Chernobyl at 22
It is the 22nd anniversary of one of the worst nuclear disasters in the world: the failure of the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power facility [Чернобыльская АЭС им. В.И.Ленина] near Pripyat, Ukraine. The West found out about the problem from alarms at Swedish nuclear facilities due to the fall out from Chernobyl. The Soviet authorities did not admit the problem for three days.
The BBC has one of their excellent In Depth sites up, and a great slide show that helps you to understand what happened, if not why.
The concrete cap over the destroyed reactor is cracking and must be replaced, but the site is still radioactive and can’t be worked on directly without killing people.
Tell me again why all these people want nuclear power facilities.
13 comments
Because the alternative is freezing cold in the dark?
In case you haven’t noticed, we’re running out of oil and natural gas, and coal is not only dirty but is literally going to bake us off the planet if we don’t quit burning it soon. There ain’t a whole lot of alternatives out there. Solar is fine when the sun is shining, wind is fine in the morning and evening when the wind blows, but we gotta get energy someplace when it’s raining for ten days straight and/or the wind has decided it doesn’t feel like blowing. Not to mention the fact that solar and wind energy simply don’t have the energy density for a first-world lifestyle. And don’t tell people they gotta go back to a third world low-energy lifestyle. Ain’t happenin’. Not voluntarily. Thus nuclear power plants.
The good news is that Chernobyl was the worst possible design for a nuclear reactor — a graphite-moderated water-cooled reactor with no containment vessel. If you look around, you’ll notice technology has moved on since the 1940’s when the basic Chernobyl design originated as a nuclear weapons production reactor. Something like a pebble-bed reactor (of which the Chinese plan to build approximately 200 of the things) are inherently safe because they cannot have a thermal runaway event (i.e., if they lose coolant, their power output goes down as they heat up, and power output vs. natural heat loss eventually hits equilibrium). Tarring all nuclear reactors with the stigma of Chernobyl is like tarring all air travel with the stigma of the Hindenberg. Modern reactors (just like modern aircraft) don’t even use the same fundamental base technology anymore…
– Badtux the Energy Penguin
Moving from one scare mineral resource to another is not the answer, it’s an excuse. If there was a realistic solution to nuclear waste I might feel differently.
A problem with current forms of steam generation, regardless of the source of heat is the need for water, which is becoming scarce. We had nuclear plants in the South shutting down during the middle of the Summer last year, and several in Europe because water quantities and temperatures were too high.
There are ways of storing the excess energy produced during high generation periods to even out production during low generation periods, and they extend well beyond batteries.
Uhm, pebble bed reactors are gas-cooled, not water-cooled. Indeed, most of the new designs are gas cooled, not water cooled, and some don’t even use steam for the turbine (helium doesn’t pick up stray neutrons and transmute into new elements, so helium-cooled reactors can run their turbines directly off of superheated helium). And there *is* a reasonable solution to nuclear waste — recycle it as new nuclear fuel. The reason reactors have to be re-fueled is because neutron sink elements build up in their fuel rods (or pellets, in the case of a pebble bed reactor), not because they “burn up” all the fissile materials in the rod. Unfortunately one fissile product of U238 fission is Pu-239, so for political reasons the United States is not currently recycling (since Pu-239 is major bomb making material).
We currently have fissiles for over 120,000 years at current energy levels, if we take advantage of all fissile materials and all fission cycles, not just U-235, and recycle and use breeder reactors to extend the usable lifespan of current fissiles. Hopefully within 120,000 years we’ll come up with cheap fusion or something. If we even exist at all at the end of that time.
As for storing the results of wind and solar, first if you covered every centimeter of non-arable land in the U.S. with solar panels not only would it be an ecological disaster causing the extinction of many species of animal, but you still would not have the energy to replace a few dozen nuclear power plants. Secondly, we still have no easy way to move large quantities of energy long distances without enormous losses, so places like the Northeast that don’t get a lot of solar energy can’t benefit from the fact that the Southwest gets lots of solar energy. Finally, the only reasonable large-scale way to store solar energy requires a lot of water — you literally pump the water uphill while the sun is shining, then run it back downhill through a hydroelectric turbine after dark. In short, solar is a nice peaking source during the daytime when air conditioning loads are at their highest, but simply isn’t going to replace some high density baseline source of energy, of which we don’t have a helluva lot right now — hydroelectric and nuclear being the only two that don’t cause global warming, and we’ve already dammed anything dammable for hydroelectric.
In short, other than moving back to a third world low-energy-use lifestyle — which is not acceptable to the majority of Americans (just ask Floridians to give up their air conditioning during the summer, I dare you!) — we simply don’t have an alternative to nuclear energy. All the hand-waving and wishing in the world won’t give solar the energy density required, or make the sun shine at night.
– Badtux the Energy Penguin
They sound fascinating, Badtux, but that is not what Florida Power & Light and the Southern Companies are proposing to build down here on rivers that will be used for cooling and steam generation. I go with what I know.
I view centralized power generation with the necessity of moving the power around to be part of the problem, not the solution. Solar is used in Florida specifically for air conditioning because it produces the highest power at the peak of the need, and peak demand is a major problem in sizing the electrical grid, so anything that reduces that peak has a major benefit. Photo-voltaic cells and solar water heating are two major ways of reducing demand on the system. Even in Britain, a solar roof can reduce demand on the grid to a quarter of what was required before the installation. Solar is having the same results in Germany. Newer, more efficient cells are being produced every year, and increased production is reducing the cost.
Once a successful LED for residential lighting is being produced at a reasonable cost, we can eliminate the CFLs, which are a stop-gap on the road away from incandescents.
When you live in a hurricane area, you either learn to cope with life off the grid for weeks, or you move, because the grid fails when trees fall on it. People still move here.
the grid fails when trees fall on it.
yep. also, i’ve actually lived here for several years without a/c, and keep it set on about 82 when i do run it.
We didn’t have air conditioning when I grew up down here, and you adjust. I have it now, but I haven’t even oiled the motor to start it up this year, despite several days in the 80s – it’s too damn expensive and there are on and off shore breezes.
When I was a child, my family had no A/C until I was 17. Now I not only have A/C, I pay for it whether I use it or not… it’s one of those central plants that drive the whole apartment complex, and we pay a prorated part based on the size of our apartments… but I still have a reluctance to use it except when necessary. (Stella makes up for any non-use on my part. 🙂 )
Some of Houston’s power comes from STNP. I’ve seen the plant from a distance, and I admit the very sight of it scares me. It’s been in use far too many years to claim, “we’ll deal with the waste by the time we have to.” No, we won’t, or at least it seems highly improbable to me. And that recently approved surface-level nuclear waste dump in West Texas convinces me we haven’t dealt with it yet.
An oboist colleague who lives near Smith Point down by the bay, a gal with a real do-it-yourself bent, has installed solar panels on her tiny home, and they supply a fair amount of her power needs. We don’t have to live like cavemen to reduce our electricity consumption considerably.
If individuals do what they can, then the problem is reduced. It is going to be painful when things get bad and people are forced to change their lifestyle, but if you start now it will be easier.
You are blessed with a sea breeze. People inland who get no sea breeze have a night-time temperature in the mid to upper 80’s with 100% humidity and *no* breeze. It becomes damnably hard to sleep under those conditions, believe me, I’ve done it, and it’s mostly sweat like a pig while a fan moves hot air over your skin and you toss and turn trying to find a position where you don’t feel like you’re in a sauna. People aren’t going to voluntarily go for that. And if there’s an alternative — like nuclear power — they’re going to go for it, regardless of whether you feel like they should just buck up and suffer in the heat or not.
But it’s not stand-alone residential that’s going to be the big problem. I just worked the numbers and if you put solar panels on every square inch of your roof and insulate the place to a fare-the-well and put in an 18+SEER A/C unit, around $60K of solar panels will do the job of keeping your single-level Florida ranch home cool, assuming you don’t have lots of days of gloomy weather in a row and/or are near an ocean where you can catch a sea breeze for evening and morning power. The problem comes in when you start talking about multi-family housing (apartments, high rises, etc.), dense office buildings, industrial areas, etc. Basically you need 1 square foot of roof area for every 2 square feet you need to heat, cool, and light, which means that my office complex could put s0lar panels on 100% of their roof and still only power the top two floors of the building. And once you consider our other electrical requirements — the server farm (not only do we need a lot of juice for the servers, the A/C is a bitch for it too), the lab facilities, the manufacturing facility — there’s no way we’re going to be able to maintain a modern high-tech environment with solar. There simply isn’t enough square feet of surface area on the building. And the same applies to every other technology building in the region. And manufacturing facilities… fughettabout it. No friggin’ way you’re going to even run a simple fabrication plant off of solar. Do you know just how much juice it takes to run a friggin metal basher to bash out metal computer cases? Or run a plastics injection machine? Or any of the other gizmos needed to manufacture stuff in other than a hand-crafted one-off manner? We’re talking a *lot* of juice… I mean, our sheet metal basher has multiple 3 phase 480v power drops into his shop. And then there’s the fab that has gigantic heaters to heat up and refine the silicone for solar panels. That’s not gonna happen with solar. There just isn’t sufficient energy density to do it, short of going out into the Central Valley and paving all that farmland with solar cells. Yeah right, and then what are we gonna eat?!
In other words, the economy goes to hell in a handbasket without some dense form of electrical generation that can keep the only innovation centers in our economy (the tech centers of the Northeast and West) up and going. The farm belt in the Midwest simply does not generate enough wealth to maintain a 1st world economy. If you want the entire economy to resemble that of, say, Brazil, fine and dandy. But that’s not what most Americans want for their nation, so you aren’t going to get what you want. Maintaining a high-tech economy with reasonable standards of living takes energy, and takes more energy than solar or wind can provide. Given that, we have a choice of coal or nuclear in the near term (since we’re running out of oil and gas). That’s just how it works, unless you can convince the majority of Americans that they need to be living like third world peasants, impoverished and half-starved. Good luck on THAT one!
I’m not talking about dismantling the existing system, I’m talking about reducing the load and limiting the need for more major power plants. If everyone who can benefit from more efficient lighting and appliances gets on board; if everyone who can use solar and wind gets on board; then the existing system can handle growth.
California uses a heck of a lot less energy today, per person, than it did in 1976, because the state got serious about the problem. The other 49 states need to get just as serious.
There is no one best solution to the problem. Maine can’t get the benefit from things that work wonderfully on the Gulf Coast. Hawaii can do things that none of the other states can possibly replicate. Each state has different strengths and weaknesses, but every state can do a much better job of cutting back on energy use, and diversifying energy production.
You described a new type of reactor, but the local utilities down here only want to build the old style reactors or coal-fired power plants. We have natural gas even in my dinky county, but the local Southern Company affiliate burns coal in its main regional generation plant, which has been rated as one of the worst coal-fired plants in the country for pollution.
You have different requirements than we do, which will require different solutions. We don’t have industry any more, the jobs were shipped to Asia.
Badtux, without contradicting most of what you say and acknowledging that it isn’t as easy as we might like to think, I will ask one question: do you know where Houston is? Hint: it is no less than 50 miles inland, and 100°/100% humidity days aren’t that uncommon.
And it’s not that Americans need to be living like third-world peasants: it’s that we will be living like them, unless we deal with some of these energy-related problems. As I said above, there’s a lot that individuals can do (if they own their own structure) that does not involve grossly compromising our standard of living. But if we don’t do those things, I’m convinced we will in fact suffer a precipitous decline in standard of living before our lives are over… and I say that as someone who is rapidly approaching age 60.
BTW, Badtux, if you think the Northeast and West are the only innovation centers in our economy, I suggest you glance at Austin, TX and the surrounding area. They don’t call it “Silicon Gulch” for nothing.
Steve, I’ve lived in Houston, and lived in Houston without air conditioning even. That’s one reason I know how hard it is to sleep when it’s so dadburned hot and humid outside. As for Austin, I can lead you to one fifty-acre area of Sunnyvale that has created more innovation over the past five years than the entire Austin area has created in the past twenty. I don’t think you understand just how *dense* these centers of innovation are on the West Coast and in the Northeast.
Bryan, the main reason California uses less energy per person now is because so much of California’s heavy manufacturing base is gone, replaced by R&D centers and server farms for the most part. A server farm uses a lot of juice but still uses less electricity than an auto assembly plant. Sure, homes are now required to be insulated and have 12-SEER air conditioning units, but it’s not the utopia you seem to think. Solar and wind power provides less than 10% of California’s energy needs, and it seems unlikely that they’ll ever provide more than 30% of California’s energy needs.
Finally, regarding nuclear plants, the old-style nuclear plants are not going to be permitted by the DoE. The DoE has a Next Generation project going for some greatly improved designs and those are the only ones that will be permitted. Even the most conservative of the new designs are much simpler and safer than the old-style plants, which were derived from military designs that, like most military designs, were both over-engineered, overly expensive, and not originally designed for safety. When the rolling blackouts start because your local utility can no longer get oil for their antique oil-fired boilers, I suspect nuclear power will start looking a *lot* better to a lot of people…
I’m not talking about a utopia, I’m talking about efficiency and not using up resources faster than is absolutely necessary. You can power a house today on the Gulf Coast with a mixture of solar, wind, and batteries. Their are several around, built after the 2004/2005 hurricanes as a reaction. The technology is still expensive, but the price will comes down and the efficiency increased as production increases.
East of San Diego they have geo-thermal and solar thermal power system in use or being built, and many more are being planned.
Our local utility uses coal, but we are still being charged for price increases in natural gas as a separate item on our electric bills, because they can.
Every region is different, and we don’t have many large buildings here, so our solutions won’t work for California, but people need to start “doing for themselves”, rather than waiting for others.
I have a large gasoline generator for one reason, my Mother can’t survive in the heat and humidity if the power goes out for an extended period. That is a problem that is address if her house had solar panels. You should have to bet your life on the competence of large organizations.