra demand without using gas-fired and store intermittent alternative energy.

 

[mheslep]

Dinorwig was the first large scale pumped storage in the UK.
It cost £500M (1975-1985) for 1800MW, although the cost was probably high because it is built in a national park and has to leave no sign that it there.
It's about 80% efficent and amazingly it can go from hot-standby to full 1800MW in 16seconds or shutdown to full power in 75seconds!

The water hammer at shutdown must rattle things a bit. At Bath County the water towers for releasing the hammer energy are big enough for a helo landing in a Bond movie.

 

[mgb_phys]

To quote from their info page -
"The shock absorber is a 65-metre vertical surge shaft, 30 metres in diameter, with a surge pond at the top (at the same level as the upper reservoir) with a volume of 45 000 cubic metres. The total mass of water in the shaft and the pond is nearly 100 000 tonnes"

A shame really - it would be fun to have put a small Welsh mountain into orbit!

 

[mheslep]

Well it took about 1M tonnes of concrete to build and they had to remove 12M tons of rock so there is an enviromental impact from that - but that's only the same as a large quarry.
The main problem is the same as that of hydroelectric power - there are a limited number of sites where you can build them and they tend to be a large distance from the generators / users of the power -

Well not quite. Its feasible to build one wherever one could build , as you allude, a large quarry. They don't require a large high flow river, a small source will do, or anything that will keep the reservoirs filled.

 

[mheslep]

To quote from their info page -
"The shock absorber is a 65-metre vertical surge shaft, 30 metres in diameter, with a surge pond at the top (at the same level as the upper reservoir) with a volume of 45 000 cubic metres. The total mass of water in the shaft and the pond is nearly 100 000 tonnes"

A shame really - it would be fun to have put a small Welsh mountain into orbit!

Yes, a perfect hide out for a Bond villain.

"Do you expect me to talk?"
"No, I expect you to die in the water hammer Mr. Bond!"

 

[baywax]

Well it took about 1M tonnes of concrete to build and they had to remove 12M tons of rock so there is an enviromental impact from that - but that's only the same as a large quarry.
The main problem is the same as that of hydroelectric power - there are a limited number of sites where you can build them and they tend to be a large distance from the generators / users of the power - people tend not to build cities or factories in isolated mountain valleys.
Having said that, anywhere that experienced the last ice age probably has a stock of ideal geography for these schemes.

Their main benefit would come from making wave/solar/wind practical since you could have a nuclear base load and use pumped storage to smooth out extra demand without using gas-fired and store intermittent alternative energy.

Thank you mgb_phys. The way I see it the ice ages and bolide incidences caused a lot more environmental damage than anything we can come up with and probably will again in the future. Of course, these incidents can be seen as cleansing as well. For instance, if there were a hit to an area where nuclear waste was stored, how much worse would the consequences be?

 

[mgb_phys]

I meant that although the scheme claims to save 15,000t/yr of CO2 emmission from base load but it generates a lot of CO2 to make that much concrete.
There is also the question of local / global polution - how much is an unspoilt region / endangered species worth against a reduction in global climate change. The same argument as for most hydro-electric schemes.
There are lots of places you can put nuclear waste where any natural event isn't going to have much effect. Most mountains survive ice ages and 3 miles down a goldmine isn't going to leak into ground water anytime soon.

Yes, a perfect hide out for a Bond villain.

So far off-topic as to be accelerating over the horizon but...
Is it lack of real estate that limits super villians? Is there a section in the NYT property pages that lists -
"Deserted island with extinct volcano, suitable for monorail with local supply of sharks"

 

[baywax]

So far off-topic as to be accelerating over the horizon but...
Is it lack of real estate that limits super villians? Is there a section in the NYT property pages that lists -
"Deserted island with extinct volcano, suitable for monorail with local supply of sharks"

Hee hee.

 

[vanesch]

No 56

http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/who_chernobyl_report_2006.pdf

You are right, I confused the number of people who had radiation sickness, 237, and the number who died of it 28 in 1986, and still 19 later. (28 + 19 = 47, I guess there must have been 9 elsewhere...)

Actually 4000.

But it nicely illustrates how we tend to hype disasters sky high.

The 4000 come from the "restricted region", Belarus, Ukraine and a few other places, limited to the 600 000 most exposed people.

But if you enlarge this to the 6 000 000 people that were slightly exposed, this adds a 5000 more foreseeable premature deaths in the next 50 years (see p 106 of the quoted report). This is based on the hypothesis of linear dose-effect relationship.