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I've been biten by a bug. The nuclear bug. We all have to focus on some itch, and this one has been brewing in my mind for some time, so I will be focusing on it and posting here. I'm not seeing a lot of talk, at least not in the Minnesota blogs, about the need for increasing our nuclear power plants here and throughout the US.
It's obvious to most by now that we need solutions to the energy supply and it's in everyone's best interests to do so by the most effecient, productive, affordable, safe, clean method possible. "That's a tall order though, Chief, some sources can answer some of those requests, but surely no one system can do all of that!" Well, I'll be looking at all of those requests, but from my basic understanding, nuclear does indeed answer all of those. I'll try to be critical even though I am coming at this with a bias in favor of increasing our nuclear power plants. I spoke with House minority leader Marty Seifert last night, and he pointed me to key players in favor of, and opposed to increasing our number of plants in Minnesota. And I'll be looking at other states and other nations for success and shortfall stories. If you have anything that will help, please let me know. To start things off, here is a reprint of a post from Dr.Jonz form back when The Attic was still open about Pebble Bed plants. And you can bet your boots that just like drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for oil, The Chinese will be ahead of us on this too:
Many of us are aware that nuclear power is the cleanest, safest form of energy production today, but no new plants have gone through the licensing or construction process in the last 30 years. In 1979 Hollywood released The China Syndrome and just 13 days later, the Three Mile Island accident occurred, stopping the future of nuclear energy in this country cold. The multi billion dollar Shoreham plant in New York was completed but never allowed to open; nuclear power had become just too scary.
The US built better rods, learned not to pack them, built a storage facility under a mountain, and developed transportation containers capable of sustaining the worst high speed crashes possible. None of this matters when people see the scary cooling towers of a nuclear reactor and think about The China Syndrome or Three Mile Island.
That just 56 people were killed in the Chernobyl accident and not 4,000 as previously thought won't sway anyone. I lived in West Berlin when it blew and the press had a field day reporting on the radiation dose in the food each day. People are just very afraid of the term radiation, even though they have no fear of having an X-ray taken at the dentist. One is safe, the other is spooky.
Well maybe a pebble bed reactor will finally get us going again. Too bad the Chinese, the South Africans, and the Germans are ahead of us here, but that's no reason not to jump on the bandwagon. From Wired Magazine on China's latest test reactor:
In the air-conditioned chill of the visitors' area, a grad student runs through the basics. Instead of the white-hot fuel rods that fire the heart of a conventional reactor, HTR-10 is powered by 27,000 billiards-sized graphite balls packed with tiny flecks of uranium. Instead of superhot water - intensely corrosive and highly radioactive - the core is bathed in inert helium. The gas can reach much higher temperatures without bursting pipes, which means a third more energy pushing the turbine. No water means no nasty steam, and no billion-dollar pressure dome to contain it in the event of a leak. And with the fuel sealed inside layers of graphite and impermeable silicon carbide - designed to last 1 million years - there's no steaming pool for spent fuel rods. Depleted balls can go straight into lead-lined steel bins in the basement. Wearing disposable blue paper gowns and booties, the grad student leads the way to a windowless control room that houses three industry-standard PC workstations and the inevitable electronic schematic, all valves, pressure lines, and color-coded readouts. In a conventional reactor's control room, there would be far more to look at - control panels for emergency core cooling, containment-area sprinklers, pressurized water tanks. None of that is here. The usual layers of what the industry calls engineered safety are superfluous. Suppose a coolant pipe blows, a pressure valve sticks, terrorists knock the top off the reactor vessel, an operator goes postal and yanks the control rods that regulate the nuclear chain reaction - no radioactive nightmare. This reactor is meltdown-proof. Zhang Zuoyi, the project's 42-year-old director, explains why. The key trick is a phenomenon known as Doppler broadening - the hotter atoms get, the more they spread apart, making it harder for an incoming neutron to strike a nucleus. In the dense core of a conventional reactor, the effect is marginal. But HTR-10's carefully designed geometry, low fuel density, and small size make for a very different story. In the event of a catastrophic cooling-system failure, instead of skyrocketing into a bad movie plot, the core temperature climbs to only about 1,600 degrees Celsius - comfortably below the balls' 2,000-plus-degree melting point - and then falls. This temperature ceiling makes HTR-10 what engineers privately call walk-away safe. As in, you can walk away from any situation and go have a pizza.
Well that sounds safer. Enough to placate Greenpeace? Of course not. But eliminating the scary cooling tower and using the words 'meltdown-proof' should be enough to sell common sense Americans. Add in the fact that this is the original design for plants developed by an American chemist in the early 40's and it all starts to sound a whole lot better.
A couple good articles on Pebble Beds:
http://cache.technologyreview.com/articles/02/01/talbot0102.0.asp
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china_pr.html
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