Re: OT: A huge glob of "climate change"

I am a hard-core scientist with respect for Germany, but...

> >Germany's trashing of their nuclear reactors is the most painfully >obvious lunacy with respect to the issue of "climate change". >Certainly that's their justification. They must have SOME >justification. Looking stupid is not a valid cause. > >Instead of depending on greenhouse-gas-emissions-free nuclear power, >now they are burning a bunch of dirty coal. Maybe they are planning >World War III? Without easy target nuclear reactors, crippling their >country is more difficult. Yeah, that must be the reason. > >Difficult to take "climate change" advocates seriously, with a sore >thumb the size of Germany.

This is great:

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin
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Hurricane Florence is dumping a lot of water on Carolina, even if not in exactly the right places to give TV reporters quite the image they wanted.

Anthony Watts - as a bought and paid for climate change denialist - is happy to jeer at the reporters.

He's less willing to notice the fact that Hurricane Florence is a very big system, and has set all-time records for rainfall in Carolina.

This is exactly what you'd expect from the one degree Celcius global warming we'v had over the past century, which means that the air over the oceans now has - on average - 7% more water vapour than it did a century ago.

Since hurricanes actually depend on having an area of ocean surface hotter than a 26C threshold to get them going, they have become more than 7% more probable in recent years, but neither John Larkin nor Anthony Watts is going to admit that.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Some of the reactors used ceramic "balls" to hold the nuclear material - great idea as it was absolutely immune to meltdown. After some teething problems all looked good, but with extended use the balls started cracking and producing highly radioactive dust. These were expensive to clean and repair plus they had lost their major advantage of no possible nuclear contamination to the local environment. They were basically just looking for an excuse to be shut down. I don't know how many of them there were.

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Reply to
David Eather

as if it's greenie anti-nuclear activists with maybe a few MILLION dollars total in activist-resources who have any power over whether nuclear plants do or don't get built.

If there were suddenly some new nuclear power technology that was clearly more profitable than fossil fuels and there was billions of dollars to be made by switching over, and they needed to level half of Houston to build it right there then that's exactly what industry would do and the government would be happy to help. No amounting of pleading for the fate of the Texan barn-owl would help.

Nobody ever went broke building gas and coal fired plants. It's not that nuclear can't be made extremely safe it's that it costs a lotta money to do it right. And f*ck spending money!

Reply to
bitrex

How is that 100 000 years determined ? I assume it is based on the time at which the spent fuel radiation is the same as the background radiation level ?

But which background radiation level ? For instance granite has a high natural background radiation level, so burying spent fuel into granite will require a shorter time :-).

Also mixing spent fuel with some inert material before burying it underground and after a long time (10 000 - 100 000 years) the radiation for each kilogram becomes lower than the background rocks.

It should also be remembered that the longer the half-life of an isotope, the lower the radiation per second. For this reason, the short term isotopes (with half-life less than a week or a few years) are really nasty. Storing spent fuel in a pool of water for a few decades an most of the short half-life isotopes are gone and the medium to long half-life isotopes radiate much less.

Reply to
upsidedown

aste disposal. There are scheme for locking up nuclear waste securely for n ext 100,000 years, but none of them has been put into practice yet, and we' ve been generating nuclear waste since around 1943, some 75 years now.

Precisely. Any waste that's active for 100k years is not a radiation concer n.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

On Saturday, September 22, 2018 at 6:27:07 AM UTC+10, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wro te:

e:

waste disposal. There are scheme for locking up nuclear waste securely for next 100,000 years, but none of them has been put into practice yet, and w e've been generating nuclear waste since around 1943, some 75 years now.

Why not find out?

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He'd have realised that the assumption was laughably wrong.

ern.

Granite emits enough radon to be a "radiation concern", and the elements th at eventually decay to produce the radon (which has a rather short half-lif e) have been around for at least 4.5 billion years.

Potassium-40, whose decay accounts for most of our natural background radia tion load (which is a radiation concern even if we can't do anything about it) has a half life of 1.251 billion years.

NT - as usual - doesn't know what he is talking about, and hasn't gone to t he trouble of finding out.

There are ways of locking up radioactive atoms in a ceramic that does make it tolerably certain that they won't get into the ground-water

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Persuading people - like NT - who don't know much, and are confident that t hey know all they need to (even when a lot of what they think they know is wrong) - that this kind of approach will work is remarkably difficult.

Apparently there are now plans - at last - to try to use Synroc to lock up some real radioactive waste, but such trial are unlikely to persuade people like NT.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

There are more concerns than just the alpha, beta or gamma rays emitted when the element decays. I agree that no one is going to be bothered by the gamma rays coming off some waste with a half-life of 1000 years. (And no one is going to be bothered by the alpha or beta particles unless they have eaten the stuff.) But as the element decays, it turns into something else - and that something else might leak out into the atmosphere or ground water, and cause trouble. Many of these heavy elements are chemically highly poisonous, and others can get absorbed into biological systems and /then/ decay.

Reply to
David Brown

Yes, but that's more a matter of the handling of toxic substances, not a matter of high security radioactive material management.

Granite/Radon is an example - we don't need secure storage for granite!

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

:

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1943,

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concern.

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matter of high security radioactive material management.

Over thousands of years. You can manage toxic substances tolerably effectiv ely on a day to day basis, but stuff that can remain dangerous for hundreds of thousand of years poses a different kind of problem.

But you do need an extractor ban in your basement if you've got granite und er the foundations. You need to shift the radon out of the basement before it can get up into your house. The risk of lung cancer from radon exposure isn't as high as it is for cigarette smoke, but radon exposure is the secon d most frequent cause of lung cancer in the US.

n/radon-fact-sheet>

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

I can certainly agree that the current methods are not ideal, and that it could make sense to separate things a bit better.

Actually, the main problem I see with the current storage systems is putting everything in water. Water is an excellent way to make sure your nasty chemicals can leak out as easily as possible, as well as offering scope for steam explosions when things overheat.

The other big problem is how inefficient these reactors are - and what unpleasant fuel they use. High temperature, high efficiency thorium reactors would produce a tiny fraction of the quantity of radioactive waste, because they turn far more of the potential energy into actual useful work. The disadvantage of thorium reactors, as far as the powers-that-be are concerned, is that they are not good at producing fuel for nuclear bombs.

Reply to
David Brown

Not actually true, but NT doesn't know any better.

The problem with really active nuclear waste is that it produces a lot of heat as well as the alpha, beta and gamma radiation.

Water may be an inconveniently good solvent, but it's a great heat transfer material - you can pump a lot of it past your hot waste and it shifts a lot of heat for every uniot of mass shifted.

What's your preferred alternative?

That does look like their major weakness.

But you do need pump radon out of any cellar that is built over granite bed-rock. There isn't much of it in the air in the basement, but still enough to make anybody living above it more likely to get lung cancer.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

I think even the powers that be realize we have more than enough plutonium to make more than enough bombs. In fact the problem we have presently is k eeping track of the plutonium we currently control. Or maybe "control" is not the right word since we seem to lose track of it from time to time.

The picture that has been painted very clearly is that the nuclear industry is more about refueling reactors rather than building new ones. Thorium r eactors won't have the same high level of cost and profit in providing fuel , so there is little incentive for the industry to be behind it. The only way we get off this inefficient uranium reactor paradigm is for the governm ent to provide incentives or do the basic research themselves.

Actually, uranium reactors may be cost prohibitive. A new reactor at North Anna is stated to cost around $19 billion not counting the money already s pent getting approvals and the operating permit (which they are recouping i n utility bills now rather than later). That is some 10x what it cost to b uild the original plant. But when I crunch the numbers, amortized over a 3

0 year life at a capacity factor of 83.5% and a 1535 MW capacity I get only about half a penny per WHr generated. That doesn't seem cost prohibitive to me. Of course that is on top of fuel costs and operating costs. Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, Dominion hasn't released any info on their e xpected cost breakdown.

Still, there is little incentive in the nuclear industry to explore alterna tive nuclear fuels or reactor designs. I suppose some of that is FUD. Jus t building a new reactor is a 30 year investment in uncertain energy times. It may well come to pass that solar will become the dominant energy sourc e for electricity. There are hurtles to cross but it's not like we've neve r done anything hard before. That could leave a nuclear industry holding a many billion dollar bag 10 or 15 years down the road.

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

ed-rock. There isn't much of it in the air in the basement, but still enoug h to make anybody living above it more likely to get lung cancer.

They don't usually circulate air in the basement, at least not if it is use d as living space. Around here they connect a fan to a pipe that goes thro ugh the basement floor to draw a partial vacuum in the space below the base ment floor. This gets rid of the radon before it enters the basement.

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

It is pretty much true. You might not want to go into the room where the stuff is stored, but radiation levels are not a problem with reasonable care.

Yes, I know - which is a good indicator that it is idiotic to consider it "waste" when you should be using the heat for electricity generation.

There are lots of ways of transferring heat - but mostly they need to be done with higher temperature systems. That makes them more costly. But done right, you can avoid most of the leakage and risk while also making more use of the heat (which is easier for higher temperatures). Molten salts are probably the best idea.

Some of the earliest experiments with nuclear reactors used thorium, but were dropped because the military wanted plutonium.

It's an overrated problem. In terms of expected years of live saved per dollar spent, you are far better off putting a non-stick rubber mat in your shower than anti-radon fans, or better street lighting. People do die of radon-provoked lung cancer, but people are always going to die of something.

Reply to
David Brown

which means there isn't an infinite supply of defense money to develop them. When nuclear plant cost something like $10B who takes a chance on it working?

Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

Thinking it untrue shows a failure to understand the basic physics of the situation.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

It's not the basic physics that complicate the situation, but rather the intricacies of radio-active decay (which NT doesn't seem to have a clue about).

Unstable nuclei frequently decay to other unstable nuclei with different chemical and physical properties.

"Pretty much true" still leaves enough room to let you kill yourself (or at least make yourself decidedly sick).

Since NT has kill-filed me, he won't have come across the counter examples of radon generators and potassium-40 (which has a half-life of 1.251 billion years, and still generates most of our background radiation damage).

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

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