Good reasons against nuclear power?

[His Divine Shadow]

Are there good reasons to be against nuclear? I don't think so, but here is a list of reasons one person gave, they sound very interesting but I would like the input of more nuclear sawy people here.

• It is extremely inefficient.
  Seriously, nuclear reactors as we use them today don't have a good burn-up rate. Because reactors these days run on low-enriched or even natural uranium, and because they use slow 'thermal' neutrons in their chain reactions, they can't use it all up; they lose too much reactivity and grind to a halt, or become unstable well before that. In order to avoid this, fuel elements still containing large amounts of long-lived transuranic isotopes have to be removed from the reactor, and stored somewhere safe or reprocessed. These waste fuel elements have to be stored for tens of thousands of years because of the transuranic waste in them. The heat is produced at quite a low temperature- usually between 350 degrees C and 600 degrees C- which is limited by the temperature of the moderator. Above this temperature, the neutrons are moving too quickly for efficient fission. The reactor dips below criticality even at full power.
• All thermal reactors produce plutonium, which represents a proliferation risk.
  Uranium is difficult to turn into a bomb. Really, even if you have access to unlimited amounts of uranium ore, only a little (about 0.72%, though less in Gabon ore) of the uranium in it is fissile. To be weapons grade, you need about 95% of it to be fissile. The only difference between the fissile and the non-fissile atoms is that one of them weighs 235 grammes per mole and the other weighs 238. There is no chemical difference at all. That means you have to separate them by mechanical means- either a huge cyclotron or a massive gas diffusion membrane system. Either is immensely energy intensive and basically sucks to build- they are huge facilities (ever seen the size of Oak Ridge? it's huge and has four nuclear reactors of its own just to power it! It uses, oh, let's say about 1.21 gigawatts and be done with it.) and you'd have no hope of hiding one whatsoever. It's impossible.
  
  However, plutonium is really easy to separate from uranium, and whenever you 'burn' natural or low-enriched uranium in a reactor, some of the U-238 gets turned into plutonium. (Plutonium is one of the transuranic waste elements I mentioned earlier.) If you can get a few kilos of plutonium, you can make a low-yield nuclear weapon really easily. It takes a team of a dozen physics and engineering students about a year to go from basic first principles and published facts, to a working design, and they don't even need access to experimental materials. This is one of the reasons why reprocessing- which would be an effective solution to the problem of waste volumes from thermal reactors- is undesirable. It produces a stockpile of plutonium whose only use at present is to build nuclear bombs. It would make a perfectly acceptable fuel for thermal reactors, except that the proliferation risk is extremely grave should that fuel fall into the wrong hands.
• We really have no idea what to do with high level waste containing long-lived transuranics.
  
  Ten thousand years is longer than any civilization on earth has ever lasted. The Egyptian pyramids are only a few thousand years old, were covered in dire warnings nver to open them, which we not only saw but carefully decoded- and we opened them anyway. How do we stop people opening our high level waste repository fifteen thousand years hence and destroying their biosphere? Some of these wastes are so unpleasant that a single kilo waste capsule can kill literally millions of people.
• Reactor designs are crap.
  Steel turns brittle when exposed to large neutron fluences. Concrete swells and turns weird too. Both turn radioactive and present a disposal problem. Water breaks down into hydrogen and oxygen. Boron in steel dissolves in water to form boric and boracic acid, which corrodes and damages reactor pressure vessels- causing several near catastrophic failures. Thermal reactors can't operate at high temperatures, so they are less thermally efficient than coal plants. Boiling water reactors aren't very stable. No current reactor can throttle quickly enough to be used as anything but the basest of base load stations. Thermal reactors have excess reactivity when they're cold. Reactor cores are large and often fitted with insufficient monitoring equipment to avoid hotspots. British AGR reactors develop cracks in cooling system penetrations into the pressure vessel. AGRs may also accumulate dislocations in their graphite cores. Most reactors can't be refuelled on load. CANDU reactors have low power densities and produce large amounts of transuranic waste (worse than PWRs, in fact.) Pebble bed reactors do not have sufficient containment structures and their even lower power densities lead to vast amounts of almost-impossible-to-reprocess waste. No fast reactor has ever operated flawlessly. Fast reactors need liquid metal coolant that is almost always involved in fires.
• Reprocessing plants are unreliable as shit, fucking expensive, and tend to kill people.
  There are essentially three reprocessing plants in the world- one in Russia which has accidentally killed lots of people, Sellafield in the UK, which has made the Irish Sea the world's richest source of technetium (this is not a joke, it really has), and Tokaimura in Japan which accidentally killed two people a couple of years ago. Sellafield was recently in the news for having a huge leak of concentrated nitric acid containing several hundred kilograms of plutonium and uranium. The entire reprocessing plant is currently offline pending working out what the fuck to do about it. Meanwhile, spent fuel elements from the world's PWRs and BWRs are piling up in waste flasks and cooling ponds all over the world.
• The civilian nuclear industry basically exists in order to amortise the vast cost of weapons development.
  Read de Groot's 'The Bomb: A Life' for a full exploration of this; I don't have time to go into it right now. I don't approve of anything that subsidises weapons that threaten three billion lives. That's you, me, your mother. It's not fucking cool. They do not make us safer.
• I don't trust accountants and politicians to make the right choices.
  Throughout the US and UK's history of use of nuclear power, choices have been motivated more by politics and pennypinching than by efficiency, safety or overall utility. Is this going to change? Have we not got enough incredibly long-lived nuclear rubbish laying around already?

And that's why I don't support the use of nuclear power at this time.

[His Divine Shadow]

Ten thousand years is longer than any civilization on earth has ever lasted. The Egyptian pyramids are only a few thousand years old, were covered in dire warnings nver to open them, which we not only saw but carefully decoded- and we opened them anyway. How do we stop people opening our high level waste repository fifteen thousand years hence and destroying their biosphere? Some of these wastes are so unpleasant that a single kilo waste capsule can kill literally millions of people.

This one seems contrived, we won't be building monuments and high level wastes being dangerous after 15,000 years from now? Don't high level waste decay really quickly, like centuries to safe levels?

[Shroom Man 777]

The civilian nuclear industry basically exists in order to amortise the vast cost of weapons development.

Uh, Japan doesn't have nukes, does it?

We really have no idea what to do with high level waste containing long-lived transuranics.

Bla bla bla. There's a difference between "don't open this or else the mummy will eat you! rar!" and "do not open this because it contains hazardous materials"

[BloodAngel]

Here's a counterpoint: if we don't use nuclear power, what do we use? Powering huge cities isn't likely the job of a hydroelectric plant, and coal power would screw up the environment infinitely more than nuclear power ever could. I'm not going to say that modern nuclear power is perfect, but it's probably better than most other options.

[Jalinth]

Not all reactor designs produce the big "P" - look at the CANDU type reactors. Also, it is not nearly as easy to separate out the various isotopes and elements as the statement makes it appear. The reason that nuclear proliferation is kept under control is that you need massive equipment to do the separation - this is not your 1st year engineering project. As to a dirty bomb aspect, chemical weapons are much easier to produce

As to the reactor design, what is the problem if these plants are only useful to cover the "base load"? So what? Cover this load, and you really reduce the amount of polluting crap you need to pump out 24/7. My understanding of utility design is that you have different plants for different needs. Some for "base" loads (these should produce the cheapest power) and others for higher demands. The ones that can quickly spin-up/spin-down produce the most expensive power, but are also only needed for the "peak" or emergency power needs.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Ten thousand years is longer than any civilization on earth has ever lasted. The Egyptian pyramids are only a few thousand years old, were covered in dire warnings nver to open them, which we not only saw but carefully decoded- and we opened them anyway. How do we stop people opening our high level waste repository fifteen thousand years hence and destroying their biosphere? Some of these wastes are so unpleasant that a single kilo waste capsule can kill literally millions of people.

This one seems contrived, we won't be building monuments and high level wastes being dangerous after 15,000 years from now? Don't high level waste decay really quickly, like centuries to safe levels?

No. High level waste contains a mixture of short and long-lived radioisotopes 1. And, of course, it is also arguable that might do something stupid in the next 15,000 years and send civilization right back to the era where flint is king. The contrived bit isn't here.

Where the contrived bit is, is the implication that 15,000 years into the future, someone will accidentally open a high-level radioactive waste disposal facility and kill millions. That simply won't be the case, unless they'll be using nuclear weapons to blow open the facilities . . . in which case, the fallout will be modestly enhanced and wouldn't kill many people, unless the winds blew it right over a city, and then it happened to rain.

And the principle difference between an Egyptian tomb and a nuclear waste disposal facility is that a tomb contains dead people, and a nuclear waste disposal facility contains things which make people dead. Given the percentage of plundered Egyptian tombs, the curses placed on them were entirely ineffective. However, if our future explorers handle the waste, they will most likely develop radiation sickness and die. This would be enough to discourage their financiers from trying to do the same thing at similarly marked facilities.

[tharkûn]

# It is extremely inefficient.

Mainly because we aren't using reactors with modern technology and design.

The heat is produced at quite a low temperature- usually between 350 degrees C and 600 degrees C- which is limited by the temperature of the moderator. Above this temperature, the neutrons are moving too quickly for efficient fission. The reactor dips below criticality even at full power.

This is a safety mechanism. By making the moderator temperature dependent it quenches instead of melting down. If you want to avoid this "inefficiency" you can use a far more thermally stable moderator - graphite. Graphite is well known and can be run at far higher temperatures, it is disfavored as this ability was part of the reason why Chernobyl blew.

Uranium is difficult to turn into a bomb. Really, even if you have access to unlimited amounts of uranium ore, only a little (about 0.72%, though less in Gabon ore) of the uranium in it is fissile. To be weapons grade, you need about 95% of it to be fissile. The only difference between the fissile and the non-fissile atoms is that one of them weighs 235 grammes per mole and the other weighs 238. There is no chemical difference at all.

This is false. Many aspect of chemical kinetics are dependent on the mass. While this difference is small for uranium (but highly useful for tritium) it does exist.

However, plutonium is really easy to separate from uranium, and whenever you 'burn' natural or low-enriched uranium in a reactor, some of the U-238 gets turned into plutonium. (Plutonium is one of the transuranic waste elements I mentioned earlier.) If you can get a few kilos of plutonium, you can make a low-yield nuclear weapon really easily.

Plutonium weapons are by far more technicly challenging than uranium weapons.

It takes a team of a dozen physics and engineering students about a year to go from basic first principles and published facts, to a working design, and they don't even need access to experimental materials.

Yes and when they try to machine their device they stand an excellent chance of dying. When you plan to make an implosive device (gun type with Pu is ridiciously prone to fizzling - you would need some ridiciously fast velocity to get a gun to work) you have to shape your fissile material to fine tolerance and work out the implosive shockwave to a high degree of accuracy and precision. Of course I'm leaving out the problems of Pu's different crystaline states (different densities), differing isotopic mixtures (while you can make a bomb with variable amounts of 240, you will need to run the numbers), and heat generation (a crude bomb will generate ample heat and destroy an ad hoc design).

Building a Pu bomb is going to require either expertise or state level sponsorship. There is no way around it.

This is one of the reasons why reprocessing- which would be an effective solution to the problem of waste volumes from thermal reactors- is undesirable. It produces a stockpile of plutonium whose only use at present is to build nuclear bombs. It would make a perfectly acceptable fuel for thermal reactors, except that the proliferation risk is extremely grave should that fuel fall into the wrong hands.

Pu is used in RTG powerplants for spacecraft, famously Cassini sent up kilograms of the stuff. Another thread on this board mentioned that the US is going to open a plant specificly to produce plutonium to ship into space.

Pu can be easily used in a burner reactor, concerns about fuel falling into the wrong hands are BS for first world nations. The containers you'd ship it in take hours/days to open if you know what you're doing and have the tools designed to open it. If need be you can load the Pu into an armored transport, have a full military escort, and drive from one facility to the next. Yes Pu is dangerous, so too are many industrial chemicals (a tanker of phosgene is far easier to convert into a lethal weapon and we ship it by the ton). Frankly Pu is much easier to store, ship, and protect than many other dangerous substances.

Yes there is a proliferation threat from nuclear power, India being a prime example. However without state level support the threat approaches zero. Iran's nuclear program represents a proliferation threat, the US, UK, French, German, etc. programs do not.

We really have no idea what to do with high level waste containing long-lived transuranics.

Yes we do. The worst of the lot, Pu, can be sent to a burner reactor and consumed. What is left can be sent through a neutron shreader (for a loss of energy) and transmuted into faster decaying products. Further when you look at other waste, particular some of the nasty chemicals, those remain lethal in perpetuity. At the end of the day burying crap in Nevada is superior to dumping MORE lanthides into the air by burning coal (coal power releases huge quantities of thorium and uranium) - not to mention sulfur dioxide and the rest.

Reactor designs are crap.

Funny the French and Japanese seem to be doing quite well with "crap" designs. Stell embrittles? Then you egineer all the steel structures to take diminishing strength into account. Concrete swells? Fine give it breathing room or change the mix. Water breaks down? This could happen but I've heard of no nuclear incident which resulted in a large build-up of hydrogen from this mechanism (I've been told 3MI made zirconium dioxide). Can only provide baseline power? So. That is the vast majority of power generation, one need only examine Japan to see that they make it work. Insufficient containment? Build a concrete dome, Chernobyl would have just as safe as TMI to the surrounding population if it had such a dome.

We know the problems, we can work with or around them. This is no different than pissing that airliners eventually develop cracks in their load bearing members (aluminium will eventually fail, you cannot stop it from happening). So what? We know the limitations and we design things with those in mind.

There are essentially three reprocessing plants in the world- one in Russia which has accidentally killed lots of people, Sellafield in the UK, which has made the Irish Sea the world's richest source of technetium (this is not a joke, it really has), and Tokaimura in Japan which accidentally killed two people a couple of years ago. Sellafield was recently in the news for having a huge leak of concentrated nitric acid containing several hundred kilograms of plutonium and uranium

Sellafield is old as hell (literally it began reprocessing in 1952 and its most modern plant dates from the 70's). The Russian plant, Mayak, is also old (was first operated fifty odd years ago) and frankly Russian designs were not built around safety. I'm wondering why the plants at La Hague are not included, they have more capacity than either the Russian or Japanese plants. As far as killing people? Please. Do you have any idea how many people have died simply in BUILDING hydro power? Or how many die when you have explosions, derailments, etc. Not to be horridly crass, but two dead people is nothing in comparison to the thousands who die annually mining coal - in China alone (officially 6,027 coal mining deaths occured in China in 2004; many think the number is much higher).

The civilian nuclear industry basically exists in order to amortise the vast cost of weapons development.

Japan. Need I say more?

Throughout the US and UK's history of use of nuclear power, choices have been motivated more by politics and pennypinching than by efficiency, safety or overall utility. Is this going to change?

Not until nuclear hysteria dies down and we can have serious discussions.

The biggest problem this guy has is that he doesn't look at the alternatives. We've heard every sin he thinks the nuclear industry makes, yet he says not a world about the alternatives, let alone the cost effective alternatives. You want to abolish nuclear? Okay what replaces it? Natural gas with the inherent explosions, water table fouling, etc.? Hydro? With the massive ecosystem disruption, deaths at the dam base, and the methane production? Coal? Yes I would like you to dump sulfer dioxide, thorium, and uranium into the air I breath by the ton. Fission isn't perfect, but it beats the crap out of the alternatives.

[His Divine Shadow]

I read this very interesting article, Nuclear power plants on average will require 1.5% of the energy they will put out during their lifespan(assumed 40 years), I cannot see how that is ineffective. Only if we compare it to what we might be getting from better designs(which might constitute a safety risk as well).

http://www.uic.com.au/nip57.htm

Anyone care to comment on this dea? Sounds very interesting, though I remember France's Superphoenix ran on liquid sodium cooling scheme and failed badly.

This was an interesting read though:

The way I'd organize a nuclear fuel cycle would be this.

Fresh fuel comes from decommissioned nuclear weapon cores. It is therefore almost pure plutonium. Mix this in appropriate proportions with depleted uranium extracted from spent fuel, enrichment operations, and old military equipment. This is 'mixed oxide' fuel, or MOX fuel for short. Mix it so that you have highly-enriched fuel. Call this HEMOX. (This has been done by French and Japanese operators in the past, though the plutonium was not from weapons.)

Jacket the HEMOX fuel pellets loosely in stainless steel or similar material, and bundle them into steel cans. This fuel is intentionally not sealed, and has loose mechanical tolerances. This enables a high burnup rate- fuel tends to swell when it is very depleted.

Take these fuel rods and place them in a fast reactor which is moderatorless. This reactor is cooled by liquid metal. (This is a proven technology.) This reactor is passively safe- the coolant cannot boil, there is no void coefficient, and there is no positive temperature coefficient. There is also no pressure vessel, and the entire reactor sits in a concrete casket ready for one-piece disposal when it is worn out. The power density is high and the temperature of the generated heat is high too.

The liquid metal coolant heats helium, which directly drives gas turbines. Helium does not become radioactive through neutron activation, so the possibility of a radioactive leak is much reduced. Helium also serves as a cover gas for the liquid metal coolant. The metal coolant is pumped by an electromagnetic pump with no moving parts. The core's reactivity is managed not by control rods, but by rotatable drums with one side reflective to neutrons and the other side absorbent. This is possible because the core is physically small- less than one cubic metre.

Because the reactor operates at normal atmospheric pressure, it is easy to perform on-load refuelling, so no excess reactivity is required, and the reactor symmetry can be maintained. Because the reactor fuel element voids are allowed to fill with liquid metal coolant, fuel elements are well cooled throughout their life.

The spent fuel elements are extracted and reprocessed on site. Plutonium (bred from the depleted uranium) is extracted and used in new fuel. The steel cans are sent to a storage facility, where they have to stay for about sixty years. (Storage of this duration is well within our capability as a civilization.) The remaining dross- fission daughters, neptunium, technetium, all of the other horrible transuranic crap- is placed in a ceramic container and inserted into a horizontal channel at the top of the reactor. While it is there it is bombarded for a period of some months with an extremely high fluence of high energy neutrons. This decomposes the long-lived transuranics into short-lived waste, which only needs storage for a period on the order of fifty years.

These reactors can also be used to start working on breaking down the huge amount of waste left over from less efficient designs.

[PainRack]

The only real problem I see with building nuclear power plants is how to distribute the power they make, as well as the space required. At the moment, we're talking about hundred megawatt plants at the min..... Great for cities, but way too overpowered for supplying villages.

[Keevan_Colton]

The only real problem I see with building nuclear power plants is how to distribute the power they make, as well as the space required. At the moment, we're talking about hundred megawatt plants at the min..... Great for cities, but way too overpowered for supplying villages.

This is why we have a thing known as the national grid, basically power plants feed into the grid and everything else draws off of it...you may remember the entire east coast of the US going dark one day...that's what happens when you let people with a "just in time" business model run the grid...

Basically you dont need a power plant next door to run your shit, it could be at the other end of the country...so the city/village thing isnt a big deal...if it's too much for a village, no problem it can supply a bunch of villages instead.

[tharkûn]

The only real problem I see with building nuclear power plants is how to distribute the power they make, as well as the space required. At the moment, we're talking about hundred megawatt plants at the min..... Great for cities, but way too overpowered for supplying villages.

The only problems are in building the grid and resistence loss; those will exist for any large scale power plant (like the Hoover Dam for instance). The backwater of Xinjing, northern Alaska, or some other really desolate place will have to have local generation, but such places will have problems regardless.

[NecronLord]

The Egyptian pyramids [...] were covered in dire warnings nver to open them,

Lies.

[Xon]

The only real problem I see with building nuclear power plants is how to distribute the power they make, as well as the space required. At the moment, we're talking about hundred megawatt plants at the min..... Great for cities, but way too overpowered for supplying villages.

The only problems are in building the grid and resistence loss; those will exist for any large scale power plant (like the Hoover Dam for instance). The backwater of Xinjing, northern Alaska, or some other really desolate place will have to have local generation, but such places will have problems regardless.

If you really are worried about power loss, use super-conductors and then cool them. The power demands for that shouldnt be too high.

Fuck all resistance to damage due to movement however

[kheegster]

The only real problem I see with building nuclear power plants is how to distribute the power they make, as well as the space required. At the moment, we're talking about hundred megawatt plants at the min..... Great for cities, but way too overpowered for supplying villages.

The only problems are in building the grid and resistence loss; those will exist for any large scale power plant (like the Hoover Dam for instance). The backwater of Xinjing, northern Alaska, or some other really desolate place will have to have local generation, but such places will have problems regardless.

If you really are worried about power loss, use super-conductors and then cool them. The power demands for that shouldnt be too high.

Fuck all resistance to damage due to movement however

Yeah, like cooling thousands of km worth of power cables to 150 degrees below freezing is gonna be real easy.

[dragon]

Here's a counterpoint: if we don't use nuclear power, what do we use? Powering huge cities isn't likely the job of a hydroelectric plant, and coal power would screw up the environment infinitely more than nuclear power ever could. I'm not going to say that modern nuclear power is perfect, but it's probably better than most other options.

Well its possible to use solar power satellites and beam done the energy in the form of microwaves. The following is a section of my research paper that I wrote for one of my Masters classes.

It is easy to calculate how much power is generated since 1 square km of solar panels receive 1.4 GW of power (Space Power, 2000). Current plastic solar cells only harnesses 6 percent of sunlight but a recent breakthrough would
6
allow up to 30 percent to be harnesses (Lovgren, 2005). Currently it would most likely take many millions of tons of material to build one thousand sq. km of S.P.S. needed to produce even 100gw of power (Space Power, 2000). With some simple calculations a 1000 km array at 6 percent would only deliver 42GW
to the ground; however these new 30 percent arrays would deliver 210GW of power.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... astic.html

http://www.spacefuture.com/power/power.shtml

And a few recent break thoughs on solar cells means they are even more efficient so more power. Start up cost might be a little high but can't be no higher than building and mainting a nuke plant

[SyntaxVorlon]

There is only one major concern I have with the US producing large amounts of Nuclear power, that of regulation and safety, which is low enough for plenty of things to go wrong and hasn't got any demand to go up at the moment. The EPA's shitty administration leads to poor regulation and law enforcement of facilities. Like that leaky reactor they washed over a few years back.
Aside from that Nukes are go!!!

[tharkûn]

If you really are worried about power loss, use super-conductors and then cool them. The power demands for that shouldnt be too high.

No but the cost issues will. Getting pliable wire with remotely close to high Tc superconductors requires a crapload of silver. The silver, however is the cheap part of the wire. You also CANNOT have the stuff above ground, first and foremost because damage which causes quenching will propogate down the line in the mother of all spikes. Second it is much easier to insulate and cool the wire underground. Third it makes it harder to steal (but trust me people will dig it up for the precious metal content). We are using superconducting wires for a few select applications, but taking power to the boonies won't be one of them for a long time.

Yeah, like cooling thousands of km worth of power cables to 150 degrees below freezing is gonna be real easy.

Bury it in a massively insulated pipe and run your coolant alongside, every so often you have electrical pumps to actively cool the coolant away from the wire. The big problem is cost, high Tc superconductors are all "naturally" ceramic. The only pliable one I know of basicly dopes a quite expensive superconductor into a silver matrix. Thousands of km of high capacity wire like that will cost more than building a hydro, solar, or wind plant for the extreme backwater village.

SV:
I have yet to find a leaky reactor story in the US that was worse than having a CAT scan. The EPA could be utterly incompotent and the adverse health effects of nuclear plants would be negligable in comparison to the ones the coal power plants give you through friggen waivers (not the government cocking up and missing what they dump into the air, but the government giving them permission to dump this toxic crap into the air).

The only major nuclear disaster was Chernobyl, and with a containment dome, even all the other BS (and trust me they were in that up to their eyeballs) wouldn't have killed anyone outside the reactor.

[PainRack]

This is why we have a thing known as the national grid, basically power plants feed into the grid and everything else draws off of it...you may remember the entire east coast of the US going dark one day...that's what happens when you let people with a "just in time" business model run the grid...

Basically you dont need a power plant next door to run your shit, it could be at the other end of the country...so the city/village thing isnt a big deal...if it's too much for a village, no problem it can supply a bunch of villages instead.

And not everyone everywhere lives in the US. Can you imagine an island country like Indonesia relying exclusively on nuclear power? That's 13,000 over islands right down there.

[sketerpot]

And not everyone everywhere lives in the US. Can you imagine an island country like Indonesia relying exclusively on nuclear power? That's 13,000 over islands right down there.

Of course there are special cases for which large nuke plants are overkill, although there has been some work done on smaller nuke plants that would be suitable for powering villages. Still, this isn't a huge problem in countries that use most of the world's power. The US certainly isn't the only country with a power grid.

So, let me summarize: nuclear power can provide the vast majority of the world's power needs because the vast majority of the world's power is drawn from power grids.

[tharkûn]

And not everyone everywhere lives in the US. Can you imagine an island country like Indonesia relying exclusively on nuclear power? That's 13,000 over islands right down there.

That depends. The larger islands should have no problem. Many of the other islands are close enough you can just hop from one of the big ones (the English are connected the European grid, and I think there is a major connector across the Baltic). Again the islands at the arse end of the country likely don't need nuclear, but they are going to be a very small minority.

Well its possible to use solar power satellites and beam done the energy in the form of microwaves. The following is a section of my research paper that I wrote for one of my Masters classes.

This aught to be good.

It is easy to calculate how much power is generated since 1 square km of solar panels receive 1.4 GW of power (Space Power, 2000). Current plastic solar cells only harnesses 6 percent of sunlight but a recent breakthrough would
6
allow up to 30 percent to be harnesses (Lovgren, 2005). Currently it would most likely take many millions of tons of material to build one thousand sq. km of S.P.S. needed to produce even 100gw of power (Space Power, 2000). With some simple calculations a 1000 km array at 6 percent would only deliver 42GW
to the ground; however these new 30 percent arrays would deliver 210GW of power.

Bwahahahaha.

A 1000 [sq] km array? Do you have any idea how much that is going to mass? With 1 cm thickness you end up with 10,000,000 cubic meters of volume. I'll grant you density of 10 kg/cubic meter which gives us 100,000,000 kg of mass to loft. It cost somewhere north of 3,000 dollars per kg to launch these days. That means it would only cost around 30 trillion per array. Unless your design has some seriously whack mass savings you are just building castles in the clouds.

And a few recent break thoughs on solar cells means they are even more efficient so more power. Start up cost might be a little high but can't be no higher than building and mainting a nuke plant

Keep telling yourself that. Japan has an active research program in this area, they are paying through the eyeteeth for a single megawatt worth of power production.

I'm completely ignoring the environmental impacts of the thousands of heavy lift launches (burning rocket fuel ain't all that eco friendly), the fabrication costs, and the assembly costs. The only way you can possibly make such a satellite economical is to drop launch costs dramaticly.

Solar power for earth will remain quite uneconomical until the price of getting to orbit drops dramaticly. It doesn't matter if you have efficiency at 1% or 99.9%, the big hurdle will be getting these monsters into orbit at a reasonably cheap cost. And before you try to tell me that they will last forever - do recall that any nice low mass array will eventually be shreaded by high velocity impacts. You are going to have to replace these suckers, maybe even on a timeframe shorter than nuclear power plants.

[kheegster]

Yeah, like cooling thousands of km worth of power cables to 150 degrees below freezing is gonna be real easy.

Bury it in a massively insulated pipe and run your coolant alongside, every so often you have electrical pumps to actively cool the coolant away from the wire. The big problem is cost, high Tc superconductors are all "naturally" ceramic. The only pliable one I know of basicly dopes a quite expensive superconductor into a silver matrix. Thousands of km of high capacity wire like that will cost more than building a hydro, solar, or wind plant for the extreme backwater village.

You are correct. The highest temperature superconductors are above the 77K liquid nitrogen threshold, the problem is in the material. At current prices, Pb-stabilized Bi-2223 (BSCCO) superconductors (Tc = 110K) cost around $21/kiloAmp/m in material costs alone.

Source

The average power consumption of an American household is probably of the order 1kilowatts, which at P=VI means about 10Amps. A village of 500 people 500km away from the power plant will therefore require a superconducting cable costing $50 million.

[Nephtys]

All thermal reactors produce plutonium, which represents a proliferation risk.
Uranium is difficult to turn into a bomb. Really, even if you have access to unlimited amounts of uranium ore, only a little (about 0.72%, though less in Gabon ore) of the uranium in it is fissile. To be weapons grade, you need about 95% of it to be fissile. The only difference between the fissile and the non-fissile atoms is that one of them weighs 235 grammes per mole and the other weighs 238. There is no chemical difference at all. That means you have to separate them by mechanical means- either a huge cyclotron or a massive gas diffusion membrane system. Either is immensely energy intensive and basically sucks to build- they are huge facilities (ever seen the size of Oak Ridge? it's huge and has four nuclear reactors of its own just to power it! It uses, oh, let's say about 1.21 gigawatts and be done with it.) and you'd have no hope of hiding one whatsoever. It's impossible.

However, plutonium is really easy to separate from uranium, and whenever you 'burn' natural or low-enriched uranium in a reactor, some of the U-238 gets turned into plutonium. (Plutonium is one of the transuranic waste elements I mentioned earlier.) If you can get a few kilos of plutonium, you can make a low-yield nuclear weapon really easily. It takes a team of a dozen physics and engineering students about a year to go from basic first principles and published facts, to a working design, and they don't even need access to experimental materials. This is one of the reasons why reprocessing- which would be an effective solution to the problem of waste volumes from thermal reactors- is undesirable. It produces a stockpile of plutonium whose only use at present is to build nuclear bombs. It would make a perfectly acceptable fuel for thermal reactors, except that the proliferation risk is extremely grave should that fuel fall into the wrong hands.

Note bolded section. Highly incorrect. Plutonium 239 produced by reactors has impurities of 240, which is non-fissionable. Any attempt to build a simple linear bomb with this will fail spectacularly, limiting the only detonation mechanism to be implosion, which is technically far beyond what 'everyone knows' to sophisticated explosives, material, and electronic engineering. Where is the author getting this nonsense about 'it takes a year for a bunch of grad students to make a bomb?' The only nations with the capacity to engineer such devices would certainly be able to produce as much plutonium as they wanted in their own reactors.
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[Gil Hamilton]

Funnily enough, with the amount of solar cells as described above, you'll have vastly more pollution than you could generate in a hundred years with nuclear power and more over, it's incredibly toxic stuff that you can't just stick under Yucca mountain. Solar cells may be basically pollution free in use, but making them involves a process called etching, which produces some truly nasty industrial waste. Frankly, nuclear power is far more environmentally friendly.

[PainRack]

That depends. The larger islands should have no problem. Many of the other islands are close enough you can just hop from one of the big ones (the English are connected the European grid, and I think there is a major connector across the Baltic). Again the islands at the arse end of the country likely don't need nuclear, but they are going to be a very small minority.

And the cost would be so highly uneconomical that it won't be worth it.

I'm not against nuclear power. I'm just saying that the only barrier to nuclear power I see is distribution and space.

[tharkûn]

And the cost would be so highly uneconomical that it won't be worth it.

That would depend on the specifics of the islands, not being all that well informed (I can only name a dozen or so from memory) it may well turn out to be cheaper to build a small coal or natural gas plant on various outlying islands than to go nuclear.

I'm not against nuclear power. I'm just saying that the only barrier to nuclear power I see is distribution and space.

Distribution I agree with, only because nuclear doesn't scale terribly well yet. Space, I don't recall nuclear requiring significantly more space than any of the alternatives. Hydro floods much more land. Coal plants require large yards to maintain a steady supply of coal. Only natural gas seems like it would be much more dense, if at all.

Nephtys:

If I had to guess I'd go with shoddy research confusing the ability of scientists to come up with a HEU gun type design to a practical Pu implosion weapon (they actually did this and grad students came up with a working gun-type design). Theoreticly you could make gun type Pu devices, you just need a mechanism for firing the "bullet" at some idiotic speed However practicly you need to go implosion and dealing with the 240 requires re-running the numbers (particularly if your seperation method is anisotropic, like many).

You could egineer such a weapon if you had some very good brains, equipment, and of course a critical mass with known isotopic composition. However virtually all the people who have the expertise to do this already work for a government, and with extremely few exceptions aren't going to sell their skills.