Since this is an international forum,any concern about whats going on in the Ukraine?

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"...France has 75% of its energy supplied by Nuclear power plants. The world should be mass producing quantities of new Gen-4 breeder nuc-plants without pressure vessel containment and characterized by minimal, short-duration radioactive waste. JMHO. But of course, the world, haunted by overblown press reports of the disasters at the old and outdated plants at Chernobyl and Daiichi doesn't want to hear about new nuclear development."

I agree. Nuclear energy has not had the proper "image management" by its proponents ..... sadly.
 
michaelmaltby said:
Nuclear energy has not had the proper "image management" by its proponents ..... sadly.
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True, but Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukishima and numerous other smaller scale accidents (like at our own Windscale reactor fire) have pandered to the fears of an anti nuclear lobby which has exploited such incidents to the full.
A bigger problem is that nuclear power is expensive, not just in terms of building and running the reactors, which are not major costs, but in storing waste and ultimately de-commissioning obsolete reactors. The cost is a bullet yet to be bitten.
Cheers
Steve
 
Other future energy choice will be geothermal.
There are vast heats under the crust. Positive research and developments are going on in my country.
 
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Shinpachi said:
Other future energy choice will be geothermal.
There are vast heats under the crust. Positive research and experiments are going on in my country.
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It is one of the advantages of living in a geologically active zone ! Obviously volcanos and earth quakes might be considered a down side

Iceland produces a substantial portion of it's energy requirements, approaching 30%, from its geothermal power plants.

It's worth remembering that the eruption in Iceland of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in just four days negated every single effort we have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet. Mt Pinatubo's 1991 eruption ejected more green house gases into the atmosphere than mankind has since he first lit a fire. It also ejected vast quantities of SO2 which actually led to a slight global cooling. There are roughly 200 active volcanos on the planet. Complicated stuff the climate

Cheers

Steve
 

The waste issue is one of the advantages of the Gen-4 nuclear breeder reactors. They burn the waste for fuel what remains is a very small percent with a far shorter half life. The main trouble is that while prototypes have been demonstrated, they won't be available for another decade at least.

Generation IV reactor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

also an interesting documentary film: Pandora's Promise
criticism of the obviously somewhat biased but informative film are directed at comparisons to current nuclear power generation and ignore the potential benefits of future Gen 4 innovation.
 

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Fortunately, today's technology means for safer operation of nuclear plants.

In Southern California, the San Onofre nuclear plant operated for the duration of it's planned life without incident and then shut down when it reached the end of it's useful life. They then considered the idea of putting it back into service because of increasing demands for energy in the Southland and after long and careful inspections they came to the conclusion that it was so well built, that they decided to put it back on line after a refit.
 

Your post make me curious about the plant.

Coming on line in 1968 I guess it's an early generation II reactor.

Just found this TV report from March 12, 2014: seems to suggest the plant will not be reactivated. sad to say… was that plant a 'model' for the China Syndrome film?

Edison to Submit Plan to Shut Down San Onofre Nuclear Plant | NBC Southern California
 
Notice how the earthquake scare tend to creep into the report?

What they aren't saying, is that San Onofre has handle two major earthquakes (Sylmar, Northridge) and many lesser magnitude quakes (Newport, Whittier, etc.) without a hitch. It was design with earthquakes in mind.
 
The problem with Nuclear is it isnt allowed to make a mistake. Windscale still has radioactive contamination, Chernobyl and Fukushima show that you cannot make a mistake from start to finish you must know all possibilities that are possible and some possiblities that seem impossible. Also it costs about 10 times more to de commission a plant than to build it and no one knows how to "cost" storing the waste for as long as "homo sapiens" have ever lived.
 

The problem is now, that the belief that the "no allowable mistake" and the other issues such as waste disposal and longevity of early methods extends to the new Gen 4 plants which are passive in design and do not produce anything like the old light water plants. Power failures to cooling pumps is no longer an issue in the new designs and that's been the major source of all the past problems. Virtually every objection you have raised pertains to the old technology. There can be no Chernobyls or Fukushima failures in the new designs. They just don't operate in the same way. The choice to build the safe reactors was always there from the beginning and many advocated to do so but the Gen I thru III reactors had weapon value and so that was the technology chosen. The new reactor designs are relatively useless for weapons purposes and some designs cannot be used for weapons under any circumstances.

It's not the same nuclear as your father knew.

from the same wiki page previously cited:

"Relative to current nuclear power plant technology, the claimed benefits for 4th generation reactors include:

Nuclear waste that remains radioactive for a few centuries instead of millennia
100-300 times more energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel
The ability to consume existing nuclear waste in the production of electricity
Improved operating safety" {my comment: as in passively safe. any power failure it shuts itself down without a post shutdown cooling issue)

The wiki page suggests these are claims but at least two of these reactors have been prototyped and extensively tested decades earlier and proven to be viable but they were not pursued for a variety of commercial, political and military reasons.
The fuel processing industry was established and didn't like the new technology which would have undercut its business and could lobby effectively to block its implementation. The military had little use for a reactor that couldn't be used to produce weapons grade fissile materiel and promoted the use of the current technology. Now, the mere mention of the word 'nuclear' makes people react strongly negative based on their past perception or even understanding of the technology.
 
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"....A bigger problem is that nuclear power is expensive"

No it's expensive to maintain ..... and now we know that .... and can budget for that. Nuclear is a natural ... with effective management. But the "big lie" of nuclear is the paranoia about radiation. There are general documented health benefits from radiation .... if it hasn't killed you.

BACK TO TOPIC
I think it's time for NATO observers .... deploying along the east-west dividing line (that the elected Gov't is going to have to secede to the Russian mob) ... to identify who these un-uniformed activists are that are over-throwing local governments. And to say to Europe and the world ... we're boots-on-th-ground, Vlad.

We (NATO) must escalate this .... rationally
 
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Some have called for UN rather than NATO observers, but it won't happen. At the moment the EU is imposing financial and other restrictions on a few more Russians (not even the Russian Federation itself) and talking about extending sanctions with no precise details about exactly how and what. The idea that you can somehow divert Putin from his objectives by inconveniencing a few Russian oligarchs is preposterous. It's difficult to believe that even those in the EU who came up with the idea believe it is anything more than tokenism.

The White House is blustering and doing absolutely nothing.

There is no stomach in the West for any kind of physical intervention, UN or otherwise, and it will not happen. Putin knows this as well as anybody. Even if some weeks or months down the line the threat is made he will call the bluff. The western powers know this too, and don't want to make themselves look even more ridiculous and impotent by forcing him to do it.

Cheers

Steve
 
Just saw on the news where a Russian jet was buzzing a U.S. destroyer off the coast of Romania. The destroyer went on alert and warned the jet to back off, which it ignored and continued buzzing it. Fortunately, the destroyer identified it as unarmed and didn't splash it.

Not a very intelligent thing to be doing, considering the tensions in the area at the moment.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/14/pentagon-russians-black-sea/7700777/
 
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Did someone at the Russian air base not get the word? If intentional, this kind of 'minor' provocative event with potentially incendiary consequences suggests to me that those who characterize Putin as a coldly calculating KGB operative are off the mark; while those that see him as a classic unrepentant bully are spot on. If he is both, so much the worse for the Ukraine and others but bullies too often miscalculate.
 
Standard Russian practice in the past, they did it for years encroaching UK airspace. Dont know if this is a one off or routine and is just being reported to up the ante.
 
They've been buzzing and ramming for decades now,its a bit of a dangerous game but hopefully cool heads prevale.
 
pbehn said:
Standard Russian practice in the past, they did it for years encroaching UK airspace. Dont know if this is a one off or routine and is just being reported to up the ante.
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Torch said:
They've been buzzing and ramming for decades now,its a bit of a dangerous game but hopefully cool heads prevale.
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You guys are absolutely right.. I'd forgotten having experienced that as well in the good old days of the cold war… Here I thought the cold war was over… I guess it's just in the nature of things Russian.
 
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