Going electric

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Going electric

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The UK nuclear reprocessing plant is at the top end of the lake district at Sellafield. It has a visitor centre, and is well worth a visit if you're near.
(The pencil museum at Keswick is also worth a visit, despite it sounding a silly idea.)
It is a long time ago I visited Seascale, probably 20 years, but at that time, our entire nuclear waste was about the size a pair of semi-detached houses. A huge amount, but small when compared with coal. (And coal slag heaps have killed, spectacularly)
At that time, we were encasing nuclear waste in glass and setting it onto the sea bed, but could be recovered in the future, they said.
Interestingly, they had three maps.
First was a map of all the locations in the UK deemed suitable for a nuclear energy plant.
Next was a map from the Leukaemia society, showing all the locations where leukaemia was higher than average.
They were almost the same map.
The third map was the sites actually used for nuclear energy plants, highlighting that there were leukaemia hotspots where no nuclear plant existed.
These were apparently to defend the plants, to show they are not the causes of leukaemia. (Although there was no mention that the plant may increase the risk, but that is another argument)
A logical conclusion is that whatever geographic conditions make it right for a plant, also make it susceptible to leukaemia. Something they claimed to be working on.

When nuclear fuel is 'spent' it is still highly radioactive, enough to do us harm, but not enough to efficiently produce energy. Hopefully sometime in the future we'll be able to harness that too, until the radioactivity levels are safe. Or we'll all glow in the dark, and no longer need lights at night.
 
Will say I actually went with university to the beach at seascale/sellafield to do some field work. Part of the safety brief was "do not pick up anything man-made you find, it's probably radio active." How true it was I don't know but dogs that get walked on that beach have mysteriously high cancer rates.

However given the area I live in still bears the scars of the coal industry whether it's more or less bad than that is another matter.
 
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There is some evidence that tolerance to background radiation is found in indigenous populations, many areas have natural radiation levels which would be at warning levels outside a man made plant. It is a sad fact of history that all commercial nuclear plants are based on technology and feedstock designed specifically to create bomb grade fissile material, or specifically not to, depending on local or geopolitical politics. So the safest and easiest to make designs have been ignored, especially one known as molten salt, as it can be configured in use for various feedstocks. It is however able to completely react its preferred feedstock to elements and isotopes which present little or no long term hazard, unlike any existing large scale design. They are also truly walk away safe, unlike Fukushima foe example, which needs a controlled shut down. It can make bomb grade materials though, so no country is much allowed to have one. Its a funny world.
 
Re: Going electricf

I don't know who "we" are, but in the UK we don't store partially reacted fuel (it's not waste), we reprocess it and get more energy out. As far as I'm aware only the USA has the, in my view misguided, policy of storing partially reacted fuel.

In the uk we produce hundreds of tons of nuclear waste every year, most stuff that comes out of a nuclear power station is nuclear waste and has to be dealt with as such, nuclear waste is not just fuel rods, though while on that subject, Sellafield the nuclear reprocessing plant which you say doesn’t store fuel rods and reprocesses it back into usable fuel, still has left over fuel rods and other products from nuclear reactors dating back to the 1950s and 60s which won’t be cleared up till at least 2025, while the rest of the site is heavily contaminated with decades of discarded byproducts from nuclear power stations and open air cooling ponds filled with radioactive sludge.

So no it’s not the USA that just stores fuel we store plenty of nasty radioactive waste including spent fuel. We also have a very large stock pile of unused plutonium knocking about that we don’t really have a use for anymore.

Sellafield will take at least another 100 years to “clean up” by which they mean make safe as the cores of reactors will continue to be harmful and highly radioactive for many centuries to come. So will need to be encased permanently in concrete to keep them safe from polluting the air and environment around them. Currently the Uk is spending about £2Bn a year to “clean up” Sellafield, which as stated is predicted to carry on till about 2120 the cost by 2120 will be hundreds of billions of pounds if not trillions (with inflation over a hundred years).

Mean while all the coal fired power stations in the UK are being converted over to biomass and away from coal (which also solves the problem with concentration of radioactive elements from burning coal)

Yes the coal industry destroyed the land scape in places and yes coal pumps out a lot of pollution, but it does make every thing around it uninhabitable for centuries, if something goes wrong.

Numbers of people killed by nuclear accidents run into the hundreds of thousands, we still feel the effects of Chernobyl today and can still record fall out from it in the UK. Meanwhile they've barely scratched the surface of the damage caused by the Fukushima accident. We’ve had our share of nuclear accidents in the UK as has America.

So the general public are rightly concerned about the nuclear industry. The new Hinkley Point reactor, if it every gets built would be the single most expensive construction project in the world by the time its finished.. Not to mention the very long term costs of cleaning it up at the end of its life as well.
 
Re: Going electricf

Most Sellafield waste is legacy and mainly from research and weapons production biased reactors, not power generation. even so the volume of waste is tiny compared to fly ash from coal powered stations and slag heaps from coal production (remember Aberfan?). As for "Mean while all the coal fired power stations in the UK are being converted over to biomass..." there are currently plans to convert a few (5or 6?) coal powered plants to biomass. Biomass power is better than coal and landfill but it still produces CO2 and ash. There are also concerns about other emissions from biomass plants.
The high cost of new Nuclear plants is not intrinsic, it's mostly additional cost due to over-regulation. Problem with radiation is it's "scary" and undetectable by human senses but detectable in the smallest quantities (each "click" from a Geiger counter is from one atom) with relatively simple and cheap equipment. If the same level of risk reduction, design assurance and redundancy was applied to aviation we would not be flying on holiday if at all.
There was a radiation "scare" at Dalgety Bay that was initially linked to Sellafield but turns out to be from burning waste from old aircraft (Ra226 luminised instruments) on an airbase on the cliff top.


Robert G8RPI.
 
A luminous clock dial, even some old dyes used in wall paper, would, if taken onto a nuclear site, have to leave as part of the nuclear waste stream.

Indeed,
Coal fly ash from a power station would be treated as radioactive waste if it came from a nuclear power station. Typical specific activity figures are around the Low Level Waste threshold so depending on the particular type / batch it would be considered either Very Low Level Waste or Low Level Waste.
Depending on spin you can say a coal plant releases more radiation than a nuclear in terms of exposure to population per MW/hr produced see: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
This does not consider accidents of course. Coal also releases more CO2, toxic metals and other chemicals.


Robert G8RPI
 
Re: Going electricf

Most Sellafield waste is legacy and mainly from research and weapons production biased reactors, not power generation.
The whole purpose of nuclear energy was to produce plutonium for use in nuclear bombs.

now quite frankly I couldn’t care less about getting into some stupid argument about the radioactive materials produced by coal burning because the Windscale incident alone released far more radioactive material into the uk air and countryside than hundreds of years of burning coal, and I’m not even going to talk about minuscule levels of radioactive material in a luminous clock

The main point here is back in your original post you basically stated than nuclear energy is super clean and not harmful to anyone, and we reprocess all our fuel to use again, except the “reprocessed” fuel just gets stored, here in the uk. Having highly enriched uranium and plutonium knocking about isn’t exactly easy, cheap or very safe to store. Also in the next two years we will have shut down all our reprocessing facilities so beyond 2020, we will be storing all our waste nuclear fuel here in the UK with no plan with what to do with it completely contradicting your previous argument.

The reprocessing plants and the Sellafield site is highly contaminated, with radiation and will take centuries before it is safe for people to live near.

Mean while any coal plant can be levelled and built on straight away, your comparison is both pointless and stupid.

Now on the point of building new nuclear plants, the cost is very high and yes there is a lot of red tape in place, with good reason, the proposed Hinkley Point C plant is an EPR reactor of which there are non in current use, they are so complex that some experts have said the design might not even work. The French plant they started building in 2007 based on the same design, is still not finished or running, having over run by 6 years and and more than £10bn over budget. The only plant of this design that has come close to going into use has been switched on (in China) and immediately burst its 45meter long boiler which will require complete replacement. The French plant has suffered faults with the metal in the brand new reactor, which means it might not ever be safe to be used without complete replacement, which is causing huge headaches and nearly bankrupt the company that’s made it as well as EDF who are building the plant.
As a result building at Hinkley Point won’t start unless the French plant is finished, running and safe by 2020, which at the moment doesn’t look good.

So no, nuclear energy is neither clean, cheap nor efficient in producing electricity. The only people who want to keep it going are idiot politicians who think that we need to have nuclear power to be a major player in the world.
 
Re: Going electricf

Hinkley C will be 3200MWe and cost >£20 billion. Large offshore wind turbines have established capacity factors of about 38% http://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors
so would need 8400MW, over 880 of the current biggest turbines (Vestas V164) at a cost around £2m/MW installed, £16.8 billion, less than the cost of Hinkley C, but less than half the lifespan. Do you want 880 220m high 167m diameter wind turbines in your back yard?

Robert G8RPI.
 
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AndyR, You are correct.... and so is Robert. This is probably not the right place for the debate, indeed. Some tremendous mistakes have been made in the past which engineers have learnt from. Cumbersome, over regulated and expensive nuclear plants persist because this debate has been poorly managed. The comparison of radiation levels in everyday objects is valid. What about fracking for gas? I have yet to find any long term evidence of it being a good idea either way..... ?
 
Re: Going electricf

Do you want 880 220m high 167m diameter wind turbines in your back yard?

1. Who said anything about any wind turbines (you’re going off on yet another tangent)

2. Doesn’t respond to anything I’ve written above.

3. You claim nuclear power is great and cheap and clean.

4. You couldn’t be more wrong if you tried.

:tosser:
 
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Re: Going electricf

1. Who said anything about any wind turbines (you’re going off on yet another tangent)

2. Doesn’t respond to anything I’ve written above.

3. You claim nuclear power is great and cheap and clean.

4. You couldn’t be more wrong if you tried.

I'll answer 2/ first, Who said I was talking to you?
1/See answer to 2/
3/ Nowhere in this thread have I claimed nuclear power is "great and cheap and clean"
4/ Apart from the grammar / logic debate, I don't know what exactly you are refering to. I'm pretty sure my figures ae correct.

Regarding some of your other comments,
You cannot relate legacy waste to future production.
The reactor in the winscale accident was a pure weapons production unit, air cooled and completely open, even so no-one died as a direct result of this accident. You can;t compare it to modern power reactors Coal plants of the same era emitted tons of toxic and harmful chemicals. The 1952 London smog is blamed on general coal burning and killed 4000 directly.
Coal fired power plants need extensive decontamination and remediation before re-use. Most are re-used for industrial not housing.

I think we should agree to dis-agree and stop this devition of the thread.

Robert G8RPI.
 
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