Electric Dirt Farmer » nuclear

Spent Nuke Fuel

the proprietor — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 02:55:00 +0000

Here’s something else I learned from the Wired Nuclear energy article. (I really should read the article all the way through before posting.)

Here’s a fun fact: Spent nuclear fuel – the stuff intended for permanent disposal at Yucca Mountain – retains 95 percent of its energy content.

That’s really remarkable. There is so much potential in nuclear technology, it’s a real shame that so little technical innovation has been done in the field.

I’m now curious about whether the Government of Canada is paying attention to this. So far all I’ve seen the Government doing is spending a bunch of money on advertising starring Rick Mercer. Now I like Mr. Mercer, but the ads just seem so very silly. Take the “one tonne challenge”?

Nice Article on Nuclear Power

the proprietor — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 02:20:00 +0000

Wired Magazine has a nice article on nuclear energy in the latest issue (13.02: the Firefox issue). It’s mostly about the US industry: why it stalled, ideas for kick starting it, and potential problems with doing just that. It’s a good article; I learned a few things I didn’t know before. In particular, I didn’t know the USA Government actually collects a tax from nuclear power producers for the purpose of waste disposal.

Nuclear Power in China

the proprietor — Fri, 03 Sep 2004 22:10:00 +0000

I have just finished reading a very interesting article about nuclear power in China from Wired Magazine. To meet the demands of the world’s fastest growing energy market, the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology (INET) at Beijing’s Tsinghua University has developed a new reactor called the HTR-10. They’ve apparently solved the problems of traditional big nukes by using something called “pebble bed” technology.

The really neat thing about this reactor is that it’s small and modular (which makes it inexpensive to build) and has no super-heated heavy water (which makes it safer). Apparently, this new Chinese reactor is incredibly fault tolerant: things can go wrong without rapidly escalating to terribly wrong.

In the event of a catastrophic cooling-system failure … 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.

This unusual margin of safety isn’t merely theoretical. INET‘s engineers have already done what would be unthinkable in a conventional reactor: switched off HTR-10’s helium coolant and let the reactor cool down all by itself. Indeed, [project director Zhang Zuoyi] plans a show-stopping repeat performance at an international conference of reactor physicists in Beijing in September. “We think our kind of test may be required in the market someday,” he adds.

The article also has an enlightening recap of why it has taken this long for someone to serious develop this kind of reactor technology. It’s a shame that it’s taken until now, but this article made me very optimistic about the potential of nuclear energy.

I picked up this link from the Chaos Manor Mail.