6 ms·

The Nuclear Energy Option by Bernard L. Cohen

30 points by ScotterC 16y ago

ars 16y ago
Looks interesting, but the background color, and font makes it hard to read.
- ScotterC 16y ago
  Yea. Thinking about emailing him to see if he'd mind if I do a full revamp of it to make it more accessible in the modern web.
- ronnier 16y ago
  If you feel like reading it straight through, you can try this: http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter1.html http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~b... The menu system on the first page is rendered using JS, so my reader can't pick it up. The good thing is, each chapter includes a "Next" and "Previous" link to the next and previous chapters.
- pavs 16y ago
  http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
ScotterC 16y ago
Bernard L. Cohen wrote this book back in 1990. It's astonishingly still very applicable.
- c1sc0 16y ago
  Goes to show that unlike political moods, the laws of physics don't change all that frequently. I wish more policy makers would make decisions based on facts rather than popular opinion. Maybe govt. needs some Google engineers?
  - joubert 16y ago
    France is probably the ultimate model for how to work rationally in the nuclear energy space. Some interesting facts and history: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
    - pjscott 16y ago
      China is the one to watch right now. They're making massive investments in nuclear. Their CPR1000 reactor (based on 70's French reactors) is now cheaper to build than modern coal plants of the same size. They're working on doing the same cost-reduction for the more modern Westinghouse AP1000, and they're developing variants on the AP1000 which are the same size, don't cost much more, but produce 40% and 70% more power. They're working with Russia to build some BN-800 liquid metal fast breeder reactors, a successor to the BN-600 and earlier BN-series reactors that Russia has been operating successfully for decades. They're also importing some Russian VVER-1000 light water reactors, apparently for variety. They're building their first commercial pebble-bed modular reactors, and I believe they're working on how to incorporate thorium into the fuel mix. This isn't nearly as good as LFTRs, but it's nice to see. They're doing some other nuclear things, but those are the big ones.
rm-rf 16y ago
As someone degreed in Physics, I have far less fear of the long term consequences of nuclear power and nuclear waste than many of the other byproducts of western civilization.
- pavs 16y ago
  Can you expand on that and tell us why this is so? Are we on the brink of sanitizing nuclear waste?
  - Devilboy 16y ago
    Coal power plants release a LOT of radioactive material into the atmosphere, much more than the couple of barrels of nicely storable waste a nuclear plant produces.
    - ScotterC 16y ago
      Very true. There's a calculation somewhere that if you actually fissioned all the fissile material within coal ash, you'd produce more energy then the burning of coal did in the first place. Also, as you point out, nuclear waste is very easily stored and contained which is what has always been done.
  - pjscott 16y ago
    I need to go to sleep, but I'll give you the tl;dr version of how you sanitize waste from most of the reactors currently in operation. First, let it cool off for a while. We're doing this. Since the volume of the waste is so small, and it's so well contained, there's really no rush to process it right away. Second, chemically separate it into its parts. Deal with them in different ways: Uranium and plutonium can be recycled and used as fuel again. Hooray for recycling! France does this; other countries are just storing the waste for later, since non-recycled uranium is cheap these days. Short-lived isotopes can be left to decay. They are short-lived, after all. This is happening as we speak. Medium-lived isotopes are the really troublesome ones. Hit them with some spare neutrons to transmute them into something shorter-lived. Put the remaining, much-diminished waste in storage. It should become harmless after a few hundred years, rather than a few hundred thousand. Fun fact: it's a lot easier with something like a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, which makes the chemistry really easy and prevents a lot of the nasty isotopes from forming in the first place. You can skip most of the rigmarole. (Huh. I guess that was longer than I thought. Oh well; who needs sleep, anyway?)
brc 16y ago
And that's where the global warming theory came from : opposition to coal plants, in favor of Nuclear plants. Since then it has been picked up an run with by everyone as a reason to use their product / not use a competitors. The resulting water is so muddy nobody can see through. I would have thought that the non-greenhouse pollution from coal, plus the deaths caused from mining put Nuclear in front. Even in the extremely rare events of Nuclear accidents the total deaths are lower than the ongoing toll from coal mining and shipping. But nobody wants to discuss that, all we get now is OMG NUCLEAR WASTE and OMG GREENHOUSE GASES! The worst outcome of it all is the obsession with wind power over all else, despite all the drawbacks as mentioned in this paper : land use, siting issues with regards to transmission to demand areas, wildlife impact, noise pollution and what happens when the wind stops. The greenhouse gas debate started as a support to transition from coal/oil to nuclear, and we ended up talking about going from coal to wind power because the wrong interest groups got control of the dialogue.
- miratrix 16y ago
  For the human species to survive on Earth over the long haul, we need a way to sustain our lifestyle with the energy coming from the Sun. In Oil / Gas / Coal, we're just living off previously stored solar energy. There is only a limited amount of nuclear fuel on Earth (not counting something like deuterium deuterium fusion reactions which likely will never be feasible in full scale) - granted, the amount of fuel we have with right technology (fast breeder reactors, thorium reactors, etc) will last a period measured in centuries, not decades. Even as someone who's working in the wind energy industry, I believe that nuclear power is clean and safe energy source that we should be actively developing and perfecting, and I'm in agreement with you that nuclear option has gotten the short end of the shaft. However, the pure renewables like Wind and Solar do have a place in the conversation, and many of issues you cite are overblown (wildlife impact/noise) or technically solvable (wind stopping - there are papers showing that by tying the entire eastern seaboard into a single grid, you can ensure certain amount of base load capacity). There are still unexplored places for wind energy (deep offshore, high altitude) that hold a lot of promise, with technology that already have been developed. If we have the will to go ahead with a full blown nuclear option, then by that time, we'd have the will to go ahead with updating our transmission infrastructure. And if we ever end up in a pure electric transportation sector, we'll have 250 million batteries-on-a-wheel that can soak up the extra generating capacity on windy/sunny days and dump it out on cloudy/still days, with nuclear likely providing the baseload capacity. I see transitions from coal to natural gas, then to nuclear, but as a stepping stone while we perfect the pure renewable solution which is the only thing that will ensure the survival of human species unless we decide to go gallivanting across the universe collecting resources from other planets. Even then, energy dense nuclear fuel will be too valuable to waste in heating up homes and food - they'll be closely guarded as a means to get to those said energy dense planets.

30 points by ScotterC 16y ago

ars 16y ago

Looks interesting, but the background color, and font makes it hard to read.

ScotterC 16y ago
Yea. Thinking about emailing him to see if he'd mind if I do a full revamp of it to make it more accessible in the modern web.
ronnier 16y ago
If you feel like reading it straight through, you can try this: http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter1.html http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~b... The menu system on the first page is rendered using JS, so my reader can't pick it up. The good thing is, each chapter includes a "Next" and "Previous" link to the next and previous chapters.
pavs 16y ago
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

ScotterC 16y ago

Bernard L. Cohen wrote this book back in 1990. It's astonishingly still very applicable.

c1sc0 16y ago
Goes to show that unlike political moods, the laws of physics don't change all that frequently. I wish more policy makers would make decisions based on facts rather than popular opinion. Maybe govt. needs some Google engineers?
- joubert 16y ago
  France is probably the ultimate model for how to work rationally in the nuclear energy space. Some interesting facts and history: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
  - pjscott 16y ago
    China is the one to watch right now. They're making massive investments in nuclear. Their CPR1000 reactor (based on 70's French reactors) is now cheaper to build than modern coal plants of the same size. They're working on doing the same cost-reduction for the more modern Westinghouse AP1000, and they're developing variants on the AP1000 which are the same size, don't cost much more, but produce 40% and 70% more power. They're working with Russia to build some BN-800 liquid metal fast breeder reactors, a successor to the BN-600 and earlier BN-series reactors that Russia has been operating successfully for decades. They're also importing some Russian VVER-1000 light water reactors, apparently for variety. They're building their first commercial pebble-bed modular reactors, and I believe they're working on how to incorporate thorium into the fuel mix. This isn't nearly as good as LFTRs, but it's nice to see. They're doing some other nuclear things, but those are the big ones.

rm-rf 16y ago

As someone degreed in Physics, I have far less fear of the long term consequences of nuclear power and nuclear waste than many of the other byproducts of western civilization.

pavs 16y ago
Can you expand on that and tell us why this is so? Are we on the brink of sanitizing nuclear waste?
- Devilboy 16y ago
  Coal power plants release a LOT of radioactive material into the atmosphere, much more than the couple of barrels of nicely storable waste a nuclear plant produces.
  - ScotterC 16y ago
    Very true. There's a calculation somewhere that if you actually fissioned all the fissile material within coal ash, you'd produce more energy then the burning of coal did in the first place. Also, as you point out, nuclear waste is very easily stored and contained which is what has always been done.
- pjscott 16y ago
  I need to go to sleep, but I'll give you the tl;dr version of how you sanitize waste from most of the reactors currently in operation. First, let it cool off for a while. We're doing this. Since the volume of the waste is so small, and it's so well contained, there's really no rush to process it right away. Second, chemically separate it into its parts. Deal with them in different ways: Uranium and plutonium can be recycled and used as fuel again. Hooray for recycling! France does this; other countries are just storing the waste for later, since non-recycled uranium is cheap these days. Short-lived isotopes can be left to decay. They are short-lived, after all. This is happening as we speak. Medium-lived isotopes are the really troublesome ones. Hit them with some spare neutrons to transmute them into something shorter-lived. Put the remaining, much-diminished waste in storage. It should become harmless after a few hundred years, rather than a few hundred thousand. Fun fact: it's a lot easier with something like a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, which makes the chemistry really easy and prevents a lot of the nasty isotopes from forming in the first place. You can skip most of the rigmarole. (Huh. I guess that was longer than I thought. Oh well; who needs sleep, anyway?)

brc 16y ago

And that's where the global warming theory came from : opposition to coal plants, in favor of Nuclear plants. Since then it has been picked up an run with by everyone as a reason to use their product / not use a competitors. The resulting water is so muddy nobody can see through. I would have thought that the non-greenhouse pollution from coal, plus the deaths caused from mining put Nuclear in front. Even in the extremely rare events of Nuclear accidents the total deaths are lower than the ongoing toll from coal mining and shipping. But nobody wants to discuss that, all we get now is OMG NUCLEAR WASTE and OMG GREENHOUSE GASES! The worst outcome of it all is the obsession with wind power over all else, despite all the drawbacks as mentioned in this paper : land use, siting issues with regards to transmission to demand areas, wildlife impact, noise pollution and what happens when the wind stops. The greenhouse gas debate started as a support to transition from coal/oil to nuclear, and we ended up talking about going from coal to wind power because the wrong interest groups got control of the dialogue.

miratrix 16y ago
For the human species to survive on Earth over the long haul, we need a way to sustain our lifestyle with the energy coming from the Sun. In Oil / Gas / Coal, we're just living off previously stored solar energy. There is only a limited amount of nuclear fuel on Earth (not counting something like deuterium deuterium fusion reactions which likely will never be feasible in full scale) - granted, the amount of fuel we have with right technology (fast breeder reactors, thorium reactors, etc) will last a period measured in centuries, not decades. Even as someone who's working in the wind energy industry, I believe that nuclear power is clean and safe energy source that we should be actively developing and perfecting, and I'm in agreement with you that nuclear option has gotten the short end of the shaft. However, the pure renewables like Wind and Solar do have a place in the conversation, and many of issues you cite are overblown (wildlife impact/noise) or technically solvable (wind stopping - there are papers showing that by tying the entire eastern seaboard into a single grid, you can ensure certain amount of base load capacity). There are still unexplored places for wind energy (deep offshore, high altitude) that hold a lot of promise, with technology that already have been developed. If we have the will to go ahead with a full blown nuclear option, then by that time, we'd have the will to go ahead with updating our transmission infrastructure. And if we ever end up in a pure electric transportation sector, we'll have 250 million batteries-on-a-wheel that can soak up the extra generating capacity on windy/sunny days and dump it out on cloudy/still days, with nuclear likely providing the baseload capacity. I see transitions from coal to natural gas, then to nuclear, but as a stepping stone while we perfect the pure renewable solution which is the only thing that will ensure the survival of human species unless we decide to go gallivanting across the universe collecting resources from other planets. Even then, energy dense nuclear fuel will be too valuable to waste in heating up homes and food - they'll be closely guarded as a means to get to those said energy dense planets.