Is Rocketing Nuclear Waste into the Sun a Viable Solution?

[vanesch]

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.

Right. Now, a nuke of about a GW electric has a price ticket of ~1 G Euro, so order of 1 Euro/W. Nukes don't need big pumping stations (but they do need small ones...). Now, even with 1 Euro = $1.5, let's add (I'm generous) $0.5 of pumping station to a nuke, the nuke comes down to $2.0 per W.

If we take it that you need about 6 times a pumping station with $0.8/W, this will cost you $4.8 in pumping station, to compensate for 1W of variable power. So *just the compensation* already costs more than twice the cost of a nuke. And we didn't even pay for the wind/solar.

 

[baywax]

Right. Now, a nuke of about a GW electric has a price ticket of ~1 G Euro, so order of 1 Euro/W. Nukes don't need big pumping stations (but they do need small ones...). Now, even with 1 Euro = $1.5, let's add (I'm generous) $0.5 of pumping station to a nuke, the nuke comes down to $2.0 per W.

If we take it that you need about 6 times a pumping station with $0.8/W, this will cost you $4.8 in pumping station, to compensate for 1W of variable power. So *just the compensation* already costs more than twice the cost of a nuke. And we didn't even pay for the wind/solar.

Check out this CDN company, Canadian Hydro. They're using environmentally sustainable pump stations as well as buying up and building Wind Farms like crazy. The former CEO's first project was to buy a small pump house used to irrigate land and cattle in Alberta and turned it into a power station for 100,000 homes.

http://www.canhydro.com/

 

[mgb_phys]

vanesch is right - even 'free' power costs more than nuclear, unless you have some local customer that can use power whenever it's available.

It still might make business sense though if you can get your customers to pay more for 'green' power than they would pay for nuclear.

It's also worth having a couple of pumped storage schemes to both handle unexpected peaks (superbowl ad breaks) and to provide grid load -balancing and restarting.

 

[vanesch]

vanesch is right - even 'free' power costs more than nuclear, unless you have some local customer that can use power whenever it's available.

Well, this is not totally unthinkable of course. For instance, hydrogen production by electrolysis might (I'm no expert) probably be such kind of flexible load, which could be powered by an erratic source.

The point is that we DO have a big load which is not flexible, and which requires adaptation. And it is this part which cannot economically be expected to live on a majority of renewables.

Again, I'm not against renewables. But I think that in the current state of technology, they do not play in the same ballpark as does nuclear, which, in my eyes is the only *realistic* alternative to fossil fuel on a majority basis. As I said, if you plan to do 10% nuclear, you can just as well plan to do 10% wind/solar. If wind/solar replaces nuclear, well, then you've won 10% on fossile, if wind/solar ADDS to nuclear, well, you'll have 20% gain in fossile, and you will be cheaper on average.

You've pretty much installed what you can concerning wind/solar, but you can go up to 80% nuclear if you want to. So the REAL replacement for fossile on LARGE scale, is nuclear.

Now, the (distant) future might be different, but you cannot plan a POLICY on something that hasn't yet been demonstrated.

It still might make business sense though if you can get your customers to pay more for 'green' power than they would pay for nuclear.

Although this might make microeconomic sense, it is stupid on macro-economic scale (you put several times the resources in just for sake of ideology), and I'm also not convinced that it makes objective ecological sense. I'm really not convinced that compact nukes are environmentally less friendly than HUGE installations, of which the impact has not been considered seriously.

It's also worth having a couple of pumped storage schemes to both handle unexpected peaks (superbowl ad breaks) and to provide grid load -balancing and restarting.

Of course, that's why you cannot even go to 100% nuclear either. Nukes are (contrary to what people think maybe) flexible, but not on a minute-scale. That is, they do not need to be static baseload (as was their use in the 70ies-80ies), they can follow the consumption, but their "slew rate" is limited, for security reasons (not technologically: Chernobyl went from 200 MW to 30GW in 7 seconds ... ok, this is bad taste )

So you need a small "fast responder" capacity to take over the very strong rises and drops in consumption, during the few minutes it takes for the nukes to adapt.

The only "fast" responders on a minute scale are hydro and gas turbines.

 

[vanesch]

Check out this CDN company, Canadian Hydro. They're using environmentally sustainable pump stations as well as buying up and building Wind Farms like crazy. The former CEO's first project was to buy a small pump house used to irrigate land and cattle in Alberta and turned it into a power station for 100,000 homes.

http://www.canhydro.com/

Yes, Canada is the dream country for hydro of course. Like some Scandinavian countries. Such experiments are interesting, they form part of the research and demonstration that they could be majority contributions. But I read on that page:

Right now, approximately 98 per cent of Alberta's energy comes from traditional methods-coal, natural gas and hydro power plants. The remaining two per cent represents alternative sources-wind, run of river hydro and biomass. At the present time, renewable energy represents a very small percentage of the mix.

That's still far from the 16-20% where the Danes arrived.

The day that a region/country arrives at, say, 50-60% alternatives with its own buffering capacity, independent from an external grid, in a relatively populated area, they will be on the same "demonstration" level as nuclear was end mid-80ies. From that point on, one can consider that a realistic demonstration has been made, and from that moment on, one can consider it in terms of large-scale policies.

 

[mheslep]

I believe the recent posts right here on PF are a good example of how the nuclear safety issue is failing to be adequately addressed. The recent post on '"Aftermath: Population Zero" view of unattended nuke plants' above addresses the National Geographic shock drama which includes the Nuke plant storage building exploding in 5 days after being left unattended. The teaser clips posted include the waste cooling building exploding dramatically. It surprises me to see, as Homer Simpson posted there, that NG is now a tool of GreenPeace type agenda groups. Now, if that can not be shot down as absolute crap with round condemnation of the NG film by every nuclear expert, then there's still something wrong with the nuclear power process regards safety.

It wouldn't be difficult to design an "all-safe" storage pool, with a closed circuit with passive cooling (thanks to natural convection).

That said, I think a week is really short. The thermal power generated by fresh spend fuel is of the order of 2KW per ton of spend fuel, which isn't that much. It is comparable to body heat (if you take a person to produce 200W per 100 kg)!

EDIT: uh, that last number is wrong, it is after a cooling period of 4 years

So is it physically impossible for a cooling storage pool w/ freshly spent fuel to explode or not? Also, Homer's comment about well the 'Russians might have one' that could blow but not here is relevant to this future energy sources discussion, since if nuclear power is to be promoted to replace fossil fuel it can not be for just the EU/US.

 

[baywax]

The day that a region/country arrives at, say, 50-60% alternatives with its own buffering capacity, independent from an external grid, in a relatively populated area, they will be on the same "demonstration" level as nuclear was end mid-80ies. From that point on, one can consider that a realistic demonstration has been made, and from that moment on, one can consider it in terms of large-scale policies.

Excellent observation.

 

[mgb_phys]

So is it physically impossible for a cooling storage pool w/ freshly spent fuel to explode or not?

A cooling ponf cannot explode/meltdown in a nuclear sense.
The fuel if stacked in a dense enough pile and left uncooled could heat to the point where the cans would rupture and the metal burn. That would lead to a cloud of radioactive particles which wouldn't be good. It is unlikely if the cans are just left suspended in air.

'Russians might have one'

The chernobyl reactor was a particularly bad design - like most early designs it was built in a hurry to produce weapons material. Candu reactors are incredibly safe - certainly safer than the Bhopal type chemical plants near a lot of US/Eu cities!
Pebble bed reactors are so safe that it's probably better letting 3rd world countries build them than gas fired stations!

that NG is now a tool of GreenPeace type agenda groups.

I used to support greenpeace ( I like whales and I don't think atmospheric nuclear tests are a terribly good idea) but their recent anti-science tack has put me off.
"Acid rain is bad, nuclear power is bad -> therefore nuclear power causes acid rain"

 

[mheslep]

...The chernobyl reactor was a particularly bad design - like most early designs it was built in a hurry to produce weapons material. Candu reactors are incredibly safe - certainly safer than the Bhopal type chemical plants near a lot of US/Eu cities!
Pebble bed reactors are so safe that it's probably better letting 3rd world countries build them than gas fired stations!

Of course, I was referring to this post commenting on https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=1643365&postcount=7", not a reactor.

 

[mheslep]

I used to support greenpeace ( I like whales and I don't think atmospheric nuclear tests are a terribly good idea) but their recent anti-science tack has put me off.
"Acid rain is bad, nuclear power is bad -> therefore nuclear power causes acid rain"

I understand one of their more reasonable founders left the organization because of its more recent radical tendencies including their desire to ban Chlorine. Just ban the entire element, everywhere.

 

[vanesch]

So is it physically impossible for a cooling storage pool w/ freshly spent fuel to explode or not?

It certainly won't explode. I don't know what it WILL do, but I'm sure that this has been studied, as the document that was linked in the thread.
The possibilities are these:
-slow evaporation of the water (5 days seems short to me, but ok).
- some equilibrium temperature of the rods will appear ; if this temperature is above the self combustion temperature of zircalloy, then a fire might indeed result, but not a big one: after all, once the metal is burned up, there's nothing else to burn.
- if the equilibrium temperature of the fuel is above 2850 degrees, then it will melt. That will be about it.

- I think you won't reach a critical situation, as there is no water (moderator) anymore, and the fuel is already depleted. In any case, this can be studied.

One can design a pool that can hold these elements indefinitely, but I think that current pools are not designed that way, simply because it was not one of the criteria. Normally, one specifies a certain "time of autonomy" a system has to be able to cope with. I don't know what is this specification.

The way to solve this is simply by increasing the volume of water per element stored, and to provide passive cooling (convection, cooling wings,...). So it has a price. People won't over-design things. Given a certain power density, one will be able, using usual engineering techniques, to estimate the temperature evolution and equilibrium temperature of a system (the hotter the system gets, the more heat is given to the environment, so at a certain temperature, there will be as many heat lost, as there is generated, and equilibrium is reached). It is hence sufficient to design the system such that the equilibrium temperature is acceptable (that no self-destruction occurs).

I don't know what is the current design of pools - I don't know what are the requirements. The only thing I want to say is that this is not a problem of principle. It is a matter of specifications. If people consider it ridiculous to expect 5 days of autonomy, then this is not specified. If this is specified, then it can be handled. Even current pools can continue to exist, one simply has to limit the amount of allowed elements inside.

 

[mheslep]

It certainly won't explode. I don't know what it WILL do, but I'm sure that this has been studied, as the document that was linked in the thread.
The possibilities are these:
-slow evaporation of the water (5 days seems short to me, but ok).
- some equilibrium temperature of the rods will appear ; if this temperature is above the self combustion temperature of zircalloy, then a fire might indeed result, but not a big one: after all, once the metal is burned up, there's nothing else to burn.
- if the equilibrium temperature of the fuel is above 2850 degrees, then it will melt. That will be about it.

Then in a drained storage building a fire is possible, perhaps likely? If the storage buildings are fire proof then no problem. I wonder if they are?

 

[mgb_phys]

It isn't so much a question of the ponds being fireproof as being airtight to contain any airborne particles. A fire is possible if the plant was abandoned - not a very likely situation to be worth building an extra containment building for!

 

[mheslep]

It isn't so much a question of the ponds being fireproof as being airtight to contain any airborne particles. A fire is possible if the plant was abandoned - not a very likely situation to be worth building an extra containment building for!

Well neglect and mismanagement often approximates abandonment.

Edit: BTW I don't mean to attribute either malady to the US nuclear industry, which appears to be run amazingly well. I know a guy over at the NRC and its impressive how on top of every thing happening at every plant in the country. What concerns me is that if nuclear power is blessed as the major replacement for fossil, and unless technology makes the full nuclear cycle stupid proof then a) I don't trust that the current track record will hold when scaled up 10 and 100X, and b) I don't see anyway at all to insure that kind of record around the world, esp. the third world.

 

[mgb_phys]

ban Chlorine. Just ban the entire element, everywhere.

Do they plan to remove just the Cl-, leaving the sea as concentrated NaOh, or remove all the salt leaving the sea as fresh water. Either way the whales are going to be seriously unhappy!

 

[vanesch]

Well neglect and mismanagement often approximates abandonment.

Edit: BTW I don't mean to attribute either malady to the US nuclear industry, which appears to be run amazingly well. I know a guy over at the NRC and its impressive how on top of every thing happening at every plant in the country. What concerns me is that if nuclear power is blessed as the major replacement for fossil, and unless technology makes the full nuclear cycle stupid proof then a) I don't trust that the current track record will hold when scaled up 10 and 100X, and b) I don't see anyway at all to insure that kind of record around the world, esp. the third world.

You are right that nuclear is a very clean and useful technology only under the strict condition of a safety culture - which, I can assure you, is really the case in the West since several decades. Without such safety culture, nuclear becomes nasty ; Chernobyl wasn't so much an illustration of failing nuclear technology, as it was a grandiose failure of safety culture (as was the case in the entire Soviet Union) in its most elementary forms.

Now, the question is: in how much does one have to put "lack of safety culture" into the design ? I think that if people are really stupid, no design will ever be totally idiot-proof. If you've decided to mess up, and you put everything into it, you will end up reaching your goal.

So abandoning SUDDENLY for a long period a nuclear power plant will, with current power plants, probably give a problem. However, abandoning a power plant after a few years of inactivity will not be a problem (the pool problem is only a problem for FRESH used fuel). Should one build safeguards against this ? It is technologically possible - not even difficult, but it will have a price. What price do we want to pay so that, after our civilization is wiped out, we want to respect certain safety criteria for hypothetical survivors ? And if we don't, what is the price they will have to pay ?

Chernobyl has shown us the maximum accident: the upper limit of everything thinkable in nuclear mishappening. What spread out the contamination was the huge fire, driven by a working reactor, in a big mass of graphite. I really don't expect the same kind of spread, even from a pool that puts a fire to the building. So you will have a severe local contamination in the worst case. It is not difficult to do something about that by good engineering, and the whole question is: are we willing to do so or not ?

In other words, this argument is not an argument against nuclear power in itself, because there are easy solutions. The question is simply: do we take that argument seriously, and are we going to do something, or don't we care ? A bit like: should we impose safety belts in cars or not ? This is not an argument against using cars.

 

[mheslep]

.. 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.

Well here we go:
A solar panel on every building
http://www.edn.com/article/CA6524103.html?text=nanosolar

Nanosolar’s ... recently announced the first printed thin-film solar cell in a commercial panel product, the Nanosolar Utility Panel; the first thin-film solar cell with a low-cost back-contact capability; the lowest-cost solar panel, which would make Nanosolar the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels that generate at as little as $0.99/W; and the highest-current thin-film solar panel, delivering 5 times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market.

 

[baywax]

You are right that nuclear is a very clean and useful technology only under the strict condition of a safety culture - which, I can assure you, is really the case in the West since several decades. Without such safety culture, nuclear becomes nasty ; Chernobyl wasn't so much an illustration of failing nuclear technology, as it was a grandiose failure of safety culture (as was the case in the entire Soviet Union) in its most elementary forms.

Now, the question is: in how much does one have to put "lack of safety culture" into the design ? I think that if people are really stupid, no design will ever be totally idiot-proof. If you've decided to mess up, and you put everything into it, you will end up reaching your goal.

So abandoning SUDDENLY for a long period a nuclear power plant will, with current power plants, probably give a problem. However, abandoning a power plant after a few years of inactivity will not be a problem (the pool problem is only a problem for FRESH used fuel). Should one build safeguards against this ? It is technologically possible - not even difficult, but it will have a price. What price do we want to pay so that, after our civilization is wiped out, we want to respect certain safety criteria for hypothetical survivors ? And if we don't, what is the price they will have to pay ?

Chernobyl has shown us the maximum accident: the upper limit of everything thinkable in nuclear mishappening. What spread out the contamination was the huge fire, driven by a working reactor, in a big mass of graphite. I really don't expect the same kind of spread, even from a pool that puts a fire to the building. So you will have a severe local contamination in the worst case. It is not difficult to do something about that by good engineering, and the whole question is: are we willing to do so or not ?

In other words, this argument is not an argument against nuclear power in itself, because there are easy solutions. The question is simply: do we take that argument seriously, and are we going to do something, or don't we care ? A bit like: should we impose safety belts in cars or not ? This is not an argument against using cars.

This is a bit like what I brought up about nuclear waste. We don't know if there will be cultural activity exposed to that waste due to geological changes or technological changes (tunnelling) or water level changes and erosion.

We don't know if there will be a lull in civilization then a new start with no knowledge of nuclear facilities, but one thing's for sure, if there is such a lull, there won't be any nuclear engineering education during the break.

We also don't know if another driver is going to hit another car or if a car might or might not lose its breaks or have its fuel pump explode... so we put in car seats and air-bags etc..

Why not treat the Nuclear industry similarly? I know why not... its because the oil industry has gotten away with murder for decades perpetrating oil spills, PCBs in land fill and so on. Why should other industries act any differently in the pursuit of profit?

It may also be that no one trusts nuclear power because they've seen how fossil fuel power was lacking in a "safety culture" and expect the same from the nuclear industry.

 

[vanesch]

This is a bit like what I brought up about nuclear waste. We don't know if there will be cultural activity exposed to that waste due to geological changes or technological changes (tunnelling) or water level changes and erosion.

No, this is studied: normally, natural processes (erosion, water flow, geological change etc...) shouldn't bring any danger. The only thing that could bring in a problem if a future civilization were going to dig and build a DEEP MINE exactly there were the waste is.

Well, then that's THEIR responsibility.

We don't know if there will be a lull in civilization then a new start with no knowledge of nuclear facilities, but one thing's for sure, if there is such a lull, there won't be any nuclear engineering education during the break.

But probably no deep digging either, and the little bit of radiation that might affect people if ever they do won't matter, given the bad medical care one can imagine too. They'll probably die sooner of the plague than of any cancer induced after 30 years...

We also don't know if another driver is going to hit another car or if a car might or might not lose its breaks or have its fuel pump explode... so we put in car seats and air-bags etc..

True, and from a certain point on, we say that the rest is the driver's responsibility. It doesn't stop us from driving cars.

Why not treat the Nuclear industry similarly? I know why not... its because the oil industry has gotten away with murder for decades perpetrating oil spills, PCBs in land fill and so on. Why should other industries act any differently in the pursuit of profit?

It all depends on the control structures one puts in place.

It may also be that no one trusts nuclear power because they've seen how fossil fuel power was lacking in a "safety culture" and expect the same from the nuclear industry.

Again, it depends on the control structures put in place.

 

[vanesch]

Well here we go:
A solar panel on every building
http://www.edn.com/article/CA6524103.html?text=nanosolar

This is indeed an interesting development: it might bring photovoltaic in the ballpark of wind energy. I wonder whether it is $1.00 per installed watt, or per average produced watt.

However, this still doesn't solve the need for absorption of the fluctuations of course.

 

[russ_watters]

The way it is worded implies that that is just the cost of the panels themselves. It doesn't include either the installation or the electronics.

 

[russ_watters]

We don't know if there will be a lull in civilization then a new start with no knowledge of nuclear facilities, but one thing's for sure, if there is such a lull, there won't be any nuclear engineering education during the break.

"A lull in civilization" would, on its own, be a disaster far beyond what it would do to the nuclear industry, so it isn't really worth planning for.

 

[mheslep]

The way it is worded implies that that is just the cost of the panels themselves. It doesn't include either the installation or the electronics.

Nor should it be as those costs will be a varying percentage of the installation size.

 

[baywax]

Is there a Tesla coil that extracts free power from the friction caused by the rotation of the Earth as opposed with the atmosphere? Didn't Tesla come up with a wireless transmission of power? If so, could that method be used to transfer power from space based solar panels?

We've thrown lots of sparks, but is that what Tesla had in mind? In this sequel to the classic Tesla Coil, we venture into the utilitarian Tesla. In clear english and 40 illustratins, we ponder the questions: Can Tesla coils do real work? Can they build an alternative florescent lighting? Will Tesla technology be the next big step in home power?

This is a reprint of Nikola Tesla's June, 1919 article in the Electrical Experimenter. The article outlines the differences between his wireless technology and that of academic convention. "The True Wireless" is one of the most important of Tesla's articles in that he explains in great detail HIS system of wireless. Also, this document, in his own words, smashes currently held beliefs about so-called "Tesla Technology". Written some years after his Wardencliff Project, Tesla explains the inefficiency and limitations of the Hertzian method of electromagnetic propagation (through the air) with great clarity -- and that his system of wireless which was vastly more effective, utilised the ground itself for propagation. Tesla states, "Properly constructed, my system [of wireless] is safe against static and other interference, and the amount of energy which may be transmitted is billions of times greater than with the Hertzian which has none of these virtues..." He explains in particular, with several analogs in diagrammatic representation, his single-wire-without-return system -- the heart of Tesla's radio and wireless power systems.

from: [edit: crackpot link deleted]

 

[vanesch]

Is there a Tesla coil that extracts free power from the friction caused by the rotation of the Earth as opposed with the atmosphere?

This really sounds like a cracking pot

 

[baywax]

This really sounds like a cracking pot

Ok... a cracking pot unfit for nuclear waste!

 

[russ_watters]

Yes, that's the Tesla free energy crackpot conspiracy theory you have there. There is nothing to it.

 

[russ_watters]

Nor should it be as those costs will be a varying percentage of the installation size.

I'm not sure that's true, but regardless, the point is that that number is useless for telling how expensive the plant will be and therefore doesn't help us evaluate the practicality of doing it.

 

[baywax]

Doomed Chernobyl reactor to be buried in giant steel coffin

Still trying to put this one to rest...!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080427/ap_on_re_eu/chernobyl_s_new_tomb

 

[canadmonster]

what about the late paul m brown researcg ib nuclear waste converted to energy?