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Kite & Key: The Green Atom
Excellent video, @troysenik. I saw it earlier in my YouTube feed. One even more powerful point about the incident at Chernobyl, was that it was government representatives that demanded that the plant operator perform the dangerous test, that included the defeating of safety systems, which led to the disaster. This was not something that resulted from normal or expected accident conditions, it was something forced without heeding the warnings and it all went terribly wrong. Had the government representative simply listened to the operators and abided by procedures used to control the plant, the test would have never been conducted and most folks likely would have never known about the nuclear power plants at Chernobyl, even with the dangerous design feature as the other remaining units generally continued to operate and similar plants are in operation to today (recollection from recent reading).
The Green Atom!
Sounds like a superhero!
And, atomic power is.
The part about people dying installing solar panels was something that I had never heard before. Nuclear power just seems like an industry that non-French Westerners do not do anymore. Besides, as I understand it, the industry either has be rather unsafe or highly subsidized which could cause electric bills and/or certain taxes to be 1.5 to 5 times higher. I don’t remember the details.
I don’t mind fossil fuels as I don’t believe in global temperature utopia as a world religion, and the United States unlike some countries generally has a lot of fossil fuels. Other than access to some clean air and clean water that all humans need, although pollution has to go somewhere, the only environmental-type issue I care about is protecting certain endangered species and probably rain forests.
And what do you do with the nuclear waste? I watched a youtube video recently on all the nuclear waste that was dumped at the Marshall Islands with 6 US servicemen dying of radiation and hundreds being diagnosed with radiation-linked cancer with the dome that they constructed now failing as no concrete was placed at the bottom of the dome.
Apparently it takes plutonium nuclear waste 24,100 years to lose half its radiation. Hmm, I would bet that China will probably be the next country with such a Wuhan-style disaster.
Is it supposed to be green in the photo/still? I see purple.
Well Troy it took you guys long enough to get to my number 1 pet peeve about the utter ridiculous theater the greenies trade in when it comes to energy production and the follies of the solar & wind cartel.
A little Nukie has hurt far few people than any other form of energy production. So unless we are willing to return to the late 1800’s eras of lifestyle, it is time we get our heads out of the sand and start
inventingproducing the next generation of nuclear power systems.It takes 24,000 years or so to lose half the plutonium. It loses radiation much more quickly than that.
Let’s say you’ve just taken one of those glowing green rods from the Simpsons out of a nuclear core. What exactly is there? It’s partly plutonium that hasn’t reacted, and partly plutonium that has. That is, it’s split into two smaller atoms, generally a larger one and a smaller one. (Before things got too politically correct to use the term the graph of the expected weight from a nuclear reaction was known as the Dolly Parton curve.) Most of the radiation you get out of high level nuclear waste comes from those waste products.
The thing about those waste products is that they generally decay pretty quickly. When they decay they lose some radioactivity; at the very least that alpha particle it just ejected is never coming back. Eventually it’ll decay down to stability and you won’t have to worry about that atom anymore. So how long do you have to wait? The more radioactive a thing is the more particles it kicks out in any given unit of time. And the more particles it kicks out the quicker it stops being radioactive. The radiation emitted from nuclear waste dies down on an exponential curve.
Now, that plutonium doesn’t stop being radioactive (not on a human timescale at least), but it’s pretty much the longest live species in that mix of radioactive waste. If we left it buried under a mountain for three, four hundred years then cracked it open what we’d have is a plutonium mine.
Nice touch with the humor, Troy. Something is working. I’ve gotten several people to follow the Facebook page. I would love to think we could build more nuclear plants. Heck, our own Sharron Harris was supposed to have 2 more reactors by now. @stad may have to correct me on that. I’m surprised we still have the one.
How long has our navy been setting to sea with nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines? What is the safety record for the reactors aboard these craft? Excellent, I believe. Why has tis record of success never been brought into the argument?
Harris was originally designed as a four-unit plant, but only one reactor was built. CP&L was anticipating much more growth, but the costs got to them. This is why Small Modular Reactors may be the best possible future for commercial nuclear power, although breeder reactors would generate fuel for the next several hundred years.
One of the biggest environmental downsides of solar and wind is the disposal of worn out equipment. You can’t just haul wind turbine blades and solar panels to the dump:
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/wind/big-winds-dirty-little-secret-rare-earth-minerals/
https://www.americanexperiment.org/solar-panels-produce-tons-of-toxic-waste-literally/
Of course, there are web sites that paint wind and solar as all rainbows and unicorns . . .
Thanks, @stad. I thought I remember something like that. Talking about wind and solar, wasn’t one of the complaints about nuclear aesthetics? Well, with all the solar farms going up around here, I have to say our “cloud making machine” out at Sharron Harris looks a lot better than acres upon acres of those solar panels.
Because as soon as we do, Murphy’s Law will kick in and there will be a disaster.
One of the reasons Navy nuclear plants are safe is that they are much simpler than commercial plants. In a commercial plant, wasted heat is lost revenue, so they are designed to be as efficient as possible. Commercial plants are also designed for base load operations – 100% power for long periods of time. Navy plants are designed to be more load-following, as ships change speed (and hence, power) much more often. Furthermore, the simpler design of Navy plants means they are less likely to break down at sea.
In summary, Navy plants are simpler, more robust, and trade efficiency for flexibility. Picture Jon Gabriel and Stad in uniform, operating a submarine reactor . . .
On the last couple of drives out west, we passed wind farm after wind farm. IMHO, they were a blight on the beautiful vista of the open range . . .
Simple and robust sound good to me. What is the magnitude of the efficiency trade-off?
Suddenly breakfast has lost it’s appeal.
I don’t have an exact figure, and it would vary depending on the operating temperatures and pressures of the reactors and steam plants (apples and oranges). I did find this for a commercial plant:
https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-engineering/thermodynamics/laws-of-thermodynamics/thermal-efficiency/thermal-efficiency-of-nuclear-power-plants/
For a commercial light water reactor, you’re looking at about 33%, and this is an ideal. I couldn’t find anything on Navy plants, but it’s probably close to the same, but less. Again, the Navy plant has a different mission – it has to be able to answer a flank bell in a heartbeat, be easy to maintain, and easy to restart in case of a scram.
The Navy reactors aren’t operated by union members, that could be part of it.
Why use a mirror image of the nighttime earth near the end? Italy’s boot is kicking Sicily the wrong way!
Informative and fun. Vive le nucléaire!
Do we care, as long as Sicily gets kicked?
Congrats on the Powerlineblog link.
That could be fixed – air traffic controllers.
It sounds as though all of this could be resolved by changing the design parameters.
My point is that the basic physics is the same for both military and commercial applications. Some of the specifics would have to change, along with scale . . .
I think about this every time I’m in Palm Springs, which looks like it has been invaded by aliens:
Yet again, something that is better in GTA. LIke the lack of homeless at the beach
I haven’t been through/past Palm Springs in about 30 years. Is that how it looks now? Yeesh.
I wouldn’t be surprised if much of what is actually produced, however little that might be, isn’t even used in PRC. It might be sold to other companies so they can claim to have “renewable” capacity.
I’ve often imagined that 200 years from now the world will be fully powered by some form of nuclear. They will look back on this time with amusement.
You know what the left/greenies can say about that? That is, if they were smart enough…
“Solar and wind power ARE nuclear, because they come from the Sun which is a huge fusion reactor!”